RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Africa produces little of the greenhouse gases blamed for causing global warming, but that continent is one of the main victims of climate change. In the next 20 years, African farmers could lose more than half of their farmland to drought and extreme heat, according to the World Bank. Let's hear from one tiny nation in southern Africa, where that would be devastating. It's Malawi. NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports on efforts to help farmers there cope.
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: Rain is so important in Malawi, people have names for different kinds of it. There's...
PENSULO MELO: Sizima ropia.
LUDDEN: Brief bursts in early fall. Then mvula yodzalira: planting rain. It sinks in the soil. For generations, these patterns have been predictable, reliable, but not now.
MELO: (Foreign language spoken)
LUDDEN: Pensulo Melo stands under a shade tree in a stiff, hot wind. He's a farmer, and he says 2010 was a disaster. He planted mid-November, as usual, but the rain dried up. And so did his corn.
MELO: (Through translator) After that, the rain comes around December 10th. So I planted my second crop.
LUDDEN: Again, no more rain. Melo took out a loan to pay for a third planting. He finally got a harvest, but it wasn't enough to pay back his loan. And he's far from alone.
(SOUNDBITE OF PHONE RINGING)
LUDDEN: A government office two hours away, in the city of Blantyre. Every 15 minutes, computers flash weather reports from across the country.
ADAMS CHAVULA: This is the lake.
LUDDEN: And state meteorologist Adams Chavula says they show farmers everywhere face tough times. In fact, this agency was recently renamed the Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services.
CHAVULA: We were given this name by the politicians, actually, because climate change is one of the priority areas.
LUDDEN: No wonder. Agriculture is Malawi's economy. Its tobacco may be in your cigarettes, its cotton in your t-shirts. You may have drunk its tea. Across the highlands and plateaus here - squeezed between Mozambique and Zambia - the vast majority of Malawians rely on subsistence farming. Yet, Chavula says, nearly every year now, it seems some part of the country is hit with a serious dry spell.
CHAVULA: We actually alternate between, you know, the droughts and floods, so, moving from one extreme to the other.
LUDDEN: Is that climate change? Well, the science isn't yet clear. But it's exactly what's expected in a warming planet. Malawi's government helps farmers sign up for crop insurance. But how to coax a harvest with the weather gone crazy?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUDDEN: A Pentecostal church here is helping figure that out. Back in 2002, millions of Malawians were starving, in a terrible drought. Living Waters Church wanted to help. It set up Eagles Relief and Development, with funding from a variety of Christian aid groups. To head it up, it turned to one of its own members with professional experience in development, Victor Mughogho.
VICTOR MUGHOGHO: My grandparents have all been farmers. I have lived in the villages myself.
LUDDEN: He didn't want to just hand out food. He wanted to help farmers make sure they'd never starve again. To do that, Mughogho realized they needed to brace themselves for a changing climate.
MUGHOGHO: The agriculture and farming systems have been completely altered and affected. So, adaptation to climate change in our context is a matter of life and death. It's not an option.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR DOOR CLOSING)
LUDDEN: To show me, Mughogho takes me on a winding drive south, a 3,000-foot drop from temperate savanna to hot valley. Lush, green hills give way to flat, brown dust. I start to sweat. We turn off the pavement, bump past round mud huts, and come to the farming community of Jasi.
MUGHOGHO: (Foreign language spoken)
LUDDEN: This is where Pensulo Melo had to plant three times to get his maize to grow. Corn has long been the staple here. But this year, Mughogho's group has given the village three bags of seed that's much more drought-tolerant. Not corn - millet and sorghum.
MUGHOGHO: They would not require as much moisture to grow and to mature and to harvest.
LUDDEN: The donation comes with a catch: next year, farmers will pass on three bags of their seed to another village. Eagles Relief works with farmers in some 60 villages, with plans to expand. But it aims to help communities help themselves. Another key change: planting differently.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAY RUSTLING)
LUDDEN: This big, rectangle plot is covered with hay, to hold in moisture.
ZACHARIAH JIM: (Foreign language spoken)
LUDDEN: Farmer Zachariah Jim says rows of maize and beans will be staggered. That helps keep harder downpours and floods from washing away the soil. But even with new methods and new crops, farmers still need rain. And they need to know: When is it safe to plant?
(SOUNDBITE OF GATE UNLOCKING)
LUDDEN: Another farmer, Michael Foley, unlocks a chain link fence and shows me a squat, concrete box. Eagles Relief installed it a year ago. Inside...
MICHAEL FOLEY: (Through translator) This is the rain gauge.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLANGING)
FOLEY: (Through translator) You can see this pail, in which rain falls.
LUDDEN: Setting down the dark, metal cylinder, Foley shows me the chart where he tracked rainfall levels last year.
FOLEY: (Through translator) When it rains at 26.7 millimeters, we put on the note boards at the church and at schools, so that people know they can plant millet.
LUDDEN: With exactly that much rain, the soil would be moist enough for millet seeds to sprout. Corn needs more - 35.6 millimeters. The measurements are sent to the state meteorological office, which broadcasts them on the radio. And this year, the office is sending its forecasts straight to Jasi's farmers. Foley and others pull out cell phones to show me - text messages.
FOLEY: (Through translator) It's in Chichewa, and it's written: (foreign language spoken).
LUDDEN: Cloudy, with a chance of showers. Despite all his work, Victor Mughogho still worries about Malawi's farmers. Eagles Relief and Development sets up pumps, to irrigate crops near rivers, but rivers are drying up. That means no more fish. And as temperatures rise, crop yields are expected to fall.
MUGHOGHO: Basically, our grandfathers had a better quality of life than their grandchildren right now. Looking at the bigger picture, you've got to ask yourself: What's the future like for these communities?
(SOUNDBITE OF KIDS PLAYING)
EVERES GENTI: (Foreign language spoken)
(LAUGHTER)
LUDDEN: Everes Genti isn't sure how old she is. But she remembers: farming life used to feel like paradise.
GENTI: (Through translator) She's saying, in 1980s, they were just so free. When they plant, they were just so sure that they were going to harvest from the field.
LUDDEN: Now, she says, we're hungry. Since a big drought three years ago, her family's cut back from three meals a day to two. So, Eagles Relief offers one last lifeline.
(SOUNDBITE OF GOATS BAAING)
LUDDEN: The group has given Genti two goats.
GENTI: (Foreign language spoken)
LUDDEN: We'll sell the offspring, she says, and buy food. Jennifer Ludden, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Even as the digital age continues to shake up journalism and force magazines out of print, one magazine in France is bucking the trend. It's steadily increasing its number of subscribers for the last 40 years. It's a nature journal, called La Hulotte. It's become the bible of outdoorsmen, hunters and naturalists alike, and is written, illustrated and published by just one man.
NPR's Eleanor Beardsley went to meet him.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Pierre, bonjour. Eleanor. (French spoken)
PIERRE DEOM: Ah, oui.
BEARDSLEY: Sixty-four-year-old Pierre Deom comes out to greet me as I pull up to his house in a tiny village near the Ardennes forest in Northeastern France. Aside from a stint in a midsized town while a student - which he says made him feel imprisoned - Deom has spent his entire life close to the woods and fields that he loves. Twice a year, his magazine, La Hulotte, focuses on an animal or plant indigenous to the French countryside.
The 100th issue was published in November. The magazine counts more than 150,000 subscribers in many countries, and is doing terrific financially. Deom says it all began in January 1972, when he was teaching science in a one-room schoolhouse here.
DEOM: (Through translator) It upset me how the forests and swamps were beginning to be degraded. The word didn't really exist yet. Some friends and I wanted to call attention to the issue but didn't know where to start. So we said, let's educate the kids. They're ready to hear our message.
BEARDSLEY: The idea was to create nature clubs, and his simple, stapled together newsletter was only meant as a way to connect clubs. But the clubs never took off. The newsletter did. Very quickly, Deom knew he had to choose between teaching and publishing his nature journal, so he took a step into the unknown.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
BEARDSLEY: While much has changed since those first issues, much else hasn't. Deom still does all the research and writing, and the illustrating by hand. He blends science and humor - in his writing and drawings - to depict the daily life and tribulations o f his creatures. Animals you might overlook or consider ho-hum, are magically and intimately brought to life in La Hulotte.
DEOM: (Through translator) I try to write about animals and plants that are easy to find because I want kids to put on boots, take a magnifying glass and take to the woods and fields to observe and be amazed by what they find.
BEARDSLEY: And it seems to work. Marine biologist Jerome Fournier began subscribing to La Hulotte when he was just eight years old.
JEROME FOURNIER: For me it was the first contact with nature when I was a child. And maybe it's the beginning for my life of scientist. I think so.
DEOM: Fournier works at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, where he says La Hulotte has a cult following.
FOURNIER: (Through translator) What's amazing is his approach. He has realistic drawings and also a little cast of cartoon creatures who comment on things and give a different perspective. You can read it as an adult or a child; it can be understood on two different levels. So scientists, regular people and children all get something out of it. It's extraordinary.
(French spoken)
BEARDSLEY: (French spoken)
DEOM: (French spoken)
Deom shows me the magazine's 100th issue. It's dedicated to the world's smallest mammal, the Musaraigne Etrusque, that lives within stone walls in the south of France. Deom speaks passionately about the teeny, two gram rodent.
(Through translator) He has to eat nearly twice his body weight every day. So winter is a big problem because there are fewer insects, so he survives by turning down his body temperature for several hours if he can't find food. It puts him into a kind of torpor state and saves energy and calories.
BEARDSLEY: Deom says he puts in about 1,600 hours of work for each issue. And though he works alone, he does have some help.
(SOUNDBITE OF WALKING)
BEARDSLEY: We walk across the street to a renovated farmhouse next to the village church. On the second floor is a busy suite of offices, with a dozen or so employees and boxes and boxes of fan mail.
(French spoken)
DEOM: (French spoken)
BEARDSLEY: Thirteen hundred letters arrived yesterday. He got 1,300 letters. My god.
DEOM: (French spoken)
BEARDSLEY: Deom regularly takes long walks in the forest. He says no one day is like another. Will he ever run out of subjects, I ask him? Oh, no never, he says. There are 13,000 species of flies and mosquitoes in France alone. I'll keep going as long as I can.
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Happy New Year. I'm Renee Montagne.
At physics conferences these days, a lot of talk is about feathers and fins.
AMY LANG: So, I have studied sharks and also butterflies.
JUSTIN JAWORSKI: Brine shrimps.
HAMID MARVI: Sidewinder rattlesnakes.
SCOTT THOMSON: They're called fire ants.
JANA NAVROTTE: The Hawaiian bobtail squid.
MONTAGNE: More and more physicists are turning to the Animal Kingdom for potential solutions to engineering problems. One particularly odd project caught the attention of NPR's Adam Cole. He brings us the story of a propulsion system inspired by the penguin.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ADAM COLE, BYLINE: Penguins have a comical reputation. They dance for Mary Poppins and play dumb commandos in DreamWorks' "Madagascar."
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "MADAGASCAR")
COLE: And a visit to real, live African penguins at the Maryland Zoo doesn't do much to shake the stereotype. The penguins waddle around in pairs on their rocky island and bray like donkeys.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRAYING)
COLE: One curious penguin stops to peck at the shoelaces of a zookeeper.
JEN KOTTYAN: Her name is Peanut.
COLE: That's avian manager Jen Kottyan. She knows all the penguins by name. There's Peanut, Winnie, Tux and dozens more.
KOTTYAN: They are very, very awkward, and kind of clumsy out on land.
COLE: But when Peanut dives into the water...
(SOUNDBITE OF SPLASH)
COLE: ...she becomes sleek and graceful. And those little wings that seemed so silly on land suddenly become extremely useful.
KOTTYAN: Their wings are small, in proportion to their body. But they are very, very powerful.
COLE: They help Peanut reach 12 miles per hour in the water. She can make sharp turns, move side to side, and accelerate suddenly. It's this maneuverability - hard to achieve in human craft - that so impressed physicist Flavio Noca.
FLAVIO NOCA: I was just amazed by their performance. And that's when, basically, I decided, OK, I want to work on penguins.
COLE: Noca is works at Switzerland's University of Applied Sciences. He says that very little is known about how these champion swimmers manage their underwater acrobatics.
NOCA: There are just, for some reason, only two basic papers.
COLE: So, Noca set out to learn more. He started by filming zoo penguins to track the exact movement of their wings.
NOCA: It was very hard, because penguins have their own mind, so they're not going to go where you want them to go.
COLE: But after watching lots of underwater videos, Noca was able to figure out the exact angle and position of the penguin wing as it completes a stroke. But he still needed a way to model and control that movement in the lab, to understand how it generates its power. So, this year, one of his research assistants built an entirely novel joint mechanism that can perfectly mimic a penguin's flipper stroke.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPLASHING)
COLE: With the mechanical flipper churning in the water, Noca can better measure the flows and forces involved. He says someday, this mechanism could help underwater craft dart through ocean.
When Noca presented his work at the American Physical Society's conference in Pittsburgh this winter, he wasn't the only one there talking about animals. Physicists and engineers from all over the world are using new tools - like computer modeling and 3D printing - to study and replicate natural systems. And when I asked them why they're so focused on nature, well, I'll let them explain.
LANG: Nature's been swimming or flying for millions of years.
JAWORSKI: Millions of years of engineering.
NAVROTTE: Millions of years of selection.
LANG: Nature may have solved problems that we're also trying to solve.
THOMSON: So we look to them for inspiration where we're a bit stuck.
MARVI: And it turns out, if you go to the nature and look for the right organism, you are going to find a pretty good solution for that engineering problem.
THOMSON: But it's not necessarily optimal.
NAVROTTE: It doesn't mean it's the only solution. It doesn't mean it's the best solution, but it gives you a direction.
COLE: That was Amy Lang, Jana Navrotte(ph), Justin Jaworski, Hamid Marvi and Scott Thomson.
And I'm Adam Cole, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And to save on costs and compete for a younger generation of customers, banks are finding new uses for the old ATM. They're making them gateways to actual human bank tellers over a phone connection. You know, say your wallet is stolen, but you still need to get money from an ATM; or you want very exact change. New ATMs will let you talk to tellers at call centers, who can handle your specific request.
Ben Bradford, from member station WFAE, reports.
BEN BRADFORD, BYLINE: There's a drive-thru ATM here in Charlotte, N.C., that looks pretty standard, but it's got an extra function. I push a button that says "Speak with Teller."
CAROLINA: Good afternoon. Good afternoon, welcome to Bank of America. My name is Carolina, how are you today?
BRADFORD: The face of a woman wearing a headset sitting in front of a plain, blue background flashes onto the ATM screen. She's one of a cadre of Bank of America employees in Florida and Delaware call centers, where they remotely control ATMs across the country. I ask for $26.
Just a 1, a 5, and a 20.
CAROLINA: OK, you want one, 5; you want one, 20; and I'm going to give you one, 1.
BRADFORD: All the details of my transaction pop up on the screen. I press confirm...
(SOUNDBITE OF BEEP)
CAROLINA: ...the machine spits out my new bills; I thank Carolina, and drive off.
BRADFORD: Bank of America started rolling out these virtual tellers in Charlotte, New York, Boston, and a few other cities earlier this year, and plans to expand further. Meanwhile, PNC Bank and Chase have been introducing their own ATMs of the future, which dispense singles and 5s. Citi's got ones that let customers open accounts and pay bills. Analyst Nancy Bush says banks ultimately see the ATMs as money-savers.
NANCY BUSH: There is a very large need for banks to continue to control their costs and, of course, branches, branch personnel, etc., are one of the bank's largest costs.
BRADFORD: The more services the ATMs can do, the less banks have to spend on tellers and branches - which are expensive but seeing less traffic than they have in decades, as mobile and online banking have taken off. The firm SNL Financial reports about 3 percent of U.S. bank branches have closed in just the past four years. Instead of spending on real estate and staffing, banks can install street-corner ATMs, and pay fewer employees to video chat - or none at all. But that leaves one problem, Bush says.
BUSH: They want you to be able to access services through technology, but they still see the branch as their biggest revenue generator.
BRADFORD: Banks want to get you into the branch, so they can sell you more products. Bank of America calls it the stairstep. CEO Brian Moynihan explained it to investors this month at a conference.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BRIAN MOYNIHAN: We're working from a checking account to a core checking account, to a credit card into an auto loan and ultimately, to a mortgage loan, and then to investment. Now, this happens, literally, thousands of times a day.
BRADFORD: So banks are launching the hybrid branch, like this Chase branch next to Grand Central in Manhattan.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Hi, how you doing?
CAROLINA: There's a lot of open space and no tellers. Instead, customers use Chase's ATMs of the future, in kiosks along the walls.
(SOUNDBITE OF BUZZING)
CAROLINA: In the center of the room, there's an equivalent to Apple's Genius Bar - for the things the ATMs can't do, branch manager Jennifer Deluca says.
JENNIFER DELUCA: New debit card, change of address, change of PIN, anything that we can do kind of quick transactions - it's midtown Manhattan - instead of taking you over to a desk and kind of going through all of it, we can get you in and out as fast as you'd like.
BRADFORD: But upstairs, there's still a traditional bank, with loan officers and financial advisers at desks. And while this branch is huge, removing tellers means Chase can move into spaces as small as a coffee shop. Bank of America and Wells Fargo opened their own, similar hybrid branches earlier this year in New York and Washington, D.C.
Some employees see the new ATMs and branches as a threat; another wave of machines replacing humans. Bank of America tellers recently picketed the new machines in Manhattan. Banking executives respond that the traditional branch isn't going away completely; the new technology is just a complement. And, that's because, they say, many people still prefer to bank with a real person instead of a video screen.
For NPR News, I'm Ben Bradford.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
TV shows in 2013 brought the demise of many major characters. Still, as the casualties piled up, NPR's TV critic Eric Deggans reminds us that the best television deaths of the year also highlighted some of the best moments on the small screen.
Before we start, we should include a spoiler alert to those fans who are still catching up on episodes of "Game of Thrones," "Breaking Bad," "The Walking Dead" and "Family Guy." You may want to turn down your radio, or maybe hum loudly for the next three minutes.
ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: For some fans, the murder of Hershel Greene on "The Walking Dead" was like killing off Santa Claus. Greene had a face full of white whiskers and a kindly manner. He was taken hostage, so the show's hero, Rick Grimes, was forced to beg for his life. It was powerful moment, Grimes pleading for compassion in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE WALKING DEAD")
DEGGANS: With one stroke from a sword...
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
DEGGANS: ...the show's villain killed Hershel Greene, "The Walking Dead's" social conscience. It was a brutal answer to the show's central question: How do you hold onto your humanity in a merciless world? And that's the best thing about a major TV character's death - it jolts the audience with an unpredictability that feels just like real life.
Certainly, "Game of Thrones" viewers reacted that way when the show unleashed its horrifying "Red Wedding" episode. As a wedding banquet ended, a rival king slaughtered nobleman Robb Stark's pregnant wife and his friends. His mother grabbed a knife. She threatened the king's wife, to stop him from killing her son.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "GAME OF THRONES")
DEGGANS: As his armed men drew closer, the king delivered a chilling conclusion.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "GAME OF THRONES")
DEGGANS: Now, that's a truly merciless world.
TV nerds might say the year's most important onscreen death belonged to Walter White, the teacher-turned-drug lord on AMC's "Breaking Bad." But I was more interested in an earlier killing, the execution of Walter White's brother-in-law, drug enforcement agent Hank Schrader. White's neo-Nazi business partners captured the DEA agent after a shoot out. And as the Nazi leader pointed a gun at his head, the agent told White why he refused to plead for his own life.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SERIES, "BREAKING BAD")
DEGGANS: Walter White thought he could outwit both his DEA brother-in-law and the neo-Nazis without anyone getting killed. But Hank Schrader's death ended that illusion.
But there's one TV demise that shook the foundations of the industry, redefining one of the most enduring series on television.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SERIES, "FAMILY GUY")
DEGGANS: Say goodbye to Brian the dog, on "Family Guy." Brian's death hit hard. Fans signed petitions, critics wrote stories and suddenly, a show that wasn't getting much attention was drowning in it.
For many TV shows, a major death is a reset button. It's a chance to shake up the series with new directions or new characters. It might be a tragedy in real life, but death can sometimes be the best thing that happens to a TV show.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: Eric Deggans is NPR's TV critic.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
There is more to New Year's Day than resolutions and hangovers. It's Bowl Day. College football fans can choose from six different Bowl games today. Commentator Frank Deford has a long view, a very long view on the state of college football.
FRANK DEFORD: It's become common for football observers, including this one, to call the All-American sport a gladiator game. This has come to the particular attention of Sarah Stroup, a Classics professor at the University of Washington, who teaches a popular course entitled War Games: Greek Athletes, Roman Gladiators, the Modern Olympics and College Football. What is especially interesting and poignant is that in this past semester, several football players took her course.
Both the professor and her football-playing students have found that, in fact, calling football a gladiator game is not just a glib analogy. For example, gladiators had coaches and very specialized trainers. They were carefully tended to by team doctors to keep them battle-ready. After all, like college football players, gladiators were valuable resources for the head coaches, who made the money that their amateur athletes did not. As one of Professor Stroup's players candidly told his tutor: I put my body in danger for other people's benefits.
Not surprisingly, gladiators were big guys who would bulk up for battle. It was another of Professor Stroup's players who himself pointed out to her that carrying fat is wise in such endeavors, because it protects your internal organs in combat or in scrimmage.
Both gladiators and football players have short careers. An average gladiator could expect to live for only three years before one of his colleagues - yes, they trained together to kill one another - would murder him. And not for nothing do the players themselves say that NFL stands for Not For Long.
What particularly surprised me to learn is that the Romans were ashamed of their love of the blood sport, Each year, Professor Stroup asks her class to name amusements that Americans are themselves secretly ashamed of. Invariably she says three answers are common: pornography, reality shows and tabloid magazines. This year, there was suggested another American shameful delight.
Professor Stroup herself had never seen a football game before she became attached to the players taking her course. She says: They're tough on the field but I know they're scared to death a lot of the time. These boys are already a lot like gladiators. And we tolerate it. We make them a special kind of student, the student-athlete, and tolerate their thuggishness and discount the brains we are knowingly damaging, and then discard them. It is a hell, but one of our own making.
Or as the Bard had one of his wiser Romans say: The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.
MONTAGNE: We bring you the comments of Frank Deford every Wednesday.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And as we say goodbye to the old year, let's take one final look back at one of the great records we overlooked in 2013. We conclude our annual series Music We Missed with bluegrass from James King.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DEVILS TRAIN")
MONTAGNE: James King is a musician with a sterling bluegrass pedigree. He was born and raised in a traditional hotbed of the music - Southern Virginia's Carroll County.
: And my great uncle played the banjo and they had a band called the Country Cousins.
MONTAGNE: King got his break performing alongside one of the all time greats: Ralph Stanley.
: I guess that's the most important thing probably that's ever happened to me in my life. What I learned from Ralph was the simpler, the better.
MONTAGNE: On his latest album, this bluegrass traditionalist performs a collection of songs from a very different branch of country music: covers of classic Country Western tunes from likes Hank Williams and George Jones.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HE STOPPED LOVING HER TODAY")
MONTAGNE: King says at first he resisted when his long time producer, Ken Irwin, suggested the project.
: I kind of looked at him with a distant look in my eye. I thought: I don't know about this.
MONTAGNE: Basically says King, he didn't feel worthy.
: But Ken explained to it me: Look, those songs was cut years ago and they was cut in a country format. We're doing this bluegrass. You just sing it the way James would sing it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CHISELED IN STONE")
MONTAGNE: The album is called "Three Chords and the Truth."
: Ain't that a title?
MONTAGNE: King says the phrase pretty much sums up his musical approach.
: Basically, what I try to do is I try to play the chords. And I tell the truth about the song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THINGS HAVE GONE TO PIECES")
MONTAGNE: King says he grew up poor, struggled with substance abuse, went through three divorces, and then a year ago tragedy struck. His 18-year-old daughter died in a car crash. So it was not difficult for him to connect with a Country Western song like "Things have Gone to Pieces."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THINGS HAVE GONE TO PIECES")
MONTAGNE: For now though, the sun appears to be shining on James King. He's now sober and happily embarked on his fourth marriage. Plus, the album he long resisted is up for a Grammy.
: It was a great idea. I sing those songs my way. And I think I done a fine job on them. I'm not ashamed of them now whatsoever.
MONTAGNE: James King's album is called "Three Chords and the Truth."
And you're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Happy New Year, I'm Renee Montagne.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Millions of American property owners get flood insurance from the federal government at cut-rate prices. And over the past decade the government has paid out huge sums of money after floods, pushing the flood insurance program deeply into the red. Congress aimed to fix that by authorizing higher premiums, which created such an uproar that Congress is now trying to backtrack.
NPR's Christopher Joyce reports.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: After a natural disaster, it's FEMA - the Federal Emergency Management Agency - that provides food, shelter, money - pretty much whatever people need. But before a disaster, FEMA can help too, with flood insurance - cheap flood insurance. You can buy a FEMA policy for 40 percent less than the price private insurers would offer.
But now, FEMA has a problem.
CRAIG FUGATE: We are $24 billion in debt.
JOYCE: FEMA director Craig Fugate recently sat before a congressional committee in Washington, D.C., and made the case for raising insurance rates. A string of hurricanes and floods over the past decade has drained FEMA's insurance fund. And then people rebuild in flood zones, in part because FEMA offers cut-rate prices on one-fifth of its policies.
FUGATE: The moral hazard of subsidizing risk is we're going to rebuild right where we were, just the way it was - and we're going to get wiped out.
JOYCE: But here's the weird thing. FEMA already has the right to raise rates. In 2012, Congress passed a law directing FEMA to charge real-life premiums, the kind of insurance rates that private companies would charge. Congress said you can stop subsidizing people, and FEMA did just that.
In 2013, the first rate hikes were applied to second homes and properties that changed hands. In some cases, premiums went up by thousands of dollars. And right away, the phones in Congress started ringing - so much so that Congress called Fugate in to demand a stop to the very law it passed.
Here's Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who actually sponsored the 2012 law that raised rates. The law is named after her.
REP. MAXINE WATERS: Let me just say, all of the harm that has been caused to thousands of people across this country that are calling us, that are going to lose their homes, that are placed in this position, is just unconscionable.
JOYCE: Now, Waters and other members want a lengthy affordability study to see just how high rates might go. They also want FEMA to finish updating its flood maps to see if people who are not in a flood zone now will end up in one. FEMA's Fugate doesn't think much of this idea.
FUGATE: If we are going to continue to do this, if we wait until all the maps are updated, it will indefinitely delay implementation.
STEPHEN ELLIS: It is buyer's remorse by the lawmakers.
JOYCE: Stephen Ellis monitors the ups and downs of flood insurance for a group called Taxpayers for Common Sense.
ELLIS: I mean they did the right thing and then that kind of outraged some of their constituents, who have howled quite loudly, and so now they're talking about undoing those reforms.
JOYCE: He says subsidized insurance from FEMA means taxpayers are footing part of the bill for people who live in flood zones. Moreover, he says, artificially low premiums actually encourage people to rebuild where they probably shouldn't.
ELLIS: Basically Congress is saying why didn't you protect us from ourselves? Why didn't you tell us that we were doing responsible reforms that were actually going to cost people money and have a bit of pain? Because that's what has to happen. It's the necessary medicine if this program is going to survive.
JOYCE: There's another way to look at this, though - the way Gerald Galloway does. He's an engineering professor at the University of Maryland who studies floods and advises the government on how to deal with them. He says yes, there are flood-prone places - like Louisiana - that suck up a big share of FEMA's flood money.
GERALD GALLOWAY: But wait a second. Thirty-five percent of our nation's oil and gas comes from the Gulf Coast, and these people are - live in some form of risk.
JOYCE: Galloway says they need to live there, to keep the oil and gas business running. He favors a step back from raising rates now for most homeowners, to devise ways to cushion the impact of higher rates in flood-prone places.
GALLOWAY: Recognize that it is not a flood insurance program. It is a program to maintain the viability of communities and their economy.
JOYCE: So Congress is now drafting a new law to delay the one it passed in 2012. That delay could last as much as four years, at which point the 2012 law will expire. Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
New York City ushered in the New Year last night with its famous crystal ball, and also the swearing in of a new mayor. Just after midnight, Bill de Blasio was sworn into office in a private ceremony in the yard of his row house in Brooklyn. He's the first Democratic mayor in 20 years. His vision of the city could hardly be more different than that of his predecessor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who presided over what many will remember as a kind of gilded age.
De Blasio is a progressive, whose campaign highlighted the gap between New York's haves and have-nots. He was not an early favorite, but ended up winning an historic landslide, a victory seen as a mandate for a new direction. De Blasio's formal swearing in will take place later today at City Hall, and will be presided over by former President Bill Clinton.
For more, we reached WNYC's Brigid Bergin. Good morning.
BRIGID BERGIN, BYLINE: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: Isn't it quite unusual for a former president to play this role? Wouldn't you expect a judge to swear in the mayor?
BERGIN: Yeah. Traditionally, it has been a judge - at least for Mayor Bloomberg and his predecessor, Mayor Rudy Giuliani. So, it's unusual. However, de Blasio's had a long relationship with the Clintons. He worked for the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton, and he also managed Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign in 2000. And their presence at this inauguration really puts the whole event in the national spotlight, I think, with a little bit of a nod to possible 2016 presidential politics. President Clinton will conduct the ceremony using a Bible once owned by President Franklin Roosevelt, and there, I think, will be plenty of buzz around a Hillary Clinton potential presidential bid.
MONTAGNE: Now, de Blasio's interracial family was very visible in his campaign. And since his election, he's been speaking of his wife, Chirlane McCray, almost as a co-mayor. It's got a kind of two-for-one feel. What's that all about?
BERGIN: Well, it's reminiscent, I think, also, of the Clintons. Every time Mayor de Blasio announces a new member of his administration, the first person he thanks is his wife, Chirlane McCray. It's clear she plays a very important role in helping him identify the policies issues and people to appoint to the administration. He calls her his most trusted advisor. In fact, she's already become the voice for one of his signature policy initiatives. She's actually narrating a video promoting his campaign for universal pre-kindergarten. At this point, she doesn't have a more formal role, but she's certainly going to be an active voice in the administration.
MONTAGNE: And talk about universal pre-k. Fighting income inequality was a big part of de Blasio's campaign. How are we seeing him start to tackle that?
BERGIN: Sure. I mean, he built the entire narrative of his campaign around this "Tale of Two Cities" idea, and it was something that really resonated with New Yorkers. Very specifically, he's got some policies that he's committed to that are specific to income inequality: building and maintaining 200,000 units of affordable housing, promoting business growth in all five boroughs, not just in Manhattan.
He's also talked about passing stronger so-called living wage requirements for businesses that are getting city subsidies. And he also wants to expand existing legislation that provides paid sick days to workers. In those particular areas, he's probably going to face some opposition from the business community. And one of the biggest challenges de Blasio is going to face in the early part of his administration will be negotiating contracts with the city's municipal labor unions. All of the city's labor contracts have expired, and that means negotiating contracts for 150 municipal worker unions.
MONTAGNE: Give us one good example of how much of a break the de Blasio administration will be from the Michael Bloomberg era.
BERGIN: I think you see the break when you look at some of the new people he's appointed to his administration, specially the new police commissioner, Bill Bratton, and his new school chancellor, Carmen Farina. Both individuals are coming to the administration with a new approach to leading those agencies. For Bill Bratton, a former police commissioner in New York City, also was head of the LAPD, he's really focusing on bringing community policing back to New York and ending this era of stop-and-frisk.
In terms of the Education Department, Carmen Farina, who was just announced this week, has talked about really prioritizing professional development and the role of teachers and parents more so than just standardized tests. In both of those examples, you see people are embodying this sort of progressive ideal that Bill de Blasio ran his campaign on, but also people who have a whole philosophy that is different from the people that they are taking over from the Bloomberg administration.
MONTAGNE: Brigid Bergin covers New York politics for WNYC. Thanks for joining us.
BERGIN: Thank you.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Looking back as a new year approaches is something of a tradition at the Supreme Court. And yesterday the High Court released an annual report by the Chief Justice offering insights into both the year gone by and the one ahead. This year, Chief Justice John Roberts highlighted a woeful lack of funding for the federal judiciary. For more we turn to NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. Welcome, Carrie.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Thanks, Renee.
MONTAGNE: You know, I've just mentioned that the chief justice is concerned about funding for the federal judiciary, and that actually is connected with the budget cuts and spending freezes that we've all come to know as sequestration. What does the chief justice say about that?
JOHNSON: Well, budget deal that was struck by bipartisan members of Congress has helped to alleviate some of the most dire problems for the federal judiciary for now. But the courts have cut more than 3,000 jobs since 2011, and John Roberts says that 1,000 more positions are at risk if Congress doesn't act. The big issue here, Renee, is what appropriations panels decide to do when Congress comes back - whether they side with more generous Senate proposals or the slightly less generous House proposals. And here's why it matters. The chief justice says more than 10 percent of federal public defenders already lost their jobs this past year. If there is no action, there are going to be more of those cuts, delaying criminal trials and civil trials. There are going to be reductions in the number of probation officers on duty, and also a reduction in security at federal courthouses. John Roberts also talks about the courts that pay jurors for serving as jurors. That money could run out before 2014 ends, meaning no more jurors for a while.
MONTAGNE: You know, Carrie, some of what John Roberts is predicting and worrying about sounds a lot like what other federal agencies have been sounding the alarms about on the budget when theirs are being cut. And some of the worst predictions actually never happened. What would make the federal courts different? Why would it matter so much to them?
JOHNSON: The chief justice says in his report that the main difference is that the court has constitutional obligations, Renee - right to speedy trial, right to a defense. And John Roberts says, unlike some other agencies, the courts can't control how big their case loads are. They deal with the cases that prosecutors decide to bring, and businesses decide to file, and bankruptcies. And the courts don't do a lot of other spending, so what we're talking about when we talk about cuts is cutting people - cutting people's jobs. To put this all in perspective, John Roberts says unlike some other huge parts of the federal budget, like the defense budget, the courts represent a tiny slice - only two-tenths of 1 percent of the federal government's expenses. So big importance, he says, not a lot of money.
MONTAGNE: Let's talk about some other issues we've been following. Where do things stand, for instance, with vacancies in the courts?
JOHNSON: Renee, there have been some huge fights over the past year over judges - so much so that, of course, the Senate actually changed its rules to make it easier to confirm judges with a simple majority vote. That meant by the end of the year, 2013, two judges were confirmed to the important D.C. Circuit Appeals Court - and another one is likely to get through in January. But a new analysis by the Brookings Institution has found that President Obama still has more vacancies now than when he took office back in 2009. That analysis by Russell Wheeler says Obama's overall confirmation rates to appeals courts are now similar to his predecessors, Bush and Clinton, but the number of lower court judges that President Obama has confirmed are lagging both his predecessors. And right now, Renee, it's just not clear yet whether there's going to be a huge push and huge momentum in the Senate in 2014 on that.
MONTAGNE: That's NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson on the annual report of the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts. Thanks very much.
JOHNSON: You're welcome.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
NPR's business news begins with Hewlett-Packard layoffs.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: In a securities filing, the maker of computers and printers confirmed that it will cut 5,000 more jobs this year than it originally estimated. That would bring to 34,000 the number of jobs the company is planning to cut worldwide by October.
The cuts are part of a restructuring plan formed in 2012, aimed at stemming losses caused by declining sales. Hewlett-Packard is based in the U.S. but it has about 300,000 employees internationally.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And before the ball dropped in Times Square last night, new numbers came out on the housing market, and they showed the past year saw the biggest gains in home prices since 2006.
NPR's Chris Arnold reports.
CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: The housing market recovery kicked into high gear last year. And that's in large part because at the start of the year, back last winter, it was just a great time to buy a house. Interest rates were at record lows. Home prices hadn't risen that much yet in many areas. Lots of respected economists were saying now is the time to buy. And, we saw a strong revival in demand from home-buyers.
DAVID BLITZER: The results are housing prices continue to go up 13.6 percent over the last 12 months.
ARNOLD: David Blitzer is an economist with S&P - which publishes the closely watched Case-Shiller Home Price Index. He thinks though such big price gains are not going to be sustainable in the coming year. He points out interest rates rose in the second half of the year, which makes monthly mortgage payments more expensive for homebuyers. That's cooled things of a bit. Home sales have slowed and prices aren't rising less quickly.
BLITZER: By this time next year, I think we'll be looking at home prices that are still going up but more likely single digits - six, you know, five, six, seven percent annual increase, not 13 and a half.
ARNOLD: Still, if the labor market keeps improving and more Americans get back to work, Blitzer thinks that should help sustain a healthy housing market.
Chris Arnold, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And today's last word in business is: Cure.
Because what happens in Vegas should stay there, like there hangover - if you celebrated New Year's Eve they are big time. A Las Vegas company called Hangover Heaven is offering much needed relief to midnight revelers with house calls and a walk-in clinic. The cure: an IV offering one and a half liters of hydration, plus a concoction of vitamins, antioxidants and headache medicine. $99 gets you the basic package called The Redemption.
But if salvation is what you need this morning, they also selling more elaborate package for $199 called The Rapture.
And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News, hoping you're having a pleasant New Years morning. I'm Renee Montagne.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne.
Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board are in the small town of Casselton, North Dakota, trying to learn what caused a fiery train crash. It's the latest in a series of accidents involving trains hauling crude oil. By far the most destruction happened last summer in Canada, where the center of a town in Quebec was destroyed, leaving 47 people dead.
Monday's crash in North Dakota caused no injuries. Still, as NPR's Jeff Brady reports, the mayor of Casselton is calling for changes in how crude oil is transported.
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: North Dakota is in the middle of an oil drilling boom and getting all that crude to market has been a problem. Without pipelines, companies have turned to trains. Monday's accident happened one mile west of Casselton. A BNSF Railway train hauling grain derailed. Then another BNSF train pulling oil tanks crashed into it.
Robert Sumwalt is a board member with the National Transportation Safety Board.
ROBERT SUMWALT: The damage to the oil train, both head-in locomotives, were destroyed, 20 cars derailed.
BRADY: Black smoke and a towering fireball rose from the flaming wreckage. It prompted authorities to urge residents nearby to evacuate. People have since returned and the railroad has opened a claims center to compensate residents for expenses associated with the evacuation.
After the deadly oil-train crash in Quebec, the types of tanker cars railroads use came under scrutiny. Critics and many in the industry say the cars need to be made safer. It appears those same types of tankers were involved in the North Dakota accident, according to Sumwalt.
SUMWALT: We have preliminary information that indicates they are DOT-111 cars. But there are different types of DOT-111 cars, so we will want to be confirming that. That's certainly one of the things that we will be looking at.
BRADY: Federal regulators already have tightened some rules for oil shippers. And they're in the process of putting even more stringent requirements in place, especially when it comes to these tank cars.
Patti Reilly, with the Association of American Railroads, says her group asked the government a few months back for new standards.
PATTI REILLY: What it means is all of these tank cars - 92,000 of them - will have to be retrofitted or phased out.
BRADY: The industry put some new requirements in place for tank cars built in the last few years. But Reilly says in light of the Quebec accident, it's clear even tougher standards are needed for existing tank cars hauling oil.
REILLY: It will need a thicker, more puncture-resistant outer-shell jacket around the entire tank car, and thermal protection, There will have to be at either ends of the tank car extra-protective head shields.
BRADY: And a pressure release valve that combined with these other improvements should make moving oil by rail safer.
The NTSB and other federal agencies on the ground now in North Dakota say preventing accidents like this is a primary goal of their current investigation.
The North Dakota accident is just one rail incident the NTSB is working on right now. There was the deadly commuter train accident that happened just after Thanksgiving in New York. And the board is investigating another train accident that happened Monday in Louisiana.
The NTSB's Sumwalt says that means a final report for the North Dakota oil train accident will not be finished quickly.
SUMWALT: We are very, very busy, especially in our rail division. So I'm going to say that I suspect it will be at least 12 months and maybe even longer.
BRADY: Sumwalt says if investigators learn something that could improve safety in the meantime, the NTSB could issue emergency recommendations for the rail industry sooner.
Jeff Brady, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
As the new year begins, some of the familiar voices you hear on NPR will be coming from different places. Call it our own version of musical chairs. Our colleague Philip Reeves has been covering Europe from his base in London. He's now moving to Pakistan. Replacing him in London is Ari Shapiro, who's been our White House correspondent. And congressional correspondent Tamara Keith is moving up Pennsylvania Avenue, leaving her perch on Capitol Hill to take over the White House from Ari.
We thought this was a perfect moment to chat with our three colleagues as they make this transition, and they spoke with our David Greene.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
So let me start with you. I'm so curious. You've all covered so many stories on your old beats, and there must be some that are sort of hanging there; you wish you had gotten to them. Phil, what story is sort of still there in Europe, and you think Ari should pick it up when he gets there?
PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: Yes. I think the most interesting story that he's likely to encounter - at least in the next 12 months - is the fate of Scotland. The Scots are going to hold a referendum, to determine whether they want to achieve full independence and separate from the U.K., or whether they want to remain within the union.
Although the polls suggest that it's unlikely to happen, the issue is still extremely interesting and important. It affects the whole standing, really, of the U.K. on the global stage. If opinion was to change over the next year in Scotland, and there was a vote in favor of leaving the union, then I think it would be a really, very big deal.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Phil, can I ask - speaking of Scotland, when you interview people with a thick, say, Glaswegian accent, do you ever use a voiceover translation in your radio stories?
GREENE: Good question.
REEVES: No, because Scotland is only a few hours away on the train, and if I were to do that, I'm pretty sure a Scottish gentleman would be on my doorstep, giving me what they call a Glasgow kiss.
(LAUGHTER)
REEVES: A Glasgow kiss, Ari - you might need to know this - is being butted on your forehead by his forehead, OK?
SHAPIRO: I hope I don't need to know that.
REEVES: And it hurts.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: I don't know if there's an equivalent of the Glasgow kiss in the White House, but...
SHAPIRO: Yeah, it's called being shut out.
GREENE: There you go. OK. What stories are you leaving behind that you hope Tamara will pick up?
SHAPIRO: Honestly, Tam, one of the stories I'm leaving behind started even before I was on the White House beat, and that's Guantanamo Bay. In the 2008 campaign, both Barack Obama and John McCain said they wanted to close it; and there was this real push in the early days of the Obama administration, to close the prison camp. But here we are at 2014, and there are well over 150 detainees still there. So have fun with that.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Yeah, it seems like political inertia has that one staying more or less the same.
GREENE: Tamara, I feel like you know a thing or two about political inertia where you're coming from...
KEITH: Yes.
GREENE: ...Capitol Hill. Is there a story that you wish you had resolved before leaving?
KEITH: The story that I've been covering since before I started covering Congress - when I got this call saying, hey, could you start a couple weeks early? - was this sort of rolling crisis-to-crisis budget fight. But I feel like they've come to this point in Congress where it looks like there could be a cease fire. And maybe this story will go away or quiet down; and the budget wars will move to the background, and reporters covering Congress could begin to do more stories about other policy fights.
GREENE: So you feel like this jumping from one crisis to the other, it's really consumed you, and made it hard to dig into policy and other stories that were kind of there and interested you.
KEITH: Absolutely. I mean, I feel like I was the budget junkie. And in some ways, it's not that it was preventing me from having time to do other stories. It's that it was preventing Congress from doing other things. It truly sucked a lot of the oxygen out of Congress for the last several years.
GREENE: Well, those are some of the stories on your minds. I'm curious to know if there are little tidbits of advice, in terms of reporting or even living in the places in which you'll be operating. I mean, Phil, what about life in London? Are there a couple things that Ari just needs to know since he's going to be living in a new city?
REEVES: When I came here, I made one vow - which is that I would not travel unless I had to, on the London Underground. You know, it's quite a beautiful city, in places; and the Underground is hell itself, in my book. So I took to cycling. Surprisingly, it's a big city, but you can get across it in half an hour on a bike. And so my tip would be enjoy the cycling, but keep your eyes out. And watch out for the other cyclists.
(LAUGHTER)
REEVES: I mean, I'm a fairly portly gentleman, and the little lanes they give you to cycle in are narrow. And so I'm puffing along in those and, you know, the real serious cyclists can back up behind you. They can't get by, and you can hear them growling and muttering. Then when finally you get to sort of the area where there is a bit more space, they all stream by like a gusher in a pipe, muttering as they go. So you have to watch out for them, too. They can be quite unfriendly, but it's good fun.
GREENE: And Ari, you're a big cycler, right?
SHAPIRO: Oh, yeah.
GREENE: Well, Ari, one thing a lot of people, I think, don't know when they hear you at the White House is, NPR has this tiny, little booth in the basement.
SHAPIRO: A booth where you sat for many years when you were White House correspondent.
GREENE: For many years, that's right. A lot of life sort of revolves around that place. But what can you tell Tam about what it's going to be like there?
SHAPIRO: Well, listen. I would say there are a few things. It's important to get off the treadmill. NPR makes that easy by having three White House correspondents. You'll be working with the extremely talented Mara Liasson and Scott Horsley; and taking one week in the White House and then two weeks out of the White House physically gives you the perspective, and also the access, that you need to do the job well.
And the other thing that I would say is that when you're in the thick of a really huge story, take a moment to appreciate that you are witnessing history. It is really easy to get spun up and obsessed with your deadlines and your stories that you have to finish. But amid all of it, you should take a step back and realize what a privilege it is to be in the White House; to be able to witness and report on these historic events that so few people actually get to see in person.
GREENE: You know, it's so funny, you and I never talked about that but when I was covering it - I mean, I said to myself, if I didn't walk in that building each day and feel this sort of majesty, then I shouldn't be in the job anymore.
SHAPIRO: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
GREENE: Tamara, I think a lot of people would assume that you would want to get the heck out of Congress as quickly as possible, given a lot of the wars and battles that we've had. But I'm curious, what are you going to miss?
KEITH: I think that I'm going to miss the access. It's truly remarkable that I can go into the Speaker's Lobby - which is this room right off of the House floor - and just talk to members of Congress. And that's sort of that majesty that you guys were talking about. It's amazing to be in this building that most people only see as just this big dome; and actually be inside and be able to say, hey, member of Congress, let me ask you a question; or let's just talk, I'm not even going to record. And they'll stop and talk to me.
GREENE: And they'll talk to you. You have a question, you know you're at least going to be able to ask it, even if it's not an answer that will help. Ari, jump in here, but I feel like...
SHAPIRO: Yeah, that's not way the White House works. If we could just wander the halls of the West Wing - I mean, you know, I think that's the way it works in shows like "Scandal," maybe, but not in real life. The pitfall covering the White House is that you become a stenographer to power - today, the president said; today, the president did. And you really need to work to get behind that, and find stories that other people are not telling.
GREENE: Well, I'm so excited to hear all three of your voices from new places. Thanks so much for coming and chatting.
SHAPIRO: It's a pleasure, thanks.
KEITH: Thank you.
REEVES: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: Talking to David Greene, that's NPR's Phil Reeves, our new correspondent in Islamabad, Pakistan; along with our new London correspondent, Ari Shapiro; and our new White House correspondent, Tamara Keith.
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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
January 1st is the day college football fans dream about - or at least they used to. Not too long ago it featured the big event - the last and biggest of the bowl games. We'll have to wait until next Monday for the BCS championship. But no worry, there are still some good games on tap for today. And here with a preview is NPR's Mike Pesca. Good morning.
MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Hello.
MONTAGNE: Six games today, Mike. Which are the big ones?
PESCA: Well, I know you want me to say the taxslayer.com Gator Bowl, Renee. I know you're a huge fan of that.
(LAUGHTER)
PESCA: Nebraska and Georgia. Those are two good teams. But yeah, the huge matchup is the Rose Bowl that pits Stanford against Michigan State. There's another interesting one - the Tostito's Fiesta Bowl. I always feel weird about the corporate plug, but they paid for it so we'll call it the Tostito's Fiesta Bowl, and that is University of Central Florida against Baylor.
Baylor has this amazing offense. They score 50 points a game. I would've like to have seen them against maybe a better opponent. Not that Central Florida - also like Baylor, only a one loss team, but Las Vegas has decreed Baylor 16 point favorites, so let's see how many points they can put up.
MONTAGNE: OK. Well, you mentioned the Rose Bowl, which...
PESCA: Yeah.
MONTAGNE: ...in fact it's the 100th Rose Bowl game. And it's the oldest, of course. Outside the championship, I would say it is the most prestigious. Would you not agree?
PESCA: I don't know how to answer that since you phrased it in the negative. I think the answer is no. But...
(LAUGHTER)
PESCA: I would say that it depends on the matchup. Historically, it's the Pack 10. Now it's the Pack 12 playing the Big 10. But sometimes the teams aren't great. This year the teams are great. This year it's Stanford and Michigan State. Other than the national championship game, this is the only pairing of top five teams. Not only are they qualified teams but it's this power on power, great defenses, you know, strong running games.
So, yes, I'm very excited to see how these teams do in the Rose Bowl.
MONTAGNE: OK. Well, aside from all the action today, there are a handful of other games before the championship next Monday. What are the other marquee matchups?
PESCA: Well, the Sugar Bowl, which is going to be tomorrow, Alabama against Oklahoma, that's going to be a huge one. And then Clemson against Ohio State in the Orange Bowl. That'll be a big one. The Cotton Bowl should be good too. That's Friday, January 3, Oklahoma State against Missouri.
So yes, there are good games. I think that because there's no playoff, there's not as much at stake as every other sport's post-season, but that's just the way college football is. Or at least has been and will be until next year.
MONTAGNE: Until next year because, at least this last one time, the BCS still applies that system that puts these games together and sets the championship matchup that so many people dislike so much.
PESCA: Mm-hmm.
MONTAGNE: So next year, what, college football will start holding playoffs. So how do you think the BCS will go down in sports history?
PESCA: OK. I was on the BCS site and I was reading an article there called "BCS: A Golden Era," and they were pointing to the fact that they normally would arrange for the top two teams as they defined it to play each other. And that's true. I mean, I guess BCS defenders would say that the BCS did the best they could do, given the limitations of the system. I'm probably not that charitable.
You know, it's sort of like they were the administrators of an inherently broken system. I don't want to give them too much credit. And even along the way they didn't do everything right. I'm glad the BCS is done. It's not all the fault of the administrators of the BCS, but a playoff is exactly what we need.
MONTAGNE: And tell us about bowl games in the era of a playoff. What happens?
PESCA: Well, the Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl and the Bell Helicopter Bowl, don't worry, they're staying. But the big ones, they're going to be used in a rotation and sometimes the official semi-finals will be, say, the Rose Bowl and the Orange Bowl. And then the other ones will also play out like they have been, as exhibitions.
And then the next year, two big bowl games, those will be the semi-finals, and then the national championship game, that's going to be auctioned off to different cities like the Super Bowl plays in different neutral sites.
MONTAGNE: Happy New Year, Mike.
PESCA: Hey, you too. And please don't bet all your money on Baylor just because of my endorsement, Renee.
(LAUGHTER)
MONTAGNE: I'll hold off, Mike.
PESCA: Deny yourself.
MONTAGNE: That's NPR's Mike Pesca. This is NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne. Around New Year's lots of us are thinking about time and how we spend it. Yesterday we heard about an unusual wristwatch that challenged how we look at time and today we bring you a story about an alarm clock designed to help you stick to those New Year's resolutions.
The Chicago based company Fig believes the clock will help keep people motivated to meet their life goals. NPR's Alix Spiegel took a look and found the clock led her into some much deeper issues.
ALIX SPIEGEL, BYLINE: It's designed to sit on your bedside table. A small rectangle with a digital display - in every way indistinguishable from any other alarm clock. Except this.
RYAN GURY: Instead of telling you the time, it tells you three very important things. It tells you how much money you have in your savings account. It tells how many friends you currently have online, and it tells you how many days you have left to live.
SPIEGEL: That's Ryan Gury, one of the people who created ALARM clock, programmed it to remotely pull information from your bank accounts and social networks, programmed it also so that after filling out information about your age and your health habits and your family history, it could use actuarial tables to estimate - and then display - the number of days until your death. So that every morning when you open your eyes...
GURY: You see reality. You see the truth. You see a little bit of a motivating number, you know, that corresponds to how well you are doing in life.
SPIEGEL: This is the premise literally built into ALARM clock, that being confronted with reality, or some approximation of reality, might feel harsh but is ultimately helpful to people who want to live their lives right.
GURY: You know, it's a reminder of you're only here for a little bit and you really have to make everything matter. You've really got to push every day.
SPIEGEL: So how does confronting reality affect us? Is it more likely to motivate or overwhelm us? That's an empirical question, but once you start down the path of trying to understand how psychologists have answered that question, you find yourself in the middle of a very interesting history.
ROY BAUMEISTER: I mean reality always has its uses.
SPIEGEL: This is Roy Baumeister, president of the Society for the Study of Motivation, who for many years has tracked how psychologists view reality.
BAUMEISTER: Well, the assumption for a long time was that mental health meant seeing the world as it is.
SPIEGEL: For decades, according to Baumeister, the belief in psychology was that reality was an important thing to understand and that people who were mentally troubled - for instance, depressed people - just couldn't really grasp reality. Their view of the world, it was believed, was deeply negatively skewed.
BAUMEISTER: What is wrong with these depressed people that they twist things in this negative way and see things in such a negative fashion?
SPIEGEL: But then a bunch of research showed that actually it wasn't the depressed people whose view of reality was distorted. In all kinds of areas, when depressed people were measured against people who were emotionally healthy, their assessments were more realistic.
BAUMEISTER: Depressed people seemed to hit it pretty much on the head. They got the answers right. It's the normal, non-depressed people who twist things and see things as better than they are.
SPIEGEL: And so in psychology - reality, it basically fell out of fashion.
BAUMEISTER: Yes. There was a what's so great about reality movement.
SPIEGEL: Baumeister says that starting in the '80s, psychological researchers started aggressively promoting positive thinking because a positively skewed view of oneself and the world was seen as more productive and more helpful just in general for everyone, but especially for depressed people.
BAUMEISTER: It's not that we have to help them see the truth. They're already getting too much of the truth.
SPIEGEL: Recently, though, Baumeister says that the thinking on reality has become more nuanced. There's more work now pointing out the downside of not seeing the world clearly and how positive thinking can harm people, particularly at certain moments.
BAUMEISTER: You see, seeing the world accurately is useful when you have to make a decision. Then you want to know what are the chances that you can succeed in this.
SPIEGEL: So now, Baumeister says, research is focused how to optimally move people in and out of accurate assessments of reality.
BAUMEISTER: A lot of people go around with these positive distortions all the time when they are doing their job or interacting with others and thinking that they're better than they are, but when they have a big decision to make, suddenly they sort of slap themselves in the face and sober up and for a brief time see the world as it actually is.
And they are realistic about their chances and then they go back to the positive view. It almost seems like semi-unconsciously that people can turn these distortions on and off as are useful.
SPIEGEL: In other words: Reality is great - in small doses.
BAUMEISTER: The positive distortion will give you the confidence when you have to get up and perform. But when you have to make a hard choice of is this something I'll be a good at or is this something I should take on, then for a brief time you are more realistic about it.
SPIEGEL: Which brings us back to Ryan Gury's vision for Alarmclock.
GURY: You see reality.
(LAUGHTER)
GURY: ...you see the truth.
SPIEGEL: The clock has never been studied, so Baumeister doesn't know for sure how it might affect people. And he insists that he himself is a fan of reality. But still, he finds himself a little skeptical.
BAUMEISTER: To pummel every one with that all the time might - might backfire and have negative effects.
SPIEGEL: From a purely utilitarian perspective, it seems there is a place for reality in our lives - it just might not be the bedside table.
Alix Spiegel, NPR News, Washington.
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Let's put aside reality for a few moments, and join celebrations around the world kicking off 2014 - and a fresh start in life offering at least the hope of happiness, peace, prosperity and love. In London, a spectacular fireworks display kicked off with Big Ben chiming in the New Year.
(SOUNDBITE OF A CROWD COUNTING DOWN, CLOCK CHIMING)
MONTAGNE: An added twist to tradition this year in London: edible banana confetti was thrown, and strawberry mist rained down on celebrants for a multisensory experience.
In Paris, fireworks lit up the sky behind the Eiffel Tower in time to music. The tower itself sparkled in the glow.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, CHEERING)
MONTAGNE: Tokyo welcomed the New Year with the sound of a gong.
(SOUNDBITE OF GONG, CHEERING)
MONTAGNE: While on Shanghai's waterfront, there was a massive sound and light display.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: There were even fireworks in places without a lot to celebrate, like the capital of the repressive nation of North Korea.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLODING FIREWORKS)
MONTAGNE: And in New York City, as always, Times Square was packed with an estimated 1 million revelers enjoying live musical performances from the likes of Macklemore and Miley Cyrus, with some much-loved classics also played for the crowd.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NEW YORK, NEW YORK")
MONTAGNE: And, of course, the annual drop of the crystal ball.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD MEMBERS: (Chanting) Eight, seven, six, five, four, three...
MONTAGNE: One city stood above all the rest in this revelry: Dubai, which already boasts the record for the world's tallest building, set another Guinness World Record for World's Biggest Fireworks Display - ever.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUM ROLL, CHEERING, EXPLODING FIREWORKS)
MONTAGNE: The show used over 400,000 fireworks and lasted about six minutes, incorporating Dubai's biggest landmarks.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLODING FIREWORKS, MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: And the finale you just heard was so spectacular it created the illusion of a sunrise over the city.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: On this New Year's Day celebrating with you, it's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
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Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne, with a short update on a woman with a very long name.
JANICE KEIHANAIKUKAUAKAHIHULIHE'EKAHAUNAELE: Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele.
MONTAGNE: OK, she goes by Loke. Last fall, she began a push to get all 36 characters of her surname on her Hawaiian I.D. The state would only accept 35. Now its transportation department says it will allow 40 characters. Next challenge: Getting Loke's full name on her Social Security Card.
It's MORNING EDITION.
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Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne. Sweden's icy winter keeps a lot of people indoors, so one enterprising ice cream truck driver took to playing his truck's jingle louder so residents could hear. So loud, in fact, that people complained. Which led the ice cream company to come up with a quieter substitute to the traditional jingle: texting. Though you have to wonder if the whoosh or the ding of a text really says ice cream coming your way, get ready. It's MORNING EDITION.
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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. Last night, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer presided over the raucous New Year's Eve countdown in Times Square. But before that, she was working, issuing a ruling that puts into doubt part of the Obamacare health insurance law. A portion of the law was supposed to take effect today. It would offer insurance for birth control to workers in businesses affiliated with religions. Sotomayor temporarily blocked it from being enforced on an order of nuns who manage several nursing homes. The Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged in Denver is one of many groups suing to block the law. They say it is a violation of their religious rights.
We're joined now by NPR's Carrie Johnson to discuss what this might mean. Good morning.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Renee.
MONTAGNE: What was this group's objection to the law? Obviously, they're a Catholic group, and they don't believe in birth control.
JOHNSON: Yeah. They're an order of nuns that operates nursing homes and homes for low-income elderly, not just in the U.S., but all over the world. And they felt that this requirement imposed on them an undo burden and obligation on their religious rights. The Obama administration it took that into account in crafting the law, and that it offered some objections and exemptions for groups such as this. They just need to sign a piece of paper, essentially, that says they're a nonprofit group, and they have some religious objections to the law. But that wasn't enough for the Little Sisters of the Poor, so they sued, along with many other groups.
MONTAGNE: Now, how does this fit into the question of religious freedom?
JOHNSON: Renee, this case and many others out there now turn on something called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It's a law that pretty much says that the government or the state should not impose an undo or substantial burden on someone's exercise of religion. And it's been used successfully by prison inmates to wear their hair and to eat certain foods. It's certainly a focus of new interest and part of the Obamacare debate, now, as well.
MONTAGNE: And, Carrie, of the many lawsuits over this issue, some include private, for-profit businesses with owners who are religious. Does this ruling of Justice Sotomayor's affect those cases?
JOHNSON: So, Renee, this is just a temporary stay. It applies to the Little Sisters of the Poor in Denver. But many other organizations are watching this case, because they, too, have filed suit based on this issue. And it's important to note: The Supreme Court has already accepted a couple of cases, including one filed by the owners of Hobby Lobby, a for-profit business who object to this contraception provision on religious grounds, and the High Court is going to hear that case later this term.
MONTAGNE: And how, by the way, did this end up coming out late on New Year's Eve?
JOHNSON: So, what happened is that many of the groups that are suing over this provision of the Affordable Health Care Act tried last night to get courts to temporarily enjoin or block enforcement of the provision, because the law takes effect January 1st. Many courts, lower courts agreed. The lower court in Denver did not agree. So the Little Sisters of the Poor took their case all the way up to the Supreme Court, and Justice Sotomayor acted, as you mentioned, just a few hours before she was to preside over the dropping of the ball in Times Square for New Year's.
MONTAGNE: And just briefly, this is a temporary stay. So what is the next step, here?
JOHNSON: Great question. The justices asked the Obama administration to respond by Friday at 10 AM. So we are going to be seeing more action on this later week.
MONTAGNE: That's NPR's Carrie Johnson. Thanks very much.
JOHNSON: Thank you.
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And in this new year, Colorado is turning over a new leaf. State license retailers spent their New Year's Eve putting plant buds on shelves, stuffing baggies and rolling joints in preparation for what's being called Green Wednesday. Colorado is the first in the nation to regulate and control a recreational marijuana industry.
According to the State Marijuana Enforcement Division, more than 300 businesses have put in for licenses to legally sell pot. About 15 of those stores are in Denver. Dozens more pot shops are expected to open state-wide in the coming months. You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
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I'm not sure if you knew this; I didn't. Cape Cod got its name for the abundance of cod off its coastline. At one time, cod actually sustained New England's fishing industry but times have changed. Over-fishing has nearly wiped out local stocks of cod and severe catch limits have been imposed. As Rachel Gotbaum reports, consumers on the cape are being encouraged to try other kinds of fish.
RACHEL GOTBAUM, BYLINE: Greg Wilinsky has been fishing on Cape Cod for more than 30 years. Until recently, he made much of his living catching cod. But that has changed.
GREG WILINSKY: I've never seen cod fishing this bad. It looks to me like it's over. And I can't catch any codfish.
GOTBAUM: Last year fishermen in New England caught 75 percent less cod than just a few years earlier. It's so bad that many say for the first time they cannot catch enough cod to even reach shrinking government quotas.
Finely JP's is a popular seafood restaurant on the cape. Owner John Pontius says his restaurant is like most places on Cape Cod - he has always served local cod. But the shortage caused prices to skyrocket so for a while he took it off the menu.
JOHN PONTIUS: You know, people come to Cape Cod thinking Cape Cod, let's get some cod fish, right? That's why they named it Cape Cod.
GOTBAUM: Now Pontius serves cod imported from Iceland. He is not alone.
PONTIUS: You know, everybody up and down the road has got the same cod from Iceland on their menu right now. If it's cod, it's more than likely Icelandic.
GOTBAUM: To deal with the shortage, New England fishermen are turning to other types of fish, specifically dogfish. Butt dogfish is considered a trash fish and has virtually no market here in the U.S.
(SOUNDBITE OF ICE MACHINE)
GOTBAUM: North of Boston in Gloucester the giant ice machines are deafening at Cape Ann Seafood Exchange, a fish wholesaler on the dock. Gloucester was once the busiest fishing port in the world because of all the cod. But those times are long gone.
CHRIS DUFFY: This fishery has been declared a federal disaster.
GOTBAUM: That's Chris Duffy. He's the manager here. In his warehouse Duffy shows off vats of freshly caught whole dogfish packed on ice. Virtually all of it will be shipped overseas to Asia and Europe.
DUFFY: This under section here is called the belly flap. Those go to Germany and they get smoked. They take the take the skin off of this and you have the dogfish backs. They're big in Europe and they will chop it up into cutlets with the meat in it and they'll fry it up that way.
GOTBAUM: So it's popular elsewhere?
DUFFY: Yeah. It's just in America it's not.
GOTBAUM: So Duffy and other fish wholesalers are trying to build a local market for dogfish. But it's a hard sell.
(SOUNDBITE OF RESTAURANT)
GOTBAUM: Connolly's Seafood is located just down the block from the Cape Ann Seafood Exchange.
(SOUNDBITE OF RESTAURANT)
GOTBAUM: Romeo Solviletti is the manager here.
ROMEO SOLVILETTI: Well, I know what they do with the dogfish. They send it to England, mostly and the English use it as fish and chips. And I believe that's why they put vinegar on their fish and chips. I mean, I'm sure there are people that eat the dogfish around here, but we don't sell any of it.
(SOUNDBITE OF PHONE RINGING)
SOLVILETTI: Hello, Connolly's.
GOTBAUM: But the firm white fish is slowly making its way into markets in New England, including into dining rooms of local hospitals and universities. Cape Cod chef John Pontius says maybe the best way to wean customers off cod is to change the name of Cape Cod itself. His suggestion? Cape Dogfish. For NPR News, I'm Rachel Gotbaum in Boston.
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Food, mealtime, is one of the few daily pleasures inmates have in prison, and food should not be used to enforce discipline or punish prisoners. That's according to the American Correctional Association, which sets standards for the nation's prisons. Still, many institutions do just that when inmates break the rules.
NPR's Eliza Barclay has that story.
ELIZA BARCLAY, BYLINE: Back in the 19th century, prisoners were given bread and water until they'd earned with good behavior the right to eat meat and cheese. Today, some prisons and jails feed prisoners a bland lump when they misbehave. They call it the loaf.
SHERIFF DAVID CLARKE: It's a food source. It contains all the vitamins and nutrients and minerals that a human being needs. It's been approved by the courts. I've had it myself. It's like eating meatloaf.
BARCLAY: Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke has used the loaf in his jail for five years. No one knows exactly how many institutions use it. But prisoners hate it.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK")
BARCLAY: The Netflix show "Orange Is the New Black" is based on the experiences of many former inmates who got the loaf in what's known as the SHU, or the isolation unit. The SHU is where Aaron Fraser had the loaf while he was serving time from 2004 to 2007 for counterfeit. He loathed it.
AARON FRASER: I would have to be on the point of dizziness when I know I have no choice.
BARCLAY: On the face of it, the loaf doesn't sound so bad. In Pennsylvania state prisons, it's made with potatoes, cabbage, oatmeal and margarine. A county jail in Washington State makes theirs with meat, apples and tomatoes. But prisoners who misbehave don't just get it once. They have to eat it for every meal, days or weeks at a time. That's why it works as a deterrent, says Sheriff Clarke.
CLARKE: When we started to use this in the disciplinary pods, all of the sudden the incidence of fights, of attacks against our staff, started to drop tremendously. You know, we'll often hear from inmates, please, I won't do that anymore. Please, don't put me in the disciplinary pod, I don't want to eat nutraloaf.
BARCLAY: Marcia Pelchat is a psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. She says humans have evolved to crave a variety of food.
MARCIA PELCHAT: Having to eat the loaf over and over again probably makes people miserable. They might be a little bit nauseated by it, they're craving other foods.
BARCLAY: And it can sometimes stop prisoners from eating altogether.
Which is why human rights advocates say it's unethical to use food as punishment in this way. David Fathi is director of the National Prison Project for the American Civil Liberties Union.
DAVID FATHI: Given that food is clearly recognized as a basic human need to which prisoners are constitutionally entitled, taking away food has always been sort of legally right on the line.
BARCLAY: The Federal Bureau of Prisons says it has never used the loaf. Still, it persists in other parts of the corrections system, and no agencies or organizations are keeping track of where and how often it's used.
Benson Li, the former president of the Association of Correctional Food Service Affiliates, offered to help us find that out.
At a recent meeting of the association, Li, who is also the food service director at the Los Angeles County Jail, conducted an informal survey. The answers he got suggest that the loaf is gradually being phased out.
BENSON LI: They are using less or some of them maybe using very sparingly - maybe two or three times in the past couple years.
BARCLAY: Li thinks that one of the reasons for this is that prisoners have been challenging the loaf in the courts.
They're hoping the courts will rule that the loaf is cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution. These suits date back to the 1970s, after the Supreme Court ruled that a potatey paste called grue served to inmates should be outlawed under the Eighth Amendment.
Prisoners have rarely convinced the courts that the loaf is that bad. Of the 22 cases brought since the beginning of 2012 alone, none have succeeded. But the corrections industry is taking notice.
Eliza Barclay, NPR News.
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This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
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And I'm David Greene. Good morning.
Modern farming has helped to make food cheaper, seems simple enough and seems like a good thing. Turns out, though, it might be bad for the environment. Take the case of one simple, essential chemical element: phosphorus. When poultry and pork are produced on large scale, it concentrates phosphorus on nearby fields and pollutes streams and rivers.
If we fix this problem, it could end up making inexpensive food a little more expensive, as NPR's Dan Charles reports.
DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: Phosphorus is one of the nutrients that plants need to grow. And for most of human history, farmers have needed more of it.
KENNETH STAVER: There was this battle to have enough available phosphorus for optimum crop production.
CHARLES: That's Kenneth Staver, a scientist with the University of Maryland's Wye Research and Education Center, which sits between farm fields and the Chesapeake Bay. That's also the tension in this story: between agriculture and water quality.
Traditionally, farmers got phosphorus from animal manure. So, if you grew crops like corn or wheat, it was good to have poultry or hogs nearby. Your grain fed the animals, and their manure fed your crops. Everything worked together. Then came industrial fertilizer, big phosphorus mines, also factories for making the other important nutrient, nitrogen, and railroads or highways to carry that fertilizer to any farmer who needed it.
STAVER: With the development of the inorganic fertilizer industry, it's possible to grow grain without having any animals close by. So you can de-couple the animal agriculture from the grain agriculture.
CHARLES: And de-couple they did. Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama, for instance, now produce the most chickens - together, more than three billion birds every year. But they don't grow that much chicken feed. They haul in grain from far away. As that grain flows from fields to chicken houses or hog farms, so do the nutrients in it - the phosphorus and nitrogen. Some goes into meat that people eat, but a lot goes into animal waste - manure.
And here's where the problem starts: Farmers near those chicken houses or hog farms often take a lot of that manure and spread it on their fields. Their crops can often use the nitrogen, but nowhere near that much phosphorus.
STAVER: And this is happening everywhere. Where you have large concentrations of animal production you tend to have a buildup of nutrients. Primarily phosphorus is the one that accumulates in soils around concentrated animal-producing regions.
CHARLES: Wherever it accumulates, it washes into streams, lakes and estuaries, where it's a disaster. It drives the growth of algae.
STAVER: So it ends up clouding the water. You don't get the light penetration to support the rooted aquatic plants that were important in the food chain. You also get these big algae blooms, and then when they die, they draw oxygen from the water. You get dead zones.
CHARLES: In many places, environmental regulators are trying to stop this buildup of phosphorus. Until recently, it looked like Maryland was taking the lead. The state has a big poultry industry right beside the Chesapeake Bay, which has been choked with nutrient pollution. Last year, Maryland proposed new rules that would have stopped farmers from putting more phosphorus on any fields that already have too much of it. It required soil tests to determine a key phosphorus index number.
Farmer Lee Richardson was worried.
LEE RICHARDSON: The word we were getting was that if you were over 150, you weren't going to spread any manure.
CHARLES: And most of his fields are over that level, he says.
The manure ban would have hit him two different ways. First, he grows chickens. If he couldn't put their manure on his fields, he'd have to send it somewhere else.
RICHARDSON: Chances are growers were going to have to pay to get it hauled away and taken out of their chicken house.
CHARLES: And second, his corn fields still need nitrogen. If he couldn't get from manure, he'd have to buy the manufactured kind of fertilizer. Richardson and other farmers protested, arguing that the new rules would inflict huge economic harm to achieve uncertain environmental benefits.
Late last year, the State of Maryland backed down. It promised to study the issue some more. Kenneth Staver, from the University of Maryland, says it's not that hard to imagine a solution to the problem.
STAVER: The obvious one is find a way to redistribute the phosphorus from the animal production facilities, back to where the crop production is.
CHARLES: Back to fields that farmers are still fertilizing with fresh, mined phosphorus.
Hauling manure such distances would cost money. Staver says that's the price of cleaner, healthier water. If farmers have to pay it, growing chickens or hogs would get more expensive. And then we'd pay for it through more expensive meat.
Dan Charles, NPR News.
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There are over seven billion of us on the Earth today, double the global population back in 1968, the year our next story begins. It's a story about a famous bet over population growth, a bet that some say helped set the tone for many environmental debates today.
Here's Planet Money's David Kestenbaum.
DAVID KESTENBAUM, BYLINE: The bet was between a biologist and an economist. The biologist, Paul Ehrlich at Stanford, was an expert on butterflies. He'd written a book called "How to Know the Butterflies," which was not a big hit. But then in 1968 he wrote another book. This one took him just a few weeks to put together. The book was called "The Population Bomb" and it got him on TV.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LATE SHOW")
KESTENBAUM: The fact that Ehrlich appeared on "The Tonight Show," it's kind of amazing because when he sat down with Johnny Carson for the interview, his message was a bit of a downer.
PAUL EHRLICH: There are 3.6 billion people in the world today and we're adding about 70 million a year, and that's too many. The very delicate life support systems of the planet - the things that supply us with all of our food, ultimately with all of our oxygen - are now severely threatened.
KESTENBAUM: Ehrlich was on the show over 20 times. And "The Population Bomb" became a bestseller. Ehrlich's warnings had a kind of obvious logic to them. When animal populations grew and depleted their resources, their food supplies, those populations often crashed.
Paul Sabin is a historian at Yale who just wrote a book on all this called "The Bet."
PAUL SABIN: There were a number of biologists and they were sort of extrapolating from their studies, in his case the butterflies - the idea of cycles of population growth and then population collapse. And there would be a devastating, extraordinary apocalyptic crash unless we took action now to try to avert that.
KESTENBAUM: So Paul Ehrlich is going to be on one side of this bet. The guy on the other side at this point is basically at home watching Ehrlich on television and getting really worked up about it. He's an economist named Julian Simon. Simon had also been worried about population. But the more he studied it, the less worried he got. Here is Simon on the TV show "Firing Line," with William F. Buckley, trying to explain why he thinks we will not run out of resources.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FIRING LINE")
KESTENBAUM: Simon was basically arguing: We are not like butterflies. We are not like any other species because we have an economy with markets. If the world demands more oil, the price of oil will go up and there will be an incentive to find more, or find an alternative.
Both Ehrlich and Simon enjoyed being provocative. Ehrlich started a movement called Zero Population Growth. He got a vasectomy to set an example and at one point proposed a tax on diapers to keep population in check. Julian Simon meanwhile seemed to enjoy poking the population worriers in the eye. He later took to wearing devil horns on his bald head when giving talks.
But Simon never got the attention that Ehrlich the megastar biologist did. And that, it seems, is why he proposed The Bet.
Again, author Paul Sabin.
SABIN: Simon wrote an article in the journal Science that denounced Ehrlich and all people like him. And this was the first time, I guess, that Ehrlich really sort of...
KESTENBAUM: Recognized...
SABIN: ...noticed him, I think. And there was a furious reply and then Simon proposed an actual bet, saying, you know, put your money where your mouth is, let's test these ideas.
KESTENBAUM: And here is how they decided to bet on the future of humanity. They bet on the price of five metals: copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten. The logic was that these metals were essential for all kinds of stuff, for electronics and cars and buildings. So if Paul Ehrlich was right that more people on the planet would mean we would start running out of stuff, then the price of these things should go up. But if Julian Simon was right - that the markets and human ingenuity would sort things out - then the prices, they would stay the same or even go down.
Before we get to how the bet actually turned out, it's worth remembering the context for all this. The 1970s felt like a time of shortages. TV news showed famines in Africa. And here at home in 1974 there were long lines at gas stations because of conflict in the Middle East.
This is from NPR that year.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KESTENBAUM: President Richard Nixon went on television. He asked people to drive more slowly to conserve fuel and to turn off outdoor decorative lighting.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: We are already planning right here at the White House to curtail such lighting that we would normally have at Christmas time.
KESTENBAUM: That's right. Nixon tried to kill Christmas lights. A cover story in Newsweek at the time summed things up. The title: "Running Out of Everything."
So that was the context for The Bet. The time period for the wager was a full decade, from 1980 to 1990. Would the price of the five metals go up or down? Those next 10 years crept by, during which the world population grew by 800 million people. Then it was 1990.
Who won The Bet?
SABIN: So Simon decisively won the bet. The prices went down by on average around 50 percent.
KESTENBAUM: Did they all go down?
SABIN: They all went down.
(LAUGHTER)
KESTENBAUM: Poor Ehrlich.
SABIN: Poor Ehrlich, right. It was a pretty substantial loss in terms of the outcome of that bet.
KESTENBAUM: One of the reasons the prices dropped was just what Simon said: People invented substitutes. Instead of aluminum, companies used plastic.
Paul Sabin at Yale says personally he worries a lot about the environment. But you got to give this one to Simon. The catastrophe Ehrlich was predicting just did not happen. So far we have not been just like butterflies. We're more complicated.
SABIN: I think that clearly victory has to go, at least so far, has to go to Simon.
KESTENBAUM: What is the good that came out of this bet?
SABIN: Well, I think that - see, I'd be much more cautious about what saying what good thing we learned out of this bet. There was a lot of fighting. There is not a lot of listening. And the other problem here is that a bet about metal prices is really poor proxy for thinking about the state of the planet.
KESTENBAUM: Sabin says he think this bet actually poisoned the waters. It helped set the stage for a world where environmental debates are framed by the extremes, one side warning of certain catastrophe, the other saying everything is going to be great.
In October 1990, the economist Julian Simon was going through the mail at his house and he found a small envelope from California. Inside was a check from Paul Ehrlich for $576. 07. There was no note.
Julian Simon died in 1998. Paul Ehrlich is still at Stanford.
I'm David Kestenbaum, NPR News.
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Let's talk about one of the reforms in the Affordable Care Act that provides funding to states to encourage preventive health care. A provider in Oregon is using the money to introduce something called The Good Behavior Game in elementary schools. The belief is that schoolchildren who play the game now will be less likely to start smoking later, saving the health care system millions of dollars.
Kristian Foden-Vencil of Oregon Public Broadcasting reports.
KRISTIAN FODEN-VENCIL, BYLINE: Teacher Cami Railey sits at a small table, surrounded by four kids at Danebo Elementary in Eugene. She's about to teach them the ss sound and the ah sound. But first, as she does every day, she goes over the rules of the Good Behavior Game.
CAMI RAILEY: You're going to earn your stars today by sitting in the learning position. That means your bottom is on your seat, backs on the back of your seat. Excellent job, just like that.
FODEN-VENCIL: So for good learning behavior, like sitting quietly, keeping their eyes on the teacher and working hard, kids get a star and some stickers. If they daydream or interrupt, they don't. Kindergartener Kelly McKurney(ph). Do you think kids like learning more when you play the Good Behavior Game?
KELLY MCKURNEY: Yes.
FODEN-VENCIL: And why is that?
MCKURNEY: Because every time when we get something, we get more and more stars.
FODEN-VENCIL: Railey says the game keeps the kids plugged in and therefore learning more. That in turn makes them better educated teens and adults who're less likely to pick up a dangerous habit, like smoking.
RAILEY: And the purpose of the Good Behavior Game is to help keep kids on task and focused and it's to encourage students to make positive behavior choices and to increase their academic and social success in the classroom.
FODEN-VENCIL: And the Washington D.C.-based nonprofit Coalition for Evidence Based Policy says it works. It did a study that found that by age 13, the game reduced the number of kids who started to smoke by 26 percent and reduced the number of kids who started to take hard drugs by more than half.
JENNIFER WEBSTER: The Good Behavior Game is more than just a game that you play in the classroom. It's actually been called a behavioral vaccine.
FODEN-VENCIL: Jennifer Webster is the disease prevention coordinator for Trillium Community Health. The fact that a kindergarten teacher is playing the Good Behavior Game isn't unusual. What is unusual is that one of Oregon's coordinated care organizations, Trillium, is paying for it. Webster stays Trillium is setting aside nearly $900,000 a year for disease prevention strategies, like this one.
WEBSTER: This is really what needs to be one, what we really need to focus on is prevention. So I actually don't see this as a risk at all.
FODEN-VENCIL: Trillium is paying the poorer schools of Eugene's Bethel School District to adopt the strategy in 50 classrooms. Trillium CEO Terry Coplin says changes to Oregon and federal law mean that instead of paying for each Medicaid recipient to get treatment, as used to be the case, Trillium gets a fixed amount of money for each of its 56,000 Medicaid recipients. That way Trillium can pay for disease prevention efforts than benefit the whole Medicaid population, not just person by person as they need it.
TERRY COPLIN: I think the return on investment for the Good Behavior Game is going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to one.
FODEN-VENCIL: So, for each dollar spent on playing the game, the health agency expects to save $10 by not having to pay to treat these kids for lung cancer, because they took up smoking later in life. Coplin concedes that some of Trillium's Medicaid recipients will leave the system each year. But he says, prevention still makes medical and financial sense.
COPLIN: All the incentives are really aligned in the right direction. The healthier that we can make the population, the bigger the financial reward.
FODEN-VENCIL: The Oregon Health Authority estimates that each pack of cigarettes smoked costs Oregonians about $13 in medical expenses and productivity losses. Not all the money Trillium is spending goes for the Good Behavior Game. Some of it is earmarked to pay pregnant smokers cold, hard cash to give up the habit. There's also a plan to have kids try to buy cigarettes at local stores, then give money to owners who refuse to sell. For NPR News, I'm Kristian Foden-Vencil in Portland.
MONTAGNE: And that story is part of a reporting partnership between NPR, Oregon Public Broadcasting and Kaiser Health News. You are listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene.
Two words are becoming very familiar with in many American schools: Common Core. The new national education program brings new testing and new standards to classrooms. The rollout has begun across the country, but a growing number of educators are expressing discomfort. Many worry that the effort is being rushed, and that people are not focusing enough on the potential impact. After all, they point out, Common Core won't just be gauging student's progress. It will also evaluate teachers, rate schools and rank states.
NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports that this growing unease could delay or even derail implementation.
CLAUDIO SANCHEZ, BYLINE: Olathe East High School in Olathe, Kansas is holding one of its parent-teacher conferences today. The turnout is good. There are grades and behavior issues to discuss, questions about courses and college options.
Not a peep, though, about the Common Core standards and new tests in Math and English, Language Arts, arguably one of the biggest changes in what schools in Kansas and across the nation will teach and test. It's just not on parents' minds. Besides, says Principal Bill Weber, even educators can't fully explain what's ahead. It's like driving in a fog.
BILL WEBER: It's definitely a fog. You know, in the state of Kansas, yes, we have adopted the Common Core, but we still do not know what the assessment will be that we're going to be administering to kids. And so we're in a lot of unknowns in terms of what is going to happen, and so that's ultimately a struggle that we face.
SANCHEZ: Kansas is one of 45 states that adopted the Common Core, in part because the Obama administration gave millions of dollars to states that adopted college and career-ready standards implicit in the Common Core.
But Kansas is also one of eight states that have pulled out of the two organizations that are developing tougher tests that'll be aligned with the new standards.
It's been a hard sell, because of a growing concern that these tests will drive the curriculum, what teachers teach, denying local educators any say in the matter. Olathe schools superintendent Marlin Berry says that concern is overblown.
MARLIN BERRY: We've not lost any local control in terms of what's going to be taught in our classrooms. We have had this conversation at multiple board meetings, and we think there's some benefits. So now a fourth grader in North Carolina is going to learn about the same thing - or they should - as a fourth grader in Kansas.
SANCHEZ: Supporters of the Common Core say that's the whole point, that students across the nation be taught and tested based on the same academic standards, not 50 different versions. Rick Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, says the problem is that Common Core proponents went forward without really explaining all this.
RICK HESS: Suddenly, you're both piloting the assessments before anybody knows what they are, and attaching consequences, and you're seeing huge pushback from some teachers who are saying, wait a minute. This is not at all what we thought we were signing up for.
SANCHEZ: The impatience of Common Core proponents, Hess argues, has turned out to be a huge mistake. And because the public's understanding was so shallow...
HESS: It inherited a lot of the animus that's been directed towards No Child Left Behind standards and testing.
SANCHEZ: No Child Left Behind, after all, started what some call a tsunami of standardized testing that angered and mobilized parents and teachers who now see the tests aligned to the Common Core as more of the same: a test-driven reform that stresses kids out and robs them of a well-rounded education.
DR. ELEASE FREDERIC: You teach, you test. You re-teach, you test.
SANCHEZ: Dr. Elease Frederic, schools superintendent in Halifax County, North Carolina, says the focus on testing is excessive, given all the other things school districts have to do to prepare for the Common Core.
FREDERIC: And it's going to take time. We just started lots of new things in North Carolina with Common Core, with assessments, with this, with that. People are kind of oomph, what next? We can't anymore.
SANCHEZ: Testing experts say if you're going to test students based on the new standards, you first have to give states time to develop new curricula so that kids have a chance to learn the new, more rigorous content.
Then you have to give teachers the training necessary to make the switch from what they've been teaching and how they've been teaching. And you have to do it all before you hold anybody accountable for how they do.
So why have the Common Core standards and tests been so rushed? Proponents know there's a very narrow window of time for everything to come together before it gets bogged down in political and ideological squabbles.
ROBERT BRENNAN: That window isn't going to stay open forever.
SANCHEZ: Robert Brennan, of the University of Iowa, is advising the people who are designing the new tests. He says despite all the confusion and angst, Americans will eventually see the value of the Common Core.
BRENNAN: I do think there's enough buy-in by states that I'm fairly optimistic that they are going to result in improved testing of a type that will give us a better understanding of the depth of knowledge our children have or don't have.
SANCHEZ: Brennan predicts that no matter how many more states defect from the Common Core, they can't go back to the kind of weak academic standards and tests that have made it so hard to figure out what American students really know and are able to do. Claudio Sanchez, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Rhode Island's Central Falls High School made headlines in 2010 for a pretty dramatic reason: The school board fired all of its teachers as part of a draconian plan to turn around a school experiencing serious problems. The teachers were later rehired, and now, four years later, a series of reforms at Central Falls High appear to be helping. Elisabeth Harrison from Rhode Island Public Radio has the story.
ELISABETH HARRISON, BYLINE: Central Falls, Rhode Island is a gritty, former mill town with many immigrants and families struggling to get by. Its high school has long been known as one of the worst in the state. Eighteen-year-old Byron Perez says the mass firing and rehiring of teachers made it worse.
BYRON PEREZ: Things are kind of crazy. When we got dismissed at three, everything was just hectic - classes, everything.
HARRISON: Perez was a freshman back then, and remembers days when teachers didn't show up for class and fights broke out in the hallways. Today, the hallways are noisy, but students are smiling as they make their way to their classrooms.
JUSTIN DRAW: All right. Here we go. All aboard.
HARRISON: Some ninth graders take their time sitting down at their desks, so teacher Justin Draw tells them to settle down.
DRAW: Hey, folks. Books out, please. Hey, phones away, Books out.
HARRISON: Draw moves from classroom to classroom, helping teachers work with students who have special needs. His job is just one example of the changes Central Falls is making, and it seems to be helping. The school has overhauled curriculum and added special programs to get dropouts back. The graduation rate is up from a dismal 52 percent to 70 percent. Senior Byron Perez says things are a lot different after the chaos of his freshman year.
PEREZ: Now that everything's settled. Everything's all good. It's, like, everything's back in control. It's, like, it's kind of a relief.
HARRISON: A relief for Perez and for teachers. About half of the original faculty remains at the school. Principal Joshua LaPlante is a former biology teacher.
JOSHUA LAPLANTE: So, for however many years, we've been a low-achieving, non-improving school. And we can refer to the times where we all felt very comfortable, because when I started here we were all very comfortable, but our students were not making any gains.
HARRISON: Long-time English teacher Richard Kinslow says he wants to see students make gains, but he sees the firings as a setback. Teachers have struggled to regain morale, and Kinslow says there are still problems with discipline.
RICHARD KINSLOW: Teachers are swore at all the time. They're told to shut up. Two have been threatened, that I know of, this year. I'll eff you up, you know, that kind of stuff.
HARRISON: School administrators say they're working on discipline and giving students a better education. Take math, for example. Test scores nearly doubled last year, but they're still among the lowest in Rhode Island. And Central Falls no longer has extra federal funding for its turnaround effort. Maria Ferguson from the Center for Education Policy says high schools face a special challenge, because students have personal issues.
MARIA FERGUSON: And then, on top of that, you layer the complexity of trying to teach math to a lot of kids who probably don't have those skills at the early level that really will support math instruction in high school, and it is not easy.
HARRISON: Teachers agree: It's not easy. But at least the test scores at Central Falls High are heading in the right direction. The question now is whether the improvement will continue as the district faces cuts in both state and federal funding. For NPR News, I'm Elisabeth Harrison, in Providence, Rhode Island.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
If you ever watched "The Cosby Show," you know this voice well.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE COSBY SHOW")
MALCOLM JAMAL WARNER: (as Theo) You know dad's cooking is really delicious. I just wish he wouldn't tell us what's in it.
GREENE: Theo, the cool, charming, sometimes mischievous member of the Huxtable family, was played by Malcolm Jamal Warner. The actor is all grown up now, at 43 years old, and he's here in Washington, D.C., working on a play. So, we asked him to drop by our studios to talk about his career, which has been shaped largely by that early work with Bill Cosby. It is hard to imagine "The Cosby Show" without Malcolm Jamal Warner playing Theo, but that nearly happened.
WARNER: They were looking for a 6'-2" 15-year-old...
GREENE: OK.
WARNER: ...and I was 5'-5" and 13.
GREENE: Not exactly the profile they were looking for.
WARNER: Yeah, yeah, not what they were looking for. And I was literally the last person.
GREENE: And how did that audition play out?
WARNER: At that time, I was 13, and the kids that you see on television are precocious and smart-alecks and get the laughs. And my audition scene was the Monopoly money scene.
GREENE: Remind us about that.
WARNER: Theo wants to be regular people.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE COSBY SHOW")
BILL COSBY: (as Cliff) Now, what kind of salary do you expect for a regular person?
WARNER: (as Theo) Two hundred and fifty dollars a week.
COSBY: Sit down. I'm going to give you $300 a week. Yes, indeed. Twelve hundred dollars a month. All right?
WARNER: Great, I'll take it.
COSBY: Yes, you will. And I will take $350 for taxes.
WARNER: Whoa.
COSBY: Yeah. Because, see, the government comes for the regular people first.
WARNER: So, the audition scene was that. And I played those scenes like you see kids on television - kind of smart-alecky, and when Cliff said something, I got my hand on my hips and rolling my eyes. And I'm killing in the room. Everybody is laughing.
GREENE: You're feeling like I got this.
WARNER: I got this. And I finish, and I look up, and Mr. Cosby is the only one who was unimpressed.
GREENE: Uh-oh.
WARNER: And he looks at me, he says, now, would you really talk to your father like that? And I said no. He said, well, I don't want to see that on this show. And then Jay Sandrich, the director, said, you know, Jamal, go back out there, work on it, and come back a little later. So, by the time I went back in, I gave them what has become Theo.
GREENE: What a teaching moment with Bill Cosby, right...
WARNER: Oh, definitely. Yeah.
GREENE: ...off the bat. Is there some words of wisdom from him that stick on your memory?
WARNER: It's interesting. Most of the things that I've learned from him come from watching his example. Of course, watching how he ran that show, but watching how he handles the job of being a celebrity. Being a celebrity can be very intoxicating and very addicting. And I've always been afraid of that, because I've grown up post-almost every child star out there who has gone wayward. And remember, you know, I grew up - my teenage years were the '80s. The mid to late-'80s, I was on the number one show in the world...
GREENE: The temptations were there, I'm sure.
WARNER: ...you know, man, living in New York. So, I had an awesome life. And the temptations were there, but there was also the understanding that when I'm out, I'm not only a reflection of my mother and my father, I'm also representing Mr. Cosby and his work. So, I definitely knew what my boundaries were.
GREENE: You've spoken about how Bill Cosby was able to accomplish something in that show in terms of breaking ground, in terms of avoiding stereotypes that was really rare and special. What exactly do you mean?
WARNER: When you look at the history of black sitcoms, they're all predicated upon the, quote, "black experience." And therefore, much of the humor is predicated on being black. Mr. Cosby wanted to do a show not about an upper-middle-class black family, but an upper-middle-class family that happened to be black. Though it sounds like semantics, they're very different approaches. Yet the Huxtables were very black, from the style of dress, to the art to the music, to just the culture. So, being black without having to act black, if you will.
GREENE: And when you went on "The Cosby Show" to work on a program, "Malcolm and Eddie," did you find it hard to avoid those stereotypes without having Bill Cosby there by your side?
WARNER: That was a battle from day one. Doing "Malcolm and Eddie" was probably the foremost miserable years of my life.
GREENE: Wow. Why's that?
WARNER: Because I had come from eight years of being at NBC, under Mr. Cosby's wing, then I get to UPN. And at the time, UPN's whole marketing strategy was the antithesis of what "Cosby" was about.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MALCOLM AND EDDIE")
GREENE: The sensitivities that you had brought from "The Cosby Show."
WARNER: Yeah. And my thing was always, we can dig deeper. We don't have to do the obvious comedy. Any black show is going to do this joke. Let's try something different.
GREENE: Have we gotten past those frustrations? Can an African-American actor feel safe now from falling into traps, or are those traps and stereotypes still there?
WARNER: Those stereotypes are still there.
GREENE: Where do you see it?
WARNER: And I don't know - and I don't necessarily know if people see them as traps. African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures. So, just as "The Jeffersons" or "Good Times" or Tyler Perry cannot represent all black people, neither can the Huxtables. There's an audience who likes a certain type of stereotypical programming, and there are artists, you know, there are actors, writers, directors, producers who like producing stereotypical work. That is a very viable form of entertainment for a lot of people.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GREENE: That was actor Malcolm Jamal Warner, best known as Theo from "The Cosby Show." Right now, though, he's starring in the play "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" based on the 1967 movie of the same name. His role, Dr. John Prentiss, tackles the issue of race head-on, and we'll hear about that tomorrow as we continue our conversation with Malcolm Jamal Warner.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Let's hear now about a new reality show featuring a mild-mannered Canadian who gives outlandish advice to companies looking to up their game. It's called "Nathan for You," and as NPR's Mandalit del Barco reports, it's become an unlikely hit for Comedy Central.
(SOUNDBITE OF BARKING DOG)
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: On a sunny winter day in North Hollywood, Nathan Fielding is directing his latest quirky marketing ploy, this one for a new housecleaning service. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: The comedian's last name is incorrect throughout this piece. It is Fielder, not Fielding.]
NATHAN FIELDER: You know, one maid takes four hours to clean a house; and two maids takes two hours, half the time. So, like, we're seeing if 40 maids can clean a house in six minutes.
(SOUNDBITE OF BUS DOOR OPENING)
DEL BARCO: On cue, a busload of unsuspecting housekeepers arrive to clean a two-bedroom house. You'll have to tune in this coming season to find out what happens next. The premise of Fielding's show, "Nathan for You," is to give what he calls out-of-the-box business advice.
FIELDER: It's very easy to take a really absurd thing that would normally be a joke but when it's framed as marketing, people are kind of like, oh, yeah. I guess that would get attention.
DEL BARCO: In one episode, Fielding staged an elaborate PR scheme for a small petting zoo.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "NATHAN FOR YOU")
DEL BARCO: The outlandish mission involved a team of animal handlers in scuba gear, guiding the pig to the goat; video of which got posted on YouTube, and ended up on national TV news. In another harebrained plan - to promote an independent gas station - Fielding devised a way to offer customers cheap gasoline.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "NATHAN FOR YOU")
DEL BARCO: To get the discount, customers had to hike up a mountain and camp out overnight.
The deadpan, 29-year-old comedian has managed to get a lot of people to play along with his ridiculous ideas, such as getting a shop to sell poo-flavored yogurt.
FIELDER: We're dealing with real business owners that aren't idiots. I mean, they're intelligent people. And it's not like they necessarily think these things are good ideas, but they're thinking: Is this worth doing to like, be on TV? And then we try to push the limits, I think, of what they are comfortable with doing.
DEL BARCO: What makes Fielding so persuasive is his monotone voice and unassuming looks. He comes across as an earnest, pale, skinny whiz kid, clearly uncomfortable in front of the camera. Here's how he describes his comedy style.
FIELDER: Like, really cool, yeah, and like, on trend. Like, really - like, hip and really high energy and loud. Just so you know, too, my lips are really chapped. I'm not wearing lipstick, in case you were wondering.
DEL BARCO: This kind of deadpan self-consciousness is key to the Vancouver native's humor. He says he's somewhat qualified to dish out marketing advice, having studied business at the University of Victoria. As a standup comedian, he landed a stint on Canada's answer to "The Daily Show," as a pseudo-consumer advocate.
Comedy Central offered Fielding his own show. He admits some of his cockamamie ideas do make the network's humorless legal team a bit nervous. But he says the show's best reactions are unpredictable.
FIELDER: The type of thing that one person would get mad at, another person would laugh at, is a good - kind of zone to be in.
DEL BARCO: "Nathan for You" starts back on Comedy Central in the spring.
Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
NPR's business news starts with Fiat and Chrysler.
The Italian automaker Fiat has paid $4.3 billion to gain complete ownership of Chrysler. The agreement announced yesterday is not a big surprise. Fiat already held a majority share of the Detroit automaker that produces Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge vehicles.
Industry analysts say this final step in the merger creates a global company that's better able to compete with the likes of General Motors, Toyota and Volkswagen.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And even as things are looking up for the auto industry, many Americans still feel the sting of the 2008 recession. In the years since, many banks have been hit with large fines, but no major Wall Street executive has been convicted of criminal charges for their role in the financial crisis. That's not always how it went. A few years ago, a series of corporate scandals generated outrage and some stiff prison sentences.
Lawrence Lanahan has the story of one rogue trader who served seven and a half years in prison, and is now trying to make amends.
LAWRENCE LANAHAN, BYLINE: It was one of the largest bank frauds in history. Currency trader John Rusnak racked up nine-figure losses at Baltimore's Allfirst Bank trying to come back from some bad bets on the yen.
He hid the losses for years by putting fake trades on the books and bullying colleagues.
JOHN RUSNAK: We'll just turn this on.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRY CLEANING MACHINE)
LANAHAN: After serving over five years in prison, Rusnak has spent his probation quietly franchising outlets of the ZIPS Dry Cleaner chain.
RUSNAK: The ZIPS concept is based on volume. You know, we can do this for a lot cheaper.
LANAHAN: It began with stroke of luck in the form of a wealthy friend of a friend named Harvey Rothstein.
RUSNAK: I went on a fishing trip about a month before I went to jail and Harvey said, you know, when you get out, I'll take care of you, it's going to be all right, don't worry, your life's going to be restored, you're going to have a normal life when you get out.
LANAHAN: Rothstein kept his word. He hired Rusnak right out of an East Baltimore halfway house to help find efficiencies in his business. And when Rusnak proposed the dry cleaner plan, Rothstein was one of the first investors.
HARVEY ROTHSTEIN: I recognized there, but the grace of God goes I.
LANAHAN: Here's Rothstein.
ROTHSTEIN: Because I have friends far brighter than I am, and I grew up in a slum neighborhood in New York City, and we all did things that we could have gone to jail for, including me. Because we thought it was fun like stealing cars for joy rides, except that's a felony.
LANAHAN: Rothstein had given him a second chance. And that inspired Rusnak to give second chances to others. He helps juveniles in adult prisons find jobs and mentors when they get out, and at his dry cleaner outlets, he says he's hired six people out of prison and over 30 out of drug recovery houses.
Two years ago, Noah Shefrin started working for Rusnak at $8 an hour while living at a recovery house following a heroin addiction. Now the 23-year-old is managing one of Rusnak's ZIPS outlets. And, he says, he's still clean.
NOAH SHEFRIN: I've gone through like things in recovery that are tough, and like where I've made mistakes, and like John's been like one of those phone calls I've made, and like, hey, like this is what happened, I screwed up, like I need help, and like he's been there.
LANAHAN: When Rusnak made his first visit back to church after prison, he spied a former Allfirst colleague and ducked out a side door. He's since shared his story with a large men's group at that church, and his pastor, Pat Goodman, finds that courageous.
PASTOR PAT GOODMAN: 'Cause it was out there. I mean, you know, it's on the front page of the Baltimore Sun, and most of us don't have our failures out in bright lights like that.
LANAHAN: Thing is, Rusnak already had a reputation as a churchgoing man before - and while - he defrauded Allfirst. After that, of course, he gained a new reputation: as a master of deception. Gene Ludwig was hired by Allfirst's parent, Allied Irish Bank, to do the forensics on Rusnak's scheme.
GENE LUDWIG: It was enormously clever in terms of the way it unfolded.
LANAHAN: What stunned Ludwig wasn't the $691 million that Rusnak lost, but his ability to go undetected for over four years.
LUDWIG: In that sense, given the longevity, as I say, this is really a major event in financial history.
LANAHAN: Six of Rusnak's colleagues were fired after the discovery. Another, who asked to remain anonymous, said the work atmosphere afterward was like a wake. Other attempts to interview Rusnak's former colleagues were unsuccessful, and you can't blame people for wanting to leave the whole episode behind them. Allfirst, in one form or another, had been in the community for two centuries, and Gene Ludwig says employees at banks like that are driven by a sense of civic purpose.
LUDWIG: This kind of a shot out of the blue is incredibly wrenching; you know, people will always ask themselves, could I have found it or should I have found it, or why did I miss it. Because that will be with them for the rest of their lives, some of these people.
LANAHAN: Rusnak says he apologizes when he bumps into people from his past, and he doesn't reach out to those who've said they don't want to be in touch.
RUSNAK: I know that I'll never be able to make up for the mistakes I made - financially, emotionally, relationally, so all I can do is start from here and try to do the best thing possible.
LANAHAN: Rusnak has paid a thousand dollars a month in court-ordered restitution since his release, for a total so far of a little over $50,000. At that rate, it would take him 57,000 years to pay off the rest.
For NPR News, I'm Lawrence Lanahan in Baltimore.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And our Last Word In Business today is green rush. The first legal sale of recreational marijuana in recent memory happened in Denver yesterday.
TONI FOX: Eight a.m., we're going to do it!
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
That's Toni Fox, who owns the 3-D Cannabis Center. She was making the ceremonial first sale, surrounded by dozens of reporters, to Sean Azzariti, an Iraq War veteran with PTSD, who was involved in the campaign to legalize pot in Colorado.
FOX: Sean, your total is $59.74.
GREENE: That amount includes a 25 percent tax. Some estimate that tax will generate over $60 million for the state each year.
MONTAGNE: After just one day, no one knows exactly how legalization will play out in Colorado. People across the country - and around the world - are watching closely.
GREENE: Some have concerns about the impact legal pot will have on public health and safety.
MONTAGNE: Everything seemed to go smoothly at the two dozen Colorado shops that opened yesterday, with long lines snaking outside the shops, despite the cold weather.
GREENE: Demand was great enough that some shops even raised prices over the course of the day. By the afternoon, the price for an eighth of an ounce of pot at one shop almost tripled, to $70.
MONTAGNE: Advocates say all of this commerce will boost the economy, and that legalization will create jobs.
GREENE: Toni Fox, of the 3D Cannabis Center in Denver, told CNN that she was expanding from nine employees to 30, by the end of the month. And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
MONTAGNE: And I'm Renee Montagne.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
GREENE: The year 2014 promises to have a lot of political drama. Some high-stakes races as the midterm elections come into view. Billions of dollars will be spent in House, Senate and governors' contests. And some of the nation's most powerful politicians are going to scrambling to hold on to their seats.
Joining us to talk about what's ahead in the 2014 elections is NPR political editor, Charlie Mahtesian. Charlie, good to see you.
CHARLIE MAHTESIAN, BYLINE: Hi, David.
GREENE: So it feels like a very dangerous sport to start predicting some of the themes that will be part of a political debate in the year ahead. But what themes are sort of shaping up as important?
MAHTESIAN: Well, it is a little dangerous. But at the broadest level, we can already see the outline of what the 2014 elections are going to look like. And what we know is that they're pretty familiar themes. What we can see is that the president's health care law is certainly going to play a central role in elections across the map, because it's going to be the centerpiece of Republican messaging.
And on the Democratic side, one theme that you'll see Democrats working very hard, is there going to highlight the idea of this notion of Tea Party is extremism; the idea that Republicans are beholden to values that are well outside the political mainstream; and that their beholden to a very small faction.
Now, those aren't the only themes, of course, that we'll see in 2014. But those are the ones that really tend to serve each party's interests and ideology at the moment.
GREENE: Well, Charlie, let me ask you this. Political analysts often talk about the sixth year of a two-term presidency being a really bad one for the president's party. Why is that?
MAHTESIAN: Well, it's because of this mysterious political phenomenon known as the Sixth Year Itch. And what that refers to is the sixth year of a two-term president's term. And almost invariably through at least the last century of American politics, it's been a terrible, rough, awful year for the party in power. And that's been true, whether it was FDR, or Dwight Eisenhower, or Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.
And what happens in the sixth year is that the party in power loses lots and lots of seats in the House and in the Senate, and even it trickles down to the state legislative level. So what we know in this Six-Year Itch is that it's a very tough time for the party in power.
GREENE: And why is that? I mean is there an explanation for it?
MAHTESIAN: Well, there's no single factor that explains it but it's probably a multitude of factors, including, you know, I think a White House uses focus over time in the sixth year. The energy level is down. There's a level of fatigue. You're not the shiny car that you came into office as. You've got lots of dents. You're dinged up. You can see it right now in the Obama administration and the diminished state that it's in with weakened poll ratings.
GREENE: And all of this can bleed into the president's party, of course.
MAHTESIAN: Exactly, and it bleeds all the way down to the bottom of the ticket.
GREENE: Our colleagues here have been talking a lot and reporting a lot on the changing face of the American electorate. And certainly it seems like every two years we're talking about different trends and a different body of voters. What do we know about the electorate and what it will look like in this coming year?
MAHTESIAN: Well, one thing that we do know about midterm elections is that the demographics of the electorate will likely be different than in 2012. Because we know for one thing that midterm turnout is always smaller than presidential year turnout. We also know from the past that the composition of the electorate is likely to be different. For example, the 2010 electorate - the year that Republicans made huge gains - the composition was much whiter and much older than the composition of the electorate in 2012.
And that has enormous political consequences these days. And so what the electorate looks like in November of 2014 is going to have very serious political consequences.
GREENE: So what races do you have your eyes on?
MAHTESIAN: Well, it's hard to pick - there are so many great ones shaping up. But I think the top one, the marquee race that I would point to, is happening in Kentucky. The Kentucky Senate race where one of the most powerful and wily politicians in Washington, the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has got a tough primary coming up against a Tea Party challenger. Then on top of that, in November, he's a pretty tough general election shaping up against Kentucky's Democratic secretary of state.
You know, another great one that bears watching is happening in Wyoming. It's a very small state, Wyoming. It's a small political community and there's a real element of drama to the race between former Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter, Liz Cheney, who is challenging incumbent Senator Mike Enzi. And that's really divided the state's political community. That's a great race to watch.
And there's another one that I think is sort of the sleeper race of 2014. If it happens, it's going to be an epic race in Florida where you've got the former Governor Charlie Crist who switched parties. He's trying to win back his old job against incumbent Republican Governor Rick Scott. And that's a race that, at the end of the day, if Crist is the nominee and he takes on Scott, you're talking about a race that could cost in excess of $100 million.
GREENE: Wow, the numbers are going to just keep getting bigger.
Charlie Mahtesian is NPR's political editor. Charlie, good to see you.
MAHTESIAN: Thanks, David.
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Our colleague Gregory Warner was reporting in South Sudan recently and he described something ominous. As he put it, people are starting to ask who their neighbors are. It suggested that a violent political struggle in Africa's youngest country could erupt into a civil war fueled by tribal differences. Today, South Sudan's warring factions will meet for the first time in neighboring Ethiopia. This comes as fighting still rages. Here again, NPR's Gregory Warner.
GREGORY WARNER, BYLINE: President Salva Kiir declared a state of emergency last night in two states, Unity and Jonglei, and today, both sides resumed their battle for Jonglei's capital, known as Bor. The mayor, Nhial Majak Nhial, reached by cell phone said that nearly every resident has fled. Thousands have gone to the remote, swampy pasturelands up north.
MAYOR NHIAL MAJAK NHIAL: There are serious health issues and also the rebels have moved into our town and people are running with only barely nothing in their hands.
WARNER: This conflict, which began in South Sudan, is a political dispute over control of the ruling party has unfolded into a military battle for territory. President Salva Kiir and his national army are fighting former vice-president, Riek Machar and soldiers defected to his side. Civilians have been killed by soldiers on both sides along ethnic lines.
U.S. Special Envoy Donald Booth is in Addis Ababa today for the peace talks. He spoke yesterday to NPR.
DONALD BOOTH: And we have made clear that those who have been responsible for those violations of human rights will need to be held accountable, but the priority right now is to get the sides to agree to stop the fighting and build the confidence of that situation and (unintelligible) hold.
WARNER: A lasting cease fire will mean solving thorny questions about the handover of power in the world's newest nation founded in 2011. Will Riek Machar, currently leading the rebel forces, find a way to legitimately contest the presidency in 2015? And will the current president, Salva Kiir, accused of authorizing an ethnic massacre, be able to hold onto his mantle as the recognized leader of all tribes? Gregory Warner, NPR News, Nairobi.
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Let's hear now about a new book that explores a major source of stress. The book is called "Scarcity," and it's a look at what happens to us when we're pressured with too little time or too little money. The authors say scarcity actually changes how we think. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam explains.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Each September, the state of Massachusetts asks one thing from "Scarcity" author and Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan: to renew his car inspection sticker. And each year, this recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award does the same thing. He's really busy so on each day leading up to the expiration of the sticker, he tells himself he'll attend to it the next day.
SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN: One more day of delay - I mean, what's the big deal?
VEDANTAM: Pretty soon, Mullainathan finds himself driving around Boston with an expired sticker.
MULLAINATHAN: The sticker is three months expired and now, you're doing all sorts of stuff; like, you're driving down the street - oh, look, there's a cop. I'd better make a right turn so he doesn't see my expired sticker.
VEDANTAM: Turning the wrong way makes Mullainathan late for a meeting, or late for class. Now, he has to spend time fixing the mistake, rescheduling meetings with students, playing catch-up. His next day gets even busier. Now, he definitely doesn't have time to fix that sticker.
MULLAINATHAN: I do this constantly. Right now, I've got a meeting to get to. I don't have the time to replace the sticker whereas the truth is, the enormous amount of distortions I've now made for the last three months because of the stupid sticker, add up to five times as much time as I would've spent just going and having it fixed.
VEDANTAM: Mullainathan recently decided to think about his behavior like a researcher would. Was he just a busy, absent-minded professor, or was there something else going on? He thought about research in his own field. He studies the economics of poverty. Lots of studies show poor people tend to make bad financial decisions, the kind that land them in ever deeper cycles of debt. Mullainathan realized there was an unexpected connection between his behavior and the behavior of the people he studied.
MULLAINATHAN: Just as the poor mismanage their money, isn't it astonishing how badly I mismanage my time?
VEDANTAM: Not having enough money, and not having enough time, might not seem like similar things but psychologically, they are similar. You're running low on something you desperately need; you feel the pinch of scarcity. Mullainathan turned to a colleague at Princeton, the psychologist Eldar Shafir. That conversation led to the book "Scarcity," which they wrote together.
Just as Mullainathan was asking why he mismanaged his own time, Shafir said he was asking why the poor make bad financial decisions.
ELDAR SHAFIR: Perhaps it's the context of poverty itself, being in that context, that brings about a very special psychology, a psychology that's particular to not having enough. And then that psychology brings out problematic outcomes.
VEDANTAM: After lots of research, Mullainathan and Shafir have concluded that when you don't have something you desperately need, the feeling of scarcity works like a trap. In a study looking at poor farmers in India, for example, the researchers found that farmers tended to be better planners and thinkers when they were flush with cash. But right before harvest, when they were strapped for cash, Mullainathan says their brains focused only on short-term goals.
MULLAINATHAN: When you have scarcity and it creates a scarcity mindset, it leads you to take certain behaviors which in the short term, help you manage scarcity but in the long term, only make matters worse.
VEDANTAM: Poor farmers, for example, tend to weed their fields less often than wealthy farmers. It's the same with being super busy. The busier Mullainathan got, the harder it became for him to make time to get his car sticker. In fact, there was a short-term reward for not getting the sticker. On each day he didn't get the sticker renewed, he saved a little time to devote to other pressing demands.
But each delay made things worse the next day. Scarcity, whether of time or money, tends to focus the mind on immediate challenges. You stretch your budget to make ends meet. People in the grip of scarcity are tightly focused on meeting their urgent needs, but that focus comes at a price. Important things on the periphery get ignored.
MULLAINATHAN: That's at the heart of the scarcity trap. You are so focused on the urgent that the important gets waylaid. But because the important gets waylaid, you're experiencing even more scarcity tomorrow.
VEDANTAM: Mullainathan and Shafir think we ought to change how we think about poverty, and how we think about time. When poor people and busy people run short of money or time, we tend to blame them.
MULLAINATHAN: There's this presumption in our entire social policies sphere that mistakes happen because of willful negligence. And I think just - understanding that yes, we need incentives to prevent willful negligence; but we also need a way to recognize that no matter how hard somebody tries, there will be mistakes.
VEDANTAM: It might be possible to reduce the impact of mistakes caused by scarcity. The poor farmer in India might need repeated reminders about weeding. One might not be enough. The minimum-wage worker in America might need a couple of extra days to pay her bills instead of being slapped with a fine one day after payment is due.
For busy people, Shafir says a respite from scarcity might mean penciling in a block of time in their calendar so long-term things have a chance to bubble up.
SHAFIR: One of the few things I've learned from the book - which I try to adhere to now - is throughout my day, when I have a day that's, you know, scheduled moment by moment throughout the day - fully packed - I try to arrange a couple of half-hour chunks, half-hour slots that are unplanned.
VEDANTAM: If you try to make an appointment with Shafir at that time, he'll tell you he has a meeting. What he doesn't tell you is that the meeting is with himself.
Shankar Vedantam, NPR News.
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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
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And I'm David Greene. Good morning. President Obama says he will soon propose changes at the National Security Agency. Former contractor Edward Snowden's disclosure of NSA surveillance programs widespread criticism and prompted a review of the agency's operations by Congress, the courts, and the White House. NPR's Tom Gjelten looks at whether the country is now at a turning point, ready to rethink the security policies in place since 9/11.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: The country's intelligence agencies have come under scrutiny before. In the 1970s, a Senate committee found the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA were involved in improper - in some cases illegal - activities. Those disclosures led to major intelligence policy changes. This past year brought the news of secret NSA telephone and Internet surveillance operations. But Richard Clarke, a counter terrorism adviser under Presidents Clinton and Bush, argues this scandal doesn't measure up to what happened in the '70s.
RICHARD CLARKE: We don't see any indication that NSA or other government organizations are abusing their power. They're acting clearly within the laws as defined by the Congress and the courts. We don't see them doing investigations for political reasons, or picking on minorities, or religious groups or ethnic groups.
GJELTEN: Another embarrassment for U.S. intelligence agencies came 12 years ago when they didn't foresee the 9/11 attacks and then erroneously reported that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Those failures also brought a round of reforms. Michael Allen, who was an intelligence staffer at the Bush White House and then on Capitol Hill, tells the story of the post 9/11 changes in his book "Blinking Red." But he doubts the NSA surveillance controversy will produce a reform push like the one he saw back in 2004.
MICHAEL ALLEN: Everyone thought, well, we have got to do something about the intelligence community's performance. This time, I think you have a lot of people who want to reform some of the activities, but it's not quite clear where to go yet.
GJELTEN: U.S. intelligence agencies can claim success in helping to prevent another major terrorist attack. The questions now are whether they've dug too deep in their search for terrorists or considered the cost to privacy and civil liberties. The White House review panel concluded last month that too often we have over-reacted in periods of national crisis. Richard Clarke was a member of the group.
CLARKE: It's probably a good time, because we have cooler heads, to rethink some of the procedures and see if we can't do things in a way more consistent with our traditional values, while at the same time not diminishing our defenses.
GJELTEN: A fine-tuning of U.S. intelligence gathering at this point might not count as a major policy change comparable to the big intelligence reforms of the past. Jack Goldsmith is a Harvard law professor who served as a Justice Department lawyer under George W. Bush.
JACK GOLDSMITH: We've been in the process of calibrating our response to 9/11 ever since 9/11, in some respects going back, in some respects going forward. It's a constant process of learning new information about what the nature of the threat is, what the costs of our particular counterterrorism programs are, what the nation is willing to accept.
GJELTEN: The White House review group recommended that the NSA halt its bulk collection of telephone records, saying the records should be stored outside the government's direct control and searched only with a court order. One federal judge recently ruled that the bulk collection was unconstitutional; another judge concluded the opposite.
Members of Congress are similarly divided over what NSA changes, if any, are needed. Michael Allen says the second-guessing of U.S. counter terrorism policies in the aftermath of Edward Snowden's disclosures has reached the point that something will have to change.
ALLEN: I think there's going to have to be some sort of catharsis, either a legislative act or perhaps solid action by President Obama, for us to be able to say all right, well, we've addressed the NSA issues, and now it's time to move on.
GJELTEN: Critics and supporters of the intelligence agencies do agree the days of big budgets and broad authorities are over. And President Obama has already signaled he'll propose some changes in the way the NSA carries out its mission. But the memory of 9/11 eleven is fresh enough and the fear of terrorism still strong enough that a major course correction seems unlikely. Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Washington.
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Earlier this week Lebanon caused quite a stir when it announced that Saudi Arabia was giving it $3 billion to buy weapons. That's a huge windfall for Lebanon's armed forces which has long been poorly equipped and underfunded, especially in comparison to the other military force in the country - Hezbollah.
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That parallel army, labeled a terrorist group by the U.S., has long enjoyed generous financial support from Iran, Saudi Arabia's main rival in the region.
MONTAGNE: And the Syrian civil war raging next door to Lebanon adds to Saudi concerns. Saudi Arabia is backing the rebels. Hezbollah is supporting Syria's government. We reached Aram Nerguizian, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies to help unravel what's behind the $3 billion gift.
ARAM NERGUIZIAN: It's an incredibly complex story. For background sake, it's important to mention that the Saudi government has always had a very cordial relationship with the Lebanese Armed Forces, but never one of significant military support. There hasn't been a long history of military aid or transfers of funds. Saudi Arabia traditionally supports allies in the Sunni community.
Lebanon is a country where you have about more or less a third of the country that is Sunni, a third of the country that is Shiite, and a third of the country that includes a majority of Maronite Christians. And that distribution is reflected in the Lebanese military, all the way up to how the officer corps is constituted.
So, for example, you have, you know, the commander of the army is always a Maronite Christian. You have four deputy chiefs of staff, one of which is Sunni, one is Shiite, and two others have to be Christian.
So you have a military that is, on the one hand, enjoys a lot support because it's viewed by a vast majority of Lebanese as being as close to representative of the complex, you know, communal tapestry of Lebanon in terms of its makeup, as one can get. And on the other hand, you have a paramilitary organization which started out as a guerrilla force and that now basically is an asymmetric combat force with some conventional capability that's been building up in urban war fighting.
MONTAGNE: Is it possible to say that Saudi Arabia has made this move with this huge amount of money to be a counterweight to Hezbollah - that is, support the Lebanese army the way Iran has sponsored Hezbollah?
NERGUIZIAN: The Saudi move is a geopolitical one. It's not just tied to Lebanese armed forces. But it's about shaking up the internal balance in Lebanon against Hezbollah. At the present, Hezbollah is the 800 pound gorilla in the Lebanese system.
MONTAGNE: Why is Saudi Arabia offering this huge amount of money now?
NERGUIZIAN: Saudi Arabia feels that in a number of countries - like Egypt, like Lebanon, like Syria - it needs to be far more proactive. And it needs, in some cases, to be far more aggressive in pursuing its national interests, which in some cases align with those of the United States. And in some cases the Saudis view a bit of a disconnect.
So in the case of countries like Lebanon, you have at least a partial perception that the United States is either not able or willing to do more to balance Hezbollah's role in domestic affairs, or to reshape the narrative in terms of Hezbollah's role fighting alongside the Assad regime in Syria.
So this plan to provide $3 billion to the Lebanese Armed Forces plays into this broader logic of trying to change the narrative.
MONTAGNE: Thank you very much for joining us.
NERGUIZIAN: I'm happy I can help.
MONTAGNE: That was Aram Nerguizian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, speaking to us from Beirut.
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Good morning. I'm David Greene.
Fifty years ago, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov made a series of predictions about 2014, and he was right. He foresaw gadgets that relieve mankind of tedious jobs, like machines that heat water and prepare coffee. He predicted smartphones, noting we'd be able to see and hear someone we call, and be able to look at photos on the same screen. He even knew Twitter and reality TV were coming, writing, quote: Mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom.
It's MORNING EDITION.
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Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. If little Lorraine Begazo turns out like many big sisters, she'll lord it over her brother Brandon that she's the older one. And she was born the year before he was. The news is that they're twins. Lorraine was born two minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve 2013. Brandon came along one minute after we rang in 2014. The twins' father says they'll celebrate with two cakes and blow out the candles over two years. It's MORNING EDITION.
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A show on Broadway will spin its final web tomorrow. When "Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark" opened in June 2011, its estimated $75 million budget was by far the biggest in Broadway history. Now, as it closes, its estimated $60 million loss means it is the biggest flop in the history of Broadway. Jeff Lunden reports.
JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE: Regardless of how you look at it, "Spiderman" was going to be one of the most talked about Broadway shows. It had songs by U2's Bono and the Edge; it was directed by "The Lion King"'s Julie Taymor; it was based on a hit Marvel comic book and movie franchise; there were going to be flying stunts right over the audience's heads.
But somehow it all went very wrong, from injured actors to huge cost overruns. Jeremy Gerard both reported on the show and reviewed it, three times, for Bloomberg News.
JEREMY GERARD: "Spider-Man" will be legendary because of the cost and because of the injuries, and because of the ridiculous press attention that was paid to it. But ultimately it's a bad show.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUNDEN: Glen Berger, the show's co-author, has written a juicy tell-all memoir about the show called "Song of Spider-Man." He says that when the show had its first reading for producers and investors way back in 2007, everyone was convinced "Spider-Man" was going to be a monster hit. Berger sat next to the actors, reading fantastical stage directions.
GLEN BERGER: Some of the things that I described in the stage directions we weren't actually able to render and so some of the story points that were perfectly clear in a reading became a lot fuzzier when we finally hit the stage.
LUNDEN: Jeremy Gerard thinks the reliance on costly and complicated special effects might have been one of "Spider-Man's" first mistakes.
GERARD: Most of the time when Broadway tries to be the movies, it's a terrible failure.
LUNDEN: At any rate, as "Spider-Man" was about to start previews on Broadway, after long, expensive technical rehearsals, it was clear that some of the effects weren't going to work at all. Like a million-dollar spider web which was supposed to hang over the audience at the end of the show for a spectacular battle sequence, says Glen Berger.
BERGER: And it turned out that the web net, they just couldn't get it to work. It just kept catching on things, and so they scrapped it. And suddenly we didn't have an ending.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
LUNDEN: When the show gave its first preview in November of 2010, it was plagued by technical difficulties. Actors were left dangling above the audience, and the show instantly became an Internet and Twitter phenomenon. As months went by, "Spider-Man" turned into the center of a media feeding frenzy, including on "The Colbert Report."
(SOUNDBITE FROM TV SERIES "THE COLBERT REPORT")
LUNDEN: Critics, tired of waiting for the show to open, came in and gave scathing reviews. Michael Cohl, "Spider-Man's" lead producer, says he took some of the criticism to heart and asked respected director Julie Taymor to make significant changes to her vision.
MICHAEL COHL: She was absolutely convinced that her vision and her show was going to make it. We were convinced of the opposite 'cause it had been playing for four months.
LUNDEN: Long story short: Taymor was sacked, a new team brought in. The show closed for three and a half weeks for major revisions and finally opened to equally scathing reviews. Still, audiences came. The show ran for over 1,000 performances, but everyone agrees that "Spiderman" was ultimately done in by impossibly high operating expenses, between $1.2 million and $1.4 million weekly. Jeremy Gerard thinks the loss will be epic.
GERARD: I think that when you factor in the very few streaks in which it took in more at the box office than it was spending at the box office, when you factor in the lawsuits and the injuries and work that had to be done on the theater, I would say it's going to be closer to an entire loss.
LUNDEN: Producer Michael Cohl plans to bring versions of "Spider-Man" to Las Vegas on an arena tour, and to Hamburg, Germany, but has no firm plans at the moment. For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York.
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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
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And I'm Renee Montagne. Malaria is among the most lethal infections in the developing world. Fewer people are dying from the disease now than any time in history, but some say even more could be done by replicating the malaria eradication methods used in the American South a long time ago. NPR's Jason Beaubien begins his report with what's being done today in Africa.
JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: A new report from the World Health Organization chronicles a steady decline both in malaria cases and deaths. More people are now sleeping under mosquito nets than ever before. And powerful new anti-malarial drugs are more widely available than even a few years ago. Joy Phumaphi, the former health minister of Botswana, says the tools are finally in place to start pushing malaria out of Africa.
JOY PHUMAPHI: There's a very, very strong belief now that malaria can be eliminated.
BEAUBIEN: Despite this optimism, it should be noted that more than 200 million people got sick with malaria last year and more than 600,000 of them died. Phumaphi, who's now with the African Leaders Malaria Alliance, recognizes that there is still a long way to go before malaria will be eliminated. And she says it remains a major drag on economic development across the continent.
PHUMAPHI: The countries that shoulder the highest burden, countries like Mozambique, like Tanzania, like DRC, like Nigeria, it is a huge burden.
BEAUBIEN: Obviously sick farmers can't farm. Absent employees can't produce. Sick children can't study. In fact, sick kids put further strain on African mothers.
PHUMAPHI: Once a child presents with fever, a mother has to take care of that child. The mothers are the main bread winners in the rural communities because they are the ones who go and plow the fields. If there are market women that wants to go and sell their produce on the market, the mother cannot do that anymore.
BEAUBIEN: The current attack on malaria in Africa relies heavily on blocking infections by getting people to sleep under insecticide-treated bed nets and on improving treatment for people who do get infected. A new study looking at how malaria was eliminated in the American South in the first half of the 20th century, however, found other factors were key to wiping out the disease here in this country.
DANIEL SLEDGE: The primary factor leading to the demise of malaria was large-scale drainage projects which were backed up by the creation of local public health infrastructure.
BEAUBIEN: Daniel Sledge, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Arlington, says efforts by the U.S. federal government to eliminate mosquito breeding grounds were crucial in driving malaria out of the American South. And he says this was an extremely important public health intervention in our history.
SLEDGE: It's almost impossible for us to imagine. In the rural South as late as the 1930's, the extent of malaria was in many ways comparable to sub-Saharan Africa today.
BEAUBIEN: Sledge analyzed archived public records to try to determine what drove the decline of malaria in Alabama. There'd been some speculation that malaria went into decline when tenant farmers started to move out of the worst affected areas to seek jobs in Northern factories. But Sledge says this wasn't the case.
SLEDGE: We found that in highly endemic areas, population actually increased over the course of the 1930s.
BEAUBIEN: He says in the U.S. malaria elimination wasn't a fluke of history, or the by-product of economic migration; it was the result of a concerted federal government program to drain mosquito breeding grounds. Large-scale drainage projects aren't central to most current malaria control programs in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. Sledge says the U.S. history around this could be instructive for efforts to wipe out the disease globally. Jason Beaubien, NPR News.
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Time now for StoryCorps. Today we hear from Susan Mello Souza and Mary Moran Murphy. In 1968, Susan and Mary were teenagers and both were pregnant. Their families wanted to keep it a secret so the girls were sent to St. Mary's Home for Unwed Mothers in Dorchester, Massachusetts. They lived there until they gave birth and then their children were put up for adoption.
Susan and Mary were roommates and at StoryCorps they remembered when they first met.
MARY MORAN MURPHY: We were given fictitious names.
SUSAN MELLO SOUZA: And yours was?
MURPHY: Melody.
SOUZA: And mine was Stella.
MURPHY: We were told whoever we're gonna room you with, you're not supposed to tell them your real name, but we broke that rule.
SOUZA: We did. I think the first thing we said to each other was, what's your real name?
MURPHY: Did you remember thinking of yourself as being a mother?
SOUZA: I didn't until I felt the baby move, especially at night. That was the hardest time for me. During the day we could occupy ourselves and I didn't think about it so much. But I remember crying most every night.
MURPHY: They didn't tell us what to expect for childbirth. Anytime somebody went into labor, it was a tunnel between the home and the hospital, and that's how they chauffeured us back and forth.
SOUZA: I remember being wheeled into the delivery room. They lay you on the bed and they strap your hands down. Then I remember the doctor coming in, and he asked me if I was going to see my baby. And I said yes, I was. I would rock her and sing to her. Oh, my God. I was so sad.
MURPHY: Oh, yeah. Once I gave birth, I remember counting her fingers and her toes. And the day I left the hospital, my mother walked me down, and we looked in the nursery. And I didn't want to walk out and leave her. But there was nothing I could do. And it was never discussed again. Did your mother sit and talk to you? My mother never did.
SOUZA: The rule of thumb was it never happened.
MURPHY: For years I never told boyfriends or doctors. How do I answer the question how many children have you had. I lied for the longest time.
SOUZA: And here we are 45 years later.
MURPHY: And it's so nice that we don't have to lie anymore.
SOUZA: Don't have to lie anymore.
MURPHY: We're lucky to have each other. That's something we'll never lose.
MONTAGNE: Mary Moran Murphy and her friend Susan Mello Souza remembering their time at St. Mary's Home for Unwed Mothers in 1968. Both women have been reunited with their daughters. The StoryCorps podcast is at npr.org.
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Just shy of his 40th birthday, Bjarke Ingels is already a big player in the architectural world. The Danish architect, now in New York, has designed museums, apartment buildings and parks all around the globe. His buildings defy conventional shapes and now, he's taking on New York City - where NPR's Dan Bobkoff spoke with him.
DAN BOBKOFF, BYLINE: In a business that's often poorly paid and anonymous, Bjarke Ingels has become something rare, especially at his age - a starchitect, in demand.
(SOUNDBITE OF OFFICE)
BOBKOFF: Models fill his firm's New York office, a design for a public pier in Brooklyn that looks like a sea creature.
: This is the manta ray that - we've called it. But essentially, it's the corner of Pier 6 and the Brooklyn Bridge Park. So basically, we just took the corner of the park, lifted it up and pulled it out to the edge of the pier, so it creates a covered space.
BOBKOFF: Ingels has unique descriptions for most of his buildings. There's an apartment building going up in Vancouver next to a highway interchange. Its base is triangular, and twists into a rectangle at the top.
: So it's essentially, almost like a weed that starts growing through the cracks in the asphalt, and sort of blossoms when it escapes the turmoil of the city around it.
BOBKOFF: Ingels' work has a few trademarks: sloping lines, and designs that are shaped to their surroundings. But you won't necessarily know a building is his just by looking at it, the way you would, say, a Frank Gehry design.
: You know, some people use only the color white, or some people use only 90 degrees. What defines their style is the sum of all their inhibitions. And I think we try to put ourselves in a situation where we can be free to choose, you know, any weapon of choice in each and every case; to match the context, the culture, the climate in the best possible way.
BOBKOFF: Ingels is nothing if not confident. And if trademark design elements don't bind his projects, it may be an idea - that a building should be built to its environment, not dropped from outer space; that being green can be fun and desirable, an idea he calls hedonistic sustainability. And if there's one design that embodies all that is Bjarke Ingels, it is this one.
: We're doing a power plant in Copenhagen.
BOBKOFF: A power plant that converts household trash into energy, uses the excess heat to warm nearby homes, and emits nontoxic fumes. It's also not far from the city center.
: So we thought like, what if we could turn this into, not a gray area on the city map, but a green area. What could you do here that would make sense?
BOBKOFF: He knew it would be a manmade mountain of sorts, in a city with few hills. And that gave him an idea. Copenhagen has snow but no ski slopes, so he'd give them one.
: We proposed it in a brainstorm as a joke. But then, you know, it wasn't so silly; and we started like, why would this not be a good idea?
BOBKOFF: It's already under construction. Soon, Danes will be able to take an elevator to the top of the power plant, and ski to the bottom. Right now, Ingels is figuring out how to make the smokestack blow perfect smoke rings because - why not? But actually, each ring will represent a certain amount of carbon dioxide emissions. If all this seems a little cartoonish, it might be because cartooning was his passion as a kid.
: In the absence of a cartoon academy, I enrolled in the Royal Danish Art Academy School of Architecture, with this plan of potentially becoming better at drawing backgrounds because - I mean, obviously, when you draw - especially as a kid - you're more obsessed with drawing people in action. You don't really draw buildings.
BOBKOFF: Somewhere along the way, the background became the foreground, and his drawings of buildings started winning architecture competitions. Renderings of his designs were passed around online. Sarah Goldhagen is architecture critic at the New Republic.
SARAH GOLDHAGEN: He's been very effective at using social media, and using the media and using digital technology in smart ways. He's devoted an enormous amount of energy to getting his stuff out there.
BOBKOFF: Goldhagen says marketing isn't a bad thing, but it doesn't necessarily translate into good buildings. But people with deep pockets are taking note.
GOLDHAGEN: Part of the reason that people are paying a lot of attention to him is that he's getting these very large-scale projects, very young, from developers.
DOUGLAS DURST: He was a very brash young man.
BOBKOFF: Douglas Durst presides over one of New York City's biggest real estate companies, even redeveloping part of the World Trade Center site. Durst met Ingels years ago at a conference in Copenhagen. After Durst gave a speech, Ingels had a question for him: Why do your buildings look like buildings?
DURST: I said because they are buildings. It was a little - it was more than veiled criticism, yes.
: At least he got sort of sufficiently annoyed to remember me.
BOBKOFF: Remembered him enough to hire Ingels to design the Durst Pyramid.
(SOUNDBITE OF BACKGROUND STREET NOISES)
BOBKOFF: Ingels is standing on a pile of dirt, plywood and rebar that will someday become a giant, twisted wedge of an apartment building.
: If you can imagine, on one end it's going to be the height of a handrail; and all the way to the left, we're going to be looking up 470 feet to the peak of a giant, saddle-shaped, pyramid building.
BOBKOFF: It will look sort of like someone knocked it on its side, and carved out a giant courtyard in the middle that Ingels calls a Bonsai Central Park.
: It has the - it has the same proportions, but it's 13,000 times smaller.
BOBKOFF: Ingels is wearing a hardhat with his firm's initials that spell BIG - for Bjarke Ingels Group, a bit of cheeky immodesty.
: There's a giant piece of wood coming our way. Maybe we should - (Laughter) - we just don't want this episode to turn into a splatter house.
BOBKOFF: It will be Ingels' first major building in New York City. It's the reason he moved to New York from Denmark and set up an office here. He links the two with Skype, displayed on big-screen TVs. He's hoping it sows trans-Atlantic romance between two of his 200 employees.
: A girl in Denmark and a guy in New York see each other and end up like, speaking so much that they fall in love and get engaged. So we haven't reached that level of breaking down physical barriers, but we're working on it.
BOBKOFF: Ingels can be charming - and modest - at times, but it's his confidence that has helped catapult him to the big leagues. Another interviewer once asked him his greatest weakness, and he had trouble thinking of one. So I gave him another chance.
: Uh...
BOBKOFF: Again, he was stumped.
: Uh - let me find an intelligent way of answering that question.
BOBKOFF: It's really hard for him. His confidence has led to other recent projects announced for Harlem and Miami. The question is whether this 39-year-old will be an architect for a moment or an era.
Dan Bobkoff, NPR News, New York.
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MONTAGNE: It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
One of the great hopes for the Affordable Care Act was that it would bring down trips to emergency rooms, trips that are hugely expensive for hospitals. The theory was that people who don't have health care coverage end up in emergency rooms because they can't afford regular medical care.
Under Obamacare, about four million more of the poorest Americans are eligible for the newly expanded Medicaid, and a new study published in the journal Science has an ominous warning: Giving people Medicaid appears to increase, rather than decrease their use of hospital emergency rooms.
NPR's Julie Rovner reports.
JULIE ROVNER, BYLINE: The findings were pretty straightforward, said Amy Finkelstein. She's an economics professor at MIT, and one of the study's authors.
AMY FINKELSTEIN: What we found is that Medicaid coverage increases emergency department use both overall, and for a broad range of types of visits, conditions and subpopulations, including visits for conditions that may be most readily treatable in primary care settings.
ROVNER: In other words, visits to the emergency departments for things that aren't emergencies. This is exactly what policymakers hoped to avoid by giving people health insurance. The idea is that they will seek lower cost and more appropriate care in doctor's offices instead. And that increase in ER care was fairly significant, Finkelstein noted.
FINKELSTEIN: Medicaid increased the number of emergency department visits by about .41 visits, which is about 40 percent.
ROVNER: Now, this is perhaps were it would be good to point out that this isn't just any study. This is the third major paper from something called the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment. It was a rare opportunity to create a randomized, controlled experiment, the gold standard of scientific research. It came about almost by accident, thanks to Oregon's decision in 2008 to expand Medicaid by lottery. The result, said Finkelstein...
FINKELSTEIN: You have, literally, by construction, made the people with and without insurance identical, on average, except for the fact that some have insurance and some don't. You've literally randomized the allocation of insurance coverage.
ROVNER: Thus, they could compare people with and without insurance almost equally. The first paper from the research team was mostly positive. It found that people who got Medicaid coverage were more likely to use health services in general, less likely to suffer from depression, and less likely to suffer financial problems related to medical bills than those who remained uninsured. The second paper was more equivocal. It found no measurable health benefits in the Medicaid group for several chronic conditions, including hypertension, high cholesterol and diabetes. It's not clear that the emergency room results will translate directly, nationwide. The study only lasted 18 months, and the population is more white and more urban than the rest of the nation. But that's not stopping critics of the Medicaid expansion. Michael Cannon heads health policy for the libertarian Cato Institute. He says he's not all that surprised by the findings.
MICHAEL CANNON: When you make emergency room care free to people, they consume more of it. They consume 40 percent more of it, even as they're consuming more preventive care. And so one of the main arguments for how Obamacare was going to reduce health care costs is just flat-out false.
ROVNER: Cannon says the study will likely further hurt President Obama's credibility for vowing that expanding Medicaid would help get people out of emergency rooms. But what's likely to bother the administration even more, he says, is what it may do to the half of the states that have yet to adopt the Medicaid expansion.
CANNON: This study is going to make it less likely that the 25 states that decided not to expand Medicaid are going to change their minds and expand Medicaid.
ROVNER: Perhaps ironic, however, is that this study doesn't come as much as a surprise to those people who actually Medicaid programs around the country.
KATHLEEN NOLAN: It is not something that is unexpected, and not something that we're not prepared for.
ROVNER: Kathleen Nolan is director of state policy for the National Association of Medicaid Directors. She says most states are already working to help people get care in more appropriate settings.
NOLAN: Things like nurse-advice lines, trying to work with the community clinics and other community providers to expand hours and make sure that people who are working two and three jobs can get access to primary care after hours and on the weekends.
ROVNER: Unlike private insurance, Medicaid doesn't deter emergency room use by charging people more. But the key to getting health costs down for all patients, she says, is educating people about where they can go instead when it's not actually an emergency. Julie Rovner, NPR News, Washington.
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MONTAGNE: And as the new year begins, we want to thank you for listening to MORNING EDITION on your local public radio station, and remind you that you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter @MorningEdition, @NPRMontagne, @NPRGreene and @NPRInskeep.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
We're picking up a conversation we began yesterday with the actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner. He is best known for the role he played in the 1980s as Theo Huxtable on "The Cosby Show." He is so well-known for that role, that even now, at age 43, he encounters people who are confused.
MALCOLM-JAMAL WARNER: People kind of have a misconception, because when someone calls me Theo and I correct them and say, no, my name is Malcolm, they think I have an attitude about it and I don't want to be associated with the show. It's like, no. I will forever be associated with that show, but my name is Malcolm.
GREENE: Just FYI.
WARNER: Yeah. And the fact that you know my name is Malcolm, but you still choose to call me Theo, because you think you're the first person today who's done that.
GREENE: How often does that happen?
WARNER: All the time.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: Theo - sorry - Malcolm-Jamal Warner did more television after "The Cosby Show" ran, but these days, he has turned to the theater, where he feels more room to breathe and be creative.
WARNER: I love the character development process. When you're working on television and film, you don't really have time. Rehearsal is a luxury. In theater, rehearsal is a necessity. I just thought of that. That's probably the most concise way I could put it.
GREENE: That's a quotable line...
WARNER: Yeah.
GREENE: ...more time (unintelligible).
(LAUGHTER)
WARNER: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, to spend three to four weeks on the floor with other actors finding stuff, you know, even with the best of writers and the best scripts, there's still - there's a texture. There's subtlety. There are nuances of the characters and the actor's performance that's not on the page. And you only get those things when you actually have a chance to be on the floor, rehearse, do the dance with the other actors.
GREENE: He's been doing that dance recently at Arena Stage Theater here in Washington, D.C. in a production of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." It's based on the 1967 movie, starring Sidney Poitier as John Prentice, an African-American doctor with a stellar resume who falls in love with a younger white woman and comes to visit her parents to announce their plans to get married.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER")
GREENE: Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who plays Dr. Prentice, says he studied how Sidney Poitier handled the role. Dr. Prentice's character had few, if any, flaws in the movie. It was a way of stressing that besides judging him by his race, his fiancee's parents had no other reason to object to him.
WARNER: In order to have the tension of the white liberal parents having an issue with him being black, you had to make him damn-near perfect. So, that could be the only issue.
GREENE: Malcolm-Jamal Warner is aiming for a more nuanced Dr. Prentice, and he feels like he and his fellow cast members today do have more room to experiment, freed from the pressures the filmmakers may have felt in 1967.
WARNER: They had to take the subject matter and treat it as a light comedy. What we have a great opportunity to do is really delve deeper into each character's very real and complex emotional response to this interracial marriage.
GREENE: And why couldn't you do that in the '60s - why couldn't they do that in the '60s?
WARNER: Because of the racial climate. I mean, there were some theaters in the country that wouldn't even play the movie because of the racial unrest. At the time, people did not want to see an interracial couple. They certainly did not want to see a black man and a white woman kissing on screen.
GREENE: You're talking about some of the things that you added to the play that were more provocative, digging deeper. There was one line where you were talking about the challenges that you face as an African-American doctor in the United States, and you said: Why do you think I work overseas?
(SOUNDBITE OF STAGE PLAY, "GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER")
GREENE: It seems like a powerful moment. Was one of the things that you feel like took things farther than the movie would have?
WARNER: That scene, definitely, because I think in the movie - again, this is a very light-hearted scene between Sidney Poitier and Spencer Tracy - you know, you add that to the play - you know, there are times when I do that line and the people in the audience go, hmm. Or they laugh, because they get it. It's, like, oh, wow, yeah. That's real.
GREENE: In a play with a lot of laughter, I mean, that's like a moment where it's like remember what was happening in this country in the 1960s.
WARNER: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
GREENE: We're at a moment where there's an African-American president who lives not far from where you're putting on this show in Washington, D.C. Are the issues that come up in the sensitivities and the questions as relevant today as they were when the movie was made?
WARNER: It's really interesting, because on one hand, you know, we had an Arena Stage donor dinner last week. And we were talking with one of the donors who had come to the show with two of his teenage kids. And they just didn't get what the big issue was, you know, that they were interracial, because the world that they live in, it's very multicultural. So they didn't really relate to, you know, what they consider an old story. They were more concerned that no one had an issue with the fact that my character was 14 years older...
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: Fourteen years older than the woman you're getting ready to get married to.
WARNER: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
GREENE: They were more bothered by that than they are...
WARNER: They were more bothered by that, yeah.
GREENE: Interesting.
WARNER: So, that's, you know, on one hand, but on the other hand - they are still, you know, those of us who live in metropolitan cities, we tend to forget about all those territories where people's attitudes are not as progressive.
GREENE: You're saying that there are places in the country where there are still a lot of discomfort about interracial marriages.
WARNER: Yeah, yeah. We're not in post-racial America, as some people may think.
GREENE: Having this conversation, you can't help sense a connection between Dr. Prentice and Dr. Cliff Huxtable. As Malcolm-Jamal Warner told us yesterday, "The Cosby Show" sent a message: You're not looking at an African-American doctor. You're looking at a doctor who happens to be African-American. It's the same message Malcolm-Jamal Warner hopes he's sending on stage today.
WARNER: There have been very accomplished black doctors since the inception of this country, (unintelligible). So, with me playing Dr. Prentice, I guess it's really interesting, because I think people, you know, know what Theo represented, and I think for a lot of people, when I walk on stage as Dr. Prentice, they're like, well, yeah, of course. Theo Huxtable would have been this guy, you know.
GREENE: Interesting. Feels like this play is coming home, in a way, for you.
WARNER: Definitely. Especially in coming back to theater. I have not been on stage as an actor in about six years. And to be able to come back with this character and reprising a Sidney Poitier role and having a great cast and such a wonderful experience, it's definitely a coming home, in a lot of ways, for me.
GREENE: Well, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, this has been such a pleasure. Thanks for stopping by.
WARNER: Hey, thank you, David. Thank you, man. Thanks for having me, dude.
GREENE: That was Malcolm-Jamal Warner. His performance in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" runs through this weekend.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene. Good morning.
It is the latest chapter in a long-running debate involving a provision of the Affordable Care Act. The provision requires most employers that offer health insurance to include birth control at no cost.
A group of Catholic nuns was among those objecting to that, and this week, they won a temporary reprieve from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Now, this morning, the Justice Department has offered its response to the legal challenge. We have more now from NPR's Scott Horsley.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: The health care law's requirement that workplace insurance policies include free birth control has been controversial from the get-go. The law grants an exemption for churches and other exclusively religious organizations, but not for church-affiliated charities. And that includes a group of nuns behind a nursing home in Denver known as the Little Sisters of the Poor.
MARK RIENZI: They take care of poor people who are very old, and they take care of them with love and dignity until they die. And they do this for people of every race and religion.
HORSLEY: Attorney Mark Rienzi works for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents the nuns and other critics of the law. The Obama administration tried to compromise, saying charities can sign a statement that they object to birth control, and leave it to a third-party insurer to pick up the cost. Rienzi argues that's not good enough.
RIENZI: To the nuns, their view is that they're just not allowed to sign what are essentially permission slips for these kinds of products. They just need to be out of the system. But the government won't let them out and threatens massive fines against them if they don't sign the forms.
HORSLEY: The White House says it's confident that it's struck an appropriate balance, one that provides working women with free access to birth control, without forcing religious charities to pay for it.
Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center argues the charities are trying to impose their own religious views on employees who may not share them.
MARCIA GREENBERGER: Not only are they asking for the authority not to provide it themselves, but we want to veto the ability of a commercial insurer to pick up the tab, too, for these women. So that is a very extreme right that has never been recognized before.
HORSLEY: In many cases, lower courts have granted religious charities temporary relief from the birth control mandate while their cases are being heard. But the Justice Department said today the Little Sisters of the Poor don't need that kind of break. That's because their insurance provider is a self-insured church plan, exempt from government regulation. In other words, Greenberger says, neither the nuns nor their insurance carrier will actually have to provide any birth control.
GREENBERGER: In truth, Little Sisters, because it is part of a church plan, is going to end up, no matter what, without its employees having contraceptive coverage.
HORSLEY: Nevertheless, on New Year's Eve, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor granted the nuns a temporary injunction, at least long enough for the Justice Department to file its response.
Whatever happens to the Little Sisters of the Poor, controversy over the birth control mandate will continue.
Later this year, the Supreme Court hears arguments from for-profit companies, such as Hobby Lobby, that object to covering birth control. For now, those for-profit employers do have to cover the cost, but the Becket Fund's Rienzi insists there are alternatives.
RIENZI: We have a big, powerful federal government that has lots of ways to get contraceptives to people if it really thinks that's urgently important.
HORSLEY: The Hobby Lobby case is expected to be argued in March.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Turkey's government is defending itself against a corruption scandal. That scandal has shaken a nation often described as the model for moderate Islamic democracy. The scandal reaches the highest levels of the government, and has sparked a strong backlash by Turkey's ruling party.
We reached NPR's correspondent in Istanbul, Peter Kenyon, to learn more about what's going on.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: On Dec. 17th, police raided some very fashionable and high-rent homes; and they took away a Cabinet minister's sons, and they confiscated money. They took away a well-known bank director. And the government immediately reacted by saying this is a political attack against the government. And so now Turks are left wondering: What is going on here? Are we seeing, finally, some moves against corruption? - which doesn't happen very often. Or are we seeing a political fight between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and one of his key allies?
MONTAGNE: So the government and the prime minister think this is an attack on them. It's all political. But what about the allegations themselves, the corruption allegations. Is there anything to them?
KENYON: Well, that is the giant question. The details are sketchy at this point because the government has moved to clamp down on the investigation. We do know that there was a shoebox containing millions, allegedly taken from the home of the bank director who was detained. One of the Cabinet minister's sons allegedly had a money-counting machine in his home, supposedly for counting bribes in connection with government contract awards. And we've seen an Azari financier arrested and suspected of funneling millions of dollars to Iran, despite international sanctions.
Now, we don't know more because the government has moved to sack some prosecutors, including the chief prosecutor in one of the probes. They reassigned police. And we're seeing, in media accounts now, that the biggest of these investigations may be, effectively, stalled.
MONTAGNE: Turkey has been a remarkably stable and reasonably moderate government over many years, but it's been running into problems in these last few years. Its neighbor is Syria. There's that conflict regime right next door. Where does this scandal leave Turkey as a regional player?
KENYON: Well, Turkey's image as an oasis of stability in a very difficult region, I'd say, was already shaken somewhat, largely by the failure of its Syria policy, which is seen as blind to the dangers posed by extremist fighters crossing the border into Syria.
MONTAGNE: It's been behind the rebels, sort of regardless of who they are.
KENYON: Very strongly anti the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, and very strongly in favor of the rebel fighters, including Islamist units that have been moving freely back and forth across the border. And now, analysts say the impact of this scandal could be to distract Erdogan at a time when he should be focusing on regional problems; No. 1 being the Syria crisis, but also the Kurdish peace process. That may be his biggest legacy of all, ending a 30-year conflict.
MONTAGNE: What, then, do you think the political fallout, come the New Year, is going to be in all of this?
KENYON: That's what everyone is focusing on now because we've got elections coming up in March. They're local elections, but it will be the first signal of how seriously the voters are taking these corruption allegations; and to what extent they like or dislike Prime Minister Erdogan's increasingly autocratic style of governing in recent years.
Then we're going to have parliamentary and presidential elections. And by the end of those, we will find out if this ruling AK Party, with its roots in political Islam, will continue to be the most successful such party anywhere, running a democracy. Or will it fall apart, split the religious vote, and will the secular opposition have a chance to claw its way back into contention?
MONTAGNE: Peter Kenyon is NPR's correspondent in Istanbul. Thanks for joining us.
KENYON: You're welcome, Renee.
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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene. Good morning.
We reported yesterday on peace talks in Ethiopia. They are aimed at ending violence that has engulfed neighboring South Sudan, a young country that gained independence only in 2011. As those peace talks take place, the situation in South Sudan is not peaceful. In fact, this could be a very ominous moment. Rebel forces - including child soldiers - appear poised to move into the capital, Juba. People are fleeing the city. The U.S. Embassy there has ordered the evacuation of more staff. The threat seems real, as rebels already regained control over Bor, a strategic city not far from the capital.
We have more now from NPR's Gregory Warner.
GREGORY WARNER, BYLINE: The battle for the minor city of Bor was always about location. Bor is the capital of Jonglei State, providing a base from which to attack that region's oil fields. But Bor is also just north of the capital, Juba. The spokesman for the South Sudanese Army, Colonel Aguer, reached this morning by cell phone, says that rebel forces - loyal to deposed Vice President Riek Machar - are still in control of Bor, and they've moved some 15 miles south, preparing to march on Juba.
The fighting force is a mix of defected army soldiers, as well as thousands of children and youth from the Nuer tribe, armed only with crude weapons like machetes and their belief in an old political prophesy.
COLONEL PHILIP AGUER: There is a prophet that, one time, a left-handed Luo Nuer will rule South Sudan.
WARNER: A prophesy that one day, a left-handed, gap-toothed man from the Nuer tribe will rule South Sudan. Riek Machar is Nuer. He's also left-handed. Colonel Aguer says his Nuer youth are fighting in a suicidal fashion.
AGUER: They are dying. And they don't know exactly what actually is killing them.
WARNER: They are dying without knowing what is killing them, he says. He says the government needs another 48 hours to win this battle. But the army has promised victory before in Bor and been repulsed, twice. The closer the battle approaches the capital, the greater the chance that South Sudan's neighbors will get involved.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, on Monday, promised that Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia - some of the best-equipped militaries on the continent - would unite to, quote, "defeat" Machar if a ceasefire did not take place. Since that announcement, Riek Machar has seemed to take two tacks. He's agreed in principle to a ceasefire and sent his delegation to Addis Ababa for peace talks. At the same time, his forces continue to take territory.
U.S. special envoy Donald Booth, reached in Addis today, says Machar has not officially said he's marching on the capital, Juba. However...
DONALD BOOTH: Intentions that are said and intentions on the ground may be two different things.
WARNER: Ambassador Booth still hopes that face-to-face talks could begin as soon as tomorrow.
BOOTH: Both sides will be looking at the root causes of the problem. They will have to come to grips with that.
WARNER: The root cause of the problem is a struggle for power. Riek Machar's announcement that he intended to run for president in 2015 triggered a series of events that allegedly resulted in an attempted coup three weeks ago. Since then, some 200,000 people have been displaced by the fighting.
David Nash is the country director for Doctors Without Borders. He just returned from a village across over the Nile River from Bor. More than 60,000 people have taken refuge there, and the conditions are ripe for a deadly outbreak of watery diarrhea or measles.
DAVID NASH: If measles gets a way in a population of young children who are living in crowded conditions, the casualties would be high.
WARNER: Now he's back in the capital, Juba. People there are also rumored to be fleeing to the remote south, despite the presence of thousands of U.N. peacekeepers in Juba and around the country.
NASH: It's yeah it's hard to say, you know, where is going to be the safe place. And you've got to be pretty desperate to run to a situation where you have no food, no water, and you're sleeping under a tree.
WARNER: But that desperate situation, for some, seems a better option than waiting in their homes another day.
Gregory Warner, NPR News, Nairobi.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
The situation in South Sudan is, in many ways, emblematic of the troubled year the continent of Africa has endured. After two decades of democracies taking root and economies growing, 2013 brought a series of seemingly intractable conflicts: flare-ups in Mali, Nigeria, the Central African Republic and, as we've just heard, South Sudan.
To get a sense of why this is happening now, we spoke to NPR's West Africa correspondent, Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, who shared her fears and hopes for a part of the world she holds dear. Ofeibea, welcome.
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: (Foreign language spoken), as they say in Senegal - a very happy New Year; and we hope a peaceful one in Africa, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Right because, in fact, let's start with the violence, sadly, in several countries in Africa. Now, these countries face different issues but when you look at them, Ofeibea, are there any common threads?
QUIST-ARCTON: Renee, at the risk of sounding knee-jerk, I think poor leadership is the main cause for many of the problems in Africa. We have seen interreligious violence. We have seen ethnic violence. But when you look at the root causes of much of the turbulence, it's people fighting for control and not giving the priority to, of course, the people they're meant to be governing. So I think that is the common thread.
But as others - and I've been discussing this with friends who cover Africa - they also say, but how come so many presidential subjects in Africa are not thumping their leaders and saying stop, no; this cannot go on. And how come so many of them are choosing to leave their countries on perilous journeys? There are many threads but poor leadership, I would say, is the No. 1.
MONTAGNE: Well, when you say making perilous journeys - Italy, the tiny island of Lampedusa, it continues to get a flow of desperate migrants. What has, then, life become for many Africans?
QUIST-ARCTON: For so many people - especially young men with no employment - they feel that it is better to leave home in search of a better life, and to send money home. But as we said, Lampedusa - this small, Italian island - 300-plus people died when the rickety boat that they were traveling on sank, and so close to the shore. And then far away in the Sahara Desert, 100 women and children dead, trying to cross - to go from Niger to Algeria, to beg for money for a better life in the Central African Republic. Now, Christians are fighting Muslims, and Muslims are fighting Christians, in a country where the two religions have lived side by side for years with no problems. Many Africans are asking: Are we rolling the clock backwards?
MONTAGNE: I mean, are there any signs for optimism?
QUIST-ARCTON: Oh, yes. But you've got to scratch hard. Yes, people are moving this continent forward. I mean small, little islands like Cape Verde, who have moved into the middle income. Mea culpa, have I had time to go to Cape Verde and tell that story? Have I had time to go to Mozambique, where growth levels have been high? Yes, people are moving this continent forward. But we just don't have enough time to focus on that, although I do hope that will be my focus this year.
MONTAGNE: Well, just finally, I wonder if there are solutions that you've heard of, that might be practical and make sense for some of the issues that are besetting nations in Africa.
QUIST-ARCTON: If I take off my journalist cap, Renee - I mean, I have felt pretty desperate in 2013. But yes, civil society - civil society is strong in many nations. But we have to - I say we, as an African - improve the institutions on this continent because, of course, weak institutions and weak leadership leads to weak nations, and that is some of the cause of the problems were seeing. Those who have a voice for the people, use it.
MONTAGNE: Ofeibea, thank you very much.
QUIST-ARCTON: Thank you, Renee.
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MONTAGNE: And that's NPR's West Africa correspondent Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, speaking to us from her home base - Dakar, Senegal.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
NPR's business news begins with securing cyberspace.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GREENE: All right, we're talking about a $1 billion deal here. The cybersecurity company FireEye has bought Mandiant. Mandiant gained some fame last year. They exposed a secretive branch of the Chinese military that was hacking into the computer networks of over 100 multinational companies.
These two companies appear to be a good marriage. FireEye detects and prevents cyber threats. Mandiant's main expertise is stepping in and plugging the hole when there is a security breach.
The merger brought a big jump in FireEye's stock price in trading yesterday.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And a vote takes place today that could have a major impact on the economy in and around Seattle. The giant airplane maker Boeing is threatening to move thousands of jobs away from the Seattle region unless 30,000 unionized Boeing workers vote to accept cuts to retirement and health benefits.
Ashley Gross of member station KPLU has the story.
ASHLEY GROSS, BYLINE: At issue is where Boeing will build the next version of its long-haul jet, the Triple Seven. The company would like to build the plane in the Seattle area and made an offer to union members in November, but they turned that down. Boeing has now sweetened its offer, but still wants workers to accept a pension freeze in 2016.
Paul Veltkamp has worked for Boeing for 17 years and plans to vote no.
PAUL VELTKAMP: This contract is a bad contract for us. It takes away things that we've been fighting for years.
ELIJAH CRAIG: I know that they've fought for us, and I'm glad that they have.
GROSS: Elijah Craig has worked for Boeing for about three years. He says he's grateful to machinists like Veltkamp who have gone on strike before to preserve benefits. But Craig says he wants long-term job security.
CRAIG: The culture of business is changing and I think that there's concessions we have to make.
GROSS: The company's been evaluating proposals from 22 states that want to win thousands of aerospace jobs. Boeing says it needs to keep costs low because airlines are demanding deep discounts. But workers in Seattle say, if that's the case, they would like to see CEO Jim McNerney cut his own pay. In 2012, his compensation rose 20 percent to more than $27 million.
For NPR News, I'm Ashley Gross in Seattle.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Recreational marijuana has been on sale in Colorado for a couple days now. And pot shops there have been surprised by the long lines of customers. Many people have been coming in from out of state hoping to be among the first to buy recreational pot legally.
But as Colorado Public Radio's Ben Markus reports, tourists are finding there are few legal places to smoke it.
BEN MARKUS, BYLINE: The lines were so long to get into pot shops on New Year's Day that Michael Jones wasn't able to make his purchase before closing time. But he didn't let that happen a second time, getting to the store in downtown Denver two hours before it opens.
MICHAEL JONES: I just want that feeling of glory, of walking out of there like I did it, you know. How many people get to say that? I think it's a monumental moment in American history, man. It's been a long time coming, there's no reason this stuff should be illegal.
MARKUS: But he can't smoke it in the shop, he can't smoke it on the street, or in a bar, or really anywhere in Denver. He drove in from Kansas City, so he doesn't have a private residence here, and he can't take it back home across state lines.
JONES: Yeah, we're probably just going to go to the hotel balcony, probably not smoke in the room though.
MARKUS: Most hotels don't permit smoking - and those that do ban marijuana smoking specifically. Jones admits that doesn't really change anything - he's just going to smoke on the down low, like he always did. But to others, this is a bigger problem.
ROB COREY: There is no safe, legal, appropriate place for a tourist to smoke marijuana.
MARKUS: That's attorney Rob Corey, a marijuana advocate, who was involved in the legalization campaign. He argues that cities like Denver are going backwards by not allowing the kind of smoke bars you can find in Amsterdam.
COREY: It's really prohibition under a different name, it's prohibition by over regulation and over restriction.
MARKUS: Corey says it's as if the city allowed liquor stores, but outlawed bars. And so he thinks people will turn to marijuana edibles, like brownies - but he says that's not the same.
COREY: People love the real deal, and the real deal is lighting up a joint.
MARKUS: Besides, it's easy to overdose on edibles - which won't kill you, but can be a very bad high. Entrepreneurs are already exploiting the lack of smoke bars.
Peter Johnson started ColoradoGreenTours.com - a kind of pot travel agency. He has to explain to clients there's no easy place to light up.
PETER JOHNSON: It's certainly a shock to people coming from out of state.
MARKUS: So Johnson says he connects people to private condos and rentals that he claims will allow pot smoking - though he wouldn't give specifics.
JOHNSON: It's a tricky question, but yes, we do have access to cannabis-friendly accommodations, generally four and five stars is what we go after, but we also do also do offer budget trips to people that are on a budget.
MARKUS: For tourists who think they can do it on their own by smoking outside, maybe find a park, think again. Denver city councilman Chris Nevitt sponsored an ordinance that banned smoking pot in parks and on sidewalks, with fines up to $1,000. So where does Nevitt think tourists should smoke their joints?
CHRIS NEVITT: That's a genuine question, and we're going to have to grapple with that.
MARKUS: He says Denver is just trying to balance permissiveness with public safety. There's concern about people getting high at smoke bars and then driving stoned. Concern for public safety wasn't enough to stop Pueblo County - two hours south of Denver. They're allowing businesses to start fenced in smoke gardens.
JONES: Hank Borunda, owner of the Greener Side dispensary, plans to build a deck where his customers can come to enjoy their marijuana.
HANK BORUNDA: Pueblo's doing a pretty cool thing, allowing that Amsterdam-type atmosphere down here.
GREENE: But Borunda says the smoke garden won't be ready until March. So until then, pot smokers from out of state will have a hard time finding a place to legally smoke the pot it's now legal to buy.
MARKUS: For NPR News, I'm Ben Markus in Denver.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And our last word in business: Beanie Babies.
Feels like we haven't talked about them since the turn of the millennium, but they're back in the news.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
For many, the soft, plush toys were supposed to be an investment. During the height of the Beanie Baby craze, people snapped up rare versions of beanies hoping to resell them later for big profits.
GREENE: But it seems like the only one who was able to cash in on the craze was the creator, Ty Warner. And now he has to pay up.
MONTAGNE: For evading taxes in more than $100 million he stashed away in secret Swiss bank accounts. He's still a billionaire, but he's paying penalties in back taxes of almost $70 million.
GREENE: And the Beanie Babies creator will be facing jail time.
That is the business news from MORNING EDITION, on NPR News. I'm David Greene.
MONTAGNE: And I'm Renee Montagne.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
On a Friday it's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. And a very cold Friday in the northeast - a winter storm still hammering there this morning. In parts of Massachusetts, over 20 inches of snow have already fallen. In upstate New York there's lots of snow and temperatures are hovering around zero.
The blizzard is bringing strong gusts of wind to Long Island, New York which is where we've reached Charles Lane from member station WSHU. He's outside Suffolk County Emergency Operation Center. And welcome.
CHARLES LANE, BYLINE: Oh, thank you.
MONTAGNE: So how cold is it where you're standing?
LANE: The last time I checked it was about 16 degrees but it feels a lot, lot colder than that. It's white and it's like a bone-shaking cold is what it's like. You can't really see much right now. My window is all iced up and when I roll down the window, you know, the snow is blowing horizontally across the sky. And then it whips up the snow on the ground; it pushes it into these eight inch drifts.
Overall, there's about - well, there's at least five inches of snow here on Long Island. The story here is about the wind and the cold. Just a bit ago I went out and took a little walk and, you know, one, I just couldn't get warm with my jacket and hat and gloves and everything, but I was only out there for, like, 10 minutes and by the time I came back the wind had just completely erased my footsteps.
And, as you mentioned, also in the region different parts are feeling different effects of the storm. Upstate New York is getting the worst of the cold and the temperature is below 22 degrees with the wind chill. Massachusetts is getting most of the snow, Boston with at least 10 inches, and just north of there there's more than two feet of snow. And we have blizzard-like conditions here on Long Island and then also on the Massachusetts Cape.
MONTAGNE: Well, it sounds pretty bad and schools in New York and Boston are closed. Some 2,300 flights have been canceled and the governor of New York - that's Andrew Cuomo - decided to close several highways yesterday. You know, just briefly, what's the concern exactly? It's some kind of ice whiteout?
LANE: Yeah. So there's several highways that have been closed here on Long Island - the Long Island Expressway, also Interstate 84 and the New York state throughway that goes up to Albany. Officials had hoped to open them by 5:00 a.m. but has extended to 8:00 a.m. because, you know, of the wind. And also because temperatures dropped a lot faster than they had anticipated. So they had to switch from salt to sand sooner than expected.
MONTAGNE: And the power situation - is there power on? I mean are people able to stay warm? Are the lights on?
LANE: Yeah. So that's really what local officials are really, really concerned about because after Superstorm Sandy - we just got a brand new power grid because after Superstorm Sandy the former utility company was vilified and labeled a failure. So lawmakers voted in to bring KSEG from New Jersey to take over the electric this year. And no one - and they just started on Wednesday and, you know, just from the get-go they get a storm.
Anyway, the lines are still on. There's not a lot of outages right now. And officials are still sort of taking a wait and see approach because this isn't really the storm to test them. Because it's so cold the snow is very light. It's fluffy and it's not the type to break the power lines.
MONTAGNE: We just have a few seconds here. Just tell us - are people staying home?
LANE: Well, that's what officials are hoping but there's also sort of this recognition that many people do have to go out. The subways in New York are running. Here on Long Island the trains are running on a limited schedule. And officials say the buses are going to start up soon. So, you know, roads are passable; everything is just very, very slow.
MONTAGNE: All right. Well, thanks very much. And I'm glad to hear you're in your car sheltering from the storm. That's Charles Lane from member station WSHU.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And let's turn our attention now to Iraq, where there's been a new bout of violence. The government there is fighting Al Qaida-linked militants who have reportedly overrun police stations and jails. Government forces have responded to this with missile strikes and ground troops. This fighting is in the country's western Anbar Province, which borders Syria.
And the Syrian civil war is partly to blame for the flare-up because it has created safe havens for Sunni militants to operate. But the Iraqi government, which is dominated by Shiites, has also been blamed for increasing the tensions by making sweeping arrests of Sunnis, including some political leaders. We're joined by Will Dunlop, a reporter in Baghdad for the French Press Agency AFP. Will, good morning.
WILL DUNLOP: Morning.
GREENE: What is the latest you've heard about this fighting? How bad is it?
DUNLOP: Well, the fighting is sporadic but ultimately militants are in control of areas of two major Iraqi cities. It's said to be up to a quarter of the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, and areas of Ramadi as well, where they've made advances in morning fighting. This violence began on Monday with the closure of a Sunni (unintelligible) anti-government protest camp that was established more than a year ago.
DUNLOP: And it has continued off and on for the intervening several days. Security forces departed areas of both of these cities and that ultimately freed them up for militants to move in and they have yet to be dislodged.
GREENE: So you mention this anti-government protest camp that was cleared out. I mean has the government said why they needed to do this now? It sounds like that really did set off this violence here, as you're describing it.
DUNLOP: The government explanation for the removal of the camp was to quote the prime minister, it had become a headquarters for the leadership of al-Qaida. They were saying it was being used by militants and that's why it had to go. However, the desire of political leaders, specifically the prime minister, to have this camp removed predates those assertions, effectively since these protests broke out, the authorities have sought to have them shut down.
GREENE: So just to be clear, I mean these al-Qaida linked militants, are they literally taking over towns and driving away people in the government?
DUNLOP: Well, it appears that yesterday they were carrying out patrols in the city of Ramadi in some areas and were able to burn police stations, some of which had been abandoned by police in both Fallujah and Ramadi and they had set up checkpoints in some areas of Fallujah. So they are in control of areas of two major Iraqi cities.
GREENE: And Will, just let me ask you, you're saying that some of these Sunni militants are linked to al-Qaida. Al-Qaida is such a broad term that, you know, strikes a lot of Americans in a certain way. We know there are different branches of al-Qaida around the world. Who exactly are we talking about here?
DUNLOP: It's unclear whether - exactly who they. There may be some Iraqis. There may be some Syrians. This is the Islamic state of Iraq and the Levant so it operates in Iraq and Syria. It's actually one of the main jihadist organizations fighting against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in neighboring Syria. There are various branches of al-Qaida separate from the central organization based in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This particular one, the unification of the Iraqi and Syrian branches of this group has not been met with approval by al-Qaida central, which is why we say and al-Qaida-linked group as opposed to one that's directly under al-Qaida control.
GREENE: You know, one of the dynamics that I think a lot of us remember in some of the reporting from Iraq is that at one point the United States military forces were able to work with some people who are Sunni to actually fight against Sunni militants. Does that seem to be an option now for the Iraqi government, to try and bring some people who are Sunni who live in these areas onboard to help them fight these militants?
DUNLOP: (Unintelligible) possibility. Actually the defense ministry spokesman said yesterday that the government had distributed arms to some Sunni tribesman. One problem with that, though, is it's a bit late in the day, ultimately, for a return to that type of cooperation because a lot of these fighters feel like they've been neglected in the years since the U.S. left and the U.S. stopped paying them.
They've faced issues getting their salaries and also in delays in terms of their integration into various government ministries, which was promised to them.
GREENE: And Will Dunlop, step back for us, if you can. You spoke recently with my colleague, Steve Inskeep, about an awful year of violence, the year 2013, in Iraq. Is this just another example of that playing out or is there a dynamic here that's new that raises some questions about the future of this country?
DUNLOP: Well, a lot of the violence in the course of 2013 with attacks were either - sometimes they were assaults on facilities like prisons, but often it was just bombings or assassinations and then the militants would withdraw. This is ultimately, I think, more dangerous in that they're actually holding territory and holding significant areas of these cities, so it's not just a hit and run type of attack. It's a more prolonged presence and a greater assertion of authority in these areas.
GREENE: Will Dunlop is a reporter in Baghdad for the French press agency, the AFP. Will, thanks as always.
DUNLOP: Thank you.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK. We've gotten through Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year's. But if you're an NFL fan, the next holiday up is Wild Card Weekend. There is football on Saturday and Sunday. Four wild card teams facing four teams that won their divisions. And there are some pretty interesting storylines to cover. Let's cover them with NPR's Mike Pesca. Hey, Mike.
MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Storyline number one - not all the teams playing are wild cards. It is called that but they get to play divisional leaders, don't they?
GREENE: Yeah. It's kind of - I mean, it's a little embarrassing that divisional leaders have to play in something called Wild Card Weekend, but that's why the teams who had the best records get the byes...
PESCA: They'll be extra motivated.
GREENE: That's right.
PESCA: Exactly. Yeah.
GREENE: Well, let's start with the first game on Saturday - the Indianapolis Colts hosting the Kansas City Chiefs. The Chiefs started the season 8-0. It looked like they were going to go undefeated. They finished 11-5. But we should say, last year they were the worst team in the NFL. It's been a turnaround.
PESCA: Yes, it has. No, it didn't look like they were going to go undefeated. They hadn't played the Broncos by that point. But, yeah. And you have to give credit to their coach, Andy Reid, who instituted an offense with Alex Smith, who is the game manager quarterback, which means he doesn't take huge chances. But that's pretty great and smart because their defense is really good.
All of that said, Indianapolis clearly has the edge in this game. Not only are they home, they played the Chiefs two weeks ago at the Chief's home stadium, Arrowhead. They beat the Chiefs rather easily in that game. Past is not prologue in the NFL but in that game we saw that I think the Chiefs might have trouble stopping young Andrew Luck and his Colts.
GREENE: All right. New Orleans Saints at Philadelphia Eagles on Saturday night. This is a game that I think meteorologists have as much to say about as people at ESPN. I mean, the New Orleans Saints do not play well in the cold and it's going to be cold.
PESCA: Yes. It is a fact that the Saints are the only team in the playoffs with a losing record on the road. And there was a time just a few weeks ago where it seemed like the Saints and the Seahawks were in a collision course and home field advantage was going to determine everything. But I think almost too much has been made about the Saints' road woes.
Because, yes, it is true they've lost their last three games on the road, but look at the opponents - the Seattle Seahawks, the best defense in the NFL.
GREENE: Mm-hmm.
PESCA: The Carolina Panthers, the second best defense in the NFL. OK. They played St. Louis. St. Louis isn't bad. They also lost to the Jets on the road, who have a good defense, and they lost to the Patriots on the road, but they did score 27 points in that game. So you add it all up, the Eagles are by far the worst team in terms of defense that the Saints will be playing on the road.
That said, both of these teams have pretty bad defenses. This could be a game in the 40s - not degrees. It's going to be 11 degrees and that'll be bad for the Saints but this could be a really high scoring game.
GREENE: So Sunday, the San Diego Chargers go visit the Cincinnati Bengals. San Diego barely snuck into the playoffs. Does that make them a pushover?
PESCA: No. It doesn't make them a pushover. In the history of teams, like we saw the Arizona Cardinals make the Super Bowl after being one of these teams that quote-unquote shouldn't have made the playoffs, that alone doesn't make them a pushover.
That said, Cincinnati is the biggest favorite this weekend. They have a really good defense. They have the home field advantage. You know, all circumstances favor Cincinnati.
GREENE: OK. And finally Sunday night at Lambeau Field, the Packers of Green Bay are hosting the San Francisco 49ers. The Packers - really interesting. They barely made it to 500 but they've got their quarterback, Aaron Rogers, back. He was there for the last week of the season. Does that mean everything is all and well in Green Bay now?
PESCA: It doesn't because their middle linebacker, Clay Matthews, is out. He's the key to the defense. And Rogers, even with that great fourth down touchdown pass and all the magic that he connotes, he wasn't great in that game. And everyone's sort of saying, well, in the first half he wasn't good but the rust is clearly off. I don't know if that's true. That seems a little too easy.
And the other thing I'd say is the 49ers are a really great team. They've beaten the Packers three times since 2012. Colin Kaepernick is a tough guy to stop. So even though the 49ers are on the road, they're the favorite in that game.
GREENE: And of course whoever wins this weekend they move on to the next week when the teams who are resting this weekend will be waiting, teams like the Broncos.
PESCA: The Broncos loom, Seahawks loom. They loom.
GREENE: Always looming. NPR's Mike Pesca. Thanks, Mike.
PESCA: You're welcome.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
These days, some people are trying to improve their health with gadgets and apps. They gather data about eating habits and exercise, and that's just the beginning in the Quantified Self movement. It promotes life logging, which aims to improve life by tracking as many details as possible. We spoke to Kitty Ireland, who works for a life logging app called Saga; and David Goldstein, who turned to life logging with the help of a coach, Josh Manly.
He wanted to control his weight and chronic pain after some catastrophic health problems, including cancer and a bus accident. Can you give me a concrete example, I mean of something that you've learned that you feel like has really helped you have a healthier life?
DAVID GOLDSTEIN: Absolutely. A great example, I would say, is something as simple as coffee. When Josh and I first sat down, he asked me, you know, about how much sugar are you getting? And I was like, oh, I don't eat candy, I don't eat any of that. You know, I maybe have sugar with my coffee. Then I was shocked to see that I was drinking something like four or five cups of coffee a day and having two to three sugars in every single cup of coffee.
GREENE: How is this different than, say, programs like Weight Watchers where you record the amount that you're eating and keep track of it?
GOLDSTEIN: I'd say it's built along a lot of the same lines. I'd say where this kind of varies is trying to really hone in on the impact of the food on other parts of your health as well. So with my chronic back pain, if we were, kind of, taking care of fruits, vegetables, and nuts and getting a lot of water, my back pain tended to do better on those days.
GREENE: So you would be recording how your back feels on a day. You would also be recording what you were eating and drinking and you could start to see connections and know what you could put into your body that might make your back feel better that day.
GOLDSTEIN: That's exactly right. We also experimented with levels of exercise. And while I didn't notice an improvement in my back pain, like, the same day I exercised, what I did notice is after a couple of weeks of regular exercise we started to see the back pain levels dip down.
GREENE: Kitty, can you give me a window into - you actually work for a company that makes Saga, this life logging app, and you say that it records everything. I mean how does it work?
KITTY IRELAND: Yeah. So your phone, if you have a Smartphone, has all kinds of censors. GPS, microphone. Android actually uses a barometer now, so we can, for instance, tell whether you're indoors or outdoors.
GREENE: So it's collecting information all these sorts of ways.
IRELAND: Right. You can bring in data from Facebook, from Twitter, from all kinds of health and fitness apps. Mood Panda is one of the apps that we integrate so you can look at, you know, where was I when I had that really good mood? Who was I with? What was I doing?
GREENE: I'm feeling bad for the friend who I find out that I was not feeling that great day and I was consistently at lunch with that person.
(LAUGHTER)
IRELAND: Yeah. I know. You really have to question some of your relationships after a while if you're always miserable around that person.
GREENE: It seems like a key to this is technology, but you spoke at a recent conference about finding your grandmother's diary and realizing that she in a way was a life logger as well.
IRELAND: This year I dug up a 1942 diary that my grandmother kept the year she turned 16.
GREENE: 1942.
IRELAND: 1942. So there's all this great wartime stuff in there. The sailors and the soldiers are all coming through. All of the boys, she was seeing at the time. And there were a lot of boys, she was seeing at the time.
(LAUGHTER)
IRELAND: I was shocked, honestly. Like, she has a list in the back and there are 57 boys she's kissed. And I'm just like Grandma, really? Actually, that was the data that I chose to extract from the diary, was her mentions of boys. And it was really fascinating because she fell in love with this one boy, Zip. And most boys were mentioned up to about 20 times in a month.
GREENE: OK.
IRELAND: Zip went up to about 50. And this happened before she started saying she was falling for him, so, you know, it took a couple of weeks for her to catch up with how much she liked this guy.
GREENE: I guess we are just reading about the boys who she wanted to put in the diary. Modern life logging might've seen every one. There might've been others.
(LAUGHTER)
IRELAND: Right. She writes all of this mundane stuff which, you know, when I was a teenager I certainly didn't think about writing down the weather or what I ate that day, and she's keeping track of all this stuff. And so as I was reading it was like, wow, Grandma was kind of a life logger. You know, if she had access to the technology that we do now she really would have probably created a complete archive.
GREENE: OK. One more question for you both. If someone heard about this and then said, my god, this is kind of creepy, what would you tell them if they're skeptical of this?
GOLDSTEIN: I would tell them that it's exactly the information you and your doctor need to get yourself to be healthy and it doesn't have to be anything more than that. So it's only what you want to share. It's only with whom you want to share it with. And it can be data that can add so much to your life that the extreme remote risk that you're putting your data at is very well worth it.
IRELAND: So what I think is creepy is the fact that there is data being collected about me that I don't know is being collected. A life logging tool gives back some of that control to you, lets you use the data. And to David's point, that's really what this is all about. It's like what is the value you get out of it?
GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, corporations already have an unbelievable amount of data on us that they use to improve themselves and their bottom line, you know, and I do think it's about time for us to start collecting our own data and use them for our own advantage as well.
GREENE: Listen, thank you both so much. It's really been a pleasure.
IRELAND: Thank you.
GOLDSTEIN: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GREENE: Based on my life logging, I have said the following four times this morning. The words are: This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene.
On a snowy day, kids are desperate to know if they'll have school. So why not ask someone with good sources, like Dante de Blasio, the teenage son of New York City's new mayor? A screenshot of a chat, reportedly from his Facebook page, went viral. A friend asked if school would be canceled. Dante replied, quote, "I'm trying to convince my dad." His mom kept people guessing, tweeting a picture of a snow shovel and the caption: What Dante will be doing if he does not go to school.
It's MORNING EDITION.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. For most fans, meeting the cast of your favorite show is enough. Apparently, not Ryan Carroll. Last September, the 26-year-old fan of "Breaking Bad" won a trip to Hollywood to watch the series finale with the cast. He told Florida's Naples News that the show was highly addictive, just like the meth they make.
This week, he was arrested for running his own drug operation and seized in the raid, a Hazmat suit signed by the "Breaking Bad" actors.
It's MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
On a Friday it's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. A very cold winter storm is engulfing much of the Northeast, dumping more than 20 inches of snow in some areas and bringing strong winds along with it. Schools are closed in Boston and New York. Thousands of flights have been cancelled. Officials around the region are asking people to stay home and let road crews do their work. Temperatures are dropping well below freezing. And we're going now to Bruce Gellerman. He's a reporter with member station WBUR in Boston. We reached him at the emergency command bunker west of the city. Good morning, Bruce. I gather you are in a subterranean bunker, but you do know what the weather's like outside.
BRUCE GELLERMAN, BYLINE: Oh, I know what it's like outside because I drove in very early this morning. There were no cars on the interstate. Very slick, treacherous, very eerie. But people are heeding the warning from the governor, who said stay off the roads, and they did, except - except maybe for me.
MONTAGNE: Right. Thank you for being here to tell us all about this. Now, I gather there's concern about power outages, quite understandably.
GELLERMAN: Well, actually, there were some concerns, but it turns out that there are only - last count 69 outages. And that's not 69 communities. That's 69 families or houses. Because the snow is so light - it's fluffy. It's very weird. You know, you'd think that being this cold, the old saying that you wouldn't get snow when it's this cold. But in fact the snow did fall and it's really light, so no - no major power outages.
MONTAGNE: Which means that people can stay warm.
GELLERMAN: Means they can stay warm and they really do need to stay warm later on today because the temperatures are even expected to plummet further. I mean minus well below zero. And then you have the wind chill. So you know, skin can freeze in just a few minutes. So people are staying indoors. They did cancel - all schools here are cancelled, but they did cancel the state government workers. They don't have to come in.
MONTAGNE: You know, we do think about outages and we do think about slippery roads and people on the road. If those aren't at this exact moment the concerns, what are the major concerns?
GELLERMAN: Well, the major concerns have been the high tides. There were going to be three. We've gotten through two of them. The next one is at 12 noon Eastern time. And that's the one that causes the most concern. They've prepositioned high water vehicles with National Guards in coastal areas north and south of Boston. They've also prepositioned boats from different organizations, the highway police, the Environmental Protection Agencies. Twelve agencies in all have been kind of prepositioned here. But it is that high tide concern. So they're telling people that maybe, you know, they haven't ordered an evacuation, but maybe they want to leave their low-lying communities.
MONTAGNE: Maybe. But is it possible they will actually evacuate the coasts? I mean I'm thinking Sandy. I'm thinking all the other storms we hear about out here across the country.
GELLERMAN: Right. Well, there has been some coastal flooding in the low-lying areas, but nothing major at this point. So the governor has not ordered an evacuation. But people know that in low-lying areas they may - you know, best to get out.
MONTAGNE: Okay, so that's - that's pretty much Massachusetts. What do you know about the rest of the region?
GELLERMAN: The rest of the region is socked(ph). And this was a really big storm. They're saying that it could have affected about 100 million people up and down the coasts. It's very cold. It's going to be very strange, though, because by Sunday it's supposed to get very warm, like 40 degrees, and have a rain shower. So in fact the snow could be gone by Monday. But this is New England, Renee. Remember, the weather could change in a heartbeat.
MONTAGNE: Alright. Well, Bruce, thanks very much for joining us.
GELLERMAN: You're very welcome.
MONTAGNE: That was Bruce Gellerman of WBUR in Boston.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
Rube Goldberg was a man who became an adjective. You may know nothing about him, but you've likely heard someone describe a convoluted device as a Rube Goldberg contraption. But Rube Goldberg was a real person, one who earned a Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning and captivated imaginations with his drawings of complicated chain reactions that complete the simplest of tasks. Mr. Goldberg died in 1970 but now the zany world he created has been collected in a new coffee table book called "The Art of Rube Goldberg: (A) Inventive (B) Cartoon (C) Genius." Joining us from our New York bureau to talk about the collection is Jennifer George, a writer and jewelry clothing designer. She is also Rube Goldberg's granddaughter. Welcome.
JENNIFER GEORGE: Thank you.
WERTHEIMER: We're also joined by New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik who wrote the introduction to "The Art of Rube Goldberg." Hello to you.
ADAM GOPNIK: Hi, Linda.
WERTHEIMER: Now, we picked one out to talk about just to sort of illustrate. Adam Gopnik, you want to start by maybe describing - well, how should we do this?
GOPNIK: Well, why don't I, maybe I should, I'll describe the machine as Rube Goldberg describes it.
WERTHEIMER: OK.
GOPNIK: Actually, as always with Rube Goldberg's work, it's sort of a parody of an actual patent office drawing. It's the way drawings of that period, showing complicated mechanisms, really worked. Only his always have this beautiful overcharge of needlessness. So, I'm looking at one right now, where Professor Butts, who is his character, the guy who thought up all of these things, trips over a hazard on a miniature golf course and lands in an idea for an automatic device for emptying ashtrays. A bright full moon, A, causes lovebirds, two little lovebirds on a perch, B, to become romantic. And as they move together, their weight causes the perch, C, to tip and pulls a string, D, which upsets a can, a watering can, E, and sprinkles the woolen shirt. And that causes it to shrink, and therefore draws the size it shrinks a curtain, which exposes a portrait of the master of a little dog. And when the dog sees the master's picture, he's so delighted that he wig-wags his tail for joy and he upsets the ashtray, spilling the ashes and the butts into an asbestos bag, which is marked J, which is attached to a skyrocket. And passing the fuse ignites it and causes rocket to shoot out of the window, disposing of the ashes. You could not imagine a simpler way of disposing of ashes from an ashtray.
WERTHEIMER: Now, Ms. George, you wrote a lovely essay for this book about your grandfather. And you say that when you share his work with schoolchildren, you also like to share little-known facts about him. What do you think people don't know about him that they ought to know?
GEORGE: He had giant ears, I think the biggest ears I've ever seen on a human being. She swam with shoes on. And he also - I begin my essay about how he taught me how to shake hands. And he always, you know, said let them know they're meeting someone. You know, no limp fish. And so I literally crush people's hands to this day when I meet them.
(LAUGHTER)
WERTHEIMER: Adam Gopnik, you write that these mechanisms present some fatal, almost unconscious commentary on the madness of science and the insanity of modern invention. Was he satirizing our world when he went about creating something very elaborate to accomplish something very simple?
GOPNIK: I don't think he was satirizing in the sense of parodying with explicit purpose or with some political point. He was having fun. But, yeah, I think that he was enraptured by the possibilities of complicated machines, about the way a car works, right? You turn the key. The gas floods. The oil - I don't know how a car works, but I know that it's complex in that way. And one of the things that fascinates me about it, Linda, is that my kids are very turned on by the drawings. They love to trace and follow them. But the machines that they know best and the ones that they work with most often - computers, right, iPhones - are sort of black boxes by comparison with the machines that Goldberg's generation knew.
WERTHEIMER: Nothing moves.
GOPNIK: Right. Nothing moves. So, I also think that we look at Goldberg's drawings with a certain kind of nostalgia for a lost era when our machinery was at least lucid.
GEORGE: They're kind of the analog to the digital age.
GOPNIK: Yeah, exactly.
(LAUGHTER)
WERTHEIMER: Now, I think that many people will be surprised to learn that Rube Goldberg won a Pulitzer Prize as an editorial cartoonist. What was the cartoon that won the prize?
GEORGE: It was a cartoon called "Peace Today" and it shows a giant atomic bomb teetering on the edge of a cliff with a lovely little picket fence around a little house with a few people sitting on the lawn. And below, it's written, world destruction.
GOPNIK: And if you think about it at all, all of these great, wonderful, funny drawings are all about chain reactions. And the ultimate chain reaction of modern science and engineering was the chain reaction that made the atomic bomb.
WERTHEIMER: Jennifer George, we've talked about the machines and some of the other things that your grandfather designed. But I also wanted to ask you about the drawing. I mean, what do you think about the quality of his drawing. It seems to me, as I look through this book, that there are a lot of cartoonists working today who owe a big debt to your grandfather.
GEORGE: Well, it's funny, when you win sort of the Academy Award of cartooning, you win a Reuben, and it's named after Rube. And so when he was getting on in years, he was very upset that he had now won a Reuben. And my father had to explain to him, but, you know, Rube, it's named after you. That didn't' really go over too well with him and ultimately he was awarded his own Reuben. But, yes, the drawings themselves, you know, I make a distinction the early drawings versus the middle period drawings and the later drawings. Really, it's that early and middle period that are so extraordinary and you see his hand on every page. By the later period, he had kind of lost his fine motor skills. The lines are thicker. The other thing is he drew funny. You can look at the drawings and laugh even if you don't read the words, 'cause he just had it in him.
WERTHEIMER: Adam Gopnik, what do you think is his legacy today?
GOPNIK: We live at the end of the great age of the mechanism, and so we look back and then not so much with the bemusement but with a certain longing for a world as neat, as sharp as black and white and lucid as Goldberg's world was. And so I think as long as we have a fascination with machines, with mechanisms, Goldberg's work will go on.
GEORGE: Any Rube Goldberg machine worth its salt goes viral on the web today. So, I think that people are just, they're love Rube Goldberg machines. They love to actually - oh, I get how that words. I mean, we are so hostage to our iPhones and our technology and really truly how does that work, this at least you can figure out when you take a look at it.
GOPNIK: And we're all delighted by the idea that there is an insanely complicated way of achieving something extremely simple.
WERTHEIMER: Adam Gopnik wrote the introduction to the new collection of Rube Goldberg's drawings. Jennifer George gathered it and she has written an essay, which is also in the book. It's called "The Art of Rube Goldberg." Thanks to both of you for speaking with us.
GOPNIK: Thank you.
GEORGE: My pleasure.
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WERTHEIMER: You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
Brazilian musician Hamilton de Holanda is taking a tradition born in the 19th century and bringing it into the 21st. It's the musical style known as choro. And for his latest recording, he invited contemporary musicians from around the world to help him interpret the songs of one of choro's pioneers. Betto Arcos brought this story back from Brazil.
BETTO ARCOS, BYLINE: Alfredo Vianna was one of the superstars of choro, better known by his nickname "Pixinguinha."
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ARCOS: The flutist and saxophonist pushed the boundaries of choro by incorporating jazz and ragtime into his compositions.
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ARCOS: Hamilton de Holanda explores that connection on "Mundo de Pixinguinha," "The World of Pixinguinha."
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ARCOS: The Brazilian recorded with Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes, French accordionist Richard Galliano and American trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.
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HAMILTON DE HOLANDA: (Through Translator) As I've traveled around the world in the past 10 years, I became friends with a few musicians and I recorded with a few of them. I thought it would be an opportunity for the music of Pixinguinha to be played by jazz musicians who know about improvisation, and who know how to interpret music that's not theirs.
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ARCOS: De Holanda plays an instrument called bandolim. It evolved from the mandolin, brought to Brazil by Portuguese, and its acknowledged master was a man named Jacob do Bandolim.
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ARCOS: De Holanda says do Bandolim's genius lay in his ability to blend music brought by the Portuguese with that of African slaves to create a perfect balance.
HOLANDA: (Through Translator) He created a Brazilian way with a lot of emotion. You hear in his music little bit of the Fado nostalgia, but also the joy of Brazilian music, and African music, too, and with such care in the refinement of a sound and the arrangements in a most impeccable way.
ARCOS: But de Holanda wanted to take the music further. And he does, says Sergio Mielniczenko. He's producer and host of "The Brazilian Hour," a radio program distributed across the U.S. and around the world.
SERGIO MIELNICZENKO: He's a musician with an incredible technique and a deep interpretation to the soul of Brazilian music. If you look at his repertoire, he plays everything from Jacob do Bandolim to Egberto Gismonti to Hermeto Pascoal. And more recently he has been pairing with very outstanding musicians as well. That's what is interesting about Hamilton. You cannot see him as a choro composer, only. Obviously, he plays choro but he's beyond. Hamilton de Holanda is music.
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ARCOS: De Holanda plays a special kind of bandolim. Normally, the instrument has eight strings, just like the mandolin. De Holanda had one built with ten strings.
HOLANDA: (Through translator) I wanted to create a polyphony in my instrument, and be able to play the melody, the accompaniment and the rhythm, all at the same time. Just as you see in a piano soloist, or a guitar soloist, I wanted to express some polyphonic ideas in the bandolim, the same way a piano works in a jazz trio.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ARCOS: De Holanda's ideas about what the bandolim can do led him to collaborate with a pianist - Italian Stefano Bollani - for another recently-released recording.
HOLANDA: (Through Translator) The bandolim has certain musical off-keys. The piano is always perfectly in tune. Perhaps the defect of the bandolim, which is a difficult instrument to tune, is that when it's paired with a piano, magic is born, which is something I cannot explain.
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ARCOS: De Holanda says though he started playing choro, he's emphatic about where he's taking the music.
HOLANDA: (Through Translator) What I'm doing today is not exactly choro, it's not only samba, and it's not just jazz. It's all of the above, the confluence of all of it. Out of all that is the music of Hamilton de Holanda.
ARCOS: It's safe to say Pixinguinha would approve. For NPR News, I'm Betto Arcos.
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WERTHEIMER: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. BJ Leiderman wrote our theme music. I'm Linda Wertheimer.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
A new exhibition fusing hip-hop and native culture has become somewhat of an art sensation in Canada. It's called "Beat Nation." More than two dozen artists offer their takes on what it means to be indigenous today. They use beats, graffiti, street smarts and politics to challenge stereotypes. North Country Public Radio's David Sommerstein reports.
DAVID SOMMERSTEIN, BYLINE: "Beat Nation: Hip-Hop as Indigenous Culture" greets you with a red neon glow and a ping-pong of sounds: A dubstep groove thumps, a high-hat skitters, a powwow chant echoes from another room.
MARK LANCTOT: The idea behind hip-hop is the idea of a mix.
SOMMERSTEIN: Mark Lanctot is a curator here at the Musee d'art contemporain in Montreal. He says hip-hop's sonic soup also embodies the diversity of being indigenous today.
LANCTOT: How aboriginal culture isn't a monolithical, single, static entity. It's something that's always changing, that always takes from other cultures.
SOMMERSTEIN: Listen closer to the sounds and you'll hear stories filtered through hip-hop. DJ and VJ madeskimo mixes traditional throat singing with electronic beats and footage of Hollywood Indian stereotypes.
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SOMMERSTEIN: In another room, Kevin Lee Burton sliced and diced his endangered Cree language into a sort of rap.
KEVIN LEE BURTON: (Foreign language spoken)
SOMMERSTEIN: Beat Nation began as an online gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2006.
TANIA WILLARD: Waiec - that's a greeting in my language. My squest - my name - is Tanya Willard. I'm from the Secwepemc Nation.
SOMMERSTEIN: Willard co-founded the site and curated the traveling exhibition with Kathleen Ritter. Willard says she first made a connection between native culture and hip-hop when she was 16. She saw break dancers at a traditional powwow.
WILLARD: Hip-hop was just making inroads in mainstream culture and here was this all-native break dance crew - you know, this was 20 plus years ago - who are touring around the powwow circuit.
SOMMERSTEIN: Hip-hop blew up in Vancouver's huge native community in the 1990s and 2000s, spawning one of the early and influential native MCs, Manik 1derful.
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SOMMERSTEIN: Tania Willard says the hip-hop beat fits naturally into the indigenous worldview.
WILLARD: We sort of talk about Beat Nation as not just electronic beats but also the drumbeats and the heartbeat.
SOMMERSTEIN: Hip-hop also filtered into native culture as young people left isolated, poverty-stricken territories for Canada's city streets, where things weren't much better. Many shuttled back and forth. And that cycle - known as the churn - is evident in Beat Nation. Skateboards turned into snowshoes are on display, along with turntables carved from wood, and indigenized iPods made of felt. Dylan Miner worked with indigenous youth to make low-rider bicycles - tricked out with painted hides and hand drums. He says a theme running through many pieces in the show is claiming space, like a slow-and-low moving low-rider, backing up traffic and demanding attention.
DYLAN MINER: Ways of asserting what I would say is indigenous presence in the contemporary moment in a way that's letting native people speak for ourselves.
SOMMERSTEIN: That message has been a big one in Canada recently. A year ago, a handful of indigenous women started a movement called Idle No More. The hashtag Idle No More spread virally. Thousands marched to protest poor living conditions and environmental degradation in native territories.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken)
SOMMERSTEIN: Idle No More and Beat Nation are of a piece - assertions of identity and agency, says Geromino Inutiq, aka madeskimo. They tell Canada, hey, we're here and we matter.
GERONIMO INUTIQ: We're not idle anymore, you know. See us in the governments and the institutions and the companies. See us on TV. We're not sitting there idly on our reserves, waiting to die, you know. We're agents of change within society and that's what it means.
SOMMERSTEIN: It's tempting to say Beat Nation represents a new Idle No More generation. But co-curator Tania Willard doesn't see it that way. She says native artists have been mixing, borrowing, and sampling hip-hop style for centuries.
WILLARD: I see Beat Nation as this continuum of innovation that indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of.
SOMMERSTEIN: Beat Nation's had successful runs in Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, and in Montreal. The show moves on to Halifax in the spring, and this coming summer, Saskatchewan. For NPR News, I'm David Sommerstein.
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WERTHEIMER: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. Scott Simon is back next week. I'm Linda Wertheimer.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
Experts have not cornered the market on good ideas. An innovative engineering program in Texas has been proving that college undergraduates can tackle and solve vexing challenges in providing health care in developing countries. NPR's Joe Palca has been exploring how inventions come to be as part of his new beat, Joe's Big Idea.
Today, he introduces us to two new engineers who are tapping the potential of bright young minds to change the world.
JOE PALCA, BYLINE: Rural hospitals in the developing world have lots of problems. Some are huge; lack of electricity, lack of staff, lack of supplies. But some problems are much smaller and can be overcome with a bit of ingenuity.
MARIA ODEN: We want to teach our students that they can solve these problems.
PALCA: Maria Oden is an engineering professor at Rice University in Houston. She runs a program designed to get students to first learn about the problems of rural hospitals, and then find solutions.
ODEN: These are not going to be MRI machines or CT machines.
PALCA: Rebecca Richards-Kortum is the chair of bioengineering at Rice and Oden's partner in this project.
REBECCA RICHARDS-KORTUM: These are going to be simple technologies that you can develop in the course of a semester or the course of a year.
PALCA: Maybe a simple system to measure drug dosage or a way to deliver the right amount of IV fluids. The students have to develop a prototype, but Maria Oden says some of these students will take their invention even further.
ODEN: Go into the field, test it, get feedback, return to Rice, redesign. Most of the time the first design doesn't work very well and so they redesign it until they get to a point where it's a product that can be deployed. That's the ultimate goal, for sure.
PALCA: Oden says once a team of undergraduates sinks its teeth into a project, it's hard to let go.
ODEN: We have teams who may have been in a class four semesters ago, and they are still working on this project - not because they're getting credit not because they're in a course, but because they want to solve this problem.
PALCA: One of the most successful projects has been something called a bubble C-PAP. It helps premature infants breathe by pushing a steam of air into their lungs. Richards-Kortum says a team of Rice students found some clever ways to make a bubble C-PAP that was affordable.
RICHARDS-KORTUM: One of the wonderful things about working with 18-year olds is that they're so creative. They don't have fixed ideas about what might not work. And so you get really crazy ideas. Like inside our bubble C-PAP machine there's aquarium pumps.
PALCA: Aquarium pumps? Well, why not. I mean, they're cheap and they worked. The students develop their inventions in something called the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen on the Rice campus. I recently went there for a visit, and Maria Oden showed me some the prototypes their students had made.
ODEN: This right here is the original C-PAP device.
PALCA: This looks like in one of the box...
ODEN: It's like a shoebox.
PALCA: ...yeah, exactly.
ODEN: It's in a plastic shoebox from Target.
PALCA: And some hoses coming out with some tubing and a fish tank pump.
ODEN: Two fish tank pumps.
PALCA: In case one breaks or to keep them going...
ODEN: No, you need two to get enough flow.
PALCA: Oden says they've tested their bubble C-PAP in rural hospitals in Malawi and now they're starting to deploy them at hospitals around that country. The device is snazzied up to look more professional but basically it's the same as the prototype - aquarium pumps and all. Richards-Kortum says it's a long slog to go from design to product to actually seeing something work, but it's worth it.
RICHARDS-KORTUM: It's sort of magic when you see it come together. It's the best part of our job.
PALCA: What was the most magical moment that you've had in the last year?
RICHARDS-KORTUM: Oh, that's easy.
(LAUGHTER)
PALCA: Richards-Kortum and Oden went to Malawi a while back with one of the students who had worked on bubble C-PAP design project. They visited one of the rural hospitals where they tested the bubble C-PAP device.
ODEN: And we went into the maternity ward, and a nurse came up to us.
PALCA: The nurse said, we used the bubble C-PAP on my baby, and it saved his life.
ODEN: She was able to go get her baby so that we could meet the baby, and the student was able to look and see a life that she had affected. And so for me, it was, you know, it just sort of sent chills all the way down my entire spine because I realized that while we're teaching students and we want them to leave here believing they can make a difference, this was the picture of a true difference being made.
PALCA: Oden and Richards-Kortum are hoping that once students learn how wonderful it feels to make a difference in the world, they'll be hooked. And at least some of those students will devote their professional lives to doing that. Joe Palca, NPR News.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer. It's that time of year when you see Christmas trees lying on the curb looking a bit worse for wear. Many of those trees will be chipped into mulch, but a few will make it back to nature as trees, thanks to some unusual recycling programs. NPR's Adam Cole has a few stories of tree rebirth from around the country, and he delivers them in rhyming verse.
ADAM COLE, BYLINE: It's the week after Christmas, and in every town, you'll see Christmas trees dying, their needles turned brown. Thirty million dead trees, that's what you'll find.
RICK DUNGEY: Just some more numbers to boggle your mind.
COLE: That's good old Rick Dungey, head of public relations, for the National Christmas Tree Association. He fields lots of calls and often they're dumb, or perhaps fueled by eggnog with way too much rum.
DUNGEY: My tree's doing great. It's still taking up water.
COLE: The calls start OK, but then they get odder.
DUNGEY: Will it regrow roots and continue to live?
COLE: Well, no, is the answer that Rick has to give. But there is still hope for all cross the nation, there's a sort of arboreal tree-incarnation. When everyone's done with their O Tannebaum - and Rick Dungey explains...
DUNGEY: Mulching programs are common - but there have been some creative ones out there.
COLE: He adds, some trees get a new life that isn't half bad. Down in Louisiana, where the land meets the ocean...
JASON SMITH: We place them out in the marsh to combat coastal erosion.
COLE: At the Department of Environmental Affairs, Jason Smith uses trees to make coastal repairs. The trees trap the soil, and make the waves slow...
SMITH: And aquatic vegetation can begin to grow.
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COLE: At Oakland's fine zoo, the word trunk is a term, that applies to both Christmas trees and pachyderms. The beasts lumber past, pining for treats, rooting around for a new thing to eat. Gina Kinzley, their keeper, says they prefer the sweet evergreens.
GINA KINZLEY: The noble firs.
COLE: The trees are both playthings and part of their diet. And they're not alone, other animals try it.
KINZLEY: Giraffe and Zebra ...
COLE: ...also give it a try.
KINZLEY: Lions, tigers, the bears...
COLE: Oh, my.
KINZLEY: The elephants really enjoy the bark.
COLE: It looks just like Christmas aboard Noah's Ark.
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COLE: The fishermen up north in Portland were stumped. The fish population has recently slumped. And part of the reason, says Mr. Mike Gentry, is that some of the streams are deplorably empty, of woody debris for the Coho and trout. There's no habitat. So, it's time to branch out.
MIKE GENTRY: They need cover from predators...
COLE: ...to hide out below.
GENTRY: They need a calm place to rest and grow. They also need a food source.
COLE: So Gentry and his team sink dead Christmas trees in their swift local streams.
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COLE: In the east, Mitchell Mann and Dominic Esposito are two Jersey boys who live by one credo:
MITCHELL MANN: To save the environment.
DOMINIC ESPOSITO: Pretty much, being green.
COLE: So, they drummed up a posse of like-minded teens. They'll grab all the trees - every one within reach, and they'll bring them all down to nearby Bradley Beach.
MANN: Once the trees are on the beach, they're laid down against a fence.
COLE: Where they form the foundation of coastal defense.
ESPOSITO: And as the wind blows, the trees capture the sand.
COLE: And soon dunes will form - at least that's the plan. And in future years...
ESPOSITO: When a storm comes through, it protects all the houses...
COLE: ...and habitat too. Though their life has been sapped and their trunks have been hewn, these trees might form forests in marshes and dunes. And dead groves will grow in the rivers and zoos. I'm Adam Cole, NPR News.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
In the world of music, there is no greater gift than having perfect pitch, or absolute pitch. For example, this note on a piano.
(SOUNDBITE OF PIANO NOTE)
WERTHEIMER: Now, someone with perfect pitch would be able to recognize that note as middle C, and they wouldn't need to refer to any other reference but their brain. The story goes that Ella Fitzgerald's band would use her perfect pitch to tune their own instruments. But is it something you are born with or is it something you can learn? Harvard professor of molecular and cellular biology Takao Hensch joins us to talk about his study on a pill that might give us the answer. Takao Hensch, thanks so much for joining us.
TAKAO HENSCH: Thank you for having me.
WERTHEIMER: So, can you just begin by explaining why people have perfect pitch in the first place? Is it in their genes?
HENSCH: Well, there are a lot of thoughts about this. There seems to be some relationship to genetics, perhaps. But primarily, people believe it's a function of early life experience or training or exposure to music.
WERTHEIMER: Could you just walk us through how your study worked? What did you actually do?
HENSCH: This study was an investigation of adult brain plasticity and whether we could reopen it through the use of a drug called valproic acid. It's a mood-stabilizing drug. But we found that it also restores the plasticity of the brain to a juvenile state. And during a two-week period on this pill or a controlled substance, a healthy cohort of young adult male subjects who were carefully screened not to have had musical experience early in life, they were asked to undertake a number of training tests online. And at the end of this two-week period, they were then tested on their ability to discriminate tones to see if the training had more effect than it normally would at this age.
WERTHEIMER: So, you actually gave people a pill and then you taught them to have perfect pitch?
HENSCH: This is the result and it's quite remarkable, since there are no known reports of adults acquiring absolute pitch.
WERTHEIMER: Now, I understand that you also studied that you might be able to use this plasticity to teach language.
HENSCH: Yes. In fact, there are a number of examples of critical period-type development; language being one of the most obvious ones. And so the idea here was could we come up with a way that would reopen plasticity, paired with the appropriate training, allow adult brains to become young again.
WERTHEIMER: What an extraordinary idea. What do you think the chances are that, say, 10 years, 20 years down the road that it might actually be possible to suddenly be able to teach people who don't speak French to speak French or people who never even heard Chinese to speak it?
HENSCH: I think we're getting closer to this day because we are able to understand at greater cellular detail how the brain changes throughout development. But I should caution that critical periods have evolved for a reason. And it is a process that one probably would not want to tamper with carelessly.
WERTHEIMER: What does that mean?
HENSCH: Well, if we've shaped our identities through development, through a critical period and have matched our brain to the environment in which we were raised, acquiring language, culture, identity, then if we were to erase that by reopening a critical period, we run quite a risk as well.
WERTHEIMER: And are you convinced that it might be possible to do it without erasing anything you wanted to keep?
HENSCH: I think the results of this study are quite encouraging from that point of view. What the pill provides is an opportunity.
WERTHEIMER: Thank you so much for joining us. Takao Hensch. He is a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University. This is so interesting. Thank you.
HENSCH: Thank you.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
2013 may have been, as some gay and lesbian activists put it, the gayest year ever. The Defense of Marriage Act was struck down by the Supreme Court, 18 states now extend marriage rights to same sex couples, the number of states now offering those rights more than doubled in just one year. But as we begin 2014, there's another issue gaining traction - transgender rights. Ross Murray is the director of news at an organization of gay and lesbian activists called GLAAD. He joins us from our New York bureau. Thank you very much for doing this, Ross.
ROSS MURRAY: Thank you for having me here.
WERTHEIMER: Now, are transgendered issues something that registered all for most Americans?
MURRAY: It registers a lot less. I think that the support for marriage equality has been following the recognition that people know someone who is gay and lesbian. And once they feel like they know and have a relationship with someone, then they understand that folks need protections and responsibilities just like everyone else. And the transgender visibility has not been as high. I think as the familiarity is going to increase then some of those same protections are going to follow.
WERTHEIMER: Now, 2014 is starting off with a new transgender rights law in California. Can you tell us about that?
MURRAY: Sure. It's called the School Success and Opportunity Act. It went into effect on January 1st. And this is the law that provides basic protections for transgender students at school. It allows them to use the facilities consistent with their gender identity, allowing them to play on sports teams, adding protections against bullying and harassment.
WERTHEIMER: What about other states? Are you looking at anything else that's going on?
MURRAY: There's a lot of work this year, and I think something we're going to see in 2014 is a greater push for transgender-inclusive health care. Connecticut just became the fifth state to require transgender medical coverage, sending a directive to health insurance companies that operate within the state that they should include benefits for transgender and transgender-specific care.
WERTHEIMER: So, is the issue that sex reassignment is not included?
MURRAY: Transgender people are denied health care both for transition services, things like hormones, things like that. And sometimes, even within private insurance, the services that are covered are gender-specific. And so, if someone, say, is born a man, suddenly they're excluded from receiving mammograms or issues for breast cancer, and those are things that need to get fixed in terms to create consistent health care for transgender people.
WERTHEIMER: There was a certain amount of publicity for transgender people in 2013. There is the Netflix TV series "Orange is the New Black," which has a transgender character who was named one of the most influential people of 2013. Do you think that has the potential to change anything?
MURRAY: I think so. One, I think that having that visibility and a fictional story that tells the story of a complex person. Most of the time in the media, on the news side of things, transgender people are often just the victims of violence and they're not talked about until after they have been attacked and perhaps murdered, which it happened a lot also in 2013. In a character like Laverne Cox's character in "Orange is the New Black," helped to provide a much richer character that people could actually relate to. One of the things we've talking about on the news side of GLAAD is that we shouldn't just be hearing about transgender people after they're the victims of violence; we need to be hearing about their lives when they're living - what they go through, what their accomplishments are.
WERTHEIMER: That's Ross Murray. He is the news director at GLAAD. Ross Murray, thank you so much for doing this.
MURRAY: Thank you so much for having me.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer in for Scott Simon. Landmark decisions on gay marriage and the Voting Rights Act defined the Supreme Court's term last year. Those rulings continue to have an impact to see individual states deal with the new realities. The court has heard just a couple of cases so far in this term. But oral arguments for new cases begin later this month. Tom Goldstein joins us in the studio for a preview of those cases. He is the publisher and cofounder of SCOTUSblog, and he's also argued many cases before the Supreme Court. Tom Goldstein, thank you for coming.
TOM GOLDSTEIN: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
WERTHEIMER: So, if decisions on gay marriage and voting rights defined the court last year, what do you think is going to define the court this year?
GOLDSTEIN: I would say campaign finance, the power of the president to make appointments without a vote by the Senate, and the Affordable Care Act is back again in its contraception mandate.
WERTHEIMER: One of those has already been argued, right, the campaign finance argument?
GOLDSTEIN: They have argued the campaign finance case. That is about contribution limits across the span of all federal candidates or to party committees, like the RNC and the DNC, the Democratic National Committee. And it looks like this sixth campaign finance challenge in the Roberts court will prevail again and there will be another part of federal campaign's finance law that's struck down.
WERTHEIMER: So, liberating all kinds of money to come into the political system.
GOLDSTEIN: Yes. That's right. People remember the famous Citizens United case, which was about corporation and unions actually spending money getting their own advertisements. This is giving money to candidates. So, more money will come into the system for sure.
WERTHEIMER: What about some of the other cases the court will hear in the term in 2014? They range from presidential powers, you said, to abortion, free speech.
GOLDSTEIN: You know, we're suffering a bit of a hangover from the two previous terms, which were so exciting. And our hangover masks that this term has a bunch of very important cases, so a lot of people are paying attention to when religious organizations have to comply with the mandate to provide contraception coverage in their insurance that they now have to provide. And that's a very difficult question when you're talking about people who aren't involved in churches but say a closely held company where the owners really do operate according to their religious convictions. We also have a very important abortion-related case in how far it is that states can keep protesters away from abortion clinics. And that's an important free speech question for the protesters and also an access question for those who favor the right to choose.
WERTHEIMER: What do you think, if you were going to pick one of all of the cases that you're looking at down the road - 30-something cases that the court will hear plus ones we don't know about yet, I assume - what's going to be the most important case of the term?
GOLDSTEIN: Well, I don't know. You might think about a case that they haven't agreed to hear yet but they're about to in all likelihood. And it's about searching your cell phone. When we think about 30 years from now, 50 years from now, a lot of the times we're thinking about technologies. And that's something that the justices just don't have a lot of experience with. And they are very likely to agree to decide when it is that the police can search the contents of your phone without a warrant. And that's important on its own terms but it also raises a whole bunch of difficult questions about where computers fit in this whole miasma of what can be searched and what can't and when judges have to get involved.
WERTHEIMER: So, all of these judges who - it's not clear to me that all of them can operate a computer.
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GOLDSTEIN: We had an argument a few years ago in which one of the justices asked what a pager was. And so they were actually very honest about the fact that they don't have a ton of experience with these technological questions. They've written opinions asking Congress to step in. But, as with so many things, that hasn't happened yet.
WERTHEIMER: Do you think this is likely to be an important term, a historic term?
GOLDSTEIN: I do, but probably for a reason that will fly below the radar for a lot of people. And that is in this term, more than in any that I can remember, the justices are being asked to overrule prior precedent. So, they're being asked to do that in the context of public employee unions, in campaign finance. Over and over and over and over again, this could be the term that most marks the court's shift to the right, where a conservative majority looks back at what the court did over the previous three decades and says that wasn't right. We're going to course-correct here. But because the cases aren't about the future of Obamacare or the Voting Rights Act or gay marriage, they just won't get the kind of public attention that sometimes a Supreme Court does.
WERTHEIMER: Tom Goldstein is a partner at the law firm Goldstein and Russell and the cofounder of SCOTUSblog. Thank you very much.
GOLDSTEIN: Thank you.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
Fifty years ago this coming week, President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Johnson became president after the assassination of President John Kennedy. LBJ mentioned the late president in his State of the Union address only three times,- most notably when he said let us carry forward the plans and programs of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, not because of our sorrow or sympathy, but because they are right.
President Johnson said he wanted every American citizen to be able to fulfill their basic hopes, and too many people in the United States live, he said, on the outskirts of hope. And then he said this administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.
The war President Johnson described was to be fought on many fronts - education, housing, health and jobs. He proposed to take on income inequality and to develop special projects for pockets of poverty in cities and rural America. He warned that this war would take a generation or more.
Did he succeed? Fifty years down the road, there are lots of arguments about that. Some successes are clear. One of the largest groups of people living in poverty in those years were old people. President Johnson, in creating Medicare and opening the way for Medicaid and other programs, changed that. But now, women and their children are one of the largest groups living in poverty. And Head Start and food stamps - programs descended from the war on poverty, programs intended for families - have been cut, recently cut substantially.
To the extent that the war on poverty was also a fight against income inequality, that battle has not succeeded. The gap between the rich and the rest is huge and is opening wider every day. Many Americans eager to work hear that the economy is improving, that the stock market has hit record highs but they don't feel it. They hope they will feel it. But now, they are among those people President Johnson spoke about 50 years ago. They are still living on the outskirts of hope.
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WERTHEIMER: You're listening to NPR News.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News, I'm Linda Wertheimer. The first major snowstorm of the new year hit the eastern half of the United States, leaving Boston, New York and cities beyond buried in snow. WBUR Boston's Barbara Howard reports on the aftermath.
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BARBARA HOWARD, BYLINE: Children sledding down a slope in suburban Brookline, Massachusetts. The storm closed schools on Friday, so why not? Fifteen inches of snow recorded at Logan Airport; nearly two feet in other parts of Massachusetts, with scattered blizzard conditions at the height of the storm. It's all a boon for area ski resorts, which have suffered through some relatively snowless winters in recent years. Tom Meyers is marketing director at Wachusett Mountain Ski Area near Boston.
TOM MEYERS: This season has actually been off to one of the best starts we have ever had. And we've had incredibly good weather for snow making, and then, of course, when we have a wonderful storm like we just had, it's just icing on the cake.
HOWARD: The snow was not fun for travelers. Airlines cancelled thousands of flights while the storm intensified Thursday night into Friday. Nancy Tebbetts waited at Boston's Logan Airport. She was trying to get home to Cady, Texas.
NANCY TEBBETTS: Well, you know, when travel in the northeast in the winter, you have to be prepared. So it's, you know, a crap shoot. That's one of the reasons we live in Texas now.
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HOWARD: The backlog of flights has been pretty much cleared up now. Logan Airport officials expect things to be back to normal today. South-facing coastal areas of Massachusetts regularly experience flooding during storms at high tide, but perennial worries that beach houses perched on sandy cliffs would fall into the Atlantic proved unfounded. Arctic air with sub-freezing temperatures has now moved into New England. Temperatures are expected to rise above freezing by tomorrow. For NPR News, I'm Barbara Howard in Boston.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
Mayor Michael Bloomberg left office this week after 12 years as the mayor of New York City. During his time in office, he changed the city in all sorts of ways, including a sweeping ban on smoking and a controversial stop-and-frisk policy. He lobbied the City Council to overturn the law and get an extra term on office, and he turned his job in New York City into a bully pulpit, speaking out on national issues like gun control and immigration, involving himself in elections far beyond his city. With us now to help assess Bloomberg's legacy is Errol Louis, the host of "Inside City Hall" on NY1. Thank you for being with us.
ERROL LOUIS: My pleasure. Glad to be with you.
WERTHEIMER: Now, I want to go back to the beginning of Bloomberg's term. Here he is, a billionaire with no particular political experience, kind of coming out of nowhere to become mayor. What was the perception of him then and how did it change?
LOUIS: Well, there was a perception of him during the campaign that he was, political speaking, a long shot, maybe a bit of a lightweight. The thing to remember, though, Linda is that this was 2001. I mean, 2001, 9/11 was an election day in New York City. That election had to be cancelled and then rerun, the primary, a few weeks later. It was a time of tremendous crisis, really a lot of things changed. And politics as usual really was defeated as much as Bloomberg's Democratic opponent was.
WERTHEIMER: So, what do you think was the thing that Bloomberg did that was the most substantial policy, the most important program, and what was the big-deal thing he did for the city of New York?
LOUIS: Oh, there are a few of them. But you can lump a bunch of them together under public health. He put a lot into the public hospital system here. He did things like the smoking ban, which alone probably will save more lives than almost anything else anybody could have done. Starting a conversation in this city about diabetes and about diet. You never hear that out of City Hall. I mean, there were prior mayors - Ed Koch comes to mind. There'd be these stories about his fainting in a restaurant where he'd be feasting on, you know, duck and all of these other gourmet dishes. And this mayor sort of started a different kind of a conversation. I mean, and that's just picking one thing. I mean, there are a lot of unsexy things like making sure the government functions more effectively, putting more of the information on the working of government online so that the public can see it. All of these things were done, Linda, without tawdry political transactions in the back room. You know, the one big exception being the one that you alluded to, which was the way that he overturned the term limits law so that he could run for a third term.
WERTHEIMER: Now, we've both alluded in various ways to his considerable personal wealth. And I would say that that in some ways sort of defined his tenure in office. Does this national figure that he became and issues like gun control, climate change, is it possible for somebody who has a regular amount of money to be mayor of New York now?
LOUIS: Well, you can be mayor but you won't have the impact or you won't do things the way that Michael Bloomberg did them. There were some allegations that we had a new type of small city corruption - nothing you could go to jail for, but that that by giving a lot of money to city groups and advocacy groups, the mayor actually purchased their loyalty or at least their silence, because they wanted some of that largess going forward. It's an interesting question. And I don't think it's gotten enough attention, in part because it is so unique. I'll give you one example. He wanted to do a project to help low-income men, and it wasn't clear whether or not it was going to have support in a tough budget. The mayor wrote a check for $30 million to jumpstart the project. I don't think we're going to see a mayor anytime soon willing to do anything remotely like that.
WERTHEIMER: Errol Louis is the host of "Inside City Hall" on NY1. Thank you very much for doing this.
LOUIS: Thank you, Linda.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
An academic thesis, at whatever level, is the culmination of months -at least -of thought and labor. Presumably, it's a grand statement of all the learning you've been doing, topped with an appropriately inscrutable, grandiose title. Maybe something like "Probing Early Galaxy Formation with Damped Lyman Alpha Absorbers." But what about a dark night in the lab when you're feeling a bit more cynical? Maybe then the title feels more like: that galaxy wasn't the one we were looking for, and after careful examination we can say that it doesn't have any other particularly interesting traits either. That's a real example from the website LOLmythesis. It's a collection of wry one-sentence real-talk summaries of theses. And with us now is Angie Frankel, she's a senior at Harvard, working on her own thesis, and the creator of LOLmythesis. Angie, thank you for being with us.
ANGIE FRANKEL: Thanks for having me.
WERTHEIMER: So, what is the story behind this website? Where'd you get the idea?
FRANKEL: Well, I was working on my own thesis, and it had become a common practice amongst friends to sum up our progress in a somewhat humorous way. So, I somewhat randomly decided one day that I should definitely collect these and publish them somewhere.
WERTHEIMER: Did you do a sort of a laugh out loud version of your own thesis?
FRANKEL: I did. Simply: I have killed so many fish.
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WERTHEIMER: What is the real title?
FRANKEL: The real title: "Characterizing the Role of a Specific Gene in Second Hartfield(ph): A Closer Look at Feverfish and Brionac Cardiogenesis."
WERTHEIMER: Now, you've collected pages and pages of these summaries so far. Do you have any special favorites?
FRANKEL: I do. So, one I really enjoy is when a space rock goes in front of a star, you can't see the star again until the rock moves.
WERTHEIMER: What about - do you find any of them sort of sound sad and discouraging?
FRANKEL: Absolutely. There is one, let's see: It seems the results of this study are not statistically significant and that was statistics at Harvard.
WERTHEIMER: So, do you think that it's inevitable that somebody begins to take a kind of bleak view of their thesis? I mean, I suppose in any humorous recitation of the title does imply a certain, I don't know, despair.
FRANKEL: Yeah. I think that there is a common theme that, you know, a lot of these theses are so specific that I think, for me at least, you know, I've seen that that's kind of how academia works, where you look at, you know, highly specific research projects and that small contribution is a contribution nonetheless.
WERTHEIMER: Angie Frankel is a senior at Harvard College. Angie, thank you so much for spending time with us.
FRANKEL: Thanks for having me.
WERTHEIMER: And good luck with the dead fish.
FRANKEL: Thank you.
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WERTHEIMER: This is NPR News.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
This is the season for personal resolutions and reinventions. We invited you to share your big changes at work, home and in life. And here is a bit of what we heard back from you.
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DEBBIE LIBERATORE: Hi. My name is Debbie Liberatore(ph). I live in Commerce, Georgia, and I'm 61 years old.
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LIBERATORE: My husband is a bodybuilder. He is 62. Recently, he started getting into contests and I was going to the contests. And I was watching all the women. I noticed that I thought I looked better than half the women up there.
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LIBERATORE: So, the next time a contest came up, I entered. And I competed against younger women, like teens in their 20s and 30s and I came in third place.
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LIBERATORE: When I won, I was shocked, but like now that it's been a couple months, I think I'll probably try it again. Maybe I'll get in first place this time.
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TODD SALLA: My name is Todd Salla(ph), 30 years old, have been living in Chicago for the past eight years. The one big thing that I'm going to be changing in my apartment for the new year is the fact that I will be joining the 21st century again with getting wireless Internet in my apartment. It's just it's time.
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HOPE LAWRENCE: Hi. My name is Hope Lawrence(ph) of Charlottesville, Virginia.
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LAWRENCE: When we were in New York, I worked for Standard and Poor's as a product manager and David piloted unmanned submarines with the oil companies. And we loved New York. It was a great life. But I just had this dream of having my own business and kind of living in the country.
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LAWRENCE: My first son was born, then my second son was born and we finally said, yep, this is it, let's move to the country. I, you know, officially formed the Hudson Henry Baking Company and we sold our first bag of granola.
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LAWRENCE: The big scary leap was not having a paycheck anymore and not having health care. And, you know, if you say let's live the good life but, you know, the good life is sometimes - it's tough but I love it. I mean, I couldn't imagine doing anything else.
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LINDA BURKE: I'm Linda Burke(ph). My husband and I recently decided that we would like to have an adventure. And so we decided that this year we would rid ourselves of all our worldly possessions, except for what would fit in our truck; our camping gear and the things that we would need on the road and take off and find the ocean. I've never been to the ocean and he wants me to see it before we get too much sicker. We're both disabled.
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BURKE: He's had two strokes. He's had two major heart attacks. And I have degenerative disc disease and Parkinson's, and it's, you know, progressing. Mine is progressing faster than his.
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BURKE: We've narrowed it down to five boxes of pictures and mementos and things that really were precious to us and we stacked those in a friend's attic - bless her heart - and we headed out.
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BURKE: You know, there's nothing worse than a regret. Nothing worse than having regrets. Take the chance and do it. Make the changes in your life that you think will help you to grow.
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WERTHEIMER: That last voice was Linda Burke. Also, Hope Lawrence, Todd Salla and Debbie Liberatore.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
And one more story about transformation. Up until about a year ago, Paul Bragiel was not particularly into sports. By his own admission, he was a chunky out-of-shape computer nerd. He was much better with his head. He's a venture capitalist at I/O Ventures in San Francisco. But when we reached him in Kittila, Finland - that's above the Arctic Circle and it's where he's training to qualify for this year's Winter Olympics as a cross-country skier for the nation of Colombia. Just to be clear: before last January, Paul Bragiel had never strapped on a cross-country ski and he didn't speak a word of Spanish. He simply realized he wanted to participate - not even win - in the Olympics once in his life. So, he's trying. Paul Bragiel, welcome.
PAUL BRAGIEL: Thanks. I appreciate it.
WERTHEIMER: Can you tell me what was the moment when you realized I must do this?
BRAGIEL: Yeah. Probably like a year ago. So, like, in my daily life, I go around the world and I speak to young student entrepreneurs about inspiration, going for your dreams. And after one of these speeches, yeah, I kind of start thinking about, hey, what kind of dreams have I not pursued out of the business like the really deep, impossible ones? And, yeah, I woke up the next morning and it kind of hit me in the head. You know what, I always wanted to be an Olympian ever since I was a little kid and maybe this is the year I should do it.
WERTHEIMER: You decided on cross-country skiing. I mean, presumably, you took a hard look at your own abilities and possibilities.
BRAGIEL: Yeah, yeah. I mean, so, the whole time I'm thinking how to solve this problem. How do I get into the Olympics? I'm trying to figure out what is the absolute easiest way for a 35-, now 36-year-old guy can make it happen. And so what I did is look at every team sport and let's see, you know, what's the difference between a number one finisher and the last place finishers. And there were about four sports that kind of came to the top: downhill skiing, cross-country skiing, bobsled and luge. Yeah, kind of by default it became cross-country skiing.
WERTHEIMER: You know, when I heard about this, my first thought was why not luge? I mean, surely that's the one that doesn't require a great deal of native talent.
BRAGIEL: Yeah. I mean, I'm sure it's still quite difficult but, like, it's really dangerous. I mean, and having seen somebody die doing it during the last Olympics, that was a major turnoff. I mean, I love to dream but I like my life even more. So, I was like, oh, I'll pass on this. I don't want to die. And so that's how it got eliminated, via that logic.
WERTHEIMER: OK. So, you picked cross-country and then you picked Colombia. Now, how did that happen?
BRAGIEL: I mean, I could never make the U.S. team in any of these sports. So, I just put together like a database of every country that's never been in the Winter Olympics and I just started writing letters to them. And most countries never responded - shockingly - but there were a few countries that kind of came back and said, hey, this is kind of interesting. And Colombia was super excited, you know, kind of moved very quickly and they really loved the idea and they were super supportive.
WERTHEIMER: So, now, you are training up at the top of Finland, where I assume it's very, very cold and very, very dark this time of year. How close do you think you are to qualifying?
BRAGIEL: I'm doing a 10 kilometer classic race. And so the first time I ever did it a few months back, it took about two hours. I'm at a point now where I'm doing about 40 minutes and that's a few minutes off of where I need to get to. So, the time is getting pretty small but, obviously, as it is a close sport, the closer you get to the goal, the harder to chip away the times.
WERTHEIMER: So, let's just take a great leap of faith and say you qualify. If you do qualify, now then what do you want to do? I mean, how is it going to feel if you come in, like, way last?
BRAGIEL: Yeah. I mean, so, I already come in way last in most of my races. So, I've kind of gotten that beaten out of me. And also the whole ski community has been super nice to me. Like, they (unintelligible) they help me with my waxes and my skis and stuff like that. So, it doesn't feel that alone. Or it doesn't feel that, like, like it's odd because everyone has been so nice and supportive of it.
WERTHEIMER: Paul Bragiel is a venture capitalist at I/O Ventures in San Francisco, but now he's training above the Arctic Circle in Finland trying to qualify for the Winter Olympics. Mr. Bragiel, thank you very much.
BRAGIEL: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
WERTHEIMER: Good luck.
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BRAGIEL: Thanks. I need it.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer in for Scott Simon. The Arab Spring was a worldwide event in that it captured the imagination of the entire world. Everywhere people heard about it, read about it, and certainly watched it. The growing demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Cairo and other Arab countries - Tunisia, Libya among others - and we have watched the aftermath of those uprisings as well.
Now, we can read intimate and personal accounts of what those early days were like. We have a collection of essays called, "Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution: Voices from Tunis to Damascus." Matthew Cassel is one of the editors of this collection and Yasmine el Rashidi is a journalist from Cairo who contributed an essay. They join us, Matthew from San Francisco, Yasmine from Cairo.
Welcome to both of you.
YASMINE EL RASHIDI: Thank you.
MATTHEW CASSEL: Thank you.
WERTHEIMER: Matthew Cassel, you're co-editor of this collection, Layla Al-Zubaidi, and half of the contributors are women. That obviously was a decision that you made. Why did you do that?
CASSEL: Well, it was a decision that we wanted to have kind of equal representation of men and women in this book, but I wouldn't say it was, you know, we had to struggle or search hard to find women contributors. The fact is, there are many women in journalism, in literature, on the ground in the Arab world. Unfortunately, however, we don't really get their voices, especially in the United States. But there are a lot of women who are involved and who are writing that we should be hearing from and we wanted to give them voice in this book.
WERTHEIMER: Yasmine el Rashidi is one of those women. You talk in your essay about the very oppressive mood in Cairo and other Egyptian cities. You talk about how the cities were somehow turning gray and falling into ruin. This is all in the run-up of years to the demonstrations in Tahrir Square. I wonder if you could read from your own essay.
RASHIDI: Sure. (Reading) Despair so deeply ingested in the psyche of Egyptians had turned over the years into an apathy palpable even in the city's air. In many ways this was a population in earth, sinking deeper and deeper, and I found myself floating, listlessly, restlessly, aimlessly, burdened by my own self as well as the story of the city. It is, a friend had said once of Cairo, like when a person decides to die.
WERTHEIMER: So in the midst of all that despair, the uprising began.
RASHIDI: In the summer before the uprising, you felt the growing tension in the air. There was sort of a confluence of factors from the economy to a crackdown on the opposition that came together and you could feel the mood in the city really shift, and that listlessness and that apathy, that began to shift into something that felt a little bit more aggressive. And you could sort of feel that something was beginning to turn.
WERTHEIMER: You describe people around you being shot and beaten, awful things happening. But you clearly feel that these were some of the best weeks of your entire life.
RASHIDI: It was absolutely exhilarating in spite of all the violence that we witnessed and were subjected to. And everyone I know, something happened to them, whether it was taking a rubber bullet or being beaten or something happened. I think for me, for my friends, it was the first time we really felt a sense of possibility and felt empowered and felt a hope that I've never felt in my life before. And I don't know if I will feel in the same way again. Now we're perhaps living in the shadow of something, and living in the shadow of these really intense feelings that we hope to recapture, and I would hope to recapture, but I don't know if we ever really will.
WERTHEIMER: Egypt appears to have taken a turn lately. The military government is aggressively pursuing the Muslim Brotherhood, but also going after secular activists. Do you think that what happened was in the end worth it?
RASHIDI: I think it was absolutely worth it and I feel something fundamental has changed in Egyptian people. You see every day on the streets people are speaking up, people are demanding their rights, they're voicing their concerns and you feel that they will no longer let governments get away with things. And I think that barrier of fear has been broken and I don't think we can turn back now.
WERTHEIMER: As the two of you look at the region, the whole region, what do you think about the future? What do you think about the sort of unfinished revolution aspect of all of these events? Do you feel that all of this is headed somewhere? Has it headed to a better place? Or has it bogged down?
CASSEL: As for where things are headed next, if you look at Syria today, it's hard to really think back and say, well, were these uprisings worth it, especially when, you know, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, millions are made refugees. It's a difficult question because for people they had, in many of these countries, they had no other option.
If you wanted to challenge the political system, you couldn't, and unfortunately it came to this dramatic events where people took to the streets and they demanded the downfall of their regimes. And I think for people in Western countries, particularly in the United States, it's important to understand what's going on in these countries and what's going to happen next. This is really for the people on the ground to decide and determine where their countries head to next.
RASHIDI: For me it's hard 'cause in Egypt things have taken a difficult turn, a turn back to the repressive regime that we grew up under. So I have really mixed feelings. On the one hand I feel this sense of hope and possibility and empowerment that we have all experienced I think is critical. On the other hand, I'm kind of morally conflicted about the various turns events have taken.
I want to have hope that in a distant future things will be very different.
WERTHEIMER: Yasmine el Rashidi's essay in this collection is called, "Cairo: A City in Waiting." Matthew Cassel is one of the editors of the collection, which is called, "Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution." Thank you both very much.
CASSEL: Thank you.
RASHIDI: Thank you for having us.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer. Boeing machinists have voted to accept a new contract. That means construction of Boeing's next generation long-haul jet will stay in Seattle. Ashley Gross of member station KPLU reports.
ASHLEY GROSS, BYLINE: The whole state of Washington has been waiting to find out what Boeing's 30,000 machinists would decide to do. The aerospace giant is the state's biggest private sector employer. That means each Boeing job has a ripple effect that benefits the whole economy. Boeing machinist Nancy Browning kept that in mind as she voted yes.
NANCY BROWNING: It doesn't just impact us Boeing workers. It impacts everywhere.
GROSS: Fifty-one percent of machinists voted to accept. That shows just how divided the union has been. In November, the workers voted 2 to 1 to reject an earlier offer. Then Boeing upped the pressure and asked states across the country to compete for the wide-body, triple seven project.
JIM LEVITT: Boeing's strategy really will bring an end to any serious collective bargaining.
GROSS: Jim Levitt has worked as a Boeing machinist for 35 years. He voted no and says he's dismayed that the company pushed this extension at a time when the machinists have little leverage.
LEVITT: We had three more years left on our contract and they came with demanding major changes in a contract when we had no ability to strike.
GROSS: The extension means Boeing workers have agreed to not go on strike for the next decade. It also means the defined benefit pension will be phased out and replaced with a defined contribution 401(k) retirement plan. Washington Governor Jay Inslee says he's glad the work will stay in the state, but he acknowledged it was a hard choice.
GOVERNOR JAY INSLEE: They had jobs on one hand and concessions of things that these folks have fought for for decades on the other. That's an extremely difficult decision, and a position that they were put in.
GROSS: In a statement, Boeing cheered the machinists' vote and said it will sustain thousands of jobs for years to come. For NPR News, I'm Ashley Gross in Seattle.
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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
Agriculture is one of America's most hazardous industries, but there's another danger for female farm workers - rape and sexual assault. It's difficult for any victim of sexual assault to press charges, and female farm workers have to overcome additional hurdles, yet some are starting to speak up about the hidden price they may have to pay to keep a job in the fields.
In this encore investigation, Sasha Khokha of member station KQED in San Francisco reports. And a note to listeners, this story contains graphic language.
SASHA KHOKHA, BYLINE: It started with a missing paycheck. In 2006, Guadalupe Chavez, a farm worker in California's Central Valley, was supposed to earn $245 for a week of picking pomegranates, money the widowed mother of two needed urgently to pay her bills. When she went to track down the check, a supervisor she never met before told her someone had it out in the fields. He said to follow him there in her car.
GUADALUPE CHAVEZ: (Foreign language spoken)
KHOKHA: He stopped in an isolated pistachio orchard. Then, she says, he got out of his truck and demanded her underpants in exchange for her paycheck.
CHAVEZ: (Through Translator) He said I'm the supervisor, I'm in charge here. And I remember that he had told me that he had a gun in the truck and so when he had said that, he banged hard on the car with his hand. I thought he's serious. If I don't do what he says, he can kill me.
KHOKHA: Then, Chavez says, the supervisor reached through her car window and forced his hand between her legs.
CHAVEZ: (Through Translator) He was hurting me. Imagine his fingers were all dirty with pesticides. I wanted for him to stop and hope that it was all he wanted. I thought if he kills me, who will take care of my children?
KHOKHA: After those long, frightening moments, he finally gave her the check, but then she says he demanded oral sex before letting her go. What Chavez describes meets the federal definition of rape and is considered a felony under California law. Two days later, she went to a rural legal aid office about another missing check.
Lawyers there noticed she seemed distraught. They gently asked what was wrong and she gave the OK to call the police.
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KHOKHA: Kris Zuniga, then of the Kings County Sheriff's Department, investigated the case.
SERGEANT KRIS ZUNIGA: Oh, absolutely I believe her. Her story was consistent.
KHOKHA: When he interrogated the suspect, Zuniga says, the man denied knowing Chavez, but then he admitted sexual contact, saying it was consensual. We'll hear more about what happened with Guadalupe Chavez's case in a moment. Most farm worker women, though, never report sexual assault to the police.
ZUNIGA: For one, they are afraid that they're going to get deported; number two, word gets around to the other bosses in the valley and the other people that are also doing farm labor work. They'll never work out there again.
KHOKHA: Zuniga's now a sergeant with the police department in the rural town of Avenal. He says many farm worker victims don't get a rape exam.
ZUNIGA: And a week goes by, two weeks go by, three weeks goes by, you've lost that physical evidence, so now you're down to a he said, she said. And those are tough, tough to prosecute.
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KHOKHA: The first stop for farm worker victim isn't usually the police station. It's more likely a place like Westside Family Preservation Services, a tiny nonprofit tucked into a rundown strip mall in the rural California town of Huron. A steady stream of women walk in after work in the fields, pulling down the brightly colored bandanas that protect their faces.
Caseworker, Amparo Yebra, says sometimes they'll confide to her about sexual violence.
AMPARO YEBRA: They have to feel comfortable, they have to feel like they can trust that they're going to be helped.
KHOKHA: Yebra says she literally holds a woman's hand and walks with her into the police station. But sometimes, she says, victims change their minds once they find out what's involved in a criminal case, including the humiliation of retelling their stories in front of a jury. Sometimes, they may choose to file a confidential complaint against the farm company instead.
SANDRA MENDOZA: (Through Translator) A lot of times the victim wants to just wrap things up as fast as possible, get some peace.
KHOKHA: Sandra Mendoza works with the Mexican consulate to help crime victims navigate the U.S. justice system.
MENDOZA: (Through Translator) Coming to an agreement with the company is confidential, no one else finds out about it from either the victim's or the company's point of view. And victims don't face the uncertainty of a jury trial, where nothing guarantees that the alleged perpetrator ends up in jail anyway.
KHOKHA: But the farm worker we met earlier, Guadalupe Chavez, wanted her alleged assailant to go to jail. The local district attorney determined there was strong enough evidence to prosecute and took the case, making Chavez one of the few farm worker women to press criminal charges in a sexual assault case. But with no witnesses in the pistachio orchard that day, the jury believed the defense that the encounter was consensual. The farm's supervisor was acquitted.
CHAVEZ: (Foreign language spoken)
KHOKHA: But even so, Chavez says she got some justice because the man she accused of raping her had to face her in court. And she says now supervisors like him may think twice about how they treat women in the fields.
CHAVEZ: (Foreign language spoken)
KHOKHA: For NPR News, I'm Sasha Khokha in Fresno.
WERTHEIMER: This story was produced in collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting and UC Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Program.
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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
2013 was an up and down year at the movies. There was a crop of box office flops. "The Lone Ranger" and "After Earth" fell into that trap. Steven Spielberg went so far as to predict an implosion of the film industry. Despite all that, 2013 looks to be the most lucrative year ever at the box office, but don't get your hopes up for the movie business just yet.
Stephen Galloway, executive features editor at the Hollywood Reporter, is not impressed by breaking that particular record.
STEPHEN GALLOWAY: What Hollywood is great at doing is touting the final numbers, the box office. But Hollywood spent so much to make movies and market them that the final result actually is somewhat disappointing. Over the summer alone, it released something like 17 enormously expensive movies, $100 million or more each. Add another 50 to 100 per picture for marketing costs, and many of those failed. So the final box office reflects the successes; it doesn't reflect the vast sums of money that were spent to get there.
WERTHEIMER: Well now, one of the things I think that a lot of people have pointed out is that for a while people just stopped going to movies. Movies seemed too expensive in straightened times. But that seems to have changed.
GALLOWAY: I'm not really sure that's true. You've still got roughly the same attendance numbers as last year. It's pretty much flat. And by the way, it's been flat for a while despite population increase. Nobody's looking at North America as a growth market. What they're looking at is the international box office. That's where more and more money is coming in, and we don't have the final numbers for the foreign box office this year, but you know, there are few red flags there too.
If you look at China, which everybody perceives as the single biggest growth market, a market that's expected to have revenues greater than North America in about five years time, this year films from the Hollywood studios didn't really do better than last year. And in the Top 10 China released films, I think roughly six of them were locally made products as opposed to American product, and that's twice the number of a year ago.
WERTHEIMER: So as the Chinese industry grows, they're liking Chinese movies better?
GALLOWAY: Correct. What China's failed to do is create an export market for their films. Hollywood's been fantastic at exporting its own movies and the amounts that Hollywood makes from foreign contract has grown year in, year out. But it doesn't seem to be showing a way to have explosive growth, and that's why over the past you've seen investors like Daniel Loeb urging, for instance, Sony to split off its movie studio because they don't see huge growth there.
WERTHEIMER: So is the film industry going to do anything to sort of fix this? I mean, do they see anything, any solutions ahead?
GALLOWAY: The studios have started making fixes. If you look at the major studios, there's been upheaval in a handful of them. Fox lost one of its chairman; Universal lost its chairman; Warner Brothers replaced its chairman. That's an awful lot of executive change. And I promise you, it wouldn't be happening if the studios didn't realize they have a problem. What they haven't created is a long-term strategy to address that problem.
WERTHEIMER: So what do you see going forward? What do you think 2014's going to turn out to be?
GALLOWAY: 2014 looks like it's going to be a repeat of 2013, but you've also got this pileup of very expensive films, tent poles as they're known, coming in the summer. You've got something like 15 films or more, big films, and it's an awful lot for a three-month window. So the question is, will the audience expand to fit those films or is there a finite number of people going to the box office, in which case some of those films will fall and Hollywood's profits will fall too.
WERTHEIMER: So is there a silver lining? Did anything that happened in cinema this year make you feel optimistic about the future of movies?
GALLOWAY: Well, there are a few good things that are happening. One is there's been some terrific movies made. "American Hustle," Gravity," Twelve Years a Slave," "The Butler," "Wolf of Wall Street." They're really, for me, superb pictures. We also have a new star who's really emerged, Jennifer Lawrence, and it's great to see a women becoming a major star when Hollywood traditionally seems to have just thrown up male stars.
These are good signs. But in the long term, the studios have yet to really create a strategy for what's going to help the American motion picture business thrive in the long term.
WERTHEIMER: Stephen Galloway is executive features editor at the Hollywood Reporter. Stephen Galloway, thank you.
GALLOWAY: Thank you so much.
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WERTHEIMER: You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
Movie theatres have tried different ways over the years to combat declining ticket sales. In this encore broadcast, Topher Forhecz reports on the latest attempt to bring in audience by recreating the comforts of home.
TOPHER FORHECZ, BYLINE: When I decided to see a movie at an AMC Theatre in upper Manhattan, the first change I noticed was I had to reserve my seat when I bought my ticket beforehand. So I just walked in and there are about nine rows of leather seats and I am in D6, so I've got to go find it.
But that wasn't the biggest change at the theater. A bunch of people are taking pictures of the different seats and chairs. And they lean back.
And people are taking pictures because there's something in the cinema that they've never seen before. Gone are the fold-up stadium seats. Instead, there are rows of plush, leather recliners that customers can stretch out on at the push of a button, myself included.
I'm about to sit down. And the moment of truth? Much better than my sofa at home. And that's the thing. Will moviegoers leave the comfort of their homes for the big screen experience, or do they want to sit on their own sofas, binging on programming they can't even get at the cinemas, like Netflix's "Orange is the New Black," and "House of Cards?"
To lure the homebodies, theatres have tried beefing up their screenings with digital film, better sound and 3-D. Now, AMC's spokesman, Ryan Noonan, says the company is introducing one element that your pad always had cornered - comfort.
RYAN NOONAN: We feel like you're not going to be able to match the experience you get when you're in a movie theater, but we feel like we could up our game on bringing the comfort of your living room into our theater.
FORHECZ: But it's a calculated risk. Noonan says those big recliners reduce the seat count by 50 to 70 percent. But even as the number of seats shrinks, attendance is rising. The company says it's seen an 84 percent increase at theaters with the new seats. That sometimes means changing the way those theaters operate.
NOONAN: We want to accommodate as much demand as we can and you know, whether that's through more showings or a longer day, we will start a little bit earlier or maybe we might run a little bit later than we used to at the theater.
FORHECZ: And in some instances, a slight increase in ticket prices. It's part of a long-term strategy: the company plans to spend $600 million installing new seats over the next five years. AMC theaters with recliners have already popped up in Washington, Ohio, Texas and other states.
NOONAN: We've got a number of them done and we have some in under construction. So I want to say it's somewhere in the mid-20s.
FORHECZ: AMC's competitors are doing the same. Regal Cinemas also operates theaters with large, plush leather seats. And sure, they're comfy. But if we're being honest, I've never had to ask a stranger what button I press to get out of my chair at home. For NPR News, I'm Topher Forhecz.
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WERTHEIMER: This is NPR News.
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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer. And it's time for sports.
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WERTHEIMER: College football fans are saying goodbye forever to the bowl championship series, and as NFL playoffs skip a kickoff today, wild card weather could be a game changer. For more, I'm joined by NPR's sports correspondent, Tom Goldman. Good morning, Tom.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Happy New Year to you.
WERTHEIMER: Thank you very much. And you as well. I wonder, Tom, as much as the BCS system was criticized for using statistics instead of actual playoffs, this year's match-ups looked pretty good. Oklahoma beat Alabama at the Sugar Bowl and Michigan State beat Stanford at the Rose Bowl. What have we learned from this much-maligned sports tradition.
(LAUGHTER)
GOLDMAN: I think we've learned we're ready for this long overdue change, the playoffs starting next season. In the four biggest, most lucrative bowl games so far, the BCS bowl games, and we've got the biggy to go on Monday night, the BCS championship game between Florida State and Auburn. But in the four already played, Rose, Fiesta, Sugar and last night's Orange Bowl, you have the underdogs winning.
Stanford, Ohio State, Alabama lost, and those schools had been fixtures at the top in recent years. And, Linda, it's an example of why there is such anticipation for a playoff because there are teams other than the usual suspects that deserve a chance at the title. A playoff will provide that chance, although it'll just a four-team playoff. But it's a start.
WERTHEIMER: So, over to the pros. The NFL playoffs start today. Who are the hot teams this season?
GOLDMAN: You know, that's a good question because hot has mattered in recent years. The eventual champions started to build momentum with surges late in the regular season. Also, the last three champions, Baltimore, New York Giants and Green Bay, all played the first weekend, wildcard weekend, and they weren't one of the teams that got the weekend off because of a bye.
So the hot teams playing on this wildcard weekend: Indianapolis has won three straight, San Diego has won four straight. San Diego's opponent tomorrow, Cincinnati, had a strong finish and is undefeated in its home stadium where tomorrow's game is being played.
Now, San Francisco has one six straight. And the 49ers are looking more and more like the team that got to the Super Bowl last season, but the 49ers play a Green Bay team in Green Bay tomorrow that squeaked into the playoffs by beating Chicago last week with a last-second touchdown pass thrown by Packer's quarterback Aaron Rodgers. I hope you saw that. He missed seven weeks before that because of a broken collarbone. So you think maybe Green Bay is poised for a magic run too.
WERTHEIMER: So weather has got to be a factor this weekend. I have to tell you that here in the northeast, we are freezing and the Midwest is colder.
GOLDMAN: Yeah. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the forecast for the game between the Packers and the 49ers at Green Bay's fabled Lambeau Field, could drop to as low as minus 51 degrees with the wind chill. That could make it the coldest ever game in NFL history.
Could it be a factor in Green Bay - also Cincinnati and Philadelphia? Yeah, especially the combination of cold and wind. It's hard to throw, hard to catch; you can imagine it stings even more to get hit. The players say attitude matters. Who will do a better job of not minding?
WERTHEIMER: NPR's sports correspondent, Tom Goldman. Thank you.
GOLDMAN: You're welcome.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
Congress could take up legislation in the new year, aimed at improving oversight of the nation's crime labs. But critics are skeptical and say reform is unlikely, despite some recent major lab scandals.
From member station WBUR, Deborah Becker has more.
DEBORAH BECKER, BYLINE: Although former Massachusetts chemist Annie Dookhan was sent to prison in November for falsifying drug tests, many of the tens of thousands of criminal cases affected by her bogus testing are still in limbo. Boston defense attorney Todd Pomerleau represents about two dozen people who were convicted based on Dookhan's tests.
TODD POMERLEAU: We're basically in this holding pattern where we keep waiting. We've been waiting for, you know, the proverbial day in court.
BECKER: When the scandal broke in August of 2012, those incarcerated based on evidence Dookhan tested, did have a day in court. Many were identified immediately and had their sentences stayed. More than 3200 so-called drug lab court hearings have been held and 352 people have been released from Massachusetts prisons.
Matt Segal, with the ACLU of Massachusetts, is looking at legal ways to try to get the state to deal with the affected cases more quickly.
MATT SEGAL: The state has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this scandal and what have we gotten for that expenditure? The answer is almost nothing. Certainly hasn't been justice. It hasn't been a better approach to the drug war.
BECKER: Prosecutors say they're waiting for a few things; a court ruling on how deal with all of the affected cases, and an investigation into all lab operations. Attorney Pomerleau says with Massachusetts having the nation's largest lab scandal, defense attorneys in the state are now more likely to question forensic testing and to scrutinize the analyst involved, especially because Dookhan was also convicted of lying about her credentials.
POMERLEAU: She's testifying under oath apparently that she had a master's degree. And the Commonwealth couldn't even confirm whether she went to the school?
(LAUGHTER)
POMERLEAU: You know, I require my interns to show me a transcript and apparently the lab had different protocols in place for employment.
BECKER: Here's the thing: There are no national regulations governing forensic analyst's credentials. In fact, there are no uniform standards for the labs themselves and there is more than one group that accredits labs. The nonprofit that accredits most of the crime labs in the U.S. is called ASCLD/LAB. ASCLD/LAB'S Chief Operations Officer John Neuner says accreditation can only go so far and the issue in Massachusetts probably was deeper.
JOHN NEUNER: It just sounds like an ethical issue. Certainly a laboratory can have all the policies and procedures in the world, but if you don't have ethical people working there, then you're going to have problems.
BECKER: Accreditation from ASCLD/LAB lasts for five years. It requires yearly inspections, which are announced. And corrective action plans are drawn up if violations are found. Neuner admits though, to his knowledge, no lab has ever had its accreditation revoked. The now-closed Hinton Drug Lab, where Annie Dookhan worked, was not accredited. But forensic consultant Brent Turvey says that might have made things worse.
BRENT TURVEY: In the Hinton Lab, if they were accredited, the incentive to commit the kind of fraud that Annie Dookhan was committing would have been higher because the issue would have been maintaining accreditation. In fact, the majority of labs that where forensic fraud is exposed, the majority of them are ASCLD/LAB accredited.
BECKER: Turvey says there have been at least 12 crime lab scandals in the U.S. over the past two years. He says with more criminal cases relying on forensics, lab oversight is something Congress needs to address.
TURVEY: The forensic science community is not like any other community. It is not beholden to anyone other than the police and prosecutors. The question is, are we creating crime fighters or are we creating scientists? And do we require them to tell the truth or do we try to require them to help the police and prosecution?
SEGAL: A report to Congress raised that same question almost five years ago but there has been little movement toward change. In Massachusetts, most forensic testing is now overseen by state police. In November, a chemist who had worked with Dookhan but was moved to the state police lab after the scandal broke was fired for lying about her credentials.
BECKER: For NPR News, I'm Deborah Becker in Boston.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Fast forward a few hundred years into the future. Resources in the United States are scarce, the government has fallen apart, and most of the population has been left looking for a better life somewhere else. Immigrant laborers, many from China have come to fill the labor void. Life in the new America is divided into three distinct societies. There's the Charters, the walled off cities populated by the elites; the working-class cities, where the laborers live; and the counties, as they're called, the lawless and wild places in between.
That is the world Chang-Rae Lee has created in his new novel. It's called "On Such a Full Sea." Chang-Rae Lee joins me from the studios at Princeton University.
Mr. Lee, thanks for being with us.
CHANG-RAE LEE: Nice to be here, Rachel.
MARTIN: The main character is a young woman named Fan. She's from one of these working-class cities - it's called B-Mor, which is a play on Baltimore. Can you describe B-Mor? Who lives there? What do they do? What is life like?
LEE: Well, B-Mor is the former Baltimore. It's been repurposed as a labor colony. And this labor colony produces pristine fishes and organic vegetables for the elite Charters, that you mentioned. And it's populated by the descendants of some settlers from a place called New China, which is I guess a village in New China that had been environmentally ruined. And so, the whole village was brought over en masse about a hundred years earlier. And Fan is one of their descendents.
MARTIN: Let's . She embarks on a journey. What is she looking for?
LEE: Well, she's looking for her boyfriend, a fellow named Reg. He suddenly disappears one day. She decides to leave the security of B-Mor in search of him. She really has no idea where to start. But one of the things that the book thinks about, I think, is the audacity of her leaving. We don't get her point of view; the book is told by a plural we, of B-Mor. And they consider and muse on all the reasons why she might have left, and all the things that happen to her outside.
MARTIN: But because we are viewing her story as the collective B-Mor, we don't ever hear Fan herself talk about what's driving her. You write about her love for Reg and that's her motivation. But you don't hear it in her words so there's a distance.
LEE: You sort of enjoy that distance. I wondered about that when I began to write, using this perspective. And I decided very early on that Fan's idea of herself almost didn't matter. This wasn't going to be one of those talky books in which the hero expounds on everything and herself. This would be quite a different book in which the narration moves in all these different directions.
Yes, it inhabits her consciousness sometimes. But there's always this tension and we wonder, well, is this Fan or is this the narrator? I quite enjoyed that distance, as you called it; gave it sort of a fable-like quality that I found quite appealing, as I really got into writing the book. And I saw Fan as the kind of figure that was out in the distance, clear, but still in the distance and that we would have to put so much onto her. Of course, following the things that happens to her but that we would be supplying the emotional energy and drive.
MARTIN: As you mentioned, along her journey she faces a lot of challenges. She takes up with some unsavory characters out in the counties who exploit her for their own purposes. And it happens to her again when she's essentially sold to a couple, a Charter couple. She's used and taken advantage of in another way, but you get the sense that she is still somehow in control. Is she really or is that the B-Mor residents' hope for her? Is that their projection, what they wish would happen?
LEE: I think there're, of course, as we are afraid of bad things happening to Fan. I mean, they're a very weary lot to begin with. But once she leaves the walls they get even more anxious. But, as you mentioned, I think she has this rootedness, that even those people who are trying to take advantage of her or use her have an immediate grasp of. They sense something about her that they can't quite put their finger on but that's very appealing to them.
So, out in the counties when she meets a sort of doctor, or the bizarre and fetishistic Charter couple and others as well, they all kind of glom onto her. And they express themselves through her in a way. She's sort of a mirror to the people and maybe to the times itself.
MARTIN: This book is a bit of a departure for you though, this dystopian world at least. Why is that something you wanted to write about and imagine?
LEE: I didn't set out to write a dystopian book or a story. Originally, I had wanted to write a social realist novel of contemporary China, focusing on Chinese factory workers in the Pearl River Delta. And I had gone over and done a lot of research; visited a factory, saw all the things and saw where they lived and where they ate. But when I came back, I didn't quite feel I had enough of a fresh angle on it.
So I put that book away and I was thinking about looking about for another story. And I was on the train from D.C. to New York, and I passed by Baltimore as I always do, and I always have in my adult life. And I saw again, after, you know, another 35 years of seeing it, the same neighborhood of East Baltimore. And I thought - separately, of course, I just thought, you know, it's just a pity that this neighborhood has been abandoned and re-habitated and abandoned again and serially over all these years. And I thought, why can't just some - I don't know - a village from China settle this place? And, you know, I was just idly thinking that. And I thought, oh gee, well, what would happen if such a thing happened and what a crazy, crazy idea? So in a way, you know, this book is sort of an immigrant novel...
(LAUGHTER)
LEE: ...set in the future. But, of course, once I got into the future and thought about building that world, my present anxieties - things that I worry about, about our own society, about income inequality and the lack of social mobility, health care issues, all those things began to come out as I set the clock forward.
MARTIN: The book is called "On Such a Full Sea." It is written by Chang-Rae Lee. Thank you so much for talking with us. We really appreciate it.
LEE: Thank you, Rachel.
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MARTIN: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In the mid-1960s, New York City's Museum of Modern Art commissioned Robert Indiana's "LOVE" painting. The now familiar L and tilted O above the V and E, it made the artist famous. It became a sculpture, a stamp, greeting cards and it obliterated the rest of his career. Now, the first-ever major retrospective of Robert Indiana's work is beginning a national tour at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Karen Michel talked to the 85-year-old artist about "LOVE'S" double-edged sword.
KAREN MICHEL, BYLINE: Robert Indiana has been pretty much ignored by the art world for the past few decades.
ROBERT INDIANA: You see, I wasn't aware that I was disrespected. I've only been neglected.
MICHEL: And, for Indiana, love has got everything to do with it; with his populist success and with his fall from art world grace - a grace that was his when the director of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art took notice.
INDIANA: There's the most important painting acquired by Alfred Barr at Museum of Modern Art, which sort of set my whole career. It took off after that.
MICHEL: Indiana stands in front of the familiar image: four red block letters, two over two, the O tilted, and the background in squares of deep blue and green. When MOMA purchased the work in 1968, the 40-year-old painter became an art world star.
INDIANA: "LOVE" bit me. It, you know, was a marvelous idea but it was also a terrible mistake. It became too popular. It became too popular. And there are people who don't like popularity. And it's much better to be exclusive and remote. That's why I'm on an island off the coast of Maine, you see.
MICHEL: Indiana lives in what he calls a kind of exile. But in the mid-1950s he was ready for New York. He eventually even changed his name from Clark, so he'd stand out.
INDIANA: There were a number of artists named Clark. And if you look in the telephone book, there are thousands and thousands of people named Clark.
MICHEL: But not so many Indianas, the name he took in honor of his home state. You could say that Robert Indiana is a bit of a sentimentalist. He mines his autobiography for everything he does, even "LOVE." That's from his childhood as a Christian Scientist, where the phrase: God is love is prominent; a phrase Indiana inverted to: Love is God. Even the colors in that famous painting come from the artist's childhood.
MARTIN KRAUSE: The red and the green from Philips 66 gas sign. His father worked for Philips 66.
MICHEL: Martin Krause is a curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
KRAUSE: And he remembered that sort of combination, it fixed itself in his mind. And when began making the "LOVE" paintings in 1965, his father died. So the red and green of the "LOVE" painting silhouetted against the blue Indiana sky is in memoriam as his father.
MICHEL: At the Whitney, two images of Indiana's parents opened the show. Unlike his other, brightly colored paintings, these are in grays. His parents stand in front of a Ford Model T. In one image, the couple is dressed. In the other, Indiana's mother reveals her breasts.
Curator Barbara Haskell says the Whitney's retrospective is intended to be a corrective.
BARBARA HASKELL: What wanted this show to do was suggest range and the breadth of Bobby Indiana's work, that extends beyond this one image, "LOVE," which is so known to people around world but has obscured the rest of his work.
MICHEL: Going through the galleries, even the artist was surprised.
INDIANA: Oh, gracious - just absolutely marvelous show.
MICHEL: Indiana is often lumped in with Pop artists, with whom he was friendly. But he describes his stenciled letters and numbers, placed in sharp angles against bright colors as hard edge, not Pop where the three and four letter words convey messages. The words eat, die, and hug appear frequently in Indiana's work.
INDIANA: Hug is my mother's word for affection. Eat was the last word that she said before she died - everything is relating to my own life.
MICHEL: There's also a series of work quoting from American writers, another referencing the civil rights movement, and one of Mae West, called "The Sweet Mystery."
INDIANA: I was great fan of Mae West, and she was a mystery. Everybody wondered is she a woman or is she a man?
(LAUGHTER)
MICHEL: The mystery of the American dream runs throughout Indiana's work. And he says it, too, is elusive.
INDIANA: The American dream, that's our folly. That's our folly. look where we're ending up.
(LAUGHTER)
MICHEL: Now, Indiana is working on a photographic biography, documenting his life's journey from Indiana to New York to the coast of Maine. His retrospective opens in San Antonio in February. A show of his prints also opens in Indianapolis and Robert Indiana won't be quite so neglected by the art world anymore.
For NPR News, I'm Karen Michel.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. The New Year is a time of new beginnings - resolutions, projects, new directions. So it's a perfectly appropriate time of year for Leo Welch, at the age of 81, to put out his debut album.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
LEO WELCH: (Singing) And I don't know what you come to do. I don't know what you come to do. I don't know what you come to do...
MARTIN: Leo Welch has been making music around the tiny town of Bruce, Miss., for decades. He was a local standout unknown to the outside world until he called up an Oxford-based record label, went in for an audition, and signed a record deal on the spot. The result is "Sabougla Voices." It's an album brimming with gospel songs, with titles like "Praise His Name" and "Take Care of Me Lord." But Leo Welch has the soul and sound of a blues man.
WELCH: That's what it was - blues. I tell them I was born not with the blues; I born in the blues.
MARTIN: Born in the blues. Leo Welch went into the Memphis studio of WKNO last week to talk with us about his music.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MOTHER LOVES HER CHILDREN")
MARTIN: Well, let's get into the album a little bit. Let's hear a song. This is "Mother Loves Her Children." Let's take a listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MOTHER LOVES HER CHILDREN")
MARTIN: Did you give your mother a lot of trouble?
WELCH: Not too much. 'Cause I know not to give her no trouble 'cause I know what's coming behind that trouble. That's a good whipping and that's what I would really get when I do wrong. She threw me up and tell me to fly right now and do right and you won't get no whooping. I said, yes, mama.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MOTHER LOVES HER CHILDREN")
MARTIN: Let's play another track off the album. This is a gospel song. This is called "You Can't Hurry God." Let's take a listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU CAN'T HURRY GOD")
MARTIN: So, what has that meant in your own life, you can't hurry God? What does that mean to you?
WELCH: Well, that means that, you know, we just have to trust Him, believe in Him and give Him time. He may not come when we want Him to come but any time He comes, He's always on time. He's right on time.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU CAN'T HURRY GOD")
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU CAN'T HURRY GOD")
MARTIN: It's a great band on this new album, some really lovely backing vocals, lovely production. But I wonder if there is something especially satisfying about the next song I'm going to play. This is a track that's rather stripped down. This is just you and an acoustic guitar. Let's take a listen to the track called "The Lord Will Make a Way."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE LORD WILL MAKE A WAY")
MARTIN: Well, I'm hope we're listening to your music for a long time. Mr. Leo Welch. His new album is called "Sabougla Voices." He spoke to us from member station WKNO in Memphis, Tennessee. Mr. Welch, Happy New Year.
WELCH: Happy New Year to you.
MARTIN: Thank you so much.
WELCH: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. And, sure, you could predictably resolve to eat better and exercise in the New Year. But what about something more interesting like committing to play the puzzle every single Sunday? And you can start...right now.
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MARTIN: Joining me now is Will Shortz. He is of course the puzzle editor of the New York Times and Weekend Edition's puzzle-master. Good morning, Will. Happy New Year.
WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel. Happy New Year.
MARTIN: So, I understand you took on really challenging New Year's resolution yourself and you stuck to it. Tell us what you did.
SHORTZ: Yeah, last year I made a resolution to play table tennis every day for the year and to film myself everyday doing it. And last Tuesday night, New Year's Eve, I played for the 365th consecutive day. And Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, the writers-directors of "Catfish" and the "Paranormal Activity" movies, are going to edit a video of me doing this.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: OK. Let's get to the task at hand. Can you remind us of last week's challenge?
SHORTZ: Yes. It came from listener Steve Daubenspeck of Fleetwood, Pennsylvania. And it said the word wizard has the peculiar property that its letters can be grouped in pairs that are opposite each other in the alphabet. So, A and Z are at opposite ends; D and W are four letters in from their respective ends; and I and R are nine letters in from the ends. And I asked: can you name a well-known brand name in six letters that has this same property? And listeners sent in a number of answers, but there's only one brand name I'd say is genuinely common, and that is the answer: La-Z-Boy.
MARTIN: The old La-Z-Boy recliner. So, that was hard. We got about 200 correct answers. And our randomly selected winner is Jeff Rothenbach of Los Angeles, California. He joins us on the line. Hey, Jeff. Congratulations.
JEFF ROTHENBACH: Thank you. Good morning.
MARTIN: So, this one come pretty easily to you? How'd you figure it out? Do you have a La-Z-Boy recliner?
ROTHENBACH: No, we don't. I actually did it old school and I wrote the alphabet down in two columns, just to see the letter pairings. And my partner and I sat down and we just brainstormed, we were just thinking out loud and putting together combinations until we finally figured out La-Z-Boy.
MARTIN: That's how you do it - a traditionalist. It works. So, you been playing the puzzle for a while?
ROTHENBACH: Yeah. We do this - this is our Sunday morning ritual. We always listen and play along with the player on the air and...
MARTIN: How do you do usually?
ROTHENBACH: Eh, maybe a little better than 50-50.
MARTIN: That's pretty good. That's pretty good. That's about what I do that. So, with that, Jeff, are you ready to play the puzzle - and to be the first puzzler of the year 2014?
ROTHENBACH: Ooh, I'm ready.
MARTIN: No pressure. OK, Will, let's do it.
SHORTZ: All right, Jeff and Rachel. Every answer today is a pair of two-syllable words. The first syllable of the word answering the first clue has the letters A-R, pronounced are. Change these phonetically to err, and you'll get a new word that answers the second clue. For example: if I said hair cutter and a North African, you would say barber and Berber.
MARTIN: Ooh. OK. You have it, Jeff?
ROTHENBACH: OK.
SHORTZ: Number one is a container of cigarettes and drape.
ROTHENBACH: Carton and curtain.
SHORTZ: That's it. A cereal grain and large and muscular.
ROTHENBACH: Ooh. Barley.
MARTIN: Yeah, yeah.
ROTHENBACH: Burly.
SHORTZ: Barley and burly. Ooh, yeah. A clergyman and an individual.
ROTHENBACH: Parson, person.
SHORTZ: Yeah. Parson and person, boy. A brand of motorcycle and actress Elizabeth.
ROTHENBACH: Harley and Hurley.
SHORTZ: That's it. Brand of bathroom tissue and a Civil War general.
ROTHENBACH: Charmin and Sherman.
SHORTZ: That's it. Specialized vocabularies and a brand of skin cream.
ROTHENBACH: Jargon, Jergens.
SHORTZ: Yeah, jargons and Jergens, yes. Relating to the body and a bit of corn.
ROTHENBACH: Carnal and kernel.
SHORTZ: That's it. A common bird and like some silver.
ROTHENBACH: Sterling would be the silver, so starling?
SHORTZ: Starling and sterling, yeah. And your last one involves a strange in stress: an English dramatist born in the same year as Shakespeare and certain wine.
ROTHENBACH: The wine would be merlot, so Marlow?
SHORTZ: Christopher Marlow and merlot is it.
MARTIN: Excellent.
SHORTZ: Nice job.
MARTIN: Jeff, that was fabulous.
ROTHENBACH: Thank you.
MARTIN: For playing the puzzle today, you will get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin as well as puzzle books and games. And you can read about it at npr.org/Puzzle. And before we let you go, Jeff, what is your public radio station?
ROTHENBACH: KPCC in Pasadena and KCRW in Santa Monica.
MARTIN: Love to hear that. Jeff Rothenbach of Los Angeles, California. Thanks so much for playing the puzzle, Jeff.
ROTHENBACH: Thank you.
MARTIN: OK, Will. What's up for next week?
SHORTZ: Yeah. Name something in five letters that's generally pleasant. It's a nice thing to have. Add the letters A and Y and rearrange the result, keeping the A and Y together as a pair, and you'll get a seven-letter word that names an unpleasant version of the five-letter thing. What is it?
MARTIN: Hmm.
SHORTZ: So again: Five-letter thing, it's generally pleasant - you'd like to have it. Add the letters A, Y. Rearrange the result but keep the A and Y together as a pair, you'll get a seven-letter word that names an unpleasant version of the five-letter thing. What is it?
MARTIN: OK, you know what to do. When you've got the answer, go to our website, npr.org/puzzle and click on that Submit Your Answer link. Limit yourself to just one entry per person, please. And our deadline for those entries is Thursday, January 9th at 3 P.M. Eastern Time.
Make sure to include a phone number where we can reach you at about that time because, if you're the winner, we'll give you a call. And then you will get to play on the air with the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle-master, Will Shortz.
Thanks so much, Will.
SHORTZ: Happy New Year, Rachel.
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ELWYN MCROY: Nothing has ever been given to me. Yeah, I've had to work and grind and fight and scratch for every move that I've made. I mean, I'm not going to lie to you, it's not like it's been easy now. I mean it's definitely been a struggle but it's a good struggle.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
That's Elwyn McRoy. He's an assistant men's basketball coach at the University of Texas-Pan American. He's worked for 12 different college basketball programs since 1997.
The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote about Coach McRoy in an article called "Bounced Around," earlier this year. And the piece tells how he skipped meals, slept in cars, and lived thousands of miles from his wife and kids to work in an industry with short contracts and high turnover.
Tomorrow, the college football season comes to an end and sports fans will be turning to basketball. Coach McRoy says despite the challenges, he was practically born to be a coach.
Elwyn McRoy is this week's Sunday Conversation.
MCROY: Both my parents were coaches. My mom, she was a coach for tennis and track. My dad was a football coach and a wrestling coach. So it's always been in my bloodlines. I don't think it was a matter of if. It was just a matter of when.
MARTIN: What was your first coaching job, short term or otherwise?
MCROY: Right when I graduated from Cleveland State University, I got into coaching at Butler County Community College. I went back to Kansas and worked for my former high school coach, Steve Ett(ph). I lived in the dorms with him and made $300 a month.
MARTIN: Three hundred dollars a month and you lived in the dorms.
MCROY: With my head coach.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Wow.
MCROY: Yeah, tell me about it. But, you know, it was also junior college and it was also my first job out of college. I mean I was fresh out of college.
MARTIN: When did you start to realize that this might be a harder journey than you thought it would be?
MCROY: Probably about after about the fifth year that I was in basketball. I couldn't seem to get a break at the Division I level. I had been coaching in junior college for five years. Every place I had been I helped win, you know, helped bring in good players. But it's about who you know, you know, and I mean, the bottom line is if people aren't comfortable with you and they don't really know you from a personal standpoint, you know, it's tough.
MARTIN: Recently, you took a short-term job that had you living in college dorms and eating in the school cafeteria. I understand, I can hear in your voice you're committed to this, this is your passion, this is what you want to do, but that had to have been hard.
MCROY: I tell you what, if there was ever a time when you can see that it was a down time for me, when I wasn't invited back to Iowa State after making it to plateau of my career, so to speak, that was very disheartening. Because I was in a good situation at Arkansas State. I was making good money, we were comfortable, we had a nice house we were living in. But when I had the opportunity to go to the Big 12, I kind of grew up in Big 12 country, being from Wichita, Kansas. It was a pay raise, it was a chance to be at a higher level. And it just turned out, I guess, not to be a good fit. Sometimes that happens in this business. But to fall from being a Big 12 assistant to having to go back to work at Hutchinson Community College, that's about as far as you can fall. And then to end up at Stillman College the following year, living in a dorm, eating dorm food, it was a far cry from making almost six figures from two years prior to that.
MARTIN: How did your family fare through all of that? I mean, you were living separately, right?
MCROY: Yeah. You know, my wife, she's been a trooper through all of this. I couldn't ask for a better woman to stand by me, you know, while I'm still trying to chase this dream. I'm a great guy, you know, but if I'm not coaching basketball I'm probably not as great.
(LAUGHTER)
MCROY: But thanks to technology, with Facetime and I have an iPad and they have a computer there, it helps. You know, it's not the same but anything is better than nothing.
MARTIN: You've got an assistant coaching job now. How's it going so far?
MCROY: I'm loving it. I mean, first of all, I'm loving being employed, OK.
(LAUGHTER)
MCROY: But I don't know if I could have asked for a better person to, I guess, resurrect my career than Dan Hipsher. He's established, you know, he's confident in who he is and what he does. I'm learning a lot of things from him. I mean, I feel very blessed every day.
MARTIN: Does it feel like a long audition of sorts? I mean, there are no guarantees beyond May, right?
MCROY: I mean, that's with any job I've had. You know, so, I mean, for me, it's just another walk in the park. I don't have any kind of reservations about who I am as a person or as a coach. So, I feel confident in what I can do.
MARTIN: Have you set a deadline for yourself? Do you know how long you'll keep taking these short-term contracts before you say, you know what, I tried and it was a good run and I'm going to try to do something else for a living?
MCROY: Well, I mean, I don't know if you can set a deadline being an assistant coach 'cause assistant coaches in this industry normally don't get multi-year contracts. My goal is to be a head coach. Yeah, I know everybody thinks they've paid their dues, but I definitely think I've paid mine. If there was some AD that was willing to take a chance on a no-name guy, I believe I would bring great promise to whatever school that will be. You know, like most people, I just, I need an opportunity.
MARTIN: Elwyn McRoy. He is an assistant men's basketball coach at the University of Texas-Pan American. He talked to us from Tempe, Arizona, a stop on the road with his players. Hey, Elwyn, thank you so much for talking with us.
MCROY: Thank you. And Happy New Year to you and I hope the new year brings much success and blessings to you.
MARTIN: And to you.
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MARTIN: You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. While the East Coast digs out from a major winter storm and the Midwest braces for heavy snow and subzero temperatures, California is praying for rain. The state just finished one of the driest years on record. And that has water managers, farmers and others worried. NPR's Sam Sanders reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF WAVES CRASHING)
SAM SANDERS, BYLINE: It's a pretty nice Friday morning on Venice Beach in Southern California. It's in the 60s, with a breeze. You can hear the waves of the Pacific crash against the sand. The sun is shining, but there's a heavy ocean cloud layer kind of blocking it out. Scott and Sue Nolan are visiting from Houston, playing kickball in the sand with their son. They are grateful to be in this mild, if not perfectly sunny, weather.
SUE NOLAN: I talked to my mother on Cape Cod, just a few minutes ago, where they're getting, you know, hit by the blizzard, so this is still nice compared to that.
SCOTT NOLAN: What, they have 15 inches?
SANDERS: Nolan says they came here for the sun, and the general lack of any precipitation, but she noticed this trip is a little too dry.
NOLAN: One of the thoughts when we're driving thru town was how are they sustaining all this with what you see so dry everywhere.
SANDERS: The Nolans are seeing the effects of California's lingering drought. Going on three years now, rain and snowfall in the state have been extremely low. The California Department of Water Resources says much of the drought the state is experiencing can be attributed to climate change. In a normal year, Los Angeles gets close to 15 inches of rain. In 2013, L.A. got about three and a half. The U.S. Drought Monitor reports that almost 95 percent of California is enduring some level of drought.
ALAN HAYNES: We're coming off two years of below normal precipitation. And we've had an exceptionally dry past twelve months. In fact, one of the driest calendar year on record in lots of locations.
SANDERS: Alan Haynes is a hydrologist with the California and Nevada River Forecast Center. He says the lack of snow in Northern California affects the entire state.
HAYNES: It's a very complicated picture as far as how people get water. But typically, in most cases, it's irrigation - water that comes from somewhere other than locally.
SANDERS: Lots of people in California get their water from the Sierra Nevada snow packs. Those snow packs, though, are only at 20 percent of average right now. And there's a danger that becomes more commonplace in a California drought - wildfires. The dry conditions could mean more and bigger fires in the future. California's water woes might soon begin to affect the entire country because California is America's number one food and agricultural producer. A drought could push up food prices. As far as the forecast for future rain? Jeanine Jones with the Department of Water Resources has a bleak outlook.
JEANINE JONES: Our seasonal forecast says that the odds point to dry. Currently in terms of the longer range weather forecast, we're not seeing any significant relief in the next couple of weeks.
SANDERS: California's Governor Jerry Brown has convened a drought task force. It will convene weekly to help the state prepare for what could be a very dry 2014. Sam Sanders, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
If you spent your New Year's Eve snacking on cronuts and chia seeds, let us introduce you to some new food trends you may see this year. WEEKEND EDITION food commentator Bonny Wolf has been reading the tealeaves.
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BONNY WOLF, BYLINE: Well, tealeaves will be big in entrees, desserts and, of course, cocktails. Starbucks has opened its first tea shop. We won't be just drinking tea. Artisan distilling keeps on growing. This could be the year of gin made with local botanicals as well as the traditional juniper berry. New, but still ancient, grains will join the now-common spelt and quinoa. Teff and freekeh may be as familiar to us by the end of the year. Nuts aren't new either.
A Harvard study shows that nut eaters live longer and lose weight. Ta-da. This year's favorite snack food. Another study finds we threw out 40 percent of our food last year. Now, grocery auctions offer unsold food and even the ex-president of Trader Joe's will open a market selling perfectly good food that's just past its sell-by date. Vegetarianism is no longer just for vegetarians. While most Americans still eat meat, 47 percent of the country eats at least one vegetarian meal a week. Cauliflower, by the way, is the new Brussels sprout. Eating local is going into overdrive. Restaurants and markets have planted gardens and built farms on the ground and on the roof. And if you can't grow it, you can buy it from professional foragers who will bring chickweed and chanterelles to chefs and consumers. Small-scale meat producers will be available as we continue to fret about industrial farming. Expect more goat, rabbit and pigeon, or squab if that makes you feel better. The meats may be flavored with za'atar or sumac, which should easier to find as we dig deeper into the foods of the Mideast. From the Middle East, we go to the Middle West for simple, hearty cooking. The Food Network names the Midwestern food movement as the number one trend for 2014. You betcha. Dessert? Ice cream sandwiches - probably made with tealeaves.
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MARTIN: Bonny Wolf is managing editor of americanfoodroots.com and editor of NPR's Kitchen Window.
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MARTIN: This is NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The U.S. Senate gets back to work tomorrow, and the first legislation up for a vote will be a three-month extension of long-term unemployment benefits. In his weekly radio address yesterday, President Obama urged Republicans to pass the bill.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Republicans should make it their New Year's resolution to do the right thing and restore this vital economic security for their constituents right now.
MARTIN: The Senate unemployment measure is bipartisan but it's not clear it has enough votes to beat a GOP filibuster. As NPR's David Welna reports, Democrats are banging the drum on the issue as a midterm election year kicks off.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: On Friday afternoon, the Obama administration teed up tomorrow's Senate procedural vote on an unemployment benefits extension cosponsored by Rhode Island Jack Reed and Nevada Republican Dean Heller. In a conference call with reporters organized by the White House, Labor Secretary Tom Perez pointed out that when former President Bush first signed long-term unemployment benefits in 2008, the average unemployed worker went jobless for 17 weeks. The current out-of-work average, he said, is 36 weeks - 10 weeks longer than state unemployment benefits last.
SECRETARY TOM PEREZ: It would be unprecedented, given the current rate of long-term unemployment, for Congress to fail to act to extend these benefits. And that is why we are so heartened by the bipartisan bill that Senators Heller and Reed have introduced.
WELNA: And Betsy Stevenson of the president's Council on Economic Advisers warned that failure to extend benefits could mean the loss of another quarter million jobs this year, precisely when the overall economy is starting to pick up steam.
BETSY STEVENSON: It seems like a silly time for Congress to fail to do something that's both essential for the people who need it and helpful for our economy.
WELNA: Prospects for reviving the jobless benefits are uncertain at best in the Democratic-led Senate. But the legislation faces even bigger hurdles in the GOP-controlled House. Before he left Washington three weeks ago, House Speaker John Boehner was asked whether he'd let a jobless benefits bill come to the floor. Boehner did not say no. After all, extending those benefits enjoys wide public support, even among Republicans. But he did attach some significant strings.
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: When the White House finally called me last Friday about extending unemployment benefits, I said that we would clearly consider it, as long as it's paid for and as long as there are other efforts that'll help get our economy moving once again.
WELNA: There are no offsets in the Senate bill to pay for the $6.2 billion cost of the three-month extension, and House Democrats say they would not vote for any GOP attempt to pay for the bill by tapping other workers' benefits. Michigan House Democrat Sandy Levin is counting on Republicans ultimately caving to popular pressure.
REPRESENTATIVE SANDY LEVIN: Once it's debated and the stories of people become more and more known, I think that's going to move the mountain here.
WELNA: President Obama kicks off that effort with a White House on Tuesday rally featuring long-term unemployed workers. David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is abroad on his 10th Mideast peacemaking visit. This morning in Jerusalem, he said Israelis and Palestinians shouldn't get bogged down in day-to-day obstacles, and instead move towards a peace agreement. There's a sense of urgency on this trip. But as Daniel Estrin reports from Jerusalem, the leaders on both sides are far from ready to sign an agreement and not making it easy for Secretary Kerry.
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Israeli and Palestinian negotiators held marathon meetings with John Kerry over the past few days, but neither side voiced any optimism. Kerry, on the other hand, came out of his last session with the Palestinians sounding encouraged.
SECRETARY JOHN KERRY: We're not there yet, but we are making progress. And we are beginning to flesh out the toughest hurdles yet to be overcome.
ESTRIN: Five months ago, Israelis and Palestinians agreed to sit down and talk peace. So far, neither side has reported any breakthroughs. But Kerry is still adamant that Israelis and Palestinians can finally resolve their conflict. And at the start of this visit, he struck a personal note from his days as a soldier in the Vietnam War, noting how far the U.S. and Vietnam have come.
KERRY: The transformation in our relationship is proof that as painful as the past can be, through hard work of diplomacy, history's adversaries can actually become partners for a new day and history's challenges can become opportunities for a new age.
Kerry said he came to propose a framework - how to solve the core issues of the Mideast conflict: the borders of a future Palestinian state, security arrangements, Palestinian refugees, mutual recognition and conflicting claims to Jerusalem. He wants the two parties to agree to a vision before hammering out the details. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greeted Kerry by questioning whether Israel has a partner for peace in the first place.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: I know that you're committed to peace, I know that I'm committed to peace, but unfortunately, given the actions and words of Palestinian leaders, there's growing doubt in Israel that the Palestinians are committed to peace.
ESTRIN: During these talks Israel has released Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks against Israelis. But Netanyahu says the Palestinian leader has greeted the freed prisoners as heroes. Palestinians are calling on Israel to stop plans to announce new settlement homes in areas the Palestinians seek for their future state. Azzam Abu Baker, a Palestinian official with the ruling Fatah Party, says the gaps between the two sides are still large. And he said Kerry has yet to present the Palestinians with any formal framework proposal for a peace deal.
AZZAM ABU BAKER: (Through Translator) If Kerry feels the urgency to do something now, the Palestinian people do not have that same feeling. To prepare for that moment, he needs to deliver, he needs to bring something, so that the Palestinians feel now or never.
ESTRIN: Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli statesman who says he receives regular updates about the negotiations, says there are some issues Israeli and Palestinian negotiators agree on, like how to share water and keeping a Palestinian state demilitarized. But he says Netanyahu is unsure about adopting Kerry's bigger vision for peace.
YOSSI BEILIN: I think he himself is still deliberating on this option, trying to weigh up what is the price of saying no to the American proposal, and what is the price of saying yes to it?
ESTRIN: At the end of his last meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Secretary Kerry said the leaders are not giving up. He said, despite criticism from their supporters, there's been enough progress in the negotiations to encourage the two leaders to keep talking. For NPR News, I'm Daniel Estrin in Jerusalem.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
As we just heard, jobless benefits are a top priority for Congress when lawmakers get back to work tomorrow. But of course, there are more big issues to resolve. And joining us to run through the rest of the 2014 congressional agenda is NPR's political correspondent Mara Liasson. Hi, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel.
MARTIN: So, Congress is going to take up jobless benefits first thing, then there's something called the debt ceiling that we're going to revisit again. This seems to be the legislative battle that just will not end.
LIASSON: The debt ceiling is a strange kind of perennial confrontation where Congress passes bills that borrow money but it neglects to raise its own credit limit. Usually, if you have a credit card, you can't charge anything if it's over your credit limit. But Congress is its own credit card company and it charges things all the time without raising its own credit limit. So, they have to raise the debt ceiling by sometime late this winter or else the country defaults on its debts.
MARTIN: What about immigration reform? Is that finally going to get some traction this year?
LIASSON: Well, as you know, immigration reform, a comprehensive bill that included a path to citizenship for the illegal immigrants already in the country, passed the Senate. It's stalled in the House. Recently, Speaker John Boehner made some indications that he wants to take it up again in little pieces. And the question is whether that will happen this year before the 2014 elections or, some Republicans think, might as just wait till the following Congress when they expect to have more Republican seats in the Senate and it's a little bit closer to the presidential election and the pressure on them will be much greater because they'll be facing a national electorate in 2016 that has a lot of Hispanic voters in it. But there are a lot of people who are very hopeful that something could get done before the 2014 elections. I just wouldn't hold your breath.
MARTIN: OK. And speaking of those midterms, later this month, President Obama delivers his State of the Union. And this speech will do a lot, I imagine, to set the stage for Democrats running in 2014. What do we expect to hear from him?
LIASSON: Well, I think we'll hear a lot about the theme that he started to explore, which is income inequality. He'll talk about raising the minimum wage. That's something that's very popular with Republican voters and Democrats. It's something that the Democrats would like to focus on, kind of an alternative to the Republican drumbeat to the Obamacare problems. Income inequality is a tough problem to solve. Even if you did all the things that would lay the stage for economic growth, you can still get divided growth. In other words, the spoils of growth are unequally divided. But I think you're going to hear a lot about that from the president. The big question is what among the things that he wants - investments in education, infrastructure, raising the minimum wage - can he actually accomplish this year with Republicans?
MARTIN: Do you expect Republicans are going to continue to attack Democrats and the president on the Affordable Care Act in these upcoming midterms?
LIASSON: I think that Republicans feel they've got their issue for the next midterm elections, and that is Obamacare. They are already hammering on those vulnerable red state incumbent senators, not just because they supported the president's health care reform law, but because they went out and they repeated that famous promise that, in the president's words, turned out to be inaccurate; that if you had a health plan that you liked you could keep it. The question is does it work for a solid year? In other words, next fall, is Obamacare just as unpopular as it is today and is that issue as potent for them? Democrats are hoping the economy improves, Obamacare gets a little bit more popular and they can turn their attention to other issues.
MARTIN: NPR's Mara Liasson. Thanks so much, Mara.
LIASSON: Thank you.
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MARTIN: And you are listening to NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
After a short delay, peace talks between the warring parties in South Sudan have opened in Ethiopia. But even as negotiations begin, the fighting continues. A top Sudanese general has been killed in an ambush outside the town of Bor, according to a BBC correspondent traveling with the military. In the past three weeks, at least a thousand people have died in the fighting in South Sudan, and as many as 200,000 may be displaced. Joining us with the latest is Nicholas Kulish of the New York Times. He's been reporting from South Sudan and is now in Nairobi, Kenya. Thanks so much for being with us.
NICHOLAS KULISH: Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: As I understand it, there are two sides in this conflict: those who support President Salva Kiir and those who support his former vice president, who's suspected of a coup attempt. And delegates from both of these parties have gathered in Addis Ababa. What's on the agenda for these talks? How ambitious are they?
KULISH: Well, they're not actually that ambitious. The two things they've laid out is discussion of the release of political prisoners and trying to have a cease-fire. So, this is not a wide-ranging negotiation that you see.
MARTIN: Trying to hammer out a path for a cease-fire though, does either side have the upper hand in these negotiations?
KULISH: I'm not sure that we even know which side has the upper hand. But I think it's pretty clear that both sides believe that they do. You know, the rebel forces have made significant advances, taking the town of Bor, and appear to have some territory south of there. But the government claims that it's retaken Bor and that it has everything under control. I would say at the moment the momentum is a little bit with former Vice President Riek Machar's rebel forces.
MARTIN: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters this morning that the talks over South Sudan need to be substantive, not some kind of delay tactic to keep the fighting going on the ground. But the conflict is still raging, as you just mentioned. Where else is the violence happening right now?
KULISH: You know, really all over the country there's been sporadic fighting. In half the states or more in more than 20 different cities. I think a lot of people are particularly worried about unity state. Near the town of Bentiu, where I think there's been very fierce fighting and little in the way of international observers who can tell us what's going on.
MARTIN: Meanwhile, aid groups have been working around the clock in South Sudan. You've been reporting there recently. What did you see in Juba?
KULISH: You know, until last night, Juba had been relatively calm, but there are tens of thousands of internally displaced people living in very poor conditions on United Nations bases where they sought refuge. I think that sort of the worst humanitarian crisis that I saw was across the Nile from the city of Bor in a place called Awarial, where some 70,000 people are living with little access to clean water, to food, to shelter. South Sudan went through literally decades of civil war in the fight to separate itself from the regime in Khartoum. So, I think that while, on the one hand, people are used to outbreaks of fighting, I think they also have a certain fatalism that once something like this starts, it can be a lot harder to stop. So, people did not seem optimistic when I spoke with them.
MARTIN: The New York Times' Nicholas Kulish. He's been reporting from South Sudan. He joined us on the line from Nairobi, Kenya. Thanks so much for talking with us.
KULISH: Thanks a lot for having me.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Anjan Sundaram had all kinds of options in the late summer of 2005. He had a master's in mathematics from Yale, a lucrative job offer from Goldman Sachs; and he was just about to begin a Ph.D. But he left all that behind and made a dramatically different choice. He headed to the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the worst conflict zones in the world, to try to start a career in journalism. At the time, the death count in that war was more than 4 million people. That number continues to rise.
Sundaram has written a memoir of the time he spent working as a freelance reporter for the Associated Press based in Kinshasa. The book is called "Stringer." It's the term for a journalist who's not on the permanent staff of a publication, and subject to much more insecure circumstances. I began our conversation by asking him why he left the security of his previous life in mathematics.
ANJAN SUNDARAM: I was just about to begin my Ph.D., and the field I was studying, abstract algebra, is very beautiful - it's really abstract - but beyond a certain point, mathematics begins to become about the beauty and not its usefulness. And at that point, I felt I needed to immerse myself in something that mattered more immediately, was more real than merely beauty. And that's what drew me to a place like the Congo.
MARTIN: Your decision to go to the Congo was somewhat random, though, right? I mean, did you have the Congo squarely in mind?
SUNDARAM: I wanted to get to a place of powerful events. It could have been Congo; it could have been anything else, at that point, to be absolutely honest. I had read about this huge war. It was even then the worst war in the world, in terms of its death toll. A few things happened to point me towards Congo. I was paying my final bill at Yale for the semester and the cashier was Congolese. And I started talking to her. She thought I was crazy to abandon my education, abandon my job offers and end up in a place like the Congo. But eventually, she became my friend, and she let me live with her family in Kinshasa. And I knew that at that point, I wanted to go to Congo because I felt I had an in to society there, that I would see it from the inside.
MARTIN: I wonder, what were your expectations in those early days, when you first arrived? Were you full of optimism about what this would mean personally for you, for your career?
SUNDARAM: I felt that there were things in the world that I wanted to see. I was full of energy to go out and see them - oblivious, almost, to the affect that they would have on me. I felt that there were famine, that this was a real part of people's lives; and it wasn't being spoken about or reported. And I felt this drive to want to go there and see it. The journalism, I was immensely lucky. I found a job as a stringer with the Associated Press not too long after I arrived and just after I had been robbed of almost all my money. So, I was in immense need of some employment. It turned out that journalism was a perfect vehicle to take me to places that I wanted to be in, to take me to events that I wanted to see and to feel the emotions that I was seeking.
MARTIN: In the beginning of the book, you pay a visit, a nighttime visit to this enclave of teenagers living in what appears to be some kind of drug-fueled haze in a kind of a community, like a ghetto of sorts. Does that mean the people you met didn't spend a lot of time reflecting on the past or planning for the future?
SUNDARAM: Absolutely. The people I met were, to a great degree, able to live in the moment and even forget the immense pain or suffering that were minutes old or just an hour old. They seemed to forget with such ease and be able to live in the present, whether that meant just enjoying the music or enjoying a conversation or enjoying a joint. That moment was so precious to them. It was something extraordinary that I found in these children.
MARTIN: Is there a way to give a sense of how these generations of violence and civil war and political unrest and famine, how this affected the people who you interacted with. Did everyone you meet have a story?
SUNDARAM: A single day in the lives of many of the people I met there would be enough in its intensity and its richness to fill up a while life in some other countries. This was incredible. I met people who had witnessed their own family members being killed. I met these children in the cemetery, who we just described. They had been forcibly exorcised by their family because their family often was not able to feed them. And so they needed to get rid of the children somehow. So, they accused them of being haunted by the devil.
I think in a broader sense, the war, the conflict - and these are all effects of the war and the conflict - it impedes people's abilities to affirm themselves. I found that the Congolese people would express themselves to no end but it was very difficult to find a job, to hold an occupation, to build a career and all the things that we in the West or other countries use to affirm our identity. Those are lacking for the Congolese. And this leaves an incredible void for them. I think we all feel a need to believe in something permanent within ourselves, something like a soul. And I think this fundamental need is denied to the Congolese.
MARTIN: You went to a place that was dramatically under-covered and really, really difficult. You said at the beginning of our conversation that this was, to some degree, about you. You were looking to be exposed to something about the human condition that you hadn't seen before. So, what did you learn and how did that change you?
SUNDARAM: You're absolutely right. I went there to be exposed to something about the human condition that I was not finding in other places in the world that I felt I had even been shielded from by my family, friends, society. We turn around away from places like Congo like we turn away from our own flaws. We don't want to look at it. And it's very hard to go there and look, as I discovered. I went there to sort of touch these events that I felt were distant from me. What happened was I ended up being touched by them in profound ways. When you see someone enduring such suffering, you think to yourself that could have so easily been me. And I don't know if, given those circumstances, if I would hold up and I would be able to fight in the way that these people do. And I don't know if I would be able to still hold on to certain values, like love and trust and belief in a better future.
MARTIN: The book is called "Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo." Anjan Sundaram is the author. Thank you so much for talking with us, Anjan.
SUNDARAM: Absolutely. No problem at all.
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MARTIN: You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
For more than 70 years, the GED exam has been a way for those who've slipped through the cracks of the educational system to take a test and get the equivalent of a high school degree. The GED was started to help returning World War II veterans who had left the classroom to join the war effort, a chance to finish high school and go to college. But that was a long time ago. And this year, starting January 1st, the GED test got a radical overhaul.
The changes are meant to match the higher standards of a changing workforce and new national educational requirements. In 2012, more than 700,000 people took the GED.
To hear what's changing on the test and why, as well as how these changes will affect the hundreds of thousands of potential test takers this year, we spoke with Anthony Carnevale. He's the director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.
DR. ANTHONY CARNEVALE: The GED, in one way or another has always been for the education system's stepchildren - the people who didn't get through the first time, or had their education interrupted for various reasons. And apart from the GIs who took enormous advantage and were very successful, it's really languished for about 25, 30 years because it's mostly been for people who for economic reasons, or other kinds of difficulty in their lives, don't make the almost effortless move through high school and then on to college.
MARTIN: So this new GED is designed to align with new educational requirements, these new Common Core standards being rolled out in school districts. But it's also said to be a better gauge of the skills needed for a more modern workforce. What does that mean? What are those new skills and how does this test measured them?
CARNEVALE: In modern economies, one of the fundamental changes has been that simply knowing something is not enough. More and more technology takes on the repetitive functions in all our work. And we're left more and more working with each other, or trying to handle exceptions - whether it's short-run production and manufacturing or dealing with individual customers, or dealing with each other.
And so, a whole set of skills, like problem solving and interpersonal skills and critical thinking - broad general skills - that you don't necessarily learn by figuring out who the first 10 presidents were.
MARTIN: So those are not things that previous iterations of the exam have tested?
CARNEVALE: Our testing system doesn't test this set of what some people call 21st century skills not really at all. Our testing system in general tests knowledge.
MARTIN: So how is this new test going to be different?
CARNEVALE: The new test is going to focus much more on the ability to use knowledge to learn more and solve problems. And what's also new here is that it's computer based. And while computer skills are not necessary to answer lots of questions, they are so much embedded in our working and daily lives that the ability to use a computer to take the test is itself a 21st century skill.
MARTIN: The new test is also said to be harder. Is that a fair characterization?
CARNEVALE: I think in the end it probably is harder. The requirements for learning have consistently grown largely because of the environments people work and live in, which tests their ability and forces them to learn more kinds of analytic thinking. So, yes, it is harder. But school is also harder than it used to be.
One of the things we've discovered with pretty strong statistical testing, is that if you give people a high standard he'll move toward it, in spite of the fact that they may start out pretty far behind.
MARTIN: So is there some recognition that while in the short run some people may be discouraged from taking the test? Or not do well on the test because of the changes that have been made. That that's OK, that in the long run it's worth it to have a test is more rigorous, that meets the standards that employers need when they're looking for people in the workforce?
CARNEVALE: The hope is that this iteration of the GED will connect to people's ambitions more powerfully than the previous GEDs did. They were somewhat academic. The new vision for the GED is much less academic and more pragmatic. So one of the things you can begin to see, if you decide to get a GED, is how it might connect you to a job you want in the real world.
MARTIN: That was Anthony Carnevale, director Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.
Getting students who have fallen off the educational grid ready for real-world jobs takes more than just a test. It takes training and support. Scott Emerick is the head of the Education program for the group the YouthBuild USA.
SCOTT EMERICK: We believe that having higher standards for our learners and higher expectations can help students in our programs. So that's the good part of the equation. I think the more difficult part of the new test: costs are increasing substantially; being held to a higher standard also requires that we provide more supports, in terms of the infrastructure for technology for taking a new computer-based, and certainly the new types of teaching and instructional shifts that we anticipate to be necessary for students and teachers to succeed on the new test.
MARTIN: So this test is going to cost more money. How much more money?
EMERICK: Well, it depends on different states and different jurisdictions, but roughly twice as much. You're seeing it go from somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 to $65 to $120 to $130 per test.
MARTIN: Is that going to be a deterrent, do you think?
EMERICK: Yes, I think for many test-takers the vast majority of folks taking the GED are low income. A significant increase in the test cost will actually be a challenge for a lot of test takers.
MARTIN: So this is also going to cost more when it comes to providing support, as you said - the resources, preparation, which is what you do. How do you make up the difference?
EMERICK: So, it requires more in terms of both the technology. And it certainly requires a lot more in terms of what we're providing for our educators. So, the difference between saying that GED test takers need really deep instruction from quality educators, who are receiving significant amount of professional development to teach in new ways and to make these instructional shifts, those costs are considerable. And that's for any program administrator and any educator in the country whose looking at the new test.
So making up that difference, in most instances, the gap is going to be so considerable that it won't be sufficient to make up the types of investments that we think really need to be made to perform and show the skills that are necessary on these new tests.
MARTIN: Do you think these changes were necessary? I mean do you think the GED as it was, was doing its job? Was it getting kids the kinds of jobs and professional opportunities that they were looking for?
EMERICK: I think that the world has changed since 2002 in the last version of the test. So I do think that the changes were in many ways necessary. So my big push, from what we've talk to our programs about, is that we can see the new test is an opportunity to point toward much more explicit future pathways; that the GED is a starting point, it's not an endpoint. The GED is not a terminal certificate. It becomes much more of a comma during a much longer narrative that the young person is writing for him or herself in terms of their career goals, their education goals and their goals as leaders in their community.
MARTIN: Scott Emerick, head of YouthBuild USA's Education program.
So who are some of those people who went on to accomplish those goals? We invited you to call in and share your experience if you were one of the people who use the GED to get a new start. Here are a few of the stories we heard.
BLANCA GUTIERREZ: My name is Blanca Gutierrez. I live in Burbank, Illinois and I work at a community college as a student success advisor. I was nervous about taking the GED test. I have to be honest. I didn't study at all for it. And I just remember thinking, what am I walking into? Having completed the exam, I kind of had like this - almost like an epiphany. I have this thirst for knowledge and I just kept wanting to go to school. And so I received the certificate and then I started looking into my local community college. It kind of snowballed from there.
DIVEDA BIGGINS: Hi, my name is Diveda Biggins. I am about to move to New York City and I'm a student at Columbia University. In the 8th grade, one of my teachers got so frustrated with me. She pulled me aside and she told me, you know, Diveda, school is not for you. I'm sure you'll succeed outside of school but you're not going to be successful here. I believed her and, you know, it stuck with me, and by the time I got to 9th grade I dropped out.
I fell in love with science, specifically neuroscience. I started reading the books. So I started thinking to myself, maybe I am smart. I should get my GED. So I've got the huge study guide. I looked it up - its 1,158 pages and all day I would study that book.
(LAUGHTER)
BIGGINS: The math questions are just like tripping me up left and right. There were sections where we had to do writing and that was really difficult. But I made it through.
When it really set in for me was when I got the certificate with the gold seal on it that said that I had a high school diploma. And when I saw how proud the people that loved me were. Of course, I needed it to start going to college, but also I proved to myself that I can learn and I can actually do it. I can show up and do it, and that something that I lost when I had that conversation with my teacher.
CHRIS HUNT: My name is Chris Hunt. I live in Los Angeles and I'm a TV writer. I found myself as a high school dropout working the lowest of the low kind of jobs you could do. All manual labor, and you come home with just a little bit of money and covered in dirt. And, yes, I went and got a GED. It was in Mesquite, Texas, home of the world championship rodeo. And I remember standing there like still covered in dirt.
And it's easy to go into a GED program and feel intimidated and then walk away and never do it. I just went in there and it was pretty basic but, you know, it wasn't the easiest thing in the world. The stars aligned for me and then I went to college, and now I'm - yeah, it's a crazy difference.
I live in L.A. now and I'm a writer. I have TV projects that we're pushing. I have a literary agent, a manager. I think the GED definitely helped me. I still appreciate dirt. Yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
HUNT: You got to stick to the root, you know?
MARTIN: That was Chris Hunt. We also heard from Blanca Gutierrez and Veda Biggins, talking about the GED exam.
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MARTIN: You're listening to NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Time now for sports.
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MARTIN: And it is coach firing season in the NFL. A new year brings in a batch of new head coaches. More on who's gotten the axe and who's signing shiny new contracts in a moment, but first we have some of last night's games to talk about.
NPR's Mike Pesca joins us to run through them. Hey, Mike.
MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Hey.
MARTIN: Two big wild card matches ups - matches up - that's a new word. Match-ups yesterday. I'm just so excited because I actually watched one of these games. The Chiefs against the Colts, I mean the Saints also faced off against the Eagles. But can we start with that first game because I stayed up, I watched it. It was amazing.
PESCA: Stayed up to watch, 7 in the East? Come on.
MARTIN: Yes, I did.
(LAUGHTER)
PESCA: That's right, you do get up early. So I'm sitting on the couch with my 6-year-old during this game telling him: This could be the greatest game I've ever seen. And he said, No. And I said: I'm telling you, I'm telling you, there was a 28-point comeback in this game.
MARTIN: I know.
PESCA: Indianapolis was down 28. They won the game. That's the first time that's ever happened in regulation - well, maybe the second time it's ever happened in regulation. The final score was 45-to-44, and that score has never been achieved. It was amazing and my 6-year-old saying, No. I'm saying, yes. This game couldn't have been more exciting. And, you know, so many records - like they combined for over a thousand yards of offense.
MARTIN: Yeah.
PESCA: There was no defense, by the way. It was just incredible.
MARTIN: Then I went to bed. But then there was another amazing game.
PESCA: Yeah.
MARTIN: A one-point decision in the first game, two points decided the Saints-Eagles game though, on the very last play?
PESCA: Yes, last second field goal. And I think both of these games epitomize the NFL. Because they were so, so entertaining but they were so, so brutal. There were so many injuries in these games and the two are not unconnected, how entertaining and how brutal they are. I mean in the Eagles game, the Kennan Lewis, who plays defensive back for the Saints, went out with a head injury, a concussion and they kept him off the field.
And right the next play, the Eagles go at, you know, they complete forward passes to the guys who took over his position. And then he's on the sideline arguing to come in the game. And there's this, you know, head trauma decision that they have to make. It's a different NFL. It's just - it's putting it right there. That's - it's one of the things that makes this as a compelling a sport as there is.
MARTIN: OK, so more games today. Chargers versus the Bengals, San Francisco at Green Bay. It's going to be cold.
PESCA: It's going to be called. It could be minus-30 with wind chill. I don't know if Green Bay will take that. The Weather Channel is doing all these specials on the game. And yeah, they do say especially for fans, don't have any exposed skin, you will get frostbite.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: OK, on to the hiring and firing of the NFL coaches. Were there any surprises in all this?
PESCA: Well, I mean, Rob Chudzinski of the Browns was fired after a year. That's not a huge shock - about 14 coaches in history have. One of them is a guy named Pete Carroll who's coaching the team right now that's likely to win the Super Bowl. It's usually a quick trigger.
But it's pretty easy. If you go down the list of the best quarterbacks, those guys are all playoff quarterbacks with the exception of maybe Jay Cutler. If you go from the bottom of the list of the worst quarterbacks, those guys are all the coaches who got fired. So you have to have a good quarterback to succeed in the NFL.
MARTIN: Were there a lot of people who were let go this season?
PESCA: It's up to seven. Mike Munchak of the Titans was just fired the other day. And, you know, I think that owners are easily displeased and fan bases are displeased. There are too many coaches who are fired logically. The thing is we don't know who are the bad firings and who are the good firings.
I think in retrospect we could say a guy like Lovie Smith, who coached the Bears to 10-and-6 season last season, maybe shouldn't have been fired. And guess what? He just got hired by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. So, retribution for Lovie.
MARTIN: Good for Lovie. NPR's Mike Pesca. Thanks, Mike.
PESCA: You're welcome.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
These days, the middle aged gamer who enjoys Call of Duty after putting the baby to bed probably grew up on the games of the Atari - or maybe even maybe the Apple IIe. Nostalgic? Well, there is a cure out there. The Internet Archive is an archive of historically important software. And it's made hundreds of classic video games available for free play right in your browser. Casey Johnston writes for Ars Technica. It's an online tech news magazine. And she played some of these games. She's here to chat with us about it. Hey, Casey.
CASEY JOHNSTON: Hi.
MARTIN: So, before we get to the games, explain exactly what it is the Internet Archive did.
JOHNSTON: Well, the Internet Archive is out to preserve significant software as well as movies, books and videos under fair use. And they recently started collecting these old classic games. They started out a few months ago with just a handful but they recently had a big expansion.
MARTIN: Why? Was there some kind of demand to do this?
JOHNSTON: It's historical preservation. They feel that the games are culturally important. Some of them are the early works of people who went on to do much bigger franchises. And they are often just favorites of older gamers who would love to see them again.
MARTIN: And are there any copyright issues with this?
JOHNSTON: Like most of copyright fair use, it's a gray area. The provision actually that they use is that libraries and archives can have one copy kind of Scot-free under the law. But posting an executable browser version of the game, whether that's a valid application of the fair use provision is still up for debate.
MARTIN: OK. One of them is called Karateka. You checked this out. Describe this game for those who don't know, which would be me.
JOHNSTON: In Karateka, you are a ninja trying to fight your way across a bridge against a bunch of enemies. And you can kick and you can punch and you can move back and forth.
MARTIN: So, not a lot of mobility. Not as much as people are used to today.
JOHNSTON: Oh, no. And...
MARTIN: And we should say also you're younger, Casey, so you didn't grow up playing these old-school games. So, this is kind of new for you. Do you play modern games?
JOHNSTON: Oh, yeah. I'm not out there with every AAA title, but I definitely dabble in video games myself.
MARTIN: So, are these boring for you?
JOHNSTON: I would say, yes, they are pretty boring.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: You have none of the baggage of nostalgia but could you recognize some historical significance to these games?
JOHNSTON: Oh yeah, of course. I mean, it gives so much appreciation to the way that games have evolved since then. And where we started from in terms of figuring out what makes people want to play and how we iterated and applied that over the generations.
MARTIN: Casey Johnston. She is a writer for Ars Technica. Thanks so much, Casey.
JOHNSTON: Yeah, thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: This is NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to spend the next few minutes talking about a controversial theory, about living and dying and living again; reincarnation. It's long been a central tenet of certain spiritual traditions, but it's not an experience that's been rigorously tested by many scientists. Enter Jim Tucker. He's a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, and he is doing exactly that - testing claims of reincarnation, especially those made by children. Dr. Tucker joins us from the Virginia Foundation, to talk about the science behind this phenomenon. Thanks so much for being with us.
DR. JIM TUCKER: Thanks very much for having me.
MARTIN: When did you first begin to get interested in this, in the idea of reincarnation as a ripe subject for scientific inquiry?
TUCKER: Well, I got interested in it in the late '90s, but this work has actually been going on at the University of Virginia for 50 years. Over the decades, we've now studied over 2,500 cases of children who report memories of past lives. And what we try to do is to determine exactly what they have said and what's happened, and then see if it matches the life of somebody who lived and died before. Once I got involved, I began to focus on American cases. And I have explained some of the cases in this new book that I have out and really, some of the American ones are quite compelling.
MARTIN: Let's talk about a few of those. You mentioned your recent book. It's called "Return To Life." And you chronicle the stories of many children, including one that got a lot of national attention. It was the story of James Leininger. He was a boy who remembered being a World War II fighter pilot. Can you walk us through that case?
TUCKER: Sure. So James is the son of a Christian couple in Louisiana. And when he was little, he loved his toy planes. But also around the time of his second birthday, started having horrific nightmares four or five times a week - of being a plane crash. And then during the day, he talked about this plane crash and said that he had been a pilot, and that he had flown off of a boat. And his dad asked him the name of it, and he said Natoma. And he said he had been shot down by the Japanese; that he had been killed at Iwo Jima; and that he had a friend on the boat named Jack Larsen. Well, it turns out that there was an aircraft carrier called the USS Natoma Bay that was stationed in the Pacific during World War II. In fact, it was involved in Iwo Jima. And it lost one pilot there, a young man named James Huston. James Huston's plane crashed exactly the way that James Leininger had described - hit in the engine, exploding into fire, crashing into the water and quickly sinking. And when that happened, the pilot of the plane next to his was named Jack Larsen.
MARTIN: And how old was James when he was making these claims?
TUCKER: Well, it started when he was 2 - and a very young 2.
MARTIN: That's amazing.
TUCKER: Like with most of these cases, it faded away by the time he was 5 or 6 or 7, which is typical. But it was certainly there, quite strong, for some time.
MARTIN: And how do you know that these kids aren't echoing things they have heard their parents talk about or making up stories, using their imagination, articulating dreams they may have had?
TUCKER: Yeah. Well, certainly with the imagination part - if we had never been able to verify that what the child said matched somebody who died, then you could certainly just mark it down as being fantasy. But in cases like James', the previous person, James Huston, was so obscure - I mean, he was a pilot who was killed 50 years before; and he was from Pennsylvania, and James was in Louisiana - I mean, it seems absolutely impossible that he could have somehow gained this information as a 2-year-old through some sort of normal means. In fact, it took his dad a couple of years - well, really more than a couple of years; three or four years - to be able to track it all down and see that in fact, that what James was saying all did fit for this pilot who was killed.
MARTIN: So break down the science for me - because there will be a lot of people who hear this who think, there's just no way.
TUCKER: Well, I think it's very difficult to just map these cases onto a materialist understanding of reality. I mean, if physical matter, if the physical world is all there is, then I don't know how you can accept these cases and believe in them. But I think there are good reasons to think that consciousness can be considered a separate entity from physical reality. And in fact, some leading scientists in the past, like Max Planck, who's the father of quantum theory, said that he viewed consciousness as fundamental and that matter was derived from it. So in that case, it would mean that consciousness would not necessarily be dependent on a physical brain in order to survive, and could continue after the physical brain and after the body dies. In these cases, it seems - at least, on the face of it - that a consciousness has then become attached to a new brain, and has shown up as past life memories.
MARTIN: This may be a dumb question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. So does that mean - does a consciousness need to inhabit a body?
TUCKER: Well, we don't know, of course. But in a case like James Leininger - I mean, it was 50 years between lives. Now, who's to say he didn't inhabit another body in the meantime? But my guess would be no. Now, in this world, it may need to be in a physical body in order to be expressed; but it may well be that our brains are conduits for consciousness, but it is actually being created somewhere else.
MARTIN: So what are you trying to reveal or prove? What, to you, would constitute an important scientific development in this field?
TUCKER: Well, I don't know that I'm necessarily trying to prove anything, but I'm trying to sort of find out for myself what seems to be going on here. And I think these cases contribute to the body of evidence that consciousness - at least, in certain circumstances - can survive the death of the body; that life after death isn't necessarily just a fantasy or something to be considered on faith, but it can also be approached in an analytic way, and the idea can be judged on its merits.
MARTIN: You were clearly interested in this for a long time, and it's what motivates your work. But I wonder, as you have evaluated so many cases over the years, how has that informed your own understanding of an afterlife and what happens when we die? Has that changed at all for you?
TUCKER: Well, I've certainly become more persuaded that there is more than just the physical reality. I do think it's quite likely that if we do survive, that there's not just one experience that everyone has; that the afterlife may be as varied as life in this world.
MARTIN: That's Jim Tucker. He's a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, and the author of "Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children who Remember Past Lives." Thank you so much for talking with us.
TUCKER: Thanks very much for having me.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Phil Everly, half of the whole that was the Everly Brothers, died on Friday at the age of 74. The brothers were rock pioneers and their style, including those close, unmistakable vocal harmonies, influenced a generation of musicians.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WAKE UP LITTLE SUSIE")
MARTIN: We spoke with two musicians profoundly shaped by the Everlys: Linda Ronstadt, and Graham Nash of CSN and the Hollies. Nash and fellow singer Allan Clarke formed the Hollies in the mid-'60s, and they were often compared with the Everly Brothers. Graham Nash is a masterful vocal harmonist himself, but he says Phil and Don Everly were unique.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WAKE UP LITTLE SUSIE")
GRAHAM NASH: When the Everly Brothers sang together, there was something in their voice that made two voices into one voice that created a sound that I don't think is possible with unrelated singers.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WAKE UP LITTLE SUSIE")
NASH: I have many, many favorite Everly Brothers songs. But I think the most important one to me was "Bye Bye Love."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BYE BYE LOVE")
NASH: That was the song that Allan Clarke and I, as teenagers, heard one Saturday night at a Catholic school girls' dance in the north of England; walking across the ballroom to go and talk to some friends, getting halfway across and "Bye Bye Love" blasting out of the speakers.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BYE BYE LOVE")
NASH: It stopped Allan Clarke and I in our tracks. We had never heard anything like that. I mean, we were two teenagers that were singing together, but we didn't sound like that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BYE BYE LOVE")
MARTIN: Linda Ronstadt grew up in a musical family, and knows firsthand about that special sibling sound.
LINDA RONSTADT: You know, the idea that they were raised using the same accent - the accent of the English that you sing in affects phrasing; it affects intonation. So they had that genetic match. And then their voices - one was seated high, one was seated low - you know, that's like lightning striking. You just don't get that very much. (Laughter)
MARTIN: In the mid-'70s, Ronstadt had a huge hit with her remake of "When Will I Be Loved?" written by Phil Everly.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHEN WILL I BE LOVED?")
MARTIN: And that's what made you think, yeah, that's a song I want to take a crack at?
RONSTADT: I mean, I had heard the Blue Sky Boys, and I'd heard the Louvin Brothers. But they had the audacity to put - you know, it was this very traditional duet sound that came down out of this traditional music from Kentucky. And then they added, you know, rock 'n' roll drums and electric guitar and bass, and they made it into something totally different. They opened the door for those of us who later followed, for folk rock. And so Bob Dylan, The Birds, the Eagles, Peter and Gordon, the Beatles, you know, they all went streaming through this gate that the Everly Brothers opened.
MARTIN: Linda Ronstadt remembering Phil Everly, who died Friday at the age of 74. We also heard remembrances from Graham Nash. This is WEEKEND EDITION, from NPR News. B.J. Leiderman wrote our theme music. I'm Rachel Martin.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL I HAVE TO DO IS DREAM")
: ...I need you so, that I could die. I love you so...
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Here's a reminder that a tough economy can change life in ways large and small. Spain has an unemployment rate of 26 percent. With six million people without jobs, the country's seen a spike in the number of buskers, street musicians. These performers have long been a part of Madrid's lively culture, but with so many people singing and strumming for money, the city is now requiring them to audition for permits, and those who don't comply face fines. From Madrid, Lauren Frayer sent this postcard.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHATTER)
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: On the train, the park, on the streets, Madrid is famous for its buskers.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FRAYER: With more than a quarter of Spaniards out of work, more and more people are crisscrossing the city with their violins and voices for extra cash. People squeeze giant accordions onto the metro and roll amplifiers on carts across cobblestones.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FRAYER: It's a happy clamor, but Madrid's mayor says it's reached its limit. A new law will prohibit amplifiers, require buskers to move along every two hours and stay 75 yards away from the next crooner. People who have been singing on the streets here for years are angry.
LAURA NADAL: People know the city because of its life, its nightlife, day life, music on streets, happy people. But we don't know why the city mayor wants us to be sad.
FRAYER: Laura Nadal is a professional pianist who sings in the street with her group, the Potato Omelette Band.
POTATO OMELETTE BAND: (Singing in Spanish)
FRAYER: She and more than 300 other musicians were forced to audition at this big cultural center in downtown Madrid for the privilege of holding out a hat in the street.
CARLOS: It's a joke. Yes, OK, you have five minutes? Play.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG MUSIC)
CARLOS: My name is Carlos. Mr. Black is my artistic name. I play in the streets 10 years.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GERARDO YLLERA: Now, you have to make a test to sing in the street.
(LAUGHTER)
FRAYER: Gerardo Yllera is another member of the Potato Omelette Band. For the unemployed, he says...
YLLERA: The street is the only place that you can go. So, if you can't sing in the street now, what are you going to do?
FRAYER: What the Potato Omelette Band did was use a hidden camera to secretly videotape their audition. The video went viral on Spanish social media because of their lyrics.
NADAL: So, it's like, oh, my poor Madrid, my city. They are taking the artists away to put police. There is no jury better than the hat, the hat you put on the floor to get the money.
FRAYER: That video of Laura and Gerardo's audition got several hundred thousand hits on YouTube. They've become the face of opposition to Madrid's noise reduction law. Their street performances draw crowds now.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FRAYER: And the band just got some news: They passed the audition and got a one-year permit to perform in the streets. For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer in Madrid.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK. We're about to meet a man who, according to Time magazine, was one of the most influential people in 2013: Alex Atala. His restaurant, D.O.M., is among the top ten in the world, and as NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports from Sao Paolo, Chef Atala is putting a new kind of Brazilian food on the map.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: He has a graying beard, tats, and he openly jokes about his days as a wild youth experimenting with drugs. He grew up in gray Sao Paulo, and came to the culinary world almost by mistake. He needed to extend his visa in Belgium when he was backpacking, so he enrolled in a cooking class. We meet in his restaurant, D.O.M., which stands for Deo Optimo Maximo - or To God, most good, most great - which he opened in 1999.
ALEX ATALA: Lots of people, they probably didn't recognize D.O.M. as a Brazilian cuisine. Lots of people didn't believe.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But he's made converts out of his fiercest critics. These days, Alex Atala is widely regarded as the most accomplished chef in Latin America. When he started out, Brazilian food wasn't in vogue. A long history with colonialism made Brazilians think European cuisine was better, and their native ingredients were looked down on. Now...
ATALA: There's something happening in Brazil.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: There is a new culinary movement here that focuses on regional Brazilian cuisine. And he's at the center of it. Atala showcases ingredients from the vast Amazon region, one of the most famous places in the world. When he began...
ATALA: Whole entire world got image, nobody has the flavor.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Not anymore. People have the flavor now. He uses iridescent rainforest insects in his meals, Amazonian fish, delicate jungle herbs in dishes that are presented in tiny, exquisite portions. His philosophy is simple.
ATALA: It's to put one ingredient or one recipe in their best moment.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Atala believes this region is now at the forefront of gastronomy.
ATALA: I do believe that South America, Latin America and mainly Amazonas is the new frontier in the sense of flavor, in the sense of textures, in the sense of diversity.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But Atala doesn't just want to change what people eat, but how people eat. When he was starting out, he was inspired by European chefs growing their own ingredients. He bought some land in the Amazon region and started sourcing his food there. He was inspired to help the local community, whom he said seemed undernourished to him.
ATALA: These changes can be hugely positive, but there is risk on it.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The risk was that his help did more harm than good. He sent food to the locals, but the plastic wrappings around the food ended up being littered everywhere. And the kinds of food the locals were eating changed because of what he was giving them.
ATALA: My intention was pure and beautiful. What I was doing, at the end of the day, was damaging.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And that's when Atala started thinking about the impact of what he does.
ATALA: Behind every dish, there's death. It is not a comfortable way to understand the food chain, but it is a way to provoke reflection.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And provoke he did, when he recently killed a chicken in front of a live audience in Denmark.
ATALA: Why? Why? Our grandmother used to kill chicken every day. The urban chefs nowadays just order chicken wings or rack of lamb or filet mignon. And we have lost our connection with our ingredients in their primary mode.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: He adds jokingly...
ATALA: Food's a very powerful weapon.
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Atala has opened the ATA institute, whose mission is to look at ways to help the Amazonian region and create sustainability and accountability in the massive food industry here.
ATALA: One of the biggest challenges or paradox for the next generation is how we are going to feed the human population.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: With that in mind, he's also helped found a food cooperative in a rice-making valley in Sao Paulo State. He says Brazil can help change the way things are done.
ATALA: Maybe we are ready to export new culture and new ingredients, as well.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: There is still a long way to go, but Atala says he's hopeful.
ATALA: There's a new door just opening, just open. And, again, Amazonas is, in my personal opinion, will be the center of this new message.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Sao Paolo.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning, I'm David Greene.
Today in Your Health, we're answering more of your questions about the Affordable Care Act. And a lot of questions, there have been. Things do seem to be going a lot better on the Healthcare.gov website. Federal officials say more than a million people enrolled in coverage by the Christmas Eve deadline. That was if people wanted their coverage to begin on Jan. 1st.
But there are a lot of questions about the deadlines and a lot more. And so we've brought in NPR's Julie Rovner, who is back to give us some answers. Hey, Julie.
JULIE ROVNER, BYLINE: Hey, David.
GREENE: OK, so we're passed that deadline. People who wanted the coverage to begin on Jan. 1st, they have their coverage. Now, we're moving on to lots of other deadlines, and that's where our questions actually start. One from Catherine Baer of Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She seems to be confused, like a lot of us. She writes: If one were to sign up in January, when would that coverage start? Let's say one signed up on Jan. 10, 2014. So how do you answer that?
ROVNER: Well, people can be forgiven for being confused about the dates, because the dates do keep changing.
GREENE: A lot.
ROVNER: Yes.
(LAUGHTER)
ROVNER: At least for now, they're supposed to work like this: As long as you sign up by the 15th of the month, your coverage starts on the first of the month after that. So if you sign up by the 15th of January, your coverage starts Feb. 1st. If you sign up on the 16th of January, though, you'll have to wait until March 1st. Same with February - sign up by the 15th, your start date is March 1st. But if you wait until Feb. 16th, you'll have to wait until the first of April. Now, open enrollment ends March 31st. Those people's coverage won't start until May 1st.
GREENE: So if you don't sign up by March 31st, that's when we start talking about penalties. And that's where, actually, our next question goes. We have a question from Anne Vanderhorst of Lexington, Ky. And she has a question about tax penalties for people who don't sign up for health insurance.
ANNE VANDERHORST: If you do get covered at some point during 2014, is the penalty prorated or does it not matter?
GREENE: OK, Julie, tell us a little about how the penalties work.
ROVNER: Well, now that it's 2014, most people will have to have health insurance or be subject to that penalty we've been hearing so much about. This first year, the penalty is fairly small. If you're without insurance for the entire year, it's the larger of $95 or 1 percent of your income, for an individual. It goes up in future years.
But if you don't have insurance, as we just mentioned, you have until the end of March to buy coverage. That's because you can be without insurance for up to three consecutive months and not pay any penalty. And yes, Ms. Vanderhorst, the penalty is prorated.
The way it will be asked when you fill out your 2015 taxes is whether your had health insurance in 2014, and for how many months. For every month you lacked insurance over three, you pay a penalty, per family member, per month. And if you don't earn enough to file income taxes, you're not subject to the penalty, by the way.
GREENE: Ah, if you're not filing income taxes, you're not subject to the penalties. Seems like an important point.
ROVNER: That's a very important point.
GREENE: More questions about the penalty we received, one of them specifically about which plans satisfy the requirement for having adequate coverage. And this question comes from Chris Rickels of Covington, Ky.
CHRIS RICKELS: I'm a part-time worker, and my current employer offers health insurance that does not meet the minimum standards of the Affordable Care Act. I talked to someone at the call center for the Affordable Care Act, and was told that as long as I had health insurance through my employer, I would not be fined. So I bought that health insurance and now, I'm hearing differently from my co-workers and - that I might be fined.
GREENE: OK, Julie, so which is it? This gentleman has health insurance through his employer, but it's not insurance that satisfies the law.
ROVNER: You know, I had to do a little investigating on this one, just to be sure. And yes, the call center operator was correct. As long as you have employer-provided insurance, you're OK, and you're exempt from any fines. Once the requirement for employers to provide coverage takes effect, the employer might be subject to a fine, but that's been put off a year.
Now, if Mr. Rickels wants to drop his employer coverage and go to the exchange and buy a more comprehensive plan, assuming his coverage doesn't cover 60 percent of typical health expenses, he would probably be eligible for a subsidy. That's assuming he doesn't earn more than four times the poverty level - about $46,000. But if he's just worried about not paying the penalty, then he's OK.
GREENE: Seems like there's a new wrinkle everywhere, with this law. So we got an e-mailed question from Robert Dodelin from Mount Laurel, N.J. And he is losing his current health insurance this month and will be going to the exchange. And he wants to know about financial information that he'll have to provide when he applies for health insurance. So what documents should people have ready?
ROVNER: This is a really good question because it turns out there's quite a bit of paperwork involved. And that's even though health plans can't ask you about your medical history anymore. But because of the availability of premium subsidies, they want to know a lot about who you are and how much you earn.
So what you'll need is proof of identity - either your Social Security number or legal immigrant status; you'll need employer and income information, which can include pay stubs or W-2 forms or if you're self employed, last year's tax return. The application also asks for information about any employer health insurance that's available to you or members of your immediate family because that affects your eligibility for government help paying for individual insurance. So gather all that stuff up before you go to the website, or before you meet with someone who's helping you apply for coverage.
GREENE: Word to the wise: Have it all ready. So Julie, this next question from Ami Rowland of Brighton, Colo., is about dental coverage under this law. I feel like it's not something we've talked much about.
AMI ROWLAND: My question is: Do I have to purchase dental insurance for my entire family, or can I purchase it just for my son?
GREENE: Julie, what's the story here?
ROVNER: That's right. We really haven't talked about dental coverage much. And it's a very important benefit to a lot of people who haven't had it before even if they have had health insurance. Dental care can be very expensive. If you have untreated dental problems, it can lead to all sorts of other health problems.
Now, this is a place where the people who designed the benefits decided to kind of split things up. We've heard a lot of complaints about there being too many benefits in this minimum package, which has driven premiums up. For that reason, only dental coverage for children is among the required benefits. But in most places you can buy either an add-on package or a separate dental plan if you want to cover adults in your family.
So the answer to Ms. Rowland's question is that assuming her son is a child and not an adult son, yes, she can purchase dental for just him. In fact, any plan on the exchange will cover his dental. She'll have to specifically add dental coverage for the adults in her family, if she wants it.
GREENE: If her son is a child, that will be required under the law - for him to have dental coverage.
ROVNER: That's right. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Not all states include dental coverage for children in health plans, and people will not be penalized if they don't buy dental coverage.]
GREENE: All right, Julie, another question. This one comes from Juneau, Alaska; from George Elgee.
GEORGE ELGEE: And my question is, can employers pay for insurance that employees buy on their own, from either from the exchange or private people?
GREENE: OK. The answer?
ROVNER: Well, it sounds pretty straightforward. It turns out Mr. Elgee is a CPA, and what he really wants to know is whether employers, particularly small employers, can basically reimburse workers who buy their own insurance, and then the employers would get a tax deduction for it. It seems the answer is probably not.
Now, there are lots of provisions in the law to encourage small employers to purchase coverage directly for their workers. There's a new tax credit for very small employers who have mostly lower-wage workers. This year, it's set to cover 50 percent of the cost of coverage. Then there's something called the shop exchange, where businesses are supposed to be able to go to get a better choice of plans for their employees.
The problem is that with the rocky rollout of the websites serving individuals, both the federal government and most of the states have really kind of put the small-business part of the program on the back burner. And where it is operating, it hasn't had a lot of traffic; and the few businesses that have tried to use it say they've had some trouble. So at least for now, that part of the program really isn't living up to its expectations.
GREENE: And you've actually reported on that; how some of the parts of the law dealing with small businesses are really being pushed aside for a while.
ROVNER: Yeah. And that may be why for now, some small employers just want to give their workers some extra money, and let the workers buy their own coverage. But in talking to tax experts, they say that may not be the best way to help their workers. That's because the higher a person's income, the less help they get paying for their premium and - in terms of those subsidies. So if an employer really wants to help, they might want to put more money into a worker's retirement plan - if they have one - or buy them, maybe, vision or dental benefits.
GREENE: All right, some answers for now. But I think it's safe to say, you and I will be back here soon with more questions and answers.
ROVNER: Indeed.
GREENE: NPR's Julie Rovner. Thanks a lot.
AMY ROWLAND: Thank you.
GREENE: And if we didn't get to your question today, we have more questions, more answers in a searchable app that's on our website. Just go to npr.org/affordablecareact. And if you don't find your answers there, you can also send your questions to health@npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Countdown to the Winter Olympics in Russia: one month, 15 sports, 98 events, and that includes of course men's figure skating. The U.S. will send only two men to the games as part of its figure skating team. Those spots will be decided this week. The national figure skating championships are underway in Boston right now, and essentially serve as the trials for the Olympics. The field is wide open and there's some fierce competition.
Figure skater Jeremy Abbott wants one of the two spots at Olympic. The three-time U.S. champion has yet to deliver on the world stage, but he wants 2014 to be the year he takes home an Olympic medal.
Marci Krivonen of Aspen Public Radio has this profile.
MARCI KRIVONEN, BYLINE: Figure skater Jeremy Abbott tugs hard on the laces of his brand new, black ice skates.
JEREMY ABBOTT: I need the support. You know, when you're jumping triple and quad jumps...
(LAUGHTER)
ABBOTT: ...you need a lot of ankle support.
KRIVONEN: In the locker room, he warms up his muscles, stretches out and loosens up his joints before he starts skating.
ABBOTT: I do the same routine before I get on the ice for every session I skate, usually three hours a day. So I do the same routine like three times a day.
KRIVONEN: Being on the ice comes naturally to the 28-year-old. He was in ice skates at age 2. He's already been to one Olympics. He placed ninth at the 2010 Games in Vancouver. He competes in the U.S. championships in Boston, starting January 10th. It's the Olympic qualifier. He'll be performing a routine set to a song by the band Muse.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
YUKA SATO: His quality of the skating is probably one of the best in the world.
KRIVONEN: Yuka Sato is Abbott's coach.
SATO: He is a very well-balanced skater. He's a great performer and he's very artistic. I think that all-around skating skill is what makes him so good.
PEGGY BEHR: I always say Jeremy has happy feet. He has like just feet that just connect with the ice.
KRIVONEN: Colorado resident Peggy Behr was Jeremy's coach for seven years during the lead up to the Vancouver games. She says she knew he was talented the first time she saw him skate.
BEHR: We walked into the rink, my husband and I before we moved here, and Jeremy was out there skating. And even my husband who doesn't have an eye for that - for you know, skating, but he could see the talent.
(SOUNDBITE OF SKATING)
KRIVONEN: Out on the ice, Abbott practices moves like a triple Lutz and a triple flip. After practice, Abbott cools down in the locker room. He knows he has what it takes to get to the Olympics - he's already been to one - but he's still nervous.
ABBOTT: I can do the tricks and I can skate. I have great skating skills and artistry and well-choreographed programs. For me, the biggest obstacle is just bringing it all together.
KRIVONEN: During his routine, he says he tries to keep his thoughts simple and methodical. Unlike other sports, he doesn't have a team cheering him on, so his performance is personal.
ABBOTT: The goal for me is the Olympics. It's Sochi, and doing my best there. And, you know, my best has the potential to be on the podium.
KRIVONEN: If he makes it to the Olympics, he could perform three times for his short and long programs and for a new possibility, the team event. The new discipline combines scores from individual performances by the men's, women's, pairs and ice dancing teams from the top scoring countries.
For NPR News, I'm Marci Krivonen in Aspen.
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GREENE: This is NPR News.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Gays and lesbians have been serving openly in the United States military since 2011. The current policy, which put an end to "don't ask, don't tell," seems to be working smoothly.
Not so smooth is the process of reversing undesirable discharges for veterans who for decades before, got kicked out of the military for being gay. NPR's Quil Lawrence sent this story about a veteran's dying wish to correct his record.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Hal Faulkner is 79 years old, and he's already lived months longer than his doctors predicted.
HAL FAULKNER: I don't know what to say. It's just incredible that I'm still here.
LAWRENCE: Faulkner joined the Marines in 1953, and served in the Philippines. In 1956, he got kicked out with an undesirable discharge for being gay. His military papers said homosexual on them, quite an obstacle in the 1950s. Still, Faulkner moved on, prospered. Then, a few years ago, he got diagnosed with terminal cancer. He contacted his family about a dying wish.
MICHELLE CLARK: I'm Michelle Clark, and I'm Uncle Hal's niece.
LAWRENCE: Hal Faulkner's family knew he was gay.
CLARK: But no one in the family knew of the dishonorable discharge. And he has been carrying this societal shame with him all of these years.
LAWRENCE: Faulkner had learned that with the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," he could get his discharge corrected. But it usually takes six months. His lawyer, Anne Brooksher-Yen, says the military agreed to expedite the case.
ANNE BROOKSHER-YEN: You know, I didn't know what that was going to mean, right? I didn't know whether expedite was going to mean six weeks or six months or - and so I did have a conversation with him where I told him, you know, that we might not be able to get this done before he died.
LAWRENCE: The Marines acted on his dying request in just two weeks. Last Friday, in Florida, a small group presented Faulkner with his honorable discharge.
FAULKNER: And I didn't think that maybe I would last through all the battles that we've had, but a Marine is always a Marine.
LT. COL. JOHN GILLESPIE: Mr. Faulkner, I have a couple of gentlemen here that would like to second what you just said.
FAULKNER: Oh, my God.
UNIDENTIFIED MARINE: How you doing, sir?
FAULKNER: Hi. How are you?
UNIDENTIFIED MARINE: Good. Once a Marine, always a Marine.
LAWRENCE: In uniform, two young Marines handed him his upgrade papers. Air Force Lt. Col. John Gillespie, with the activist group OutServe-SLDN, read it out loud.
GILLESPIE: I'd like to present to you this letter from the chairman of the board to the commandant of the Marine Corps, with the recommendation to upgrade your DD214 to honorable. Congratulations, sir.
FAULKNER: Thank you very much.
GILLESPIE: Yes, sir. It's an honor.
LAWRENCE: Friends and family stood by, mostly in tears; including Fred Sainz, of the Human Rights Campaign. It pushed for years to allow gays in the military. Sainz hopes more veterans will get their records upgraded.
FRED SAINZ: You certainly can't right the wrong of six decades. You can make it right, going forward. And that's what happened today, and that's what we hope will come to thousands of Americans similarly situated.
LAWRENCE: Sainz reckons at least 114,000 troops got bad discharges for being gay in the years before "don't ask, don't tell." But many of them don't even know they're eligible to correct their records, and get benefits like VA health care or home loans. For Faulkner, it was never about the benefits, says his lawyer, Anne Brooksher-Yen.
BROOKSHER-YEN: It was really overwhelming, seeing Hal finally have this wrong righted. He is such a wonderful, loving man; and he served with honor in the military, and it was so important to him.
FAULKNER: I will always be a Marine. Semper fi.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED MARINE: Oorah.
LAWRENCE: Quil Lawrence, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
On a Monday, this is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
We are looking this morning at the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, and what might be a battlefield that's merging. In both countries, there's been a surge of al-Qaida-linked militias. In Syria, they've taken the lead in the fight against the Assad government.
In Iraq, they have caused a wave of violence, including bombings against civilians, and attacks on government forces. In both places, they are Sunni Muslim extremists, and they are linked, sharing territory and troops. And now the al-Qaida-linked forces themselves are under attack from moderate Sunnis.
NPR's Deborah Amos has been watching these developments from Beirut. Deb, good morning.
DEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: Good morning.
GREENE: So, can you just start by giving us a sense of why we're beginning to talk about these two conflicts as the same battlefield, in some ways?
AMOS: The war in Syria has softened the borders, and al-Qaida has taken advantage of that. The al-Qaida group in Syria is mostly from Iraq. They have been joined by radicals from across the globe. And because of the chaos in Syria, they have been able to gain territory in the north. At the same time, they have grown stronger in Iraq. That border is completely porous. So they move back and forth.
In fact, the al-Qaida-linked groups in Syria are funding themselves from money that they extort from people in Iraq. So, what we are seeing now is a conflict that has jumped borders. This is now a regional conflict, both in Syria and Iraq, and there has even been, for the first time, claim of responsibility of a car bomb here in Lebanon. And all of this is because of the Syrian war.
GREENE: Well, Deb, if we think back to the beginning of the war in Iraq, suggestions that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to al-Qaida were dismissed by many people. How has al-Qaida's influence been growing there?
AMOS: It has been growing because of the conflict in Syria. These groups can move easily between one country and another, and that is what they have been doing. So, as they gain strength in Iraq, they came across the border into Syria, and they joined the fight against the Assad regime. And, in fact, they were welcomed here, because they were the most disciplined. They were the most well-armed of all of the factions. And so Syrians who oppose the government saw them as a savior.
But as time has gone on and they have turned from fighting the regime to controlling territory, their brutal tactics have created enormous anger among Syrians. I'll give you an example: In the town of Raqqa, which they control, they impose strict rules. They have burned churches there. They have turned churches into headquarters. They've banned smoking. The capital punishment there is beheading, sometimes in public. This is enraged Syrians.
You have felt this anger growing, but this has been the first time that there's been an armed challenge to an al-Qaida group in northern Syria.
GREENE: And who are the people who are challenging them?
AMOS: It's a group that calls itself the Army of the Mujahideen. What it is, is eight or nine brigades that came together and decided that they were going to go after this al-Qaida affiliate. On Thursday, they posted on Facebook - which is how Syrians talk to each other - a challenge: Get out of Syria.
Now, this newly-formed group then began a fight. And over the past three or four days, they have taken back to towns in northern Syria. They have seized a border post on the Turkish frontier that was controlled by this al-Qaida group. And the fight is continuing, even today. I spoke with an activist in Syria who says they are being challenged in every town that they control in northern Syria.
GREENE: And Deb, let's just step back, if we can, looking at both Syria and Iraq. I mean, if we have al-Qaida extremists who are Sunni, and then we have some more moderate Sunnis who are fighting and trying to stop them, that dynamic might be growing in both countries. How does that change these two conflicts?
AMOS: I think it's very new to be able to say it will change the conflict. I think it is important that it has happened. We've seen this model before in Iraq. It was a strategy by the U.S. military to say to Sunni moderates: Your future is better without al-Qaida. And that proved to be true, and they did join against al-Qaida in Iraq. It is now happening in Syria, where groups of Sunni rebels have decided that al-Qaida groups have gone too far and have become oppressive in the same way that they feel that the Syrian regime is oppressive. So now they are trapped between two forces, and they have decided to take on al-Qaida in northern Syria.
GREENE: All right. We've been talking to NPR's Deborah Amos, who joined us from Beirut, following the conflicts in both Iraq and in Syria.
Deb, thanks, as always.
AMOS: Thank you.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
NPR's business news starts with a change of guard at the Fed.
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GREENE: The Senate is set to vote on Janet Yellen's nomination today. She is President Obama's pick to succeed Ben Bernanke as the chairman of the Federal Reserve. If Yellen is confirmed as expected, she'll take over for Bernanke at the end of this month.
Yellen would become the first female chief in the bank's 100 year history, joining a handful of women heading central banks around the world.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And now let's turn to the big show in Las Vegas. We're talking about the Consume Electronics Show that's kicking off this week. Companies from around the world are flying in with enough new gadgets to fill acres and acres of showrooms. And this year, there is an entire section dedicated to new technology that the industry hopes you love so much, you're willing to wear it.
Aarti Shahani from member station KQED reports.
AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: There is a lot going on at the Consumer Electronics Show. The major car companies are out in full force with smart driverless cars and a solar powered car. There's 3-D printers that can print body parts and edible food. And, of course, more jumbo TVs with even higher definition.
But the buzz word, according to spokeswoman Karen Chupka, is wearables - devices that connect directly to the human body.
KAREN CHUPKA: There's a Reebok skullcap for football players that can help them know how strong the blow is to their head and help them make a decision about whether or not they want to continue playing in the game. Or there's a dress that can be changed to different colors based on your mood, and or in some instances can even help you power your other devices.
SHAHANI: The big question with wearables is: do people actually want to wear them? Chupka says last year they got some traction with smartwatches, Google Glass eyewear, and wristband activity trackers, but they didn't blow up.
Personally speaking, I plan to check out the collar you can put on your dog - to help interpret her barks.
For NPR News, I'm Aarti Shahani.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And we can't get enough of the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. We're staying right there with a question: two-door or four-door? Gas or hybrid? Soon it won't be long before the car salesperson is asking Apple or Google?
Automakers unveiled an alliance yesterday that's aimed at bringing Google's Android operating system into millions of cars in the next few years. Here's NPR's Steve Henn.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: If you are like me you've pretty much given up on paper maps and now rely almost entirely on a smartphone for directions.
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HENN: Directions to the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas.
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SIRI: Which the Cosmopolitan? Tap the one you want.
HENN: Using Siri this way has its downsides. Last night, Apple's personal digital assistant sent me to the wrong side of town.
And even in the best of circumstances using a smartphone in a car means looking down into your lap on the highway or struggling to get your phone to play nice with what automobile companies now call infotainment systems.
And even these fancy built-in navigation systems can present their own special challenges.
Last night, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Audi and Nvidia, a chipmaker wanted to show off what their technology could do inside cars, so they sent me for a test drive with a guy named Leon Thompson.
LEON THOMPSON: Let go to Circus Circus - it's like fear and loathing in Las Vegas.
HENN: OK. Let's...
THOMPSON: Have you ever read that book?
HENN: Turns out Thompson didn't know how to use the system and I couldn't figure it out.
THOMPSON: I believe all the controls are right here. So we go to menu...
HENN: Navigation. All right, I'm going to click that. All right. Now we want to tell it where to go. Circus Circus. How do we enter it? Um. Hmm.
We never made it to Circus Circus, and it was obvious that even the slickest, fanciest in-car infotainment systems on the market today still have their issues.
And tech companies see an opportunity in all of this. If they can make this stuff simple and make it work there is money here.
So last summer, Apple said it was working with half a dozen automakers to integrate Siri - its voice activated personal assistant into automobiles. And today, Google announced it's working with GM, Audi, Honda and Hyundai to form what they're calling the Open Automobile Alliance.
These companies hope to create common standards that will allow Google's Android software to work seamlessly and safely within their cars. And computer chip makers like Nvidia are hoping for a boom in automotive business.
Danny Shapiro runs Nvidia's automotive chip division.
DANNY SHAPIRO: We are enabling the automakers to put more powerful systems in their car, but much like your phone can get software updates over the air, we see cars following that same model.
HENN: The bet here is that an open platform for in-car computing will help give birth to a new generation of software that actually works in cars, software that can help you find your way to your hotel without endangering the lives of those around you on the road.
Charles Golvin is a long time industry analyst. Golvin says for any mobile operating system to take off in the automobile it has to abide by this rule first...
CHARLES GOLVIN: Whatever you're designing has this prime directive of, you know, do no distraction whatsoever.
HENN: He's even kind of hopeful that all this digital technology invading the automobile could make driving safer. Last year, Audi showed off its own prototype of a self-driving car.
MATHIAS HALLIGER: We think that 90 percent of the innovations in the car will come from electronics.
HENN: Mathias Halliger works for Audi. His job is to design Audi's MMI - or Man Machine Interface. And think about what he just said. He believes that 90 percent of all new innovation in automobiles will come from electronics.
So perhaps it's no surprise that this German automotive engineer is now based in Silicon Valley.
Steve Henn NPR New at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK, our Last Word In Business is ski tweeting. Is that really a thing?
Well, the Australian Olympic Committee has placed a social media ban on its athletes at the Sochi Winter Games - coming up, in Russia. Tweeting, Facebooking and Snap-chatting join partying as officially forbidden activities.
Winter athletes can thank their summer colleagues for the new social media ban. The country's Olympic committee came up with the rule after a disappointing showing by the Australian swim team during the London Summer Games.
A recent review of that team's 2012 Olympic performance suggests excessive drinking, bullying and yes, social media were major distractions ,and kept the swimmers from bringing home multiple golds as expected.
But some Aussie athletes headed for Sochi for the Winter Games have already turned their noses up at the rule, expressing their feelings - where else? - on Twitter.
That's the business news on Morning Edition, from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm David Greene.
For many Americans who are out of work, the road got even tougher at the end of December. Their long-term unemployment benefits expired. An estimated 1.3 million people stopped receiving checks. Congress is back in Washington this week, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says restoring these benefits is a top priority. But some lawmakers don't see this as the best solution. And the falling unemployment rate in the country has eased the pressure to keep these benefits in place.
Here's NPR's Yuki Noguchi.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Sandra Patterson has had steady work, mostly in retail store management, for most of her 45 years. Since last February, though, she's had no luck.
SANDRA PATTERSON: I've applied for customer service jobs. I've applied for reception jobs. I've applied to Hardees, McDonald's, Wendy's.
NOGUCHI: Her benefits ran out at the end of the year and she's willing to trade down to any job she can get. She's often told she's too experienced for the minimum-wage work.
PATTERSON: How can you be overqualified if you're willing to take that position?
NOGUCHI: So Patterson is now on financial lockdown. She can't make this month's rent. She mostly stays home to save on gas and spends a lot less on groceries.
PATTERSON: I used to spend about maybe 250 a month for myself. But now I'm maybe 50 to $75 a month.
NOGUCHI: Jared Bernstein is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He says Patterson is a good example of how not extending long-term jobless benefits affects the economy overall. If she had more money, she'd spend more on food.
JARED BERNSTEIN: The grocery then needs to restock the shelves, order more, so there's an inventory function there and a delivery function there. And you can kind of get a sense of how the economic activity creates ripples through the economy. Not just at the site of purchase there but with upstream industries as well.
NOGUCHI: The Congressional Budget Office says expiration of benefits could shave as much as four-tenths of a percent off annual economic growth. The White House also notes the percentage of the workforce that's out of work for at least six months is still twice what it normally is when Congress cancels emergency benefits.
But the national unemployment rate is down substantially from its peak and falling. So some states have cut back regular benefits. And some states no longer qualify for the most generous level of additional federal support, which at the height of the recession allowed for as much as 99 weeks of benefits. Many Republicans believe extended benefits keep some people from taking jobs they might otherwise accept.
Bernstein, who was Vice President Biden's chief economist, says people who settle for lesser jobs or have to start new careers face a long road back to normal.
BERNSTEIN: Lots of people who start out their career in a down economy or in a recession find that they don't progress as quickly over time. And it actually can take as much as 10 to 15 years to make up the kind of lost mobility that you get just by dint of kind of starting at the wrong time.
NOGUCHI: Jada Urquhart suspects this may be true for her.
JADA URQUHART: I'll never make as much money as I did teaching - I know that. Which is kind of sad, you know.
NOGUCHI: As a libertarian, Urquhart says she feels squeamish about the government spending on jobless benefits. But on the other hand, she hasn't been able to find teaching jobs since she lost hers at a high school in Cardington, Ohio last year. She's going to school to become a social worker which means she's now an intern at age 60.
URQUHART: I'll be the new kid on the block with the gray hair and wrinkles.
NOGUCHI: She says she's made various changes to cut her budget by at least a third.
URQUHART: I cut the cable. I had an alarm system but I turned that off. I can break my contract on my cell phone, so that will save a couple hundred dollars. I keep my heat a lot lower - I turn it down to like 58 at night. I didn't buy any Christmas presents. It was a kind of a skinny Christmas.
NOGUCHI: And it will likely be an even skinnier New Year when her benefits run out later this month.
Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
As we said, those unemployment benefits will be a big topic for lawmakers as they return to work in Washington this week. But that is just the beginning. It also time for the latest round of budget battles.
Cokie Roberts is with us as she is most Mondays. Good morning, Cokie.
COKIE ROBERTS, BYLINE: Hi, David.
GREENE: How was your holiday?
ROBERTS: Great. Yours?
GREENE: It was very good, thank you.
ROBERTS: Good.
GREENE: So didn't Congress work some of this out when it comes to budget disagreements at the end of 2013?
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ROBERTS: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, they did and it might all work. But that unemployment vote, by the way, the test vote on unemployment insurance extension, could come as soon as tonight.
GREENE: Wow.
ROBERTS: And the Democrats are seeing this as a big issue to take into the 2014 election. We'll see whether they're right about that or not.
GREENE: The midterm elections, we should say. It's going to be another big topic this year.
ROBERTS: Absolutely and hovering over everything, of course. But the appropriations committees, those money spending committees, did - the staffers did meet over the holidays and there seems to be a good bit of confidence that they will actually have something ready for the Congress to vote on and that we will avert any kind of government shutdown. So I think that you are likely to see that, at least, proceeding.
GREENE: So we had this agreement at the end of the year, which sounded like the two sides came together sort of in theory, but now the appropriations committees are actually doing the nuts and bolts work to try and make this a reality.
ROBERTS: That's right. You know, that is the actual spending bills, which is, of course, what Congress is supposed to do in individuals bills, but they've wrapped it all together in this one big bill and there might be some individual bills pulled out of it, but we'll see.
GREENE: Well, if they do indeed get through this money battle and, you know, there's always a question before it's actually said and done, I mean do we go through all of this over again with the debt limit come next month? I mean these things just come one after the other.
ROBERTS: I think not. Now, the president, again, says he won't negotiate over the government going to default. The Republicans, once again, say they have to get something for voting to extend the debt limit, whether - so we'll see whether they are going to really dig in their heels. I think not, that they feel like they didn't win anything on that last year.
And we'll also see whether Speaker Boehner's fed-up attitude toward the adamant minority of his caucus, which we saw at the end of last year, is sustainable. Now, there were meetings over the holidays in the D.C. area of the Tea Partiers and their allies, and they say they're girded for a fight against what they deem the Republican establishment, but mainly on social issues rather than economic issues.
So I think Boehner can probably keep the government going through the debt limit with the help of the Republican business community, so that crisis is averted. Then the question is whether he can keep pushing against those Tea Partiers and their allies to do immigration reform, which he clearly does want to do.
GREENE: It seems he clearly does want to do it and what kind of chance does he have in this dynamic in the Republican Party to push an immigration through the House?
ROBERTS: Well, it's going to be obviously very tough. I think if you get through the spring where there's some Republican primaries and you see if Republican incumbents are challenged from the right, if they are not and if it looks like they are somewhat safe, then I think he probably will bring up a series of immigration bills, break it up into different bills, one on border security, one on work visas, one on amnesty, and then put together different coalitions behind each one of those bills.
That's what happened, you know, in the famous compromise of 1850 with Henry Clay. He couldn't get it through as one great big bill and then Stephen Douglas came through and broke it up into individual parts, California in as a free state, slavery outlawed in D.C., Fugitive Slave Act(ph) enforced, and you've got different coalitions behind different ones and staved off the Civil War for 10 years.
GREENE: Something that Washington - you can look back even more than a century ago to history and learn some lessons. Well, Cokie, speaking of potential primary fights in the Republican Party, it sounds like one person who was going to be challenging an incumbent, Liz Cheney, is set to drop out of the Wyoming Senate race. What do we know about that this morning?
ROBERTS: She has issued a statement saying serious health issues have recently arisen in our family and under the circumstances I've decided to discontinue my campaign. Look, she was running 30 to 40 points behind Mike Enzi, and she - that primary wasn't till August, but she has run into serious family problems, saying she was against gay marriage, her gay sister saying that relegated her to second class citizenship. That's tough in a family.
GREENE: All right. Cokie Roberts, always good to be with you. Have a good week.
ROBERTS: You too, David.
GREENE: This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Here's the name of a government office that caught our attention: the Vice Ministry for the Supreme Social Happiness of the People. This is a newly created office in Venezuela, where government bureaucracy sure seems to be growing. John Otis tells us more.
JOHN OTIS, BYLINE: Venezuela's government has made a lot of quirky decisions. Under the late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, Venezuela created its own time zone by setting the clock back half an hour. It redesigned the flag so that a horse galloping to the right now moves to the left, in line with the government's politics. Chavez died of cancer in March but his successor, President Nicolas Maduro, has made his own startling announcements.
PRESIDENT NICOLAS MADURO: (Speaking foreign language)
OTIS: In an October speech, Maduro said he was creating the Vice Ministry for the Supreme Social Happiness of the Venezuelan People. Critics immediately ridiculed the new office and its flamboyant Orwellian name.
CARLOS BERRIZBEITIA: (Speaking foreign language)
OTIS: Opposition lawmaker Carlos Berrizbeitia claimed the government was trying to put a happy face on a nation plagued by high crime, inflation and food shortages.
RAFAEL RIOS: (Speaking foreign language)
OTIS: But when I catch up with Rafael Rios, the newly appointed vice-minister for happiness, he says the job is more than just government propaganda. His office coordinates social welfare programs for the poor, the disabled, drug addicts and pregnant teenagers.
RIOS: (Speaking foreign language)
OTIS: Rios quotes Latin American liberator Simon Boliva, who once proclaimed that the most perfect government is the one that produces the greatest amount of human happiness. Many international development experts agree. They insist that traditional indicators like gross domestic product are inadequate and that happiness and well being are key for measuring human progress.
These arguments are catching on. The United Nations now publishes an annual world happiness report. In 2013, that report placed Venezuela first among South American nations and 20th overall. So for all its problems, Venezuela is apparently a fairly joyful place. When I ask why, Venezuelans point to their tropical climate, to expanded government health, education and nutrition programs, and to the country's massive oil deposits, which can make people from all walks of life feel well endowed.
Edna Correa, who works at a Caracas call center, thanks a live-for-today mentality.
EDNA CORREA: It doesn't matter what is happening around the world, you can see always the beaches full, crowded, people playing on the streets or going to dance every weekend. You see people trying to have fun and to enjoy the moment.
OTIS: But if that's the case, why does Venezuela need a special happiness vice ministry? It turns out that the pursuit of supreme happiness was part of Hugo Chavez's official government plan that's now in the hands of President Maduro.
TIBISAY SERRADA: (Speaking foreign language)
OTIS: Tibisay Serrada is dean of the Sociology department of the Central University of Venezuela. She says the government sees happiness as a collective rather than an individual endeavor and one that's best achieved through socialism. But many Venezuelans don't like the idea of their government defining happiness. They see it as another step towards greater government involvement in all aspects of Venezuelan life.
DAVID SMILDE: It's not a minimalist project.
OTIS: David Smilde, a senior analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, says Venezuelans are right to be concerned.
SMILDE: That a government would aspire to actually be the guarantor of supreme happiness can be a little alarming.
OTIS: But others shrug off the happiness office as just another one of their government's crazy ideas. Indeed, some joke that the Vice Ministry for the Supreme Social Happiness of the Venezuelan People is already achieving its purpose because so many people are laughing about it. For NPR News, I'm John Otis in Caracas.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Last night was the season premier of, wait for it, "The Bachelor." Yes, it is back for another season, the 18th, in fact. The reality show where a single guy gets to choose a potential wife from a couple dozen women - and this season's single guy is Latino, the first bachelor of color in the show's history. NPR's Shereen Marisol Meraji has the story.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI, BYLINE: ABC is calling this month Juan-uary after "The Bachelor"'s new star, Juan Pablo Galavis.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE BACHELOR")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Juan Pablo.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: He's so cute. Oh, my god, I'm gonna die.
MERAJI: Yeah. And he is one in a million, ladies. According to the show's promos, he's totally Juan-derful. Alex Nogales runs the National Hispanic Media Coalition, a group working to put more Latinos in front of and behind the camera, and he says it's about time the show diversified its starting lineup.
ALEX NOGALES: "Bachelor" and "Bachelorette," I think, is trite and frivolous and you have all these people crying melodramatically and so forth. Having said that, how we are perceived is always going to be the way that we're treated. If we're not even visible, it's even worse.
MERAJI: The show's producers have been called out in the press repeatedly for "The Bachelor"'s lack of diversity. ABC faced a class action suit last year lead by two African-American men who auditioned and claimed they were treated unfairly based on race. And at first glance, Nogales says, Juan Pablo Galavis does look like every other bachelor.
NOGALES: He's a very good looking, athletically built and engaging fellow who happens to be very light-complected.
MERAJI: Light-complected with light brown hair and light eyes. Critics of the choice vocal in the blogosphere and on social media said he's just another white guy. Michelle Herrera Mulligan, editor and chief of Cosmo for Latinas, says it's more nuanced than that.
MICHELLE HERRERA MULLIGAN: I could see why people would take issue with that notion that he's the first non-white bachelor to be on there, but I do think that he is absolutely the first non sort of quote-unquote culturally white bachelor to be one there.
MERAJI: Herrera Mulligan says ABC made an interesting choice. Yeah, Galavis may look white, but he's bilingual and bicultural, born here, raised in Venezuela. He played soccer professionally, speaks with an accent...
JUAN PABLO GALAVIS: I'm taking the risk of not spending time with my daughter to be here...
MERAJI: ...and has a daughter, a nod to the importance of family in Latino culture. But most importantly, she says, he's the star of the show.
MULLIGAN: We're either like the funny best friend with a mom with a funny accent, or we're frankly the help. And then that, to me, in this, you know, 2014, it seems like a dangerously antiquated view of who we are.
MERAJI: Alex Nogales from the National Hispanic Media Coalition says ABC is taking a step in the right direction, but...
NOGALES: The largest Latino group residing here in the United States are Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. I mean we're 70 percent of that group that is called Latino.
MERAJI: And he says a majority of those Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are mestizos, mixed with indigenous and Spanish blood. They're brown and deserve to be Bachelors and Bachelorettes too.
NOGALES: And they've got to include everybody, African-Americans as well as Latinos of every coloration. And forget this bull (bleep) of, you know, we can't find any. They're there.
MERAJI: Nogales says he hopes ABC won't end this season of "The Bachelor" and go back to business as usual. He's expecting more than a Juan-off. Shereen Marisol Meraji, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
As far as New Year's resolutions go, saving more money is often a popular one. Actually being able to do that - well, we know how that story usually ends. But researchers may have come up with a winning method. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam, we are all ears.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Carolann Broekhuizen is a retired life insurance claims examiner. She lives in Waterford, Michigan. Whenever she has a little extra money, there are some things she likes to do.
CAROLANN BROEKHUIZEN: I do buy lottery tickets. I will buy the state raffle tickets on occasion. There are several casinos locally and I will go to one of them with friends every now and again, when I have a little bit of play money.
VEDANTAM: Broekhuizen never gets in over her head. And she doesn't mind losing. In fact, she expects to lose money. The reason she gambles is because she enjoys it. Researchers have been studying people like Broekhuizen and they've come to the conclusion that if you want to help people save money, preaching isn't gonna cut it. You have to make saving money as fun as a visit to the casino.
A couple of years ago, when Broekhuizen visited her credit union, she was told about a program called Save to Win. If she stashed some money away, she would get a shot at a grand prize of $10,000. The more money she saved, the more opportunities she'd have to win.
BROEKHUIZEN: I said, you know, why not? It's saving for retirement. That can't hurt.
VEDANTAM: Broekhuizen kept putting money away but just like her visits to the casino, she didn't win the big prize.
BROEKHUIZEN: I thought it was a one-year program, to be all honest with you. And I didn't hear anything the first year, so I assumed I did not win.
VEDANTAM: Even though she was a little disappointed, Broekhuizen says she liked the fact she could win something extra while saving for retirement. Then, a few months ago, she got a phone call out of the blue.
BROEKHUIZEN: The person identified themselves as being from my credit union. My first thought was that a check had bounced and I wasn't real happy. And then she went on to explain that I had won the cash prize, and beyond that I couldn't think for a while because something like this happens to other people; it doesn't happen to me.
VEDANTAM: Broekhuizen's Community Alliance credit union is one of several credit unions in Michigan that features the Save to Win program. It is also active in a handful of other states. Economists aren't surprised the program is getting people to save. At the University of Maryland, Emel Filiz-Ozbay recently conducted a controlled scientific experiment into the benefits of prize-linked savings programs. She found people save more and are more willing to leave their savings untouched if saving comes packaged as a lottery.
EMEL FILIZ-OZBAY: We found that indeed people seem more patient or more willing to wait additional weeks to get more money when it is offered in lottery-like form.
VEDANTAM: The catch, Filiz-Ozbay says, is that banks in most states are not allowed to offer such programs because private institutions are not allowed to run lotteries. But she says policy makers ought to know these programs are different than regular lotteries.
FILIZ-OZBAY: Unlike the standard lotteries, the consumer is not losing the initial capital, initial principal. So what you invest is always there, you are not losing it. In the lottery, once you buy the ticket, if you don't win the prize, money's gone.
VEDANTAM: Back in Michigan, Carolann Broekhuizen has a theory about why she won the $10,000 prize.
BROEKHUIZEN: My mother passed away earlier in the year and I just looked up after it had a chance to sink in, I looked up and said thank you, Mom.
VEDANTAM: In homage to her mom - and the spirit of the prize - Broekhuizen didn't go on a spending spree. She took the money and stashed it away in her savings. Shankar Vedantam, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm David Greene. Secretary of State John Kerry spent much of last week in the Mideast, where he tried to push Israeli and Palestinian leaders towards a peace agreement. Yesterday he flew to Saudi Arabia and Jordan to update the monarchs of those countries on the progress of the talks. But as NPR's Emily Harris reports, if there has indeed been progress, it remains under wraps.
EMILY HARRIS, BYLINE: Before Kerry left Jerusalem for his Sunday trip, he was asked to share one example of progress in Israeli/Palestinian peace talks. The secretary would only say that all the contentious key issues are on the table - tangled up together.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: It's a puzzle, and you can't separate out one piece or another. Because what a leader might be willing to do with respect to a compromise on one particular piece is dependent on what the other leader might be willing to do with respect to a different particular piece.
HARRIS: Here are a couple of pieces. At Israel's cabinet meeting yesterday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted that the number of terrorist attacks against Israel in 2013 was the lowest in 10 years. But he also faulted the Palestinian Authority of encouraging hatred against Israel and its existence as a Jewish state.
Netanyahu cited this as the root problem in peace negotiations. Palestinian Authority officials say recognizing Israel as a Jewish homeland erases Palestinian history. They also warn that Israel could disrupt the peace process if it keeps building Israeli homes on land Palestinians want for a future state. Secretary Kerry said yesterday it's not clear whether all those puzzle pieces he compared this conflict to will fit together in a solution.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
KERRY: And this is a conflict that has gone on for too long, so positions are hardened. Mistrust obviously exists at a very high level.
HARRIS: At other levels, perhaps less so. Yesterday the Israeli companies developing a major offshore natural gas field announced a billion dollar, 20-year deal with the Palestinian Authority, its first export customer. Kerry returns to Washington today, but Israeli and Palestinian officials expect him back next week. Emily Harris, NPR News, Jerusalem.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Opinion polls, as we know, are a mainstay in U.S. political campaigns. Well, now American officials are trying to bring that practice to Afghanistan as the country prepares to elect a new president in April. The U.S. embassy in Kabul has commissioned three rounds of polling in the lead-up to Afghanistan's election. The hope is that the polling data will help inform voters and candidates and reduce the potential for election fraud. NPR's Sean Carberry reports from Kabul.
(SOUNDBITE OF CELL PHONE RINGING)
SEAN CARBERRY, BYLINE: While cellphones have proliferated since the fall of the Taliban, coverage isn't quite universal enough for effective telephone polling in Afghanistan. So that means conducting interviews face to face, says Alicia Boyd, vice president of Glevum Associates, one of three U.S. firms conducting election polling in Afghanistan.
ALICIA BOYD: You need to have a field team that is able to travel and is as similar to the people that you are interviewing as possible.
CARBERRY: Which means hiring a qualified Afghan organization with experience conducting surveys. Boyd says it's essential to build a rapport with the interviewee in a country where people tend to be suspicious of strangers who show up asking sensitive questions. And those questions need to be carefully worded.
BOYD: You have to use language that they can understand, especially considering that the education level is quite low.
CARBERRY: Forty percent of those surveyed in the Glevum poll never went to school and only four percent graduated from college. Dr. Pamela Hunter is Glevum's research director. She says questions used routinely in the West, with optional responses such as more likely or less likely, are too complex for Afghan voters.
DR. PAMELA HUNTER: So we tend to lean more towards yes and no questions, or it doesn't matter. You know, always giving them an out.
CARBERRY: By giving them an out, she means making it acceptable for people to give a negative answer. Chona Echavez, with the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, a Kabul think tank, says that Afghans often give answers that they think the surveyor wants to hear.
CHONA ECHAVEZ: You have the common sentiment that is being expressed, and then the survey says contrary to that common sentiment.
CARBERRY: For example, in the Glevum poll, 77 percent said they were at least somewhat confident that the elections will be fair and transparent. Yet most Afghans say past elections were marred by massive fraud. The pollsters and their U.S. sponsor recognize that some of the results will not be accurate, but the embassy in particular believes it's essential to establish baselines and make polling part of the political process here.
The two frontrunners in the polls released in recent weeks are Ashraf Ghani Amadzai, a former finance minister, and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the leading opposition figure. Both ran in the 2009 presidential election. Right now they have double digit leads over the rest of the field. Analysts say that could be just a factor of name recognition at this early stage of the campaign.
SAYED TAHER: (Foreign language spoken)
CARBERRY: But Sayed Taher, a 46-year old fruit seller from Wardak Province, says he doesn't know any of the candidates. We heard similar comments from a number of Afghans who live outside Kabul.
EHSANULLAH: (Foreign language spoken)
CARBERRY: Eighteen-year old Ehsanullah, who gave only one name, says he's opposed to the whole idea of polling in Afghanistan.
EHSANULLAH: (Foreign language spoken)
CARBERRY: The polling on TV humiliates some candidates. It shouldn't happen, he says.
Some officials have also expressed skepticism about the surveys, including presidential candidate Daoud Sultanzoi, who is polling around one percent right now.
DAOUD SULTANZOI: It's totally misleading and it's totally designed for other purposes.
CARBERRY: The U.S. Embassy says it expects to hear accusations that the polling is part of a plot to influence the outcome of the election. But American diplomats say it's worth the risk to have data that can help reduce fraud.
Christine Roehrs, with the Afghanistan Analysts Network in Kabul, says even if the polling is sound, there's still the potential for a huge disparity between the polling data and the election results.
CHRISTINE ROEHRS: A person's personal opinion and his vote are two different things. The decision to vote is subject to a lot of different calculations and many have to do with the sheer survival.
CARBERRY: Such as tribal or ethnic affiliations, and whether a candidate is more likely to provide benefits to his supporters. Two more rounds of polling are planned between now and the April 5th election.
Sean Carberry, NPR News, Kabul.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
We've known for some time that having more education usually leads to higher pay. Well, now a study suggests that the advantage persists even into retirement years, in part because those with more education tend to stay in the workforce longer.
NPR's Ina Jaffe covers aging, and she has this story.
INA JAFFE, BYLINE: For people in their late 60s or 70s or beyond, college might seem like a long time ago. But the impact persists, says study co-author Heidi Hartmann.
HEIDI HARTMANN: It proves to be an excellent investment. That investment in higher education will last as long as you live.
JAFFE: The numbers are dramatic.
HARTMANN: If you have a postgraduate degree, you will make - just in your retirement years - three to five times what a worker with only a high school education or less will earn at age 65 going forward.
JAFFE: Another reason the incomes of people with college or post-graduate degrees remain higher after age 65 is that more of them are staying in the workforce, says Hartmann.
HARTMANN: We believe it's because the occupations are less physically demanding. They do remain intellectually demanding often, especially if you have a post- graduate degree. And people have the likelihood of working two, three, four times more at older ages if they have those degrees, than if they have only high school or less.
JAFFE: The report was published by the Institute for Women's Policy Studies. Hartmann is the president. She says at every level of education, men make more money than women. And the wage gap is greatest for those with the most education. That's because of the differences in occupations. Women, for example, are likely to be school teachers and nurses.
HARTMANN: Men are more likely to be magistrates, judges, lawyers, state legislators, CEOs, doctors, surgeons.
JAFFE: At least, that's the case for people over 65 now. But with the numbers of women in those professions increasing among younger workers, Hartmann says she expects this gender gap among older Americans to shrink over time.
Ina Jaffe, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GREENE: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Here's news many of you know already - it's cold, really cold, even dangerously so in much of the United States; and another Arctic blast is expected. We are talking about temperatures 25-below zero in North Dakota. And the South isn't being spared; it's single digits in some spots in Georgia and Alabama.
Chuck Quirmbach, from Wisconsin Public Radio, reports.
CHUCK QUIRMBACH, BYLINE: School officials have known for days that the subzero temperatures were coming, and made the decision Friday to close all public schools in Minnesota and many in Wisconsin. Milwaukee Public Schools spokesperson Tony Tagliavia says the district didn't want to risk exposing children and staff to the frigid conditions.
TONY TAGLIAVIA: These are temperatures at which it's actually dangerous to spend even small amounts of time outside, between the temperature and the wind chill. And that's what's driving our safety concern, and that safety concern is what drove us to close school.
QUIRMBACH: On the other hand, homeless shelters are seeing more people come through their doors. About 20 men gather in the TV room at the Guest House shelter in Milwaukee. One of them, Tony Lee, says he spent a little time outside during the day yesterday - and that was enough.
TONY LEE: Oh, you know, you've got to bundle up, get layered up. And man, everybody was like, moving slowly. You know, cars was moving slow 'cause it was cold. Some cars wouldn't start. You know, you were ready to (unintelligible) out there.
QUIRMBACH: Guest House Executive Director Cindy Krahenbuhl says it's frigid enough outside that even those men who don't like to be in shelters are coming in.
CINDY KRAHENBUHL: So when it gets this cold - deadly cold - we know those people need to be inside. And so we're very grateful that we're able to do our overflow operation of at least 15 additional beds.
QUIRMBACH: Guest House says it will adjust its rules. And instead of asking all the men to leave during daylight hours, will allow them to stay. National Weather Service forecaster Jeff Boyne says the source of all the cold air is far Northern Canada, in the Yukon.
JEFF BOYNE: Temperatures up there were in the minus-30 to minus-40-degree range. And that air mass has been moving southward with it since the midpart of last week.
QUIRMBACH: Boyne says it shouldn't be quite that cold in the Upper Midwest today into tomorrow, but he says temperatures will be well below normal. Much of the cold will eventually penetrate the Southern and Eastern U.S. Broadcasters talked a lot about the bitter conditions during yesterday's National Football League playoff game in Green Bay, won by the San Francisco 49ers by the score of 23 to 20. Game temperatures hovered around zero. But afterwards, players said the cold wasn't that bad. And Packers Coach Mike McCarthy, instead, took the blame.
MIKE MCCARTHY: We knew we needed to score more than 20 points today, and I didn't get that done.
QUIRMBACH: Packers fans may spend much of today inside brooding about the loss - because it may be too cold to do so outside.
For NPR News, I'm Chuck Quirmbach in Milwaukee.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Fans will not be complaining, at least not about the weather tonight, as Florida State and Auburn face off in a very important game. They're playing in tonight's college football championship in warm and sunny Pasadena, Calif. And there's even better news for the many college football fans who've grown to loathe the Bowl Championship Series, known as the BCS. Tonight marks the end of it. It's being replaced next season by a playoff that will decide the national champion.
NPR's Tom Goldman is in Southern California to cover the game. Tom, good morning.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Hello.
GREENE: So we've got one heck of a match-up here, between the top-ranked Florida State and No. 2 Auburn. But first, out of respect, do we need to have a some kind of eulogy for the good old BCS?
(LAUGHTER)
GOLDMAN: Sure - but would it be tacky, David, to start the eulogy by popping open a bottle of champagne?
GREENE: You can start it any way you want to.
(LAUGHTER)
GOLDMAN: Yee-ha. We have loathed the BCS these many years - 16, to be exact - because of the way it put together the championship match-up; computer rankings and polls that often seem to go against common sense or fairness. But ironically, the BCS's final act - matching undefeated Florida State against 12-and-1 Auburn - is absolutely the right move; they are the two best teams in the country. So we will bid the BCS good riddance with a little pat on the back.
GREENE: The BCS is saying we can get it right this year...
GOLDMAN: Yeah.
GREENE: ...and then goodbye. Well, give us some thumbnails of the game. What makes these teams so good and so clearly, the two best in the country?
GOLDMAN: Well, if you like offense: lots of scoring, lots of plays that gain lots of yards. The stats say we should be in for a treat. Florida State's offense on average gained 529 yards per game this season. That's a huge amount of yardage.
GREENE: Wow.
GOLDMAN: And the Seminoles beat every opponent except one, by at least 27 points. The defense is hardly shabby. They led the nation in the fewest points allowed, 10.7 per game.
Auburn is no statistical slouch, either. The offense gained, on average, 505 yards per game; averaged 40 points per game. Unfortunately, the Tigers' defense also sports high numbers; they allowed over 420 yards per game, and 24 points per game.
And David, if you can deal with a few more numbers, here are some from ESPN that might help fortify Auburn fans.
GREENE: OK.
GOLDMAN: In the last 10 seasons, there have been three BCS championship match-ups between an undefeated team and a one-loss team. All three times, the one-loss team won the game, each time by at least 20 points.
GREENE: Wow. Well, that's good news for Auburn fans.
GOLDMAN: Yeah.
GREENE: Give us some players who you're keeping an eye on tonight.
GOLDMAN: Obviously, Jameis Winston is the biggest name. The Heisman Trophy winner, quarterback for Florida State has been unstoppable in his first season. He's passed for 38 touchdowns and only 10 interceptions. Florida State is stacked with other stars, too - a trio of wide receivers: Rashad Greene, Kelvin Benjamin and Kenny Shaw.
For Auburn, running back and Heisman Trophy finalist Tre Mason led the nation's No. 1-ranked rushing offense. Quarterback Nick Marshall hasn't gotten the accolades like Winston, but he's been very important for the Tigers as well.
GREENE: And remind us how these teams got here, Tom. I mean, Auburn had what was sort of a magical season, in some ways.
GOLDMAN: Absolutely. Florida State just steamrolled everyone from the very beginning - not close games. In fact, Jameis Winston said this weekend the biggest test was off the field - the rape allegation against him; a case in which charges were not filed. He said that was the adversity this season that he and the team had to overcome. Auburn, as you say, had a wild ride that provided two thrilling plays in particular: the desperation pass that was tipped and caught for a winning touchdown against Georgia; then a week later, the miracle touchdown return off a missed field goal versus Alabama, in the Iron Bowl.
And the Tigers say they're a team of destiny? Who's going to argue after plays like that?
GREENE: Yeah. And Tom, let me just ask you. You mentioned all the legal problems for Florida State's quarterback, Winston. No charges filed; does that mean it's over now?
GOLDMAN: Well, you know, it certainly seems to be so here. The talk is about football and Winston's greatness on the field. But the accuser's lawyers says the case isn't over, and that the accuser and her family are going to try to seek justice through avenues that are still available to them. And that could include a civil suit against Winston, at some point.
GREENE: All right, Tom, enjoy covering the game tonight.
GOLDMAN: Thank you.
GREENE: NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman, who is in Southern California to cover tonight's final BCS Championship Game, before we say goodbye to the BCS.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GREENE: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning, I'm David Greene.
Temperatures are plummeting today over much of the country, so you might want to brush up on cold weather survival tips. Dress in layers, wear a hat and gloves, check on elderly friends and relatives. And don't lick anything metal. That's a lesson one 12-year-old in New Hampshire learned the hard way.
Maddie Gilmartin wondered what would happen if she touched her tongue to the flagpole in her front yard. Well, it stuck. Her parents eventually freed her with a bit of warm water.
You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. Zoe Averianov was 10 years old, riding a ferry from England to Belgium. She tossed a bottle into the sea with a letter about her love of the flute and hamsters. She asked for someone to write her back; 23 years later, someone did. Zoe, who's 33 now, heard from a Dutch couple who found her bottle off the coast of the Netherlands.
They say they plan to keep Zoe's letter on their piano. To send their response, the couple opted for a quicker method of delivery - the postal service. You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Those robust gaming sales were helped by promises of better graphics and better online gameplay than previous versions of both Playstation 4 and Xbox One. But some game developers are pushing a different boundary: better storytelling. They're using videogames to tell sophisticated, emotionally complex stories.
NPR's Travis Larchuk has more.
TRAVIS LARCHUK, BYLINE: At first, the game "Gone Home" feels like a first-person shooter, or a horror game. The player is in a house in the woods, walking down dark hallways. A thunderstorm rages outside.
(SOUNDBITE OF THUNDER)
LARCHUK: But that's where the similarities end. Steve Gaynor is the game's lead designer.
STEVE GAYNOR: There's no violence in "Gone Home." There's no shooting. There aren't any enemies. There aren't any other people in the game at all. It's just you in this house by yourself, trying to put the pieces together by exploring the space.
LARCHUK: "Gone Home" is actually a coming-of-age story, told through the journals of a fictional high school student, Samantha Greenbriar.
The player walks around the house, opening drawers and closets and discovering letters and journals from Samantha and her parents. Each one reveals a little bit of their story.
Here, Samantha realizes she and a girl in her class have feelings for each other.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "GONE HOME")
LARCHUK: It's just about a normal family and what happened to them. You know, it's not about science fiction or military or supernatural stuff. It's a story that could have happened down the street from you.
And the game's selling pretty well for an independent video game: 50,000 copies in the first month. Gaynor used to work on big-budget, blockbuster games, like the "Bioshock" series. But he left that job to focus on more intimate projects.
GAYNOR: I have always been interested in working on stuff that is more personal and smaller scale and more about people and individuals.
LARCHUK: And he's not the only one. Lucas Pope designed the game "Papers, Please." In this game, the player is a border guard working for a fictional communist country. The player is forced to make difficult choices about who can cross the border, all while making barely enough money to help his family survive.
Pope says today's developers have a broad definition of what a videogame can be.
LUCAS POPE: Like, my generation, or the people who make games now, they grew up with games their whole life. Probably the first generation that did that. So I think it's really natural to like consider that you can have a game about anything.
LARCHUK: Nick Suttner says he's noticed a bigger trend recently. He works for Sony, the company behind Playstation. As part of his job, he frequently hears pitches from independent designers.
NICK SUTTNER: There was a really interesting shift away from mechanics to storytelling, when you play a game, and it feels like it's about something, and it's not just about shooting something. It's about an experience the developer had and wanted to communicate that idea in their game, or about, like, this moment of beauty or sympathy.
LARCHUK: Some call these empathy games. They focus on engaging with the player on an emotional level.
Ryan Green's taking that to an extreme. His deeply personal project uses the medium of a videogame to create an interactive memoir. It's called, "That Dragon, Cancer."
RYAN GREEN: My wife and I have four boys, and our third son Joel was diagnosed with cancer when he was one. And we've been fighting that for the past almost four years.
LARCHUK: The game puts the player in Ryan Green's shoes, during a night at the hospital.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEOGAME, "THAT DRAGON, CANCER")
LARCHUK: It becomes apparent there's nothing the player can do to make the situation better. Just like in real life, sometimes there is no easy answer.
Ryan Green says his game is more like a poem. I asked who he imagines will play this.
GREEN: I hope it's people that appreciate good film and good literature.
LARCHUK: All three developers I spoke with share that hope, that their games will also reach an audience of people who may not consider themselves gamers.
Travis Larchuk, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning, I'm David Greene.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. In the years following 9/11, waterboarding became a household word. That simulated drowning technique, used on detainees believed to be withholding valuable information, became part of what the CIA called its enhanced interrogation techniques. Critics, including President Obama, have called it torture.
John Rizzo was the CIA's top lawyer who helped usher in those interrogation techniques, at a time when the CIA was under great pressure to prevent another attack. Rizzo calls his new memoir "Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy And Crisis In The CIA. In fact, it was one crisis in particular, in the 1970s, that led him to the agency.
JOHN RIZZO: Yeah. Perversely enough, that was the reason I - I decided to join CIA; reading the revelations in the media of the findings of what was called the Church Committee, led by a senator named Frank Church. It exposed, for the first time, a number of eyebrow-raising CIA activities from the '50s and '60s including assassination plots against foreign leaders, drug experiments on unsuspecting U.S. citizens, mail openings during the Vietnam War.
It was a rather breathtaking array of misdeeds, is the only way to put it. And I was reading it, as a young lawyer, and then thinking myself: I have no idea whether the CIA has lawyers but if they don't, they're probably going to need some now.
MONTAGNE: Well, let's fast-forward to post-9/11. In the book, you trace the origin of enhanced interrogation techniques within the CIA. It's quite a history. It includes waterboarding, which became hugely controversial. How did it start?
RIZZO: Well, it started, actually, a few months after 9/11. That was when the agency captured the first big fish of the al-Qaida command structure, a guy named Abu Zubaydah. And Abu Zubaydah was thought to know if there were any ongoing plans or plots against the homeland. And he was captured; he was actually captured in Pakistan, after a furious gunfight. He didn't come quietly. He was wounded fairly severely.
The agency brought doctors from Johns Hopkins over to the black site where he was taken, to make sure he pulled through. And as soon as he pulled through, he basically - in the view of our experts, he was holding back. And he would never be forthcoming with what he knew if only the normal question-and-answer - so-called Joe Friday approach - was taken. So it was decided that extraordinary measures needed to be considered.
Now, keep in mind, Renee, the context of the times, here. The country was still in the throes of dread and fear that another attack was coming. Everyone in Washington - on the Hill, in the government - and I believe a large majority of the American people were demanding that the next attack on the homeland be averted at all costs. So the pressure was intense.
MONTAGNE: The CIA was not allowed to just plunge in willy-nilly to do this. And that's where you come in. You were the top lawyer on this, and there had to be a legal basis for it. So part of developing a legal basis involved you and others getting a look at a list of what was being proposed. One thing about that list that grabbed me was the descriptions on the list of these techniques. And, you know, just as an example, one is called walling - as in pushing a detainee against a wall. And it was very particular: shoulder blades first. The detainee would have to have a protective collar placed on him, to prevent whiplash. I mean, it's almost surreal when you read it now.
RIZZO: Well, believe me, it was rather surreal to me at the time, too. I mean, these were techniques that I had never seen before. Reduced to writing, they are quite graphic, and quite detailed. And I have to take responsibility for that because I was determined that the Justice Department, you know, whether they approved them or disapproved them, would have the most no-holds-barred, almost detached description of some very aggressive maneuvers. So, I mean, it was I and the rest of the CIA leadership who insisted that each of these techniques be spelled out; that there be no misunderstanding between us and the Department of Justice about how these techniques would be administered. So that's how those descriptions came about.
MONTAGNE: And who spelled them out? I mean, who was coming up with the techniques and proposing them?
RIZZO: These were people in the counterterrorism center of the CIA, composed of operatives, analysts, psychologists; all focused on the counterterrorism target.
MONTAGNE: There was one technique - in your words, it was so gruesome that not only you and others at the CIA in the legal department, but also the Justice Department judged it too extreme, and stopped short of approving it. Can you give us a sense of what would have been worse than waterboarding?
RIZZO: Yeah. You know, as you may have surmised, because the - my book had to go through pre-publication review at the CIA, I was told that I had to not go into detail about what that one particularly gruesome technique was. I mean, I guess what I can say to you is, you know, when I saw what waterboarding was, I mean, I had never heard of that word before. But this technique, I thought was even more chilling and scary than waterboarding - which, Lord knows, I thought was quite chilling on its own right. So it was very rough - I mean, something that would come out of an Edgar Allan Poe plot line.
MONTAGNE: Well, our imaginations usually make things worse than they actually are, but I guess we'll have to, what...
RIZZO: Well...
MONTAGNE: ...you know, we'll leave it to our imaginations?
RIZZO: Yeah. And you can be fairly liberal in letting your imagination run. It was far and away, I think, the toughest of the toughest. And, you know, the Justice Department, when they called me up, you know, they basically said, look. You know, we have the opinion ready on the rest of the techniques, but for this particular one, we're not sure we can approve it. And with some sense of relief, I told the Justice Department: Well, then, why don't we just drop it?
MONTAGNE: Now, there was, at this point in time, an infamous memo - and it's come to be known as the torture memos - the Justice Department basically saying that these harsh techniques didn't rise to the level of torture. Remind us what torture would have been defined as.
RIZZO: Yeah. And those torture memos, of course, were all addressed to me, as the chief legal officer. And in fact, it was I who sought the Justice Department's legal opinion. So...
MONTAGNE: To give the CIA legal cover. But was that, effectively, really, to - in a sense, cover your and the CIA's rear end?
RIZZO: Well, I suppose that's one way of putting it, Renee. Yeah. I mean, I thought it was important. I'd been around the agency long enough to know that proceeding down this path posed extraordinary peril in the future for the institution and the people who would be involved in the program, including myself. But no, I think it's fair to say - and I don't shy away from the fact that one of the motivations, considerations I had was to provide what I thought would be detailed and durable legal cover for our employees who were going to be operating in good faith under the conclusion of the Justice Department and their own chief lawyer - me - that these things were legal.
MONTAGNE: Well, I just asked you if, you know, what the Justice Department's definition of torture was. I could say it involved permanent bodily harm, organ failure or death. But looking back, regardless of that definition, is waterboarding torture?
RIZZO: No. I mean, I'm a lawyer, and torture is legally defined in U.S. law. If I had concluded - or more importantly, if the Justice Department concluded that these techniques constituted torture, we would never have done them. So, I mean, I can't say they were torture. I didn't concede it was torture then, and I don't concede it was - it's torture now.
MONTAGNE: John Rizzo was the CIA's top lawyer in the years following 9/11. Tomorrow, we'll hear more, including why Rizzo didn't keep an interrogation program he was deeply uncomfortable with, from coming into being.
You can read an excerpt from "Company Man" at npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Let's hear now about Sunday Assembly. It's the brainchild of two British comedians who started a church for people who don't believe in God. They launched Sunday Assembly just a year ago and already its spread across the globe. In this country, there are now around 30 Sunday Assembly chapters.
NPR's Mandalit del Barco reports from the atheist congregation here in Los Angeles.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: It sometimes feels like church in the auditorium of the Professional Musicians Union in Hollywood.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUITAR MUSIC)
BARCO: Hundreds of people are gathered on a Sunday morning to meditate, listen to inspirational poetry and stories, and to sing.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: The words going to be on the screen.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "REVOLUTION")
BARCO: There's a live band performing songs by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Jerry Lee Lewis. And instead of a sermon, there's a lecture by experimental psychologist and neuroscientist Jessica Kale about the biology of gender identification and sexual orientation.
JESSICA KALE: What I want to get across is gender is a spectrum. It's not a binary thing. We've got manly men, we've got girly girls, and we've got everything in between. And I think we all kind of accept that we're somewhere in between these two.
BARCO: Mostly at the Sunday Assembly, there is no God talk. That appealed to divinity student Noel Alumit.
NOEL ALUMIT: I don't necessarily have to believe what you believe, but we won't tell you what to believe - you know, props for that, respect. Total respect for that. You know...
(LAUGHTER)
ALUMIT: ...total respect for that.
BARCO: That was exactly the intent of Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans when they started Sunday Assembly.
SANDERSON JONES: It turns out there are loads of people out there who want to live better, help often and wonder more...
BARCO: In an online crowd funding campaign video, the two British comedians talk about their idea for gathering self-proclaimed godless congregations.
PIPPA EVANS: It's all the best bits of church but with no religion and awesome pop songs.
JONES: It's a celebration of life.
EVANS: And it's not a cult.
SANDERSON JONES AND PIPPA: But that's exactly what we'd say if it were a cult.
(SOUNDBITE OF EERIE MUSIC)
BARCO: This lighthearted approach seems to be reaching a growing number of nonreligious people.
PHIL ZUCKERMAN: This is a big now - a big boom of secularity. People not wanting to associate with religion, not wanting to identify as religious.
BARCO: Phil Zuckerman teaches about secularism at Pitzer College in Southern California. He's also the author of the books "Faith No More" and "Society without God." He says his research shows that 20 percent of Americans today report being non-religious. And among Americans younger than 30 years old, that number is 30 percent.
ZUCKERMAN: Some people who were raised with religion reject it for certain reasons that leaves them with a bitter taste in their mouth about religion. Either they had bad experiences in their church or they saw hypocrisy in the youth pastor, or they felt that their religion was manipulative - or all the litany of reasons people might not like religion. Those people are a little bit angry at religion.
BARCO: But Zuckerman says Sunday Assembly appeals to the more optimistic atheists, those hoping to recreate what they felt was good about religion.
ZUCKERMAN: They miss the community. They miss the music. They miss the multi-generational coming together with people that you might not otherwise be hanging out with. But they don't want to go to a place where they have to keep their intellect on hold. They don't want to push pause on the skepticism button, you know, in their mind.
BARCO: Zuckerman notes that for years there have been secular organizations, like the Ethical Culture Society, American Atheists and various humanist centers. But he says unlike some of them, Sunday Assembly is not out to critique or debunk religion.
That approach drew 38-year-old TV animator David Hernston and retiree Valerie Stansfield who's 75.
DAVID HERNSTON: You know, I don't believe in God. And so, going to church there's too much - you know, even with like Unitarian Church, it's not so explicitly God-dy, but there's still some spirituality that just doesn't resonate for me at all. And so, I've been hoping for this sort of community experience for a long time.
VALERIE STANSFIELD: Yes, I think it will grow. There's a lot of people who feel spiritual. They want the spiritual feelings. They want the celebration. It's natural. All humans love it.
BARCO: And they both said they like the music.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GREAT BALLS OF FIRE")
BARCO: One of the co-founders of L.A.'s Sunday Assembly chapter is Ian Dodd. By day, he's a camera operator for such TV shows as "Community," "True Blood" and "Entourage."
IAN DODD: I got involved with Sunday Assembly about last February or March when I first started seeing the stories online about the London assembly. And by August, we had a website and a YouTube channel and we had 900 people signed up ahead of time. And here we are at our second assembly. And we take our non-belief as a beginning point, not an end point. Because this is the here and now and this is all we can count on, what is it we're going to do make a difference here?
BARCO: The members were encouraged to volunteer to read to children at a downtown elementary school, to donate blood and to plant some trees with a local charity organization. In addition to Sunday Assembly, Dodd is a member of the Unitarian Church in Santa Monica. He was once a practicing Buddhist who also dabbled in various New Age philosophies.
DODD: As a young adult, I went off doing my exploration and checked out this and that and tried to find something that was bigger than myself. And I discovered that the universe in itself is bigger and more fantastic and more awe-inspiring, than any story that human beings have ever created for themselves.
BARCO: Dodd does acknowledge that Sunday Assembly is not without its factional schisms like many religions. He says the newly formed chapter in New York has already split over how much to emphasize atheism. But he says the L.A. group is staying away, for now, from any kind of dogma, pro or con.
Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: And you are listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
A group of people determined to prove that the government is spying on its citizens - certainly something we could be talking about today.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
But we are actually looking back more than 40 years to the evening of March 8, 1971. That's when a group of burglars carried out an audacious plan.
GREENE: They pried open the door of an FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole files about the bureau's surveillance of anti-war groups and civil rights organizations. Hundreds of agents were put on the case, but the crime went unsolved - until now. A new book reveals for the first time that the burglars were peace demonstrators who wanted to start a debate about the FBI's unchecked power to spy on Americans.
And details of this past crime come out of course just as the country is weighing the merits of surveillance all over again. NPR's Carrie Johnson has the story.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: The plotters executed their break-in on a night when millions of people sat glued to their television sets, watching Muhammad Ali square off against Joe Frazier for the heavyweight championship of the world. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: The boxing match was aired on a closed-circuit network in the United States and was unavailable in homes.]
(SOUNDBITE OF SPORTS BROADCAST)
JOHNSON: That 15-round bout was a brilliant distraction exploited by a group of anti-war activists who set out to burgle a small FBI office outside of Philadelphia and expose some of J. Edgar Hoover's secrets. Bonnie Raines was one of those activists, and she's talking publicly about what she did for the first time in 42 years.
BONNIE RAINES: It seemed that no one else was going to stand up to Hoover's FBI at that time, and we knew what Hoover's FBI was doing in Philadelphia in terms of illegal surveillance and intimidation. And we thought that somebody needed to document what many of us knew was happening.
JOHNSON: Weeks earlier, Bonnie had piled her long hippie hair into a winter cap, put on a pair of glasses and posed as a college student interested in the FBI. She wanted to get a look inside the bureau's small office in the town of Media, Pennsylvania, to case the joint, even if it meant risking imprisonment. Another member of the team, draft protester Keith Forsyth, was chosen to pick the lock at the FBI office. But when the time came, he got a nasty surprise.
KEITH FORSYTH: When I got there, there was a brand-new high-security lock on the door.
JOHNSON: Forsyth rushed back to confer with the other burglars and they agreed to keep trying. So he returned to the office, got down on the ground, and slowly applied a crowbar to another door.
FORSYTH: It was a great relief because, you know, the original plan was for me to be in and out in a couple of minutes, and I don't know how long I spent up there, but it was probably at least an hour.
JOHNSON: Forsyth and the other burglars chose their name carefully.
JOHN RAINES: We called ourselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI.
JOHNSON: John Raines was a professor of religion at Temple University and Bonnie's husband. The burglars were sure that Hoover, who ruled the bureau with an iron fist, had been carrying out illegal surveillance on Vietnam protesters and civil rights groups.
RAINES: And he was an icon. Nobody in Washington was going to hold him accountable. He could get away with doing whatever he wanted to do with his FBI. And it was his FBI, nobody else's.
JOHNSON: The breaking and entering was supposed to get evidence of that spying so Congress and the public could no longer ignore it. Not long after the burglary, reporter Betty Medsger received an anonymous package at her desk at the Washington Post: secret documents. She published the story.
BETTY MEDSGER: The country learned for the first time that the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was almost completely different than what the country thought it was.
JOHNSON: Medsger's new book, "The Burglary," covers the history of that episode, and the revelations those documents helped bring to light. For one, the FBI had been opening files on so-called subversives, people who simply wrote letters to the editor objecting to the war in Vietnam. The papers also showed the FBI was encouraging agents to infiltrate schools and churches in the black community using secret informants, turning people against each other.
MEDSGER: I think most striking in the Media files at first was a statement that had to do with the philosophy, the policy of the FBI. And it was a document that instructed agents to enhance paranoia, to make people feel that there's an FBI agent behind every mailbox.
JOHNSON: Powerful stuff for people like John Raines, who had traveled south as a Freedom Rider and marched in Selma, Alabama on Bloody Sunday.
RAINES: The distinction between being a criminal and breaking laws is very important. When the law, or when the institutions that enforce laws, interpret laws, become the crime, as happened in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, then the only way to stop that crime from happening is to expose what's going on.
JOHNSON: Before long, the purloined files from that tiny FBI office published by Medsger and other reporters began to attract wide attention, such as on this CBS broadcast in April, 1971.
(SOUNDBITE OF CBS NEWS BROADCAST)
JOHNSON: It took years, revelations by other reporters and a congressional investigation led by Senator Frank Church, but eventually lawmakers did rein in the FBI and the CIA. Betty Medsger's new book about the FBI investigation fills in some details. Hundreds of agents were dispatched to find the burglars. The FBI narrowed its search, building profiles of seven prime suspects. But they got almost all of the suspects wrong.
The burglars had been meticulous. They left no fingerprints, and they surreptitiously photocopied the files at the colleges where they taught. FBI agents did visit Raines, but he deflected their inquiries.
RAINES: With no physical evidence left from the burglary itself, they were faced with having to sort through a thousand or 2,000 suspects, and that was an overwhelming job, which of course did overwhelm them. They never found us.
JOHNSON: The burglars went about their lives, vowing never again to talk or meet to protect their secret. John Raines started writing the first of many books. His wife Bonnie, a child and family advocate, describes carrying on this way.
RAINES: In my case, it was working and pursuing a degree and driving carpool.
JOHNSON: After five years, the statute of limitations passed on the crime of burglary, and members of the group say they breathed easier. But still they kept their mouths shut until one night, years later, when Betty Medsger happened to be eating dinner in the Raines house. That's when John Raines mentioned in an offhand way that he had anonymously sent Medsger documents from the FBI burglary in 1971.
MEDSGER: I said, Are you telling me that you were burglars in Media? And they said yes. And I was very shocked and very eager to know more.
JOHNSON: The Raines family helped her locate the others involved in the burglary and most of them agreed to break their silence - four decades after they took on J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and won. Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm David Greene.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
Neither arctic conditions nor cancelled flights kept most of the Senate from returning to Washington after the holidays for last night's vote on the new chair of the Federal Reserve.
GREENE: All but 17 senators showed up, and most voted to confirm Janet Yellen. She will replace Ben Bernanke at the end of the month, the first woman to head the central bank in its 100-year history.
MONTAGNE: The number of missing senators did affect another much-watched vote. It postponed action on a bill that temporarily extends long-term unemployment benefits. That vote is now slated for today.
NPR's David Welna reports.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: For many Democrats, last night's 56 to 26 vote confirming Janet Yellen to head the Fed was a ringing bipartisan endorsement of the need for tighter supervision of the nation's big banks.
Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown hailed Yellen as an advocate for the victims of the 2008 economic implosion.
SEN. SHERROD BROWN: In the years since the crash, Governor Yellen has been a voice on the need for strong, sensible regulations that protect American workers and small businesses, instead of the too-big-to-fail banks.
WELNA: Eleven Republicans joined every voting Democrat in confirming Yellen. But Iowa's Chuck Grassley, who's the top Republican on the Finance Committee, did not. The Fed, he said, has been doling out too much easy money in its push to revive the economy.
SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY: We need a chairman focused on a strong dollar and low inflation.
WELNA: Not one Republican opposed holding the vote on Yellen's confirmation. But when the Senate then turned to the matter of unemployment benefits, number two Republican John Cornyn of Texas objected to a vote.
SEN. JOHN CORNYN: This is a serious issue, but if this was anything other than a political exercise, the majority leader would've rescheduled this vote when we did not have 17 members of the United States Senate unable to be here and vote on this.
WELNA: Majority Leader Harry Reid responded by rescheduling the vote for later this morning. He did so after commending his fellow Nevadan, Republican Dean Heller, for co-sponsoring the bill that would restore unemployment payments that lapsed 11 days ago for 1.3 million jobless Americans. Heller said he was acting on behalf of the many who remain unemployed in Nevada.
SEN. DEAN HELLER: These are hardworking individuals who rely on these benefits. They are trying to find a job. They want to provide for their children. But for these benefits to simply vanish without giving families the time to plan or figure out alternatives to help them get by, to me, is just not right.
WELNA: And Rhode Island's Jack Reed, the bill's Democratic co-sponsor, added that the bill's really only a measure to buy time.
SEN. JACK REED: We've tailored this, Senator Heller and I, so that it's just three months. So it provides the immediate assistance to unemployed workers. It's retroactive, so we'll pick up those people who lost their benefits December 28th. But it also gives the Senate, the appropriate committees and the House the ability to think through this program in an orderly way.
WELNA: Typically, such long-term unemployment payments have not been paid for by cutting spending elsewhere. But Republicans are insisting on such offsets this time. Maine Republican Susan Collins is seeking reelection this year.
SEN. SUSAN COLLINS: I want us to get on the bill, so that we can talk about an offset to pay for it.
WELNA: Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey, who's not up for reelection, says he won't vote to move forward on the bill. And what would he say to the thousands in his state who've just lost their unemployment benefits?
SEN. PAT TOOMEY: That I'm going to continue to work for policies that help create jobs, which is what people want the most.
BROWN: Tennessee Republican Bob Corker also intends to block any extension of benefits.
SEN. BOB CORKER: Look, I think everyone understands this first phase is nothing but a political act. And I think, hopefully, you know, we'll do something that makes greater sense.
WELNA: But Democrats insist this election year is the time to address income inequality. Majority Leader Reid says jobless benefits will be followed on his agenda by a bill raising the minimum wage.
SEN. HARRY REID: When a mother or a father working two or three jobs still can't afford groceries and rent the same month, it's a sign something is wrong in this country.
WELNA: And Democrats are confident most voters feel the same way.
David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
All right. Here are the voices of some meteorologists around the country. This was in Indianapolis.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: This is the coldest wind chill I've ever reported in on the Weather Channel. It's 41 below zero. The air temperature is 13. In fact, it has dropped eight degrees in four hours this morning, as that wind just eats right through you.
GREENE: And no surprise, it is also cold in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Could be so cold the National Weather Service is calling them life threatening, saying wind chill temperatures could dip as low as negative 50 today.
GREENE: It is cold as far South as Baton Rouge.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: I don't know if we've ever really talked about having a wind chill advisory in effect in our area, but indeed...
GREENE: The bitter weather is a result of the ominous sounding polar vortex. And joining to explain this vortex is Andrew Freedman, senior science writer for Climate Central, an independent non-profit organization that researches and reports on the science and impact of climate change. Andrew, welcome to the program.
ANDREW FREEDMAN: Thanks for having me.
GREENE: So, let me start with the question that's on the minds of a lot of Americans right now, and that is why is it so cold?
FREEDMAN: Well, it's so cold because we have this polar air, this polar vortex, which is this area of low pressure and fast-moving winds over the Arctic that normally stays pretty friendly and up over Canada.
GREENE: Friendly to us, at least. Not to Canada, I guess.
FREEDMAN: Friendly to the U.S., at least. This is air that is circulating the Arctic. And in the last couple of days, it's sort of become lopsided, sort of like a figure skater that has extended their arms, and then tripped. You know, when a figure skater pulls their arms in, they spin tighter and tighter and faster and faster. But when they put their arms out, they are a little bit slower and a little bit more wobbly and more prone to fall or stop skating at the end of their routine. And what's happening now is that a piece of it is down on the other side of the globe, and a piece of it kind of got lopsided and came down on top of us. It just is a weather pattern that we don't see very often.
GREENE: Well, I wanted to ask you: How often do we see it? How rare is it for one of these things to come down onto the lower 48 of the U.S.?
FREEDMAN: Well, it's not all that rare to get pieces of the polar vortex to break off and affect parts of the U.S. What's rare is that this is sort of a huge part of the vortex that has descended on us and a huge area of the U.S. that's being affected. We have single-digit temperatures, overnight lows all the way from the Deep South near the Gulf Coast to the U.S.-Canadian border, all the way up to Maine and Minnesota. I mean, this is a huge expanse. You can say that it's the coldest that it's been since at least the early '90s, and in some places since the early '80s and late '70s. Thankfully, it's kind of this brief taste of how bad it can get, and then we go back to average, to slightly above average temperatures.
GREENE: I mean, is climate change playing some sort of role here in the cold we're seeing this week?
FREEDMAN: We actually have these possible connections between the Arctic - which is warming rapidly, and which is losing sea ice - and these perturbations, these shifts in the jet stream over North America and over Europe. And many scientists are convinced that there's enough circumstantial evidence to potentially convince a jury that there is this link, and that the weather patterns are becoming more and more suspicious as being influenced by human activities. But the physical connections, the actual smoking gun that would link Arctic warming to weather patterns that we see right now - like this one - isn't quite there yet. It hasn't quite been proven. So whether or not it would convince a jury of scientific peers in this case is unclear. And I think in the next few years, we'll know a lot more. But certainly, climate change is influencing every weather pattern that occurs today, in some ways large and small.
GREENE: Andrew Freedman, stay warm and thanks so much for talking to us.
FREEDMAN: Thank you.
GREENE: Andrew Freedman is a senior science writer for the nonprofit Climate Central.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
After being legal for less than three weeks, same-sex marriages in Utah have come to a halt. The U.S. Supreme Court has granted Utah's request to stay a lower court's decision in favor of those marriages, and for the moment, they have stopped. More than 900 gay and lesbian couples got married in the brief time it was legal to do so. Now, they're not sure if the state is bound to recognize those unions. From member station KUER in Salt Lake City, Terry Gildea reports.
TERRY GILDEA, BYLINE: When the Supreme Court ordered on Monday morning that same-sex marriages be stopped in Utah, Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swenson was preparing to issue more marriage licenses to gay couples.
SHERRIE SWENSON: There were some ceremonies scheduled within my office, and we, of course, had the deputy clerk tell them that they couldn't perform the ceremony.
GILDEA: On December 20th, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby overturned Utah's law banning same-sex marriage, known as Amendment 3. The Utah Attorney General's Office filed a total of five requests to stay Shelby's ruling, and four of those were denied. But this week, the Supreme Court granted the stay. So, same-sex marriage in Utah is now on hold while the state crafts an appeal to the 10th Circuit.
SEAN REYES: The stay restores us back to the position we were in prior to the district court's decision. So, Amendment 3 and all of the state statutes that were affected by the decision are now back in place.
GILDEA: That's Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes. He says it's unclear whether the state is bound to recognize the more than 900 gay couples who got married in the last two weeks.
REYES: This is precisely the uncertainty we were hoping to avoid by requesting a stay immediately upon the decision of the district court. It's unfortunate that many Utah citizens have been put into this legal limbo, but we're evaluating their legal status currently.
GILDEA: Now, those gay couples who got married are concerned about the future of those unions. Jim Dabakis got married on December 20th, just hours after the lower court ruling was made public.
STATE SENATOR JIM DABAKIS: I called Stephen, my partner for the last 27 years, and said put a tie on. We're getting married now. Meet me at the clerk's office. The next call was to Mayor Ralph Becker, the mayor of Salt Lake City. I said: Mayor, will you marry us? And he said, of course, Jim. When? I said 15 minutes. He said, I'll be there.
GILDEA: Dabakis, who is a state senator and the chairman of the Utah Democratic Party, doesn't understand how rights to marry can be granted and then taken away.
DABAKIS: Clearly, these are valid marriages. But I am very nervous about the tens of thousands of other Utah couples that will be deprived, over some amount of time, from getting married.
GILDEA: Given Utah's strong connection to the Mormon Church, many gay couples here never thought they would be able to marry. Ken Kimball was overjoyed to marry his long-time partner Miguel. Even though the Supreme Court stayed the ruling, he is confident marriage equality is within reach.
KEN KIMBALL: It's difficult to have something so personal be - waiting your whole life for something, having it given to you, and then having it put on hold, and then being caught in limbo. It's a little bit uncomfortable, for sure.
CARL TOBIAS: I think the precedent, insofar as we have it, is to recognize those that were validly entered at the time they were entered. And so we'll just have to see.
GILDEA: Carl Tobias is a constitutional law professor at the University of Richmond. He says the Supreme Court's stay shouldn't invalidate any same-sex marriages that occurred in the last two weeks. Tobias also says what's happening in Utah could lead the Supreme Court to decide the fate of other states attempting to regulate marriage.
TOBIAS: This may not be the right vehicle. The court may wait for a number of other cases that are in the pipeline. It's just very early to be able to tell exactly how this will play out. But certainly, this seems to be one of the first cases in the federal system. It could be a landmark opinion.
GILDEA: Tobias says Utah's appeal to the 10th Circuit Court will be on expedited review, meaning a decision could come sooner than normal. Briefs from both sides are due by the end of January. Oral arguments could soon follow. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints released a statement saying that the action taken by the Supreme Court allows for a more reasoned and thoughtful discussion on the issue of same-sex marriage. Church officials also said they remained firm in their belief that marriage, as a union between a man and a woman, deserves protection under the law. For NPR News, I'm Terry Gildea, in Salt Lake City.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
The issue we just heard about is also making news in suburban Seattle. A Catholic school there apparently fired a staff member for being in a same-sex marriage. NPR's Martin Kaste has more.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: Mark Zmuda was a vice principal at Eastside Catholic School until shortly before Christmas. The school says he resigned. He insists he was fired. But both sides agree about why he left.
MARK ZMUDA: They said it was because I was married to a man, and violated Catholic teaching.
KASTE: That's Zmuda in a video posted on YouTube over the weekend. It shows him and his new husband being interviewed by one of his former students. The video has reignited the controversy over Zmuda's departure, in part because he says the school suggested that he could solve his problem by getting a divorce.
ZMUDA: You know, the fact that I have a same-sex partner, and having a same-sex marriage, they're against that. But I also thought another teaching that they were against was also divorce. So, I'm a little shocked that that was even on the table.
MICHAEL PATTERSON: You know, I was not part of that conversation.
KASTE: That's the school's lawyer, Michael Patterson. He says, apparently, the school president apparently did mention divorce to Zmuda, but that she did so with good intentions.
PATTERSON: Out of frustration, to try to keep a valued administrator, Sister Mary Tracy may very well had thrown that out as a hypothetical without consultation with her lawyers or with the church, you know, how do we go about trying to keep you here.
KASTE: Now the school's facing a backlash, especially from its own students. Before the Christmas break, many of them walked out of class, and they held raucous protests on Zmuda's behalf. One rally attracted the newly elected mayor of Seattle, Ed Murray. He's also in a same-sex marriage. On YouTube, Zmuda called the protests incredible.
ZMUDA: I mean, this was all student-driven. The students are the ones who put this stuff on social media, and have stood by me.
KASTE: It's a delicate situation for the school. It sent emails to parents warning against more protests. But the school's lawyer is careful not to condemn the students.
PATTERSON: You know, we applaud them for exercising their First Amendment rights, but certainly, we have our own First Amendment rights that need to be respected, as well.
KASTE: The courts have affirmed church's First Amendment right to impose their religious doctrines on their ministerial employees. It's a category that includes teachers.
PATTERSON: It is a Catholic school, and given those parameters, it should not have been any complicating surprise to him that he needed to adhere to those Catholic principles.
KASTE: And Zmuda isn't even the first to find himself in this situation. In early December, a Catholic high school near Philadelphia fired a teacher after he got a same-sex marriage license in New Jersey. Legal experts say the schools are within their rights, but students at Eastside Catholic have pledged to keep up their protests. Martin Kaste, NPR News, Seattle.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Imagine being on a quiet fishing trip and suddenly coming face-to-face with creatures who are huge and can leap out of the water. And, by the way, they reproduce in big numbers. They are Asian carp. They have already invaded parts of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Now there are fears Asian carp could take over the Great Lakes. Researchers believe they know how to slow this invasion but it could be costly and it could take decades.
Here's NPR's David Schaper.
(SOUNDBITE OF A MOTOR BOAT)
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: For years, environmentalists, conservation groups and others in the Great Lake region have been sounding the alarm, warning of a pending invasion of an aquatic kind.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Ooh-ha.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: We've got two.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Crap. Crap.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Got three.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Oh, crap, they hurt.
(LAUGHTER)
SCHAPER: This is YouTube video of two men boating up the Wabash River in Indiana, laughing as they dodge dozens of huge, flying, Silver Asian carp - an invasive species of fish that leaps out of the water when disturbed by motors. With its cousin, the Bighead Asian carp, these invasive fish have completely taken over parts of the Wabash, as well as portions of the Ohio, the Illinois, and other rivers in the Mississippi River watershed.
They're not just big, but Asian carp are prolific reproducers and voracious eaters, without natural predators. So they can quickly crowd out native species of fish. Many scientists fear if the invasive species becomes established in the Great Lakes, it could devastate commercial and sport fisheries worth billions. So many Great Lakes advocates have been calling for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to seal off the rivers and man-made canals in the Chicago area that Asian carp could travel through to get into Lake Michigan. The Corps has spent the last few years studying just how to do that.
DAVE WETHINGTON: Thank you, Eddie. And good afternoon everyone...
SCHAPER: Dave Wethington is Corps' project manager for the study. In a conference call with reporters, he detailed eight options to block the advance of Asian carp. Two of them would involve constructing barriers in Chicago area waterways, in order to physically separate the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds.
WETHINGTON: Physical separation does have the ability to really buy down the risk of all types of aquatic nuisance species transfer through that aquatic pathway.
SCHAPER: There's a catch or two. Depending on where the barriers go, physical separation would cost at least 15-and-a-half billion dollars. And because the barriers would require the construction of new flood controls in the Chicago area, including storm water tunnels and reservoirs, as well as water treatment plants, Wethington says the project could take at least 25 years.
WETHINGTON: Is that going to be in time? You know, your guess is probably as good as anybody else's.
SCHAPER: With the Asian carp at the Great Lakes' doorstep that answer is not sitting well with Michigan Republican Congressman Dave Camp.
REPRESENTATIVE DAVE CAMP: We're looking for a developed proposal that would bring about immediate action to eliminate this threat. And obviously 25 years doesn't fit that matrix.
(LAUGHTER)
SCHAPER: Camp and Michigan Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow pushed through legislation accelerating the Army Corps study by two years, and hoped it would only focus on separating the watersheds.
But the Corps is presenting other options, too. For example, a new kind of lock-and-dam system that would flush and treat water in the locks to eliminate invasive species. But most of the plans would still cost billions and take at least 10 years to implement. The Army Corps of Engineers is holding a series of public hearings on the proposals beginning Thursday in Chicago.
David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
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NPR's business news starts with console sales.
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GREENE: Microsoft announced sales of its new Xbox One topped three million units by the end of 2013. In a blog post, the company called it the most epic launch of Xbox, by all measures.
The third-generation console was available a week before Thanksgiving. It's been competing with Sony's new baby, Playstation 4, which also launched in November.
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It's largely been known that race plays a role in who has access to the Internet. A new study suggests income and age might play even bigger roles. Among lower-income African-Americans, smartphones are often a way to make up for not having a broadband connection at home.
NPR's Laura Sydell reports that that might not be enough.
LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: African-Americans who are young and college-educated are on the same footing as whites when it comes to getting online: 86 percent of 18-29-year-olds have broadband at home. African-Americans are using smartphones at the same rate as whites - 56 percent - regardless of income.
But Aaron Smith, who did the study for the Pew Research Center, says using a mobile device as a primary means of accessing the Internet has drawbacks. There's a lot you can't do on a smartphone.
AARON SMITH: For instance, you know, distance learning or filling out job applications. Those may be much more difficult to do on a smartphone than on a more traditional device.
SYDELL: But according to Smith, on the lower end of the economic spectrum, blacks trail whites when it comes to Internet access by about seven percentage points. Smith says that's a growing problem in a world in where an Internet connection is key for everything, from accessing education to getting government services.
SMITH: So, to the extent that this particular group that has a very strong need for some of those services is much less likely to be online, I think that's a very relevant finding for, you know, policymakers, nonprofits and other people who are seeking to serve that community.
SYDELL: Ultimately, Smith says the biggest takeaway for him from the study is that class trumps race when it comes to Internet access.
Laura Sydell, NPR News.
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And today's last word in business today is: cash only.
Colorado's retailers may be allowed to sell marijuana now, but under federal law, the state's banks cannot knowingly do business with them.
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This has forced marijuana merchants in the state to operate almost solely in cash. Denver's city council, not happy. They called yesterday for Washington to change the law.
MONTAGNE: But even then, Colorado marijuana shop owners would still have a plastic problem. Official Visa, MasterCard and American Express rules prohibit the use of their debit and credit cards to purchase pot.
GREENE: Visa, it's everywhere you want to be, I guess, except if you're in the marijuana business. That's the business news on MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
MONTAGNE: And I'm Renee Montagne.
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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne.
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I'm David Greene.
We have been hearing for, well, what feels like forever about skyrocketing health care costs. It's at the center of debates in Washington and state capitals. And many people feel the impact on their wallets and pocketbooks. But here's this reality: Spending on health care, while still going up, appears to be rising more slowly. 2012 was the fourth straight year of modest growth.
As NPR's John Ydstie reports, the people who crunch the numbers for the government are far from ready to call this a long-term trend.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: Health care spending from all sources rose 3.7 percent in 2012. That's slightly higher than in 2011 but about average for the four years beginning in 2009. A number of things contribut,ed to the modest increase. For one thing, the growth in spending on nursing home services was slower.
Anne Martin is an economist with the Office of the Actuary at CMS, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. She says growth in prescription drug spending also declined.
ANNE MARTIN: The slowing of prescription drug prices, because of the wave blockbuster drugs that went off patent, at the end of 2011 and in 2012, led to lower prices for previously expensive drugs.
YDSTIE: Slower growth in Medicare spending also contributed. And increases in private health insurance spending remained at historically low rates. The Affordable Care Act had a minimal impact on spending growth in 2012 according to the actuary's report.
Despite the tempering of the growth in health care spending, Aaron Catlin, a deputy director at the CMS, says his group doesn't see evidence of a long-term moderation of the rate of health care spending increases. And Catlin says this kind of stabilization in health care spending has occurred before.
AARON CATLIN: It's consistent with what we've seen in post-recessionary periods in the past.
YDSTIE: Consumers spend less on everything during a recession, including health care, and historically there's a lag in the recovery of health care spending.
Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation, acknowledges that health care spending does stabilize after recessions, but he says this time is different.
LARRY LEVITT: Growth this slow for such a sustained period of time truly is unprecedented. I mean these are the lowest rates of growth over these years for a half century, I mean since they've been recording these numbers.
YDSTIE: Levitt says a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of health care trends finds there's more going on than just the lagging effects of the recession. It concludes that one factor that's slowing spending growth is the rise in health insurance deductibles for consumers.
LEVITT: And as their out-of-pocket costs increase, people are somewhat discouraged from using the health care system, and that brings health care costs down.
YDSTIE: Levitt also believes that even though the ACA hasn't fully kicked in, health care providers, like hospitals, are already taking measures to reduce costs in order to comply with and compete in the new system.
John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
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The company that made a defective artificial hip has agreed to pay more than $2 billion to thousands of patients who had to have those implants replaced. But some patients are questioning whether the settlement is enough. Consumer advocates say the deal with Johnson & Johnson does nothing to prevent faulty medical implants from getting on the market in the future.
NPR's Rob Stein reports.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: Mary Schrag is 69 and lives outside Seattle. Life has been a struggle since she got the defective metal joint implanted in her hip.
MARY SCHRAG: I'm still in a lot of pain in my back and my hips because I'm not really able to walk steadily. And I do feel very depressed because I - it's just trying to get through another day.
STEIN: And that's even after Schrag went through a complicated operation to have the implant replaced. She used to work, travel and hike. Now she has a hard time just standing up and can barely walk with a cane. She needs a wheelchair to go shopping.
SCHRAG: All I know is I'm just - I feel like I've been living in a hell for many, many years. My life just will never be the same.
STEIN: Schrag is one if about 8,000 patients who are candidates for compensation through the settlement with Johnson & Johnson, which owns the company that made the defective hip. Steven Skikos is a San Francisco attorney who helped negotiate the deal for the patients.
STEVEN SKIKOS: Those patients who had the implant taken out are eligible to participate in a settlement that amounts to two and a half billion dollars. And those patients are available to receive compensation, which is essentially around $250,000.
STEIN: The deal also pays patients' bills for getting their implants replaced and sets up a $475 million pool for those who suffered the worst complications. But the exact amount each patient gets could end up being higher or lower, depending on things like how long they had the bad hips, their age, their weight. Many patients would probably get about $160,000.
SKIKOS: There's no amount of money that, for a lot of these patients, will compensate for what they've been through. But the truth is, is that in terms of the negotiation of this particular agreement, there was no penny left on the table.
STEIN: Some patients are happy with the deal. Jeanette Trout is 66 and lives in Manchester, Pennsylvania. She's expecting about $165,000.
JEANETTE TROUT: I'm tickled to death with the money I'm getting. It's going to help me tremendously. I mean this - this is God-sent. This is God-sent.
STEIN: But some patients feel betrayed. Some are angry that lawyers are getting about $800 million. Others say the amount of money it looks like they'd get won't come close to making up for their suffering and any future medical bills they may have. Mary Schrag.
SCHRAG: I really do not think it's fair. I truly, truly don't. This has jeopardized my life and my health indefinitely.
STEIN: And patients aren't the only ones who aren't satisfied. Lisa McGiffert is with the Consumer's Union Safe Patient Project. She says the settlement does nothing for thousands of other people who also got the defective joints.
LISA MCGIFFERT: There are about 27,000 other people who got this particular brand of hip who are not included in this settlement.
STEIN: Not included because they haven't had their hips replaced yet or filed lawsuits, and there are thousands more who got similar devices. And, McGiffert says, the settlement does nothing to prevent another defective medical implant from destroying more lives in the future.
MCGIFFERT: I think the settlement is inadequate to address the fundamental flaws in this market.
STEIN: McGiffert says implants like artificial hips and knees can get approval without thorough safety studies if they are similar to other products already on the market.
MCGIFFERT: We think that all medical devices that are implanted in the body - that is, it takes surgery to put them in, it takes surgery to take them out - that those devices should have to go through rigorous testing that requires some clinical evidence that they are safe.
STEIN: And that every device should come with a warranty and be tracked closely to catch any problems more quickly. But the medical implant industry disputes all of this. David Nexon of the Advanced Medical Technology Association says the current system insures safety without stifling innovation.
DAVID NEXON: No process is perfect and sometimes things turn up that weren't detected when FDA reviewed it or when the manufacturer developed it. But by and large, patients can be very confident that the medical devices that are used in their procedures are very safe products.
STEIN: Johnson & Johnson would not make anyone available for an interview. In a statement, the company said the settlement was fair. Steven Skikos, the attorney who negotiated the deal, said the lawyers got patients the most they could.
SKIKOS: Every element of this was very hard fought, so I can say with confidence that the lawyers who put this together put together the best deal possible under these circumstances.
STEIN: Skikos says the lawyers will help any patients who need to have their hips replaced in the future get compensated. In the meantime, those who are eligible for this settlement have until April to decide whether to accept it or keep fighting for more. Rob Stein, NPR News.
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The Florida State Seminoles completed their undefeated run a college football championship last night. In Pasadena, here in southern California, the Seminoles won the title game of the Bowl Championship Series, the BCS, with a 34 to 31 win over the Auburn Tigers. This is the last season that will follow the controversial BCS format and NPR's Tom Goldman reports the Seminoles provided a classic finale.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Before the thrills, it was a pretty good game at halftime, quiet enough for Roy Kramer to reflect. Kramer was one of the main people who helped create the BCS in 1998 with its primary goal of matching the top two ranked teams in a national title game. There was lots of criticism over the years because the BCS wasn't a playoff system, which will be in place next season.
But as Kramer looked out at the Rose Bowl Field last night, waiting for the second half to start, he said Florida State and Auburn had the potential to show how great the BCS actually was by pairing the best against the best.
ROY KRAMER: I just hope it's a great football game because that's what we tried to create, was that game that would excite people about college football.
GOLDMAN: It took until well into the fourth quarter, but Roy Kramer got his wish.
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GOLDMAN: With four and a half minutes left, auburn built its lead to 24-20 on a field goal and then kicked off to Florida State's Kermit Whitfield. He's a five-foot-seven-inch freshman who, his coach says, ran the third fastest 100 meter dash in high school track history. Last night, he blazed 100 yards on the football field.
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GOLDMAN: But that was just the start. Auburn got the ball back and finished its drive with the outstanding running back Tre Mason blasting through for a 37 yard touchdown run. Auburn was up 31-27, a minute and 19 seconds away from a national title. As the side of the stadium wearing Auburn orange buzzed in anticipation, the Florida State red side ruined their impending party.
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GOLDMAN: Florida State's Jameis Winston, the Heisman Trophy winning freshman quarterback, capped a long drive with a two yard touchdown pass to receiver Kelvin Benjamin with 13 seconds left in the game. In a season of effortless wins, neither the Seminoles nor Winston had been challenged like this. He said afterwards, he was ready.
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GOLDMAN: Florida State head coach Jimbo Fisher said it was Winston's best game of the season because Winston wasn't his best.
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GOLDMAN: Of course, last night was not all about Jameis Winston, even though much of the college football season was, with his superlative play on the field, and with a rape allegation that left questions about his off-field behavior. Last night, says Fisher, was about all of Florida State football.
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GOLDMAN: Auburn had a pretty good team itself. Afterwards, Tigers players talked about letting down their fans because they didn't keep their promise of accomplishing one of the greatest turnarounds ever from last year's dismal three and nine season, to national champs. But they, along with Florida State, gave a rousing farewell to the BCS that even Roy Kramer might not have envisioned. Tom Goldman, NPR News.
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MONTAGNE: It's NPR News.
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A bone chilling cold snap will affect nearly 200 million people in the United States before it subsides. Many areas of the country have wind chill warnings or advisories in place. The cold is sweeping today, east and even south. The Midwest has been frozen now for a couple days. Here's NPR's Cheryl Corley.
CHERYL CORLEY, BYLINE: Walk down a Chicago street and you might not even recognize your best friend. The frigid temperatures mean just about everybody is bundled - scarves drawn tight, hats pulled down low, often only eyes visible.
LENNY MILES: It's too cold. It seems like it's 20 below.
CORLEY: Chicagoan Lenny Miles, who's giving a coworker's stalled car a jump wasn't too far off the mark. The city set a record at -16 Monday, colder than the temperature in Antarctica. Add to that a weekend snowstorm, and it's the type of weather that can make any Chicago mayor anxious. Thirty-five years ago one mayor lost his job when the snow packed streets weren't cleared. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel sounds like he remembers.
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CORLEY: Even so, the cold weather has meant closed schools in Chicago and other cities, power outages in places like Indianapolis, treacherous travel throughout the Midwest, and lots of people hibernating at home. Chicagoan John Willis ventured outside yesterday and says he knows all about this type of weather.
JOHN WILLIS: I started at the post office in 1995. It was sixty below zero.
CORLEY: That was the wind chill nearly 20 years ago and the last time many parts of the country witnessed that type of cold. Willis isn't worried, though, about today's dangerous temperatures.
WILLIS: I took vacation for this week, so. It was the right time.
CORLEY: The right time to put aside that unofficial motto of neither snow nor rain nor heat shall stop us, but in Milwaukee, Steven Fye(ph) is ready to take it on. He's a bicycle courier and he's dressed for the cold.
STEVE FYE: I have two bottom pairs of tights on, four upper pieces of tights on, a wool jersey over that, cycling jacket over that, two pairs of socks.
CORLEY: The frigid weather can also mean nearly nonstop work for the owner of a Massachusetts construction firm and his plumbers, so Brendan Morrissey says he's been calling his customers.
BRENDAN MORRISSEY: Yeah. I'm just telling them to make sure the heat is turned up an extra four, five degrees. Make sure they close the garage door and run the faucets very slowly.
CORLEY: So the pipes won't freeze.
MORRISSEY: Because a frozen pipe that bursts, it can cost thousands and thousands of dollars.
CORLEY: So preparation has been key, especially in the South where states are bracing for possible record temperatures in the single digits today. Jean Thompson of south Nashville says she has new central heating and a backup.
JEAN THOMPSON: Three space heaters, one kerosene heater, and as many blankets as we need.
CORLEY: The good news is that the polar freeze should end soon with the weather back to normal by this Thursday or Friday. Cheryl Corley, NPR News, Chicago.
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And with much of the nation is in the middle of this brutal cold snap, let's take a moment to hear from scientists who study other planets or even the chilliest places on Earth. Those researchers commonly encounter temperatures that make this news-making cold seem downright balmy. We asked NPR science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel to find out just how low it can go.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: I caught up with researcher Paul Mayewski yesterday just as he was headed out of town.
PAUL MAYEWSKI: Actually, I'm on my way to Antarctica. I'm in Kennedy Airport getting ready to get on a plane that'll take me eventually to Ushuaia, Argentina to catch the ship.
BRUMFIEL: Mayewski is with the University of Maine. He studies ice cores - columns of frozen water that can act just like tree rings to tell us what the climate used to be like. He's traveled to glaciers and the arctic, but the coldest place was the Interior of East Antarctica.
MAYEWSKI: Daily temperatures were on the order of about minus 55 degrees Centigrade.
BRUMFIEL: OK. I just want to run that through Google here. Minus 55 C to F. Minus 67?
MAYEWSKI: Yep, and that's without the wind chill.
BRUMFIEL: At those temperatures, you've got to keep all your supplies inside your jacket just to keep them from freezing solid.
MAYEWSKI: It's super cold. Chocolate, everything, everything that you eat that hasn't been right against your body all day is like eating ice, obviously. It's a great time to crack your teeth if you don't remember to warm up some of the things you're going to eat.
BRUMFIEL: OK. So that's cold for Earth. But it's toasty compared to other parts of the solar system. Check out the forecast on Saturn's moon Titan.
ELIZABETH TURTLE: Titan's surface temperature is 94 Kelvin which is -290 Fahrenheit.
BRUMFIEL: Elizabeth Turtle is with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. She's part of the Cassini mission which studies Titan. It's so cold there that the moon's bedrock is frozen water. Here methane is a liquid instead of a gas.
TURTLE: You get the methane in the atmosphere...
BRUMFIEL: It's so cold there that the Moon's bedrock is frozen water. Here methane is a liquid instead of a gas.
TURTLE: You get the methane in the atmosphere condensing into clouds raining out on to the surface, and then running across the surface eroding it into channels, rivers and lots of lakes.
BRUMFIEL: Getting colder but science can go even lower. Back here on Earth, Sara Haravifard is a physicist who works at Argon National Laboratory.
SARA HARAVIFARD: You know, (unintelligible) without too much trouble, we can get to minus 459.13 Fahrenheit.
BRUMFIEL: In some sense, temperature is just the jiggling of molecules and atoms. And at the temperatures at which Haravifard works, the jiggling mostly stops and weird things start happening. Electricity can flow without resistance. If you stir a cup of liquid helium, it will keep whirling forever. Haravifard studies materials at these low temperatures in order to figure out how they work. Well, normally she does anyway. When I called her, it was minus 14 and she couldn't get her driveway clear.
HARAVIFARD: The problem is not the snow. It's very cold so it's the frostbite I'm worried about.
BRUMFIEL: Antarctic Researcher Paul Mayewski has some advice that might help.
MAYEWSKI: Wear plenty of layers. Keep your skin as covered as you can - don't expose anything. And try to move as much as you can.
BRUMFIEL: You know what? It can even be fun.
MAYEWSKI: If you're well dressed and you're keeping warm on the inside, being out in the cold can be very enjoyable.
BRUMFIEL: Easy for him to say. The spot in Antarctica he's headed to, he says temperatures are in the high 20s right now. That's a lot warmer than most places here in the States.
Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Many of you have been sending us pictures of experiments you've been conducting in the bone-chilling conditions.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
In Madison Wisconsin, where it was minus nine degrees when Lora Keuhl and her two children created their very own cloud.
LAURA KEUHL: We boiled water and then just opened the door and threw it up into the air.
MONTAGNE: Creating an ominous plume of frozen mist.
KEUHL: And it kind of - the kids were laughing because it came into our house because the way the wind was blowing. So it was like a big fog that came in.
MONTAGNE: By the way, be careful if you try this yourself. You can get burned if the wind blows the hot water back on you.
GREENE: Please be careful. In Champlin, Minnesota, Jennifer Vendel and her son blew bubbles outside when it was about 17 below zero.
JENNIFER VENDEL: And we saw them freeze in mid air. And when they dropped to the ground, they didn't break. They just rolled because they were frozen.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: Jennifer's husband, Shane Vendel, created a banana hammer
SHANE VENDEL: My grandpa showed it to me a long time ago when I was a little kid. And if you throw a banana outside when it is below zero, it will actually freeze hard as a brick and you can actually hammer a nail into a piece of wood with it.
MONTAGNE: Sara McGilvra, of Belgium, Wisconsin, and her two kids wanted to see what happens when a raw egg meets a wind chill of minus 38 degrees.
SARA MCGILVRA: We popped open the patio door and cracked it on the pavement.
MONTAGNE: Seventeen minutes later...
MCGILVRA: It was a little squishy in the middle. But it was definitely hard enough that you could pick it up and whack it on the side of the door and it wasn't going to break.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: OK, that is just plain weird. And maybe you're doing some of this kind of stuff, trying to prove how cold it is where you are. If you are, why don't you send us some pictures of your own cold weather experiments. You can send them to nprcrowdsource@NPR.org.
MONTAGNE: And, David, you know, I'm sitting here in relatively warm - very relatively warm - Southern California.
GREENE: Ah-huh.
MONTAGNE: We're talking 60, 65, 70, 75 degrees...
GREENE: Brag, brag, brag.
MONTAGNE: You know who could (unintelligible) after listening to all of these folks? I'm actually jealous. I'm actually jealous of the cold.
GREENE: Well, kind of - I'll get a video feed going.
MONTAGNE: We'll last a few minutes.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: And we can do an experiment together.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: It's cold here. Not as cold as the Midwest but cold.
MONTAGNE: Alright, OK.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
If you have ever enjoyed an action-packed Kung Fu film, take a moment to thank Sir Run Run Shaw, who passed away today at age 106.
(SOUNDBITE OF FANFARE MUSIC)
GREENE: The television and movie mogul popularized the Kung Fu genre, opening Shaw Brothers film studio in Hong Kong, in his early 20s.
(SOUNDBITE OF A MOVIE TRAILER)
GREENE: Shaw Brothers grew to be Asia's largest production studio by the late '50s, and also one of the most influential film companies in the world. They produced almost a thousand low-budget, action, kick-flicks, including "The Magnificent Concubine," "The One-Armed Swordsman" and also this film, "Five Fingers of Death."
(SOUNDBITE OF A MOVIE TRAILER)
GREENE: Sir Run Run Shaw, knighted in 1977, went on to run one of the world's dominant Chinese-language television networks, launching careers of many Chinese film mega-stars.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne.
It's actually not that surprising that Detroit barber Brian "B-Dogg" Price did not get enough volunteers to help him break the record for most haircuts in one hour. The current record is 34. And would you like a haircut that took less than two minutes? Still, it would be free, so he's reached out to churches and shelters for volunteers for another run at the record this spring. The barber plans to use two electric clippers simultaneously.
It's MORNING EDITION.
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Good morning. I'm David Greene. YouTube videos can be all fun and games. Until your raccoon gets arrested. Mark Brown of Tennessee posted videos last summer that went viral. It was him dancing and showering with his pet raccoon Rebekah. But with the attention came Tennessee wildlife officials, who confiscated the masked animal.
State law says you can't keep native animals captured in the wild as pets. Brown lobbied to change the law. No luck. Now, he's running for governor. So Tennessee could have one unique first pet. It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
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This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
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And I'm Renee Montagne. And some news this morning, JPMorgan Chase has agreed to pay $1.7 billion to settle charges related to the bank's Secrecy Act and we're going to be joined by NPR's Jim Zarroli. Good morning.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: So let's hear what the government says about JPMorgan Chase's role.
ZARROLI: Well, JPMorgan was Madoff's primary bank during most of the time he had his investment business. You may remember, he was taking in billions of dollars from investors - including some rich and famous ones and telling them that they were getting big returns, all the returns were really fictional - it was a Ponzi scheme, a lot of people lost everything. Madoff pleaded guilty, he is in a prison in North Carolina serving a 150 year prison sentence. The government says that there were suspicions within JPMorgan about what was happening and that when this happens, under the Bank Secrecy Act, the bank is supposed to file a suspicious activity report. It filed one with regulators in the U.K. but it didn't do so in the United States. It failed to warn the government about what was happening - this is what regulators contend and as a result, Madoff was able to get away with this for a lot longer than he would have otherwise.
MONTAGNE: So explain for us the charges that JPMorgan is facing now.
ZARROLI: Well, it faces two criminal charges under the Bank Secrecy Act but an important thing here is there will be deferred prosecution. If the bank reforms it's money laundering procedures and it pays investors, you know, the $1.7 billion - the government, you know, isn't promising, but the implication is that it will not pursue the case any further. This is the largest ever criminal forfeiture by a bank in a case like this and there could be more money, more fines, there's going to be a press conference this afternoon. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Treasury Department Office that deals with money laundering could add fines of their own.
MONTAGNE: Has JPMorgan reacted yet to this?
ZARROLI: Well, a spokesman for the bank has said today that yes, the bank could have done a better job of pulling together the pieces of information and the concerns that were being expressed about Madoff within the bank. But the spokesman also said that no employees willingly assisted Madoff, they just had suspicions - they didn't follow-through on them - but they didn't do it on purpose, in other words. This has been a really rough year for JPMorgan Chase, the past year it has paid billions of dollars in settlement for much of it stemming from the financial crisis for different incidents. The biggest of course was in November when it paid more than $13 billion over mortgage abuses but it also paid fines for energy market manipulation and the London whale trading fiasco. And in each case, the bank has just decided to pay the fines and move on - try to put it all behind - and also, when necessary, it has promised to implement the reforms that the government asks for.
MONTAGNE: Thanks very much, Jim.
ZARROLI: You're welcome.
MONTAGNE: NPR's Jim Zarroli.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm David Greene.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. There was a surprise in the U.S. Senate yesterday. Six Republicans crossed party lines and voted to extend long-term unemployment benefits, benefits that expired for 1.3 million Americans just after Christmas. The bill still needs to clear the House.
GREENE: The Federal Unemployment Insurance Program dates back to the 1930s and the New Deal. And it was 50 years ago today that the American public heard a solemn promise to build on existing protections for the poor. It came from President Lyndon Johnson.
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PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.
MONTAGNE: Johnson said it was a war that the nation could not afford to lose. At the time, one in five Americans was poor. Today, things are better, but tens of millions of Americans are still poor, which raises the question: Did the war on poverty fail?
GREENE: It's a question NPR will explore during the course of this year. We'll also be looking at what's being done today to reduce poverty. We begin in Appalachia, where President Johnson traveled to generate support for his new campaign.
Here's NPR's Pam Fessler.
PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: People in the isolated hills of Martin County, Kentucky, rarely saw outsiders, let alone a president. So Johnson's visit in 1964 was a very big deal. Lee Mueller was a young newspaper reporter. He recalls the crowds in downtown Inez, the county seat, waiting for the presidential party to arrive at an abandoned miniature golf course.
LEE MUELLER: It was just like a hayfield full of long grass, and it looked like helicopters landing in Vietnam or something when they came over the ridge. There were four or five of them, I think.
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FESSLER: He says the locals didn't know their role in this new, domestic war, but a government film shows that the White House clearly did.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: In this south central mountain country, over a third of the population is faced with chronic unemployment.
FESSLER: It was to give poverty a face and a name.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Typical of this group is Tom Fletcher, his wife and eight children. Fletcher, an unemployed sawmill operator, earned only $400 last year, and has been able to find little employment in the last two years.
FESSLER: At the time, the poverty rate in this coal-mining area was more than 60 percent. Johnson visited the Fletchers on the porch of their home, a small wooden structure with fake brick siding. And photographers took what would become one of the iconic images of the war on poverty: the president crouched down, chatting with Tom Fletcher about the lack of jobs.
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FESSLER: Fast forward 50 years, and some things haven't changed much at all: the Fletcher cabin for one. It's still standing along a windy road about five miles outside of town. It now has wood siding, painted orange. There's a metal fence with a no trespassing sign to keep out strangers. There are lots of small houses and trailers along this road, but also some new, bigger homes that could be found in any American suburb.
And downtown, Inez has some new offices and a big bank. Roads are well-paved, and people say the schools and hospitals here are a lot better than they used to be.
Still, Martin County remains one of the poorest counties in the country. Its poverty rate is 35 percent, more than twice the national average. Unemployment is high. Only 9 percent of the adults have a college degree.
Much of the poverty today is tucked between the mountains, in what are called the hollers.
NORMA MOORE: Hi.
FESSLER: Hi. How are you?
MOORE: We were up all night. Hi, I'm Norma.
FESSLER: Norma Moore greets visitors from Appalachia Reach Out, a faith-based charity that helps the area's poor. Moore cares for her eight-year-old grandson, Brayden. She says his parents didn't want him, that he was born with a rare blood disease and is severely disabled.
MOORE: And they said he was dying. And then at four months, I got him. And I've had him ever since.
FESSLER: Brayden doesn't talk or walk. But he's in constant motion, rolling on the floor of their double-wide trailer home, bumping into walls and doors.
MOORE: Come on. Come in here, get mommy. Come on.
FESSLER: There's no question that Moore's life is incredibly stressful. She says she gets by on her faith. But here's where the war on poverty has also made a big difference. Today, she gets food stamps, supplemental security income for her grandson and energy assistance to heat her home. She shakes her head thinking about life without it.
MOORE: I would be homeless. I would be the one living on the street, if it wasn't for that.
FESSLER: She looks down at her grandson on the floor.
MOORE: He would probably be in a home somewhere.
FESSLER: Today, many people here rely on government aid. In fact, it's the largest source of income in Martin County. People say it's helped reduce hunger, improved health care and given young families a boost, especially at a time when coal mining jobs are disappearing by the hundreds.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Singing) Get your body moving, get your body grooving.
FESSLER: Children in a Head Start class skip across the lunchroom in a nearby school. This is one of the signature programs of the war on poverty, helping low and moderate-income children get ready for school. Budget cuts are always a concern here. Some of these children get their only hot meal of the day here at school.
DELSIE FLETCHER: My name is Delsie Fletcher. I am a family service worker at Martin County Head Start.
FESSLER: Fletcher helps Head Start parents with services, such as getting their high school diplomas, so maybe they can get a better job. And yes, Delsie is one of those Fletchers: married to one of the children who stood on the porch with President Johnson. I'm curious how the war on poverty has helped her husband's family, if at all. Turns out, along with the famous photo, it's a sore topic.
FLETCHER: They don't like to talk about it, because, you know, they don't want to be known as the poorest family in Martin County.
FESSLER: And she says they probably weren't, that most of the Fletchers have done OK for themselves. Still, it hasn't been easy. Her husband had some of his toes cut off when he worked in the sawmills, and now he's on disability. Work around here can be tough and dangerous, which is why coal mining jobs pay so well. But now they're scarce, and there's nothing to replace them, so people are struggling to adjust.
THOMAS VINSON: My name is Thomas Vinson, and I've been a resident of Martin County for 41 years. And I work in the coal fields, and I'm unemployed right now.
FESSLER: Vinson says he has a big house payment and three sons to raise.
VINSON: You know, times is tough, but, you know, we're making it.
FESSLER: One reason is Vinson's wife got a job at a gear factory through a federally funded program to help unemployed miners. Vinson's grateful for the short-term help, but worried about his future. Overall, he's disappointed in the war on poverty. He says he sees too many people around here just collecting checks. And to what end?
VINSON: They call it poverty, but I call it abusing the system. You know, like, if you're going to file up for SSI, you go in there and say the right things, you'll come out of there with a check.
FESSLER: His feelings are widespread around here: What good are all these government programs if they don't get you a job? Mike Howell runs the local community action program, where the Vinsons came for help. The program's a direct result of the war on poverty. Howell agrees that the war has yet to achieve its goals, but says the reason is a lack of support, that the burst of enthusiasm after President Johnson's visit has waned. Every year, his program has to fight for funds.
MIKE HOWELL: We have kind of let poverty go to the side. It's still way too high. Somebody asked me one time about the war on poverty, and I said, well, it really wasn't a war. It was more of a skirmish. And we need to declare war on poverty again.
FESSLER: One, he says, that goes back to Johnson's original goal, which was to help people not only survive, but to thrive. Pam Fessler, NPR News.
GREENE: Later today on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, we'll hear how some are trying to convince young people to stay in Martin County, Kentucky.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Amazing to think it is frigid here in the U.S. but in Sochi, Russia, where they hope to be holding skiing events at the Olympics next month, temperatures right now are in the 50s. Ahead of those games, we are bringing you stories about what athletes are doing to get an edge over the competition. We're calling this series The Edge. Plenty of elite athletes transition to being coaches. Not many though go from being coach to Olympian. That is what cross country skier Holly Brooks did.
Alaska Public Radio Network's Annie Feidt has her story.
ANNIE FEIDT, BYLINE: On a frigid day at Hatcher Pass, north of Anchorage, Holly Brooks glides up to a start line.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: OK. Three, two, one, go.
FEIDT: This race is just a practice with her Alaska Pacific University teammates. It's a chance for Brooks to test her skills before heading to Europe for the busy World Cup season. Then she'll go to Sochi for the Olympics in February. Brooks is now a seasoned member of the U.S. Ski Team. But a little more than four years ago, she was on the sidelines. On July 4, 2009 that all changed.
HOLLY BROOKS: It was actually this really awkward and odd epiphany.
FEIDT: Brooks was competing in Mount Marathon - the Super Bowl of Alaskan sports. It's a rugged mountain running race straight up and back down a nausea-inducing incline.
BROOKS: I was leading and I suffered an extreme case of dehydration. And I passed out right in front of the emergency room, which is conveniently along the course of Mount Marathon.
FEIDT: She was just a few tantalizing blocks from the finish line.
BROOKS: And just how close I came to winning, it was like it flipped a switch in my mind and my body. And I was laying in the emergency room and I said to myself - I didn't tell anyone- I want to go to the Olympics.
FEIDT: It was an improbable goal. At the time, Brooks was 27, at least a decade older than most cross country skiers who set their sights on the Olympics. Brooks had done well in a two popular recreational races but had zero international experience. The games in Vancouver were just seven months away.
BROOKS: You know, there were a lot of people that told me: Oh, with your background, you can never do this. Or you're too old, the U.S. Ski Team will never nominate you. You know, you're past your prime.
FEIDT: But Brooks believed she had a shot. And so did many of the athletes she coached.
DON HAERING: I knew Holly was fast.
FEIDT: Don Haering skied for Brooks in high school and in college. He says when the team was training, Coach Brooks was always right there with them.
HAERING: It's not like she would stand there on the side of the trail and tell you where to go. She would go ski with you the whole time and if you did a hard interval set, she might do the whole thing with you. And then, you know, you go home and rest and meanwhile Holly has another session to do. And I would assume she did the same thing with them too.
FEIDT: Brooks pursued her dream with reckless abandon, as she puts it. And it paid off. In 2010, she eked her way onto the Olympic squad. Four years later she has a shot at a relay medal in Sochi. Looking back, Brooks says she can't exactly recommend her unusual path to other skiers. But she says her background gives her something many of her younger competitors lack: perspective.
BROOKS: You know, I am the oldest one on the team. I know that I don't have 10 more years in my career. So there's a certain amount of, you know, I hesitate to call it urgency. But I'm really excited for what's to come.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Let's go, Holly.
FEIDT: Back at Hatcher Pass, Brooks is rounding the last corner of the race course, eying the finish line.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Up, up, up, up, up, up.
FEIDT: This race may be just for practice but Brooks doesn't hold anything back. She wins by three seconds and finishes exhausted, but with a huge smile on her face.
For NPR News, I'm Annie Feidt in Anchorage.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's hard to root for the home team when your teeth are chattering. But that's what fans did last weekend during the frigid opening round of the NFL playoffs. It was five degrees in Green Bay, 25 in Philadelphia, and in the 30s in Cincinnati. As for the fans who watched from the comfort of their warm living rooms, commentator Frank Deford does not question their dedication.
FRANK DEFORD: How well I remember when a savvy old promoter told me that the cleverest thing that sports ever did was to emphasize the concept that fans should always support their team - come defeat, discomfort or indignity. Balderdash, he exclaimed. A rotten sports franchise no more deserves your support than does the corner cleaners that ruins your shirts or the bar that gives you weak drinks.
Now, in those hoary days of yesteryear, the only way that a devoted fan could donate the obligatory support was to show up live and buy a ticket to sit. I've been amply reminded of this in these recent godforsaken days, as games have been conducted under the most gruesome of conditions.
First there was hockey's Winter Classic, played in Michigan, where 105,000 supporters, in temperatures approaching zero, peered through a storm, searching for a distant glimpse of the puck whenever snow was cleared from the rink. By contrast, three of the first-round NFL playoff games did not immediately sell out. Which would mean that by league fiat the entire home-team city that failed in its ticketed support would've been summarily punished, deprived of a televised rendition of the game.
The call for attendance volunteers went out. It was like in those war movies where the bad guys threaten to blow up a whole community unless someone steps forward and sacrifices himself by confessing - but still no sellouts.
Now, nobody could've believed that the NFL would've denied, say, all of metropolitan Cincinnati their right to see its Bengals play in the comfort of their own club cellars, and sure enough various sponsors bought up the ugly ticket residue. It was sort of like the Federal Reserve buying dollars or bonds or whatever it does in a similar great American crisis. It was more sell-off than sell-out, but the league's blackmail policy prevailed.
But it made me think: Nowadays, do you have to show your support by purchasing a ticket? Really? The NFL makes much more from TV than at the box office. Aren't you - Bengals supporter, say - doing your fair share by staying comfy, warm downstairs by your own huge HD, where you're surrounded by chosen friends and family, where you have your own choice refreshments, your own toilet facilities? Darn-tooting you're supporting your team, just in 21st century cyber-style. Sports tickets are so passe.
But may I suggest that the next time the NFL finds itself needing bodies to fill up a refrigerator that is doubling as a stadium, that it contact those 105,000 brave souls who went to the hockey game in Michigan and pay them to be professional supporters. Obviously they have the talent for it.
MONTAGNE: Commentator Frank Deford joins us each Wednesday.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
For all the meticulous planning and expensive buildup before the Olympics, some things cannot be controlled - like when an injury prevents an athlete from showing up. In this case, one of winter sports' biggest stars, American Alpine skier Lindsey Vonn has a knee injury that we now know will keep her from competing next month. The Gold medal winner is beloved by fans and she has huge sponsorship deals with brands like Under Armour, Oakley and Rolex.
Tripp Mickle covers the Olympics for Sports Business Journal. We asked him about Lindsey Vonn's star power.
TRIPP MICKLE: She was clearly the face of the Sochi games coming into these Olympics. And everybody loves a story of someone overcoming an obstacle. And she started a relationship that really put her from the sports pages into the pages of People magazine, as well. And that's her relationship with Tiger Woods. She really had some pop and star power that nobody else in these Olympics has.
GREENE: And we should be very careful. Both of us don't want to suggest that we're not concerned about her health, obviously. But when a huge athlete like her is not going to the Olympics, at the last minute like this, it has to have some financial implications. And let's start with NBC. I mean how much does this mean to them?
MICKLE: This is a huge loss for NBC. They were going to feature her in promotions leading up to the games. And then she provided a huge advantage to them because she was going to compete in five events, over the entire two weeks of the games. And they've lost that.
GREENE: So Procter & Gamble, they're an actual sponsor of the Olympics. And that meant that they could use Lindsey Vonn if she were actually competing. But there're some companies that are not sponsoring the Olympics who would've faced restrictions, and not been able to actually use her during the games itself. Does that open some opportunities for some of those companies now?
MICKLE: Yes, the clear winner is Under Armour. They developed a winter ad campaign that features Lindsay Vonn throughout the advertisement. And they're going to be able to keep that advertisement up and running during the Olympics, when Lindsey is still going to be a topic of conversation, and still going to be a top of mind for a lot of viewers of the Olympics - even though she's not participating.
So in a funny twist here, you actually see a sponsor who's going to be able to use an Olympic athlete during the games, in a way that they wouldn't have been otherwise.
But Procter & Gamble, which is an Olympic sponsor, was going to make her the face of their advertising around the Thank You Mom campaign that they've developed. And if you've seen these commercials you basically need to wipe your eyes after you've seen them, because they're just very emotional - talking about moms picking up kids from the age of four all the way up until they come down the slopes in their first Olympics.
And Lindsey -Lindsey was just going to be a spokesperson for that. And they're not going to be up to use her the same way they would have after the Olympics. They'll be a use her leading up to it but not afterwards.
GREENE: Any long-term implications for Lindsey Vonn when it comes to either her skiing career, or on the business side, the endorsements that she hopes to have?
MICKLE: I think the long-term implication will really play out over the next four years. Lindsey is 29, she's got one more Olympics in her. Now, if she's able to come back and perform well at that Olympics then she could still cement her name among all-time Olympic greats. And that could be great for her opportunities for appearances and endorsements after her competing days are over.
But if she's not able to come back and perform at a high level, then this could really be looked back at as a missed opportunity for her at a time when she could have transcended the world of skiing, the world of the Olympics, and really made a name for itself as just a global sports icon.
GREENE: Tripp Mickle covers the Olympics for Sports Business Journal. Tripp, thanks so much for talking to us.
MICKLE: Thanks so much for having me.
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GREENE: This is NPR News.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
On the evening of November 22, 1963, just hours after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his newly sworn-in replacement, President Lyndon Johnson, met with advisors in Washington to get the affairs of state in order.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
At the end of that meeting, a top economic advisor, Walter Heller, told the new president that he had been directed by Kennedy to find ways to help people in poverty.
ROBERT CARO: And Johnson slams the door shut so he can talk to Heller another couple of minutes about it and he says to Johnson: Well, how fast do you want to move ahead with this program? And Johnson says to him: Full tilt.
MONTAGNE: That's LBJ biographer Robert Caro describing a moment that would lead six week later to a now-famous speech, Johnson's first State of the Union address. We're marking its 50th anniversary today.
GREENE: LBJ laid out an ambitious plan to fight poverty. It would help him politically as many liberals who supported more help for the poor were suspicious of the new president, but poverty was also something this president knew personally.
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PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON: We shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.
GREENE: NPR is spending time this year looking at whether the nation has won or lost the war on poverty. Now, with the help of biographer Robert Caro, let's return to the moment that war was declared in that speech by Johnson.
CARO: To look at his face as he's saying those words, you know, Johnson did not have a handsome face, but he had a very tough face, and sometimes his eyes narrow and his lips would get into a very thin, grim line, and they're sort of pulled down on the corners so they almost seem like a snarl.
I wrote in my book that the senators and representatives sitting below him as he was making the speech were suddenly looking into a face that they knew from his time in Congress, the face of a Lyndon Johnson who was determined to win. He put everything into that speech because it was something he believed in so deeply.
GREENE: Well, let's talk about why he believe in it so deeply. A lot of it goes back to his childhood in Texas.
CARO: Yes, you know, his father failed. He once had been a very respected state legislator and businessman, and he totally failed. And as a result, for the rest of his boyhood, Lyndon lived in a home that they were literally afraid every month that the bank might take away.
And there was often no food in the house, and neighbors had to bring covered dishes with food. In this little town, to be that poor, there were constant moments of humiliation for him, and insecurity; was a terrible boyhood.
GREENE: You wrote in one of your books that he hated poverty so much that there were moments when, for example, someone would point out some children passing by and say that they were wearing rags and he would get very offended by that and say, those are not rags.
CARO: Yes. Offended and hurt. You know, one of the time that happened was when they were on - he was still vice president and they were on a motorcade in Iran and they passed a group of children and one of the people with him, A Dr. Hurst, his cardiologist actually, said to Johnson: Look at the rags those children are wearing.
And Johnson just exploded and he said: That's not rags. Those are patched clothes. That's a lot different from rags. And Hurst said I realized then how much he hated poverty. And the reason, of course, that rags meant something very specific to Johnson was that he had younger brothers and sisters and they were wearing patched clothes because they were so poor.
He didn't want them called rags. Rags meant something even worse.
GREENE: This speech, the War on Poverty, where did those words come from? Did they come from Johnson himself?
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CARO: Well, it's very interesting. Nobody really knows that. I talked to Ted Sorensen who was Kennedy's, you know, great speech writer.
GREENE: Speech writer and advisor and...
CARO: And immense help to me. He lives near me and we used to talk in the afternoons about these things. He once said to me, you know, that sort of - he didn't use the word corny. I can't remember his right word. He said President Kennedy would never use a phrase like that. However, looking through Kennedy's speeches, he had used and probably in a speech Sorensen wrote, that phrase.
GREENE: Sorensen just forgot about that it might have been his words.
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CARO: Absolutely. But, you know, I wrote in this last book, "The Passage of Power," I said, but he loved that phrase, and was part of his hatred of poverty because Johnson could be a very ruthless man. And I wrote he knew what to do. You know, he says poverty is ignorance, lack of education...
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JOHNSON: ...and a lack of education and training. And a lack of medical care and housing. And a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.
CARO: These were, to Johnson, real-life foes, and Johnson knew what to do with enemies; you destroy them. So he loved the word war. Now he didn't see anything wrong with it.
GREENE: Robert Caro, can you help me make sense of this moment in history? We have Lyndon Johnson giving this War on Poverty speech. You're talking about how personal this was for him, but you also have spent a lot of time writing about how politically calculating this man always was. I mean, what does this moment in this speech tell us about this president?
CARO: Well, to me, Lyndon Johnson, in everything he did, there was always a political calculation. But in some of the things that he did, there was - I wrote in "The Passage of Power" the phrase - I just found it here, is there was something more, something that had to do less with strategy than with memories. And I think that driving him was not only the political calculation to make himself more palatable to liberals, to put his own stamp on the presidency because he was going to be running for re-election, there was also the memories of his youth and what poverty meant to him, and how it hadn't been his fault that he was in poverty.
And that translates in this speech into the sentences where he basically says too many people are living on the outskirts of hope.
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JOHNSON: ...of hope. Some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. And this administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.
GREENE: Lyndon Johnson speaking 50 years ago today. We were speaking about that moment with historian and biographer Robert Caro. His most recent book, "The Passage of Power" recounts the early weeks of Johnson's presidency and the launch of what we now know as the war on poverty.
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This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. Good morning. In Brazil, a petition asking the government to give asylum to Edward Snowden has almost 75,000 signatures. The former NSA contractor wrote an open letter to the Brazilian people last month and he praised the South American nation for its stand against America's spying tactics. Still, as NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports, opinion is divided on what to do about Snowden.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: Should they or shouldn't they? That's the question Brazilians are asking themselves after Snowden's letter.
RICARDO DE SOUZA: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Ricardo de Souza is a 37 year old hairdresser. He says, I think the Brazilian government should give him asylum. He did something good for humanity, he says.
JULIANE KAORI MATSUBAYASHI: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Juliane Kaori Matsubayashi is a 24 year old editorial assistant. I don't think so, she says. I think he should go back to the United States but he shouldn't be punished, she says. Opinion too is divided among the cognisati. Last month, a group of senators came out in support of the former NSA employee. Even a Supreme Court justice, Luis Roberto Barroso, spoke in his defense.
JUSTICE LUIS ROBERTO BARROSO: (speaks Portuguese)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: If Brazil had given him asylum and I was still a lawyer, I would have defended him, Barroso told Brazil's biggest daily. Columnists have also come out on Snowden's side, writes Helio Schwartsman in Folha de Sao Paulo. He gave an unequivocal service to governments around the world and U.S. citizens. I am of the opinion that if he asks, asylum should be granted.
But another columnist, Reinaldo Azevedo, wrote in the right-wing Veja magazine's blog: Snowden is a traitor to his own country. What does Brazil gain by giving him shelter? Pedro Arruda is a political analyst at Sao Paulo's Catholic University.
PEDRO ARRUDA: (Through translator) It is very unlikely asylum will be given. President Dilma Rousseff has already expressed herself, or rather her silence has given her opinion.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Brazil's government has indeed been circumspect. It says that Snowden has not formally asked for asylum, so it hasn't considered the matter - hardly rolling out the welcome mat. Paulo Sotero is the director of the Brazil Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He says President Rousseff already showed her displeasure by postponing a state visit to the U.S. She is also pushing United Nations action on global Internet privacy issues.
PAULO SOTERO: She obviously was very upset about the revelations, but values Brazil-U.S. relationship and knows how important it is to cultivate those relationships, especially in this moment that Brazil is starting to face some tough economic issues and needs to integrate its economy more and more with advanced countries, especially with the United States.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Those revelations, written in the Brazilian press by Rio de Janeiro-based journalist Glenn Greenwald, include allegations that the NSA was spying on Rousseff's personal emails and on the state oil company, Petrobras. Julia Sweig is the director of Latin America studies for the Council on Foreign Relations. She says also while Snowden is a popular figure in Brazil, his fate is not top of the agenda here.
JULIA SWEIG: I don't think the Brazilian public is by and large looking to pick a big public fight with the United States.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: She says granting asylum to Snowden would be a bridge too far for Brazil. Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Sao Paulo.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And we expect to interview Robert Gates in the next few days. He was defense secretary for both Presidents Bush and Obama, and the memoir he's soon to publish is making news for his sharp assessments of two administrations. Gates describes a remarkable conversation he witnessed between President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
In it, Clinton admits it was political reasons that prompted her to oppose the troop surge in Iraq in 2007. At the time, she was running for president against Barack Obama, who had long opposed that war. Gates complains about the administration's, quote, "total focus on politics." He also contends that two vice presidents, Joe Biden and Dick Cheney, focused too much on politics at the expense of policy.
MONTAGNE: Robert Gates, a Republican, does praise President Obama at times. At one point in his memoir, he compares Obama's deliberate decision-making to that of Abraham Lincoln.
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MONTAGNE: And it's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.
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During the seven years after 9-11 that the CIA used what it called enhanced interrogation techniques, three detainees endured the harshest technique: waterboarding.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
One was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of 9-11. Another was Abu Zubaydah, known as al-Qaida's travel agent, for helping coordinate attacks.
MONTAGNE: Their experience with waterboarding - what many critics call torture - has generated outrage for years. John Rizzo was the CIA's acting general counsel at the time, and helped usher in the program of enhanced interrogation.
GREENE: He is out with a memoir, and he joined us to look back at the controversies and crises in his long career at the CIA, including one not of his making.
MONTAGNE: As the CIA's top lawyer, you found yourself the center of a huge scandal, which involved videotapes: many, many hours, over several days, that documented the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, one of al-Qaida's operatives. Those tapes were destroyed against your expressed wishes, and many other higher-ups. Mostly, I think many of us thought, well, they were destroyed because the CIA didn't want to look so bad. It would be a scandal. But you suggest there was a little bit more to it than that.
JOHN RIZZO: Yeah. You know, those of us who were opposed to those tapes being destroyed - speaking of myself - I mean, any sentient lawyer, I think, would have said to a client, look, this will not look good. If you destroy these things, people are going to assume you're destroying them because there's something hideous or wrong in them.
But I do think that the people - and I'm talking here about the head of, first, the Counterterrorism Center, and then later, the director of operations, a man named Jose Rodriguez, a man whom I did and continue to respect and consider a friend. But he was convinced - when he first came to me, urging the approval to destroy them - he said he was convinced that sooner or later, these tapes would be made public somehow, somewhere. And I distinctly recall him saying someday, these things are going to be shown on "60 Minutes." I know it. And when they are, the faces of the agency interrogators, even if there's some attempt to hide their identities, people will find out about them. Bad guys will find out about them, and these people will be in jeopardy.
MONTAGNE: You do also write, though, that you have no doubt - you were that powerful and that high up - that if you'd said the word, if you'd pushed it, much, if not all, of the enhanced interrogation initiative would have died before it was born. That's how you put it. Why didn't you? Because you had doubts.
RIZZO: It's somewhat inchoate, and especially trying to explain my rationale in 2002. Now, we're in - 12 years later. But it's necessary to go back in time. The country was in the grips of extreme peril and dread. Most everyone, I think it's fair to say, assumed that it wasn't a question of if, but when the next major attack was coming in early 2002. And here we had a fellow, Abu Zubaydah, that all of our experts claimed that if there was going to be another such attack, this guy Zubaydah would know about it. And in the professional conclusion of our interrogators, he wasn't talking. He was holding back. He was never going to talk.
So, sure, I could have - I mean, at that point, I had enough experience and reputation in, you know, my position at the time. You know, I could have gone to the CIA director and - George Tenet, and told him I think these are risky, dangerous. I don't know whether they constitute torture or not. But regardless of what the legal definition is, we shouldn't do this. And that would have ended it, I'm confident.
But what if I had done that? And what if there had been a second attack a week or a month afterwards, and there were thousands of bodies lying in the streets or in rubble somewhere, and we shied away because it was me? It was me who convinced the CIA leadership not to do it. And Abu Zubaydah is meanwhile telling his captors that you guys didn't get me to talk. In the final analysis, I couldn't countenance a thought of having to live with that possibility. So, that, more than any other, is what caused me to not basically stop this idea in its infancy.
MONTAGNE: Much of what we've been talking about took place during the Bush administration. In the Obama administration, catching and harshly interrogating reputed terrorists has given way, more or less, to killing them: targeted killings by unmanned drones. You retired in 2009, but you have some knowledge of this, direct knowledge of this. How is it decided who to target?
RIZZO: There are details about the drone program I simply can't address, because it remains a classified U.S. government program, notwithstanding all the public pronouncements that have been made by senior officials. And, you know, I was not allowed to get into that kind of operational detail in the book. I mean, suffice it to say, it's not willy-nilly, that there is a vetting process. It's a very careful - and I assume continues to be - a very careful, selective process.
MONTAGNE: Although you did once describe it to Newsweek magazine as a hit list, which is pretty dramatic.
RIZZO: Yeah. Yeah. You would have to raise that, wouldn't...
(LAUGHTER)
MONTAGNE: You got in trouble for that, too, didn't you? You said too much.
RIZZO: Yeah. Yeah. That's a - yeah. That's a - I mean, that's another story in and of itself. But that was my fault, my mistake. And I was told not to talk about it in those terms again. So that's one of the reasons I have to be circumspect now.
MONTAGNE: Well, let me just ask you one thing that is your opinion. On one of the last pages of the book, you know, in a section, sort of, lessons learned, you refer to the drone program as one of the more ironic lessons - I mean, just your opinion. How do you mean by that?
RIZZO: Well, the drone program was begun, actually, about the same time that the enhanced interrogation program was done, back in 2002. And I know it was no secret this was happening. It was reported. And yet during all of those years - and not, actually, frankly, until the last year or two - was there ever, that I could discern, any objection on moral or legal grounds from Congress, from human rights organizations, about the U.S. government conducting an organized program of killing. While at the same time, an organized program of admittedly aggressive interrogations was deemed to be morally and legally unjustifiable and reprehensible. And I found that dichotomy - and I still do - ironic.
MONTAGNE: But, in hindsight, looking back at this entire program, would you dispute that enhanced interrogation techniques do not and did not produce useful intelligence, or at least intelligence that couldn't be gotten otherwise?
RIZZO: Well, I mean, let me say this: I'm not going to tell you that it is absolutely impossible. I think that's unknowable, honestly. I can't tell you that the information that we derived couldn't have been gotten. It's just a question of: How long would that have taken? And would it have been too late?
MONTAGNE: Well, thank you very much for joining us.
RIZZO: Thank you, Renee.
MONTAGNE: John Rizzo's memoir, "Company Man: 30 Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA."
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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm David Greene.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
We're going to spend the next few minutes looking at some of the reasons why South Sudan seems to be falling apart, just a couple of years after celebrating its independence from the North. Independence was also seen as an American success, because the rebellion in the South was a long-running bipartisan cause in Washington. So, when a vicious cycle of ethnic killing broke out last month, the U.S. pushed hard for peace negotiations between the countries feuding politicians, its president, and its vice president. Those peace talks aren't going well, and that highlights that the U.S. influence with the government and its leaders has its limits, while some question how the U.S. has used what influence it has.
NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Aid groups paint a grim picture of what's happening in world's newest nation. Elke Leidel, who is with Concern Worldwide, managed to visit thousands of displaced people in an oil-rich region where rebels have gained ground. She says there's an urgent need for a ceasefire and for humanitarian access.
ELKE LEIDEL: All this should happen very, very quickly if we want to avoid an even bigger disaster. It is already a disaster but it will become bigger and bigger every minute if it is not stopped.
KELEMEN: There were plenty of warning signs last year but she says no one expected the violence to escalate so quickly. Princeton Lyman echoes that. He's a longtime diplomat who was, until last year, the Obama administration's envoy to the region. Lyman spent much of his tenure trying to resolve the outstanding hostilities between South Sudan and its former rulers in the North. And he had a hard time getting Washington to raise concerns about internal politics in the South.
PRINCETON LYMAN: You had so much sympathy for the South that it became very difficult to criticize them for anything.
KELEMEN: South Sudan's constituency included administration officials as well as celebrities. Lyman says he understands their sympathy for the South, where millions died as mainly Christian and animist rebels fought a decade's long war of independence from the Arab rulers in Khartoum. But once South Sudan became a state, he says, the U.S. needed to be more hard headed.
LYMAN: I can't tell you the number of times people accused me of quote, "moral equivalency" - that you're putting them on the moral equivalency with Khartoum, which is the personification of evil.
KELEMEN: And Lyman says South Sudan's President Salva Kiir used that constituency to his benefit and ignored U.S. advice on internal matters.
LYMAN: He was listening more and more to what I call the secure-i-crats9ph), the people who were telling him you are surrounded by enemies, who let us take care of them - we'll harass them, we'll kill them, we'll jail them. And we tried hard pushing him back on this and we weren't successful.
KELEMEN: Ted Dagne has a different perspective. He worked as a U.N. advisor to Kiir's government until last summer.
TED DAGNE: I don't think people really understood what has transpired over the past six months very well.
KELEMEN: Last summer, Kiir fired his vice president and longtime political rival Riek Machar - someone Dagne says has never been happy in the number two spot.
DAGNE: He's very open. He's always engaged international diplomats. But he has always been ambitious over past 20 years to assume power and to become the number one.
KELEMEN: Both in the rebel movement in South Sudan, and now in the independent state. That political infighting has touched off tribal violence that has been hard to control. And the U.S. leverage is limited, says Dagne, a longtime advocate for South Sudan.
DAGNE: It's like seeing your child, who you brought up to be a great kid, seeing him moving in the direction that is influenced by bad behavior. And what I see in South Sudan is once independence was achieved, some of the leaders, in my view, have forgotten what they were elected to do.
KELEMEN: Dagne says the best the U.S. can do is to work with regional players to send a united and constructive message, urging both sides to negotiate. And to make clear to Machar that he won't be recognized if he tries to seize power.
Much is at stake, says Lyman, the former envoy on the Sudans.
LYMAN: If this becomes a really failed state - if we can't resolve this conflict and bring this country back - it will be a blight on the region, and a sad ending, I think, in everybody's mind to what was a just struggle for independence.
KELEMEN: And one the U.S. has backed diplomatically and financially for many years.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Egypt is another African country where the U.S. has deep ties but where there has been plenty of turmoil.
Let's focus on one community that found a bit of holiday peace there. It was Christmas yesterday for Egypt's large population of Coptic Christians. Following the military coup last summer that ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, there was a wave of attacks on Christians. But as they mark the holiday yesterday, many said they're beginning to feel more hopeful that their country's political situation is turning in their favor.
NPR's Leila Fadel sent this report.
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Christmas eve mass began at 8PM at this small Coptic church in Cairo. Young women flaunted new clothes, and flipped their freshly coifed hair as they walked into church. People purchased round loaves of bread used for communion.
And Rafiq Samy took a picture of his toddler and his wife in front of the nativity scene in the church courtyard.
RAFIQ SAMY: I think, number one, that all Christians will pray for is our peace, our country peace actually, then our peace of mind, because we miss this also, through the last three years.
FADEL: And despite the broad crackdown on Islamists and critics of the military-backed government, Samy believes the coup was a blessing that will lead Egypt to prosperity and stability. The future, he says, will be brighter.
SAMY: I see that the light is coming on.
FADEL: It is a sentiment repeated by many here at the Boutroseya Church on Christmas Eve. Egypt's interim president made a historic visit to the Coptic pope to wish him a Merry Christmas this year. The first such visit since the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser.
And at the main cathedral, Pope Tawadros II reassured the community in his sermon broadcast on television.
POPE TAWADROS II: (Through Translator) If we are going through rough times, then we should be sure that they will be followed by better days.
FADEL: It has been a tough three years for Egypt, political turmoil, instability, sporadic violence and sharp economic decline. And minority communities, like the Christians, who make up at least 10 percent of Egypt's more than 80 million people, have at times felt the pressure most intensely.
Following Morsi's ouster, at least 50 churches were attacked. Many Islamists scape-goated Christians, accusing them of being the driving force behind the coup. Christians blamed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood for the violence. But there is no proof that the Brotherhood organized the attacks.
On Monday night, outside the main cathedral where the pope gave midnight mass, army tanks lined up, roads were blocked and police patrolled.
Christians in Egypt have long suffered injustice. They can't build churches without presidential permission. This may change if Egyptians vote in a new constitution later this month. And for decades, Egypt's leaders have glossed over religious violence. Just months after the 2011 revolution, Egyptian troops attacked Christian protesters in Cairo, leaving more than two dozen dead. Later Egyptian state television called on honorable citizens to protect the army from the Christians.
Now, analysts say, the military-backed government is trying to use the Coptic community as a pawn in its propaganda war with the Muslim Brotherhood. But analysts like Ishak Ibrahim of the Egyptian Initiative for Human Rights, says the government still hasn't done enough to protect the community.
ISHAK IBRAHIM: (Foreign language spoken)
FADEL: He says the government has the responsibility to protect all Egyptians, and their responsibility doubles when it comes to Christian Egyptians, because they have been the target of religious violence in Egypt for decades.
But on Christmas, the worry faded away and the midnight mass at Bourtoseya church was filled with joy.
(SOUNDBITE OF SINGING AND CHURCH BELLS)
FADEL: Rozan Rafaat stood with her sister in the church courtyard next to a row of lit candles.
ROZAN RAFAAT: (Foreign language spoken)
FADEL: We celebrate, regardless of the circumstances, she says. I'm sure that God will protect us and even if something happens, it was His will and we could not change anything.
Leila Fadel, NPR News, Cairo.
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GREENE: This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
NPR's business news starts in the App Store.
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MONTAGNE: Apple reports $10 billion in App sales, making 2013 a benchmark year for its mobile store. Last month, with the holiday season, iPhone and iPad users spent one billion dollars downloading virtual games and gadgets.
Apple credits their new operating system, iOS 7, for inspiring both new apps and redesigns of popular old ones. Some of the big moneymakers are games like "Minecraft" and the guessing game from Ellen DeGeneres, called "Heads Up."
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK, let's hear about a company that largely missed out on the mobile device boom. Intel - the giant computer chip maker. Chances are you won't find anything from Intel in your smartphone. But they are looking for ways to get in the game as the world of computing moves to new places - like your wrist, and in your ears. Here's NPR's Steve Henn.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: For a couple of years now, Intel has kind of reminded me of GM in the early 1970s. Back then, GM was making these big powerful cars. And when the VW Beetle and the Toyota Corrola showed up on American shores, big sedans were done.
In computing, the mobile revolution has hit Intel like the gas crisis. All of sudden it was really important to produce computer chips that sip power from a tiny battery instead of gulping it from a wall socket.
SERGIS MUSHELL: I don't think they've ever denied it, that they're behind the curve and they're coming in and putting all their efforts in to go after mobility.
HENN: Sergis Mushell tracks this industry for Gartner Research. He says today you not only need to make a fast chip, you need an energy-efficient one as well.
MUSHELL: It's all about performance.
HENN: And as our devices get smaller and computers are built into things like watches and glasses, batteries shrink and this problem gets even harder.
Mike Bell at Intel says his company is determined to compete in this space. Bell runs Intel's new devices group.
MIKE BELL: In my mind, this technology is going to take off technology when it is embedded that people look at things and don't even realize there's technology there. Like people look and go, wow, that has a computer inside of it?
HENN: Bell shows me a pair of ear buds designed by Intel. They look normal, but actually monitor your heart rate, and an app for athletes connects that heart data to your music collection.
BELL: And if you are below your target heart rate zone, it plays fast music to speed you up.
HENN: Then he shows me a tiny computer - it's just about the size of a postage stamp. Intel calls it the Edison. It has a Linux processor and connects to the net wirelessly. And it's small enough to build into clothing - like a new born baby's onesie.
DULCIE MADDEN: My name is Dulcie Madden. I am the CEO and co-founder of Rest Devices and we make the Mimo smart baby monitor.
HENN: A baby monitor your baby wears.
MADDEN: The actual onesie itself has two green sensors on it. When you clip on a little turtle that is about the size of a nilla wafer - thereabouts - a mom or a dad will put it on their baby and then they can see in real time their babies breathing, skin temperature, body position, activity level - so if the baby is awake or asleep, and then you can listen to audio,
HENN: It's cute. The green sensors look like leaves and the turtle is crawling over the rim of the baby's belly. Intel's little computer goes inside that plastic turtle - and it's small enough that Madden and her team had to do a lot of work to make sure it wasn't a choking hazard.
But no, it's not a poopy diaper alarm. It's really aimed at anxious parents.
CORRIE LUONGO: I'm a very laid-back parent in the day-to-day stuff, but at night, I couldn't shake the anxiety.
HENN: Corrie Luongo helped test the Mimo wireless onesie on her third baby, Callan.
LUONGO: They were very good sleepers. They slept through the night from a very early age, but I never did.
HENN: This wireless onesie let Luongo check that every thing was OK from a warm cozy bed. She liked it so much she now works for the company.
But Dulcie Madden says helping anxious parents sleep is just the beginning of what a little wireless onesie computer could accomplish. Already, her team has designed a bottle warmer that learns a baby's feeding habits - without you havening to program anything - and turns itself on when automatically when that onesie sends it a message that your baby is waking up.
Madden says, the coffeemaker could be next.
Steve Henn NPR News, Silicon Valley.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And the recently merged American Airlines and US Airways just launched the first of several changes the carrier says are designed for its frequent flyers.
Bill Zeeble with member station KERA in Dallas reports that what is now the world's largest airline is assuring its best clients they'll keep their perks.
BILL ZEEBLE, BYLINE: The first thing Fort Worth-based American Airlines wants customers to know is that they can collect and use frequent flyer miles earned on either American or US Airways. Airline consultant Michael Boyd says the airline learned from more turbulent recent mergers.
MICHAEL BOYD: When United merged with Continental, there were a lot of glitches there of transferring miles and it caused some heartburn among passengers.
ZEEBLE: So American's new president, Scott Kirby, who held the same title at US Air, said in a statement: Customers get to reap the benefits of the merger, and experience perks they value most.
Boyd says the move just makes sense.
BOYD: This calms the herd - if you will - so the frequent flyer knows that, I'm not going to have to worry about my club room benefits. So you get that out of the way. Consumer anxiety is what causes consumer dissatisfaction. That's what they're trying to do away with.
ZEEBLE: Elite customers of both carriers also will continue early check-in and boarding, and have bags checked at no charge. The company says other changes will take place over the next 18 months or more.
For NPR News, I'm Bill Zeeble in Dallas.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And our last word in business is: Spread the butter.
Maybe some of you are slathering butter on a piece of toast right now or dropping a pat of butter into your oatmeal. You're not alone. Butter consumption is at a 40-year high - and here's an image I almost hesitate to offer - the average American - according to some estimates - eats 5.6 pounds of butter every year.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
That's a 25 percent increase over the past decade. Its jump in popularity is due to an overall trend towards natural foods, and a rejection of processed ones.
And the FDA recently banned trans fats, the hydrogenated oils found in many imitation butter products.
GREENE: But even with the rise of foodies and state fair butter sculptures, we're not even close to the per-capita consumption of the 1930s, which was over 18 pounds of butter a year per person. Why did it make me...
MONTAGNE: That's a lot toast.
GREENE: I don't want to have any butter now for days.
MONTAGNE: Mashed potatoes.
(LAUGHTER)
MONTAGNE: I don't know, it sounds good to me, David.
GREENE: OK. OK.
MONTAGNE: Butter...
GREENE: More power to you. That's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
MONTAGNE: And I'm Renee Montagne.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene. Good morning.
The fight on Capitol Hill over whether to extend long-term unemployment benefits has echoes of so many debates of the past over the best way for the government to help people who are struggling economically. Supporters of measures like this say how can Washington turn its back on people who are out of work and trying to pay the bills? Opponents talk about how short-term solutions can be a distraction from getting to the real problems.
Yesterday, a bill extending unemployment benefits for three months averted a Republican filibuster in the Senate. President Obama immediately urged Congress to pass the bill, saying the extension will provide, quote, "a vital economic lifeline."
But as NPR's Ailsa Chang reports, even if this legislation does ultimately pass the Senate, it faces a stiff battle in the House.
AILSA CHANG, BYLINE: By Capitol Hill standards, this was about as nail-bitingly suspenseful as it gets. A vote count that genuinely caught lawmakers off-guard. By yesterday morning, many Democrats had expected to see a three-month extension of jobless benefits fail, including Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a lead sponsor of the bill.
SEN. JACK REED: I guess being Irish I'm always expecting the worst. So, yeah, I was surprised. But that might be more cultural than political.
CHANG: Moments later, President Obama praised the Senate for clearing the path, and he urged Congress to swiftly finish the job and restore benefits that had expired last month for 1.3 million people.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: These are not statistics. These are your neighbors, your friends, your family members. It could at some point be any of us.
CHANG: But the vast majority of Republicans in both the House and Senate are solidly opposed to the measure. Many, like Jeff Sessions of Alabama, argue these payments will do nothing to boost job growth or to address the root causes of unemployment.
SEN. JEFF SESSIONS: You have fever for two weeks - very high fever - and all you're doing is taking an aspirin is not a very smart thing. We need to figure out what's causing this fever.
CHANG: Even Republicans who voted to let the bill proceed in the Senate have real concerns, such as Dan Coats of Indiana. He still wants to see cuts in the federal budget to absorb the six-and-a-half billion dollars these benefits will cost.
SEN. DAN COATS: This deserves a debate. And if we can put reforms in the program to ensure that those who really need it can get it, and we can find a way to pay for it, that ought to be given an chance. It's really going to be up to the majority leader as to whether he allows us to debate this, to offer amendments and vote and get it to the point where I can support it.
CHANG: But majority leader Harry Reid says he it's inappropriate to find budget cuts when Congress is providing emergency relief.
SEN. HARRY REID: My colleagues say they want to pay for this bill. This is new religion for them because all five times that President Bush signed extended unemployment benefits, it wasn't paid for.
CHANG: Senate leaders say the tectonic plates are shifting this election year; gripes about Obamacare will soon give way to concerns about unemployment. But as confidently as they spoke yesterday, the Senate's proposal still needs to pass the House to become law - and it's not looking pretty.
Outside conservative groups are grading lawmakers for their votes on this bill. And Andrew Roth, of Club for Growth, says he's confident the bill will die in the lower chamber.
ANDREW ROTH: The House has said that it's dead on the arrival. And I'd like to take them at their word on that. Now, in the end, will they cave to Harry Reid and President Obama? Sure, that's always a possibility. But right now, it looks like they're going to demand some sort of concessions in order to pass the bill.
CHANG: House speaker John Boehner stood his ground Tuesday, and said in a statement that the House will focus on growing the economy, and that the President needs to come up with a way to offset the cost of any extension.
House Democrat Sander Levin of Michigan says the speaker is just trying to make unemployment someone else's problem.
REP. SANDER LEVIN: I don't think we should play ping-pong with the lives and the lifelines of the unemployed of this country. I don't think it should be offset. If the speaker thinks so, let him propose a specific offset, which he hasn't.
CHANG: Levin and other Democrats say this three-month extension will buy everyone some time. Pass it now. And then, during the next three months, they promise they'll be happy to talk about any offsets or job growth programs Republicans desire.
Ailsa Chang, NPR News, the Capitol.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
In other Senate business, the Judiciary Committee today considers President Obama's nominee to lead the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. That nomination could not have come at a more challenging time. Last year, the Supreme Court overturned a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Now, government lawyers are trying to find another way to protect minorities at the ballot box. But NPR's Carrie Johnson reports the president's nominee could get bogged down in something else - battles over his record.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: The son of immigrants from Ireland and Nigeria, Debo Adegbile grew up in the Bronx, where he endured stretches of homelessness. He also worked as a child actor on "Sesame Street" - as in this sketch where he introduced Grover to a letter of the alphabet.
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FRANK OZ: (As Grover) That is an S?
DEBO ADEGBILE: (As character) Yes.
OZ: (As Grover) That - I got this thing that - this over here - over here is S?
ADEGBILE: (As character) Yes.
OZ: (As Grover) This is an old friend of mine. Hey - S, baby!
JOHNSON: Years later, Adegbile put himself through school and eventually got a job at the storied NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He's argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on two occasions, including a landmark case last year involving federal oversight of states with a history of discrimination.
ADEGBILE: This statute is, in part, about our march through history to keep promises that our Constitution says for too long were unmet. And this court and Congress have both taken these promises seriously. It is reasonable for Congress to make the decision that we need to stay the course so that we can turn the corner.
JOHNSON: The high court, divided 5 to 4, ruled against those arguments, and tossed out the Voting Rights Act system that made states get preapproval before changing their election laws. For conservatives like Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, the court was right and Adegbile was wrong. Von Spakovsky has followed Adegbile's work for years, and has doubts about his record.
HANS VON SPAKOVSKY: They need to nominate someone who believes in the race-neutral enforcement of our discrimination laws. And this individual doesn't believe in that, and that's one of the reasons why he really should not be confirmed.
JOHNSON: But former colleague Elise Boddie, now a law professor at Rutgers, couldn't disagree more.
ELISE BODDIE: Debo is a passionate advocate. He's also principled and believes strongly in the Constitution and strongly in the civil rights laws. And I am quite confident that he would enforce the laws as appropriate, and the country would be very lucky to have him.
JOHNSON: It's clear the administration wants to build up its civil rights legal muscle. In addition to promoting Adegbile, the Justice Department is bringing in another voting rights heavyweight, Stanford Law rofessor Pam Karlan. Karlan's been thinking about new strategies for a long time. Here she is last summer, at a conference sponsored by the American Constitution Society.
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PAMELA KARLAN: And so we need to be vigilant about defending the gains we have, and about thinking in the long term about how we build strategies. We build the intellectual capital to make arguments so that we have the tools in place the next time we have a Supreme Court that has been induced to listen.
JOHNSON: Karlan and Adegbile are both part of that effort, taking on such steep challenges as the federal cases against voter ID laws in Texas and North Carolina. But only Adegbile, as head of the civil rights division, will need Senate confirmation. In that struggle, he'll need to overcome the opposition not only of voter fraud activists, but also the Fraternal Order of Police.
The FOP wrote President Obama this week to express extreme disappointment in the nomination. They say Adegbile worked for the Legal Defense Fund when it handled an appeal from Mumia Abu-Jamal, an activist convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer. Allies of the nominee say that work was confined to issues of jury selection and jury instructions, which they consider matters of fairness and not evidence of his being soft on crime. But Adegbile will likely face questions on his view of that case today.
Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
A Swiss banker has pleaded not guilty to charges that he helped thousands of Americans evade paying their taxes. Raoul Weil was one of the top managers at UBS. It's a Swiss bank that helped nearly 20,000 Americans hide their assets in secret accounts. UBS already agreed to pay a large fine and hand over the names of U.S. account holders. Now, the Justice Department is prosecuting the man allegedly behind the massive tax fraud scheme. Here's NPR's Greg Allen.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Raoul Weil was the head of UBS's global wealth-management business. But Stephen Kohn, of the National Whistleblowers Center, says he was also something else.
STEPHEN KOHN: Weil is the kingpin. He ran the worldwide illegal bank program.
ALLEN: It's a program that catered to wealthy clients around the world, including thousands in the U.S. Prosecutors says UBS managers, led by Weil, broke U.S. and international laws by helping clients set up accounts intended to help them evade paying taxes. It all began to unravel in 2007, when a former UBS banker disclosed much of the scheme to U.S. authorities.
The U.S. indicted Weil the following year, charging him with conspiracy to commit tax fraud. He wasn't extradited to the U.S. though until last year, after he was picked up by Italian authorities while on vacation there. Yesterday, in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Weil pleaded not guilty to conspiracy. Edward Robbins, former tax prosecutor with the Justice Department, says he thinks the government will try to make a deal.
EDWARD ROBBINS: He's a huge catch. So the goal here, I would think, for the prosecutors would be to get him to cooperate and find out what else is going on at UBS that they missed.
ALLEN: Despite all the walls that have come down, Stephen Kohn says there's still a lot about UBS and Swiss banking that prosecutors haven't uncovered - at least publicly. Kohn represented former UBS employee Bradley Birkenfeld, who first blew the whistle on the bank's overseas account practices.
Kohn worries the government may make a deal without requiring Weil to reveal all he knows about accounts held by government officials and other high-profile clients, including some from the U.S.
KOHN: There's been very few big fish identified. And we know through Birkenfeld that there are specific people that should have been identified and should have been prosecuted and still have not.
ALLEN: Until the scheme fell apart, nearly 20,000 Americans held secret accounts at UBS. Tens of thousands more held secret accounts in other offshore banks. In 2009, after months of negotiations, UBS agreed to pay $780 million and to turn over to the IRS the names of its U.S. account holders. Nathan Hochman, the former chief tax prosecutor for the Justice Department, says it was a landmark settlement.
NATHAN HOCHMAN: The UBS case sort of broke the dam on foreign bank secrecy.
ALLEN: With the UBS revelations, the Justice Department extended its investigation to include other Swiss banks. A series of indictments followed. At the same time, under an amnesty program, nearly 40,000 U.S. taxpayers disclosed once-secret offshore accounts, netting more than $5 billion in taxes and penalties.
And Hochman says a new law going into effect this year goes further. It significantly tightens the penalties for foreign banks that don't disclose information on their U.S. accounts.
HOCHMAN: The information that the IRS is going to start getting from foreign banks will be extensive. And U.S. taxpayers won't be able to keep their unreported tax income abroad without fear that the U.S. government is going to find out about it.
ALLEN: Former UBS banker Raoul Weil will be back in court in two weeks. In the meantime, he's posted bail of $10.5 million. Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
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Edward Snowden is, of course, facing some serious criminal charges here in the United States for stealing classified documents and leaking details of domestic and international surveillance programs. It's unclear if Snowden will ever return to this country to face charges, but that hasn't stopped a vigorous debate in recent days over whether Snowden should be eligible for clemency.
We're going to hear two voices in that debate beginning today with Jennifer Granick. She's the director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Jennifer, thanks for coming on the program. We appreciate the program.
JENNIFER GRANICK: Thank you.
GREENE: So make the case for me, if you can, that Edward Snowden deserves some kind of clemency.
GRANICK: Well, we would not know what our government is doing, we would not know the extent to which they spy on us, were it not for Edward Snowden. There were whistleblowers before him about the NSA, but the documents that Snowden took proved the truth of what those whistleblowers and what Edward Snowden was saying. And only because we have those documents, our government has had to come clean about its practices.
GREENE: Well, let me ask you about what he uncovered. You say that he uncovered the extent to which our government is spying. It seems that to this point he has not uncovered that the government is doing anything illegal. Is that fair to say?
GRANICK: No, I don't think that is a fair characterization. Courts have called what the government's done unconstitutional. And, you know, the very people who passed the law that the government uses to justify that bulk collection have said that wasn't what they wanted the Patriot Act to say. So if Congress passes laws and the NSA interprets them in ways that are completely contrary to Congress's intent, that is not lawful - that's not lawful collection.
GREENE: Let me ask you about a column that appeared in Slate magazine, from Fred Kaplan. He suggested that, sure, Edward Snowden revealed, you know, some activities by the NSA spying on American citizens. But he asks why Edward Snowden had to keep going from there and reveal a lot of activities abroad that in theory could be very dangerous to this country when they're revealed. As he put it: An operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan, radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan's Northwest Territories.
Why did Edward Snowden have to go further than looking at domestic surveillance?
GRANICK: You know, I think the idea that we should only be worried domestic spying on Americans that clearly breaks the law is very narrow. This is not an area where there is a lot of law because the law is secret and the interpretation of the law is secret. What we've learned is that our government is doing things worldwide that definitely directly affect our privacy as Americans but affect the privacy of other people globally as well, that affect whether the network is secure, that affect our relationships with allies. And these are important things that go well beyond the question of is there just mass spying here at home.
We've learned so much more than that that's disturbing. And we have Edward Snowden to thank for that.
GREENE: Are there cases though where a government like the U.S. government needs to be able to legally keep its practices secret?
GRANICK: I do think that secrecy is appropriate in the practice of intelligence. But what we are doing now is we are totally over-classifying and keeping things secret that absolutely should not be secret. I don't see and I haven't heard any good case made that any of things that we've learned as a result of the documents from Edward Snowden have harmed national security. And if you look at the statements of officials, they've haven't identified anything either. They say, well, there might be harm, maybe there will be harm.
To me the things that clearly should be secret are: Who are the suspected terrorists that we are trailing? That is the purpose of the top-secret FISA court, to approve those secret targets. But what should not be secret are extra-legal - meaning where there is no law to authorize it, but it's something that intelligence agencies have decided to do - that shouldn't be secret. Congress needs to review that. There needs to be public understanding.
And that's the only way that we have a conversation about what is the right balance, what are the right practices, what kind of nation do we want to be as a democracy at this point in history.
GREENE: Jennifer Granick is the director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Jennifer, thanks so much for joining us.
GRANICK: Thank you.
GREENE: As we've said, we're listening to all different viewpoints about Edward Snowden's future. And tomorrow in the program, we'll hear from a former general counsel at the NSA.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne.
Making headlines this week is the polar vortex. And we can report that Hell has frozen over. That would be Hell, Michigan where temperatures fell to minus 13 degrees and even colder with the wind-chill. There are conflicting histories as to how the tiny town got its name, probably from the German word for bright - not because it resembles a fiery underworld. Hell, Michigan is due to warm up today to a balmy high of 16 degrees.
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Good morning. I'm David Greene. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker will be at the Milwaukee County Courthouse early this morning. Not for a press conference. This isn't tied to any political scandal. He's got jury duty. The governor was bumped from a murder trial but then put on a jury for a personal injury lawsuit. Not the most high-profile case.
The judge reminded jurors not to read headlines about the case. Then he added that the media probably won't even be interested - except for that one familiar-looking juror. You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
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For beer drinkers, there's an explosion of choices out there - what with the boom in craft brewing. Besides the Pale Ales and Stouts, there are now dry hopped double brown ales - even chocolate and fruit infused beers.
NPR's Allison Aubrey has this morning last word in business. Actually, a bunch of words, on yet another frontier in the world of brewing.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Like a lot of couples, John Voorhees and Alicia Boyce do not have the same preferences when it comes to drinks with dinner. Alicia tends towards wine. John's more of a beer guy.
JOHN VOORHEES: Usually she encourages me on wine anyways.
AUBREY: But when they sat down to dinner recently at a restaurant in D.C. called The Red Hen, they were intrigued to be offered a drink neither of them had ever heard of. It's best described as a wine-beer mash up.
VOORHEES: This could be a good combination, you like wine, I like beer, so this could be, this could be it.
AUBREY: Bartender Victor Dooley Red pours the drink.
VICTOR DOOLEY: We serve it in a wine glass, kind of to remind people that's the whole idea - the whole, there's a touch of wine.
AUBREY: And as he pulls back the tap, what streams into the glass looks like just a just a dark ale, it's foamy and deep brown.
But what else is in there?
DOOLEY: It's almost like a hidden secret.
AUBREY: That secret? A red wine grape slurry called lees. It's basically the stuff that falls to the bottom of the barrel during the fermenting process. It's bits of grape skin and seed fragments, dead yeast cells.
And Red Hen owner Sebastian Zutant says blending it with beer creates a completely novel taste.
SEBASTIAN ZUTANT: It has a really distinct, kind of, like red wine characteristic as well as a beer characteristic. It has this like really kind of like rustic, pruney(ph), kind of like dried cranberry. It's cool stuff, it's weird stuff, it's funky stuff, but I think it works.
AUBREY: Sebastian says what sparked his interest in this wine-beer cross-over, is that he was talking to some friends in the local wine industry and they told him that they usually just toss out the wine lees. It's considered a waste product.
So he approached another friend, Jeff Hancock, who owns a local brewery called DC Brau. And, as the saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure.
JEFF HANCOCK: What we are looking at right now - that's the active brewing down in the brew house.
AUBREY: The brewery looks like a cross between a garage and a warehouse, and it is filled with steam.
It's like a vapor of bear.
HANCOCK: Right. Yeah. Unfortunately, since we have neighbors above us, we're in a basement unit, we weren't able to vent the steam outside. Traditionally, that is what you would have.
AUBREY: So they've just gotten used to all this aromatic steam, and for now it, kind of, adds to the charm.
HANCOCK: And now I think you can start to smell the hops a little bit.
AUBREY: What's in the tank is a porter ale. Now usually the process ends here. But for this new cross-over, the partners take the wine lees they get from two vineyards in Virginia and blend them with the beer.
So as the mist of hoppy steam drifts to the back of the brew house, we go to a wall that is stacked with old wine barrels. This is where the wine-beer fusion takes place.
The wine lees is a viscous, almost like cough-syrup.
HANCOCK: We are pouring the lees through a funnel into the top of the barrel.
AUBREY: This thick slurry is unappealing to the eye. But it's the taste Hancock is focused on. He's looking to pull the red wine tannins that give complex flavor out of the wine lees and into his beer.
HANCOCK: When you add it to the barrel and mix it to the beers, it creates a really, really unique flavor profile.
AUBREY: Back at The Red Hen, Sebastian Zutant says he's been serving this a few months, and customers seem to like it.
ZUTANT: It was definitely a crap shoot. We definitely rolled the dice and it seemed to work out quite nicely.
AUBREY: John Voorhees and Alicia Boyce are about to take their first sip.
ALICIA BOYCE: It smells like an old barn.
(LAUGHTER)
AUBREY: But then, she tastes it.
BOYCE: It's different. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean it's good.
AUBREY: And john's response.?
VOORHEES: I'm sold. Yeah. I would, you know, truly wine and beer together - right from the first taste.
AUBREY: It's the novelty that people seem to respond to. And DC Brau's Jeff Hancock says that's exactly what he's going for. With more than 2,400 breweries across the country now, the competition is tough.
HANCOCK: The further the competition grows, the further you have to distinguish yourself.
AUBREY: And like the owners of The Red Hen and DC Brau, Brewers from Colorado to Delaware are experimenting with all sorts of barrel aging and wine-beer combinations, fusing two of humankind's oldest beverages into one.
Allison Aubrey, NPR News.
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MONTAGNE: And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
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OK, how about something more low tech: The umbrella. These days when one breaks, you might just turn away. But it wasn't always like that. In Paris, umbrella repair was once a thriving trade but now it's just down to one shop.
NPR's Eleanor Beardsley sent this postcard.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR CHIMES)
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Bonjour, Monsieur Millet.
THIERRY MILLET: Bonjour.
BEARDSLEY: Thierry Millet's umbrella shop lies in a tiny passageway in what used to be a thriving artisanal district in Paris' 18th Arrondissement. Downstairs the tiny shop is bursting with elegant and colorful French-made umbrellas for sale.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
MILLET: (French spoken)
BEARDSLEY: Upstairs the umbrellas are all broken, lying in a pile in one corner. In boxes along the walls, Millet fingers stacks of ribs, springs, handles, and all kinds of umbrella parts you wouldn't even know the names for.
(SOUNDBITE OF BANGING)
BEARDSLEY: On his scarred, wooden work table Millet repairs about 10,000 umbrellas a year. He says you have to be fast and precise. My first burning question: Why bother to repair an umbrella at all?
MILLET: (Through Translator) First of all, in France alone we throw out about 15 million umbrellas a year, and they're not recycled. But it's more than that. People who come to me are attached to their umbrellas for sentimental reasons. Many times they have beautiful stories about them. So I feel obligated to restore them.
(SOUNDBITE OF BANGING)
BEARDSLEY: Millet says repeatedly buying cheap umbrellas costs more than investing in a one good one, which can last a lifetime. He harvests his parts from used umbrellas people give him. Millet wasn't born into the trade. He bought this shop 10 years ago after being laid off as director of a high-end furniture store. He says, luckily, his craftsman training at a French art school has made him very versatile.
(LAUGHTER)
BEARDSLEY: With his quick wit and convivial style, Millet has also become somewhat of a tourist attraction. His little umbrella shop from a bygone era is written-up in many guidebooks. It's also classified by the French government as a business of living heritage. Millet tells this group that umbrellas originated in China about 6,000 years ago. That makes repairing them the world's oldest profession, he says, with a wink.
MILLET: (Through Translator) Umbrellas began to be democratized in the beginning of the 19th century when the bourgeois class didn't have horse-drawn carriages, to protect them from the rain - so they started carrying umbrellas.
BEARDSLEY: Millet says umbrellas were popular into the 20th century, before falling out as a fashion statement. Later, the market was flooded with cheap imports from China.
(SOUNDBITE OF METAL)
BEARDSLEY: He says repairing umbrellas still brings surprises. Like the time he discovered a sword hidden in the shaft of one. Millet also found these brass umbrella parts engraved in the 1870s during the uprising of the Paris Commune.
MILLET: (French spoken)
BEARDSLEY: To the brave Parisians on the barricades, he reads.
Millet his work is seasonal - at best, nine months a year. Even though it's not raining today, 70-year-old Chantal Almeric has brought in two of her favorite umbrellas for repair.
CHANTAL ALMERIC: And I couldn't find another one which was automatic, and so light. You see? I bought it in Portugal many years ago.
(LAUGHTER)
ALMERIC: And I like it.
(LAUGHTER)
BEARDSLEY: Not surprisingly, Almeric loves umbrellas. She describes another one in her collection.
ALMERIC: With a lizard handles.
BEARDSLEY: A lizard?
ALMERIC: Yes, which come from my mother. And you see? And it is very nice one.
BEARDSLEY: And how old is this umbrella from your mother?
ALMERIC: Oh, I should say, perhaps hundred years.
(LAUGHTER)
ALMERIC: Oh, yes. Oh, magnifique...
BEARDSLEY: Almeric is delighted as Millet hands back one of her umbrellas, good as new. Millet says giving a second life to a much-loved object also gives a little youth back to its owner. And that's magic.
MILLET: Auvoir, Madame.
ALMERIC: Good-bye.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR CHIMES)
MILLET: Auvoir, Madame.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Auvoir, Monsieur.
BEARDSLEY: Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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Ishmael Beah was an adolescent when, as he's described it, rocket-propelled grenades introduced the people of his town to war. That was the mid-1990s.
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In his memoir, "A Long Way Gone," Beah wrote of losing his parents and brothers to Sierra Leone's vicious civil war, fleeing and wandering the countryside with a band of boys until he was recruited as a child soldier by government forces. He told of a descent into hell, committing atrocities, as many child soldiers did on both sides of the conflict.
MONTAGNE: In his new novel, "Radiance of Tomorrow," Beah imagines a journey, this one after the war is done. When he joined me, we began at the beginning, with an old woman walking back into her town to ruined homes and scattered bones, until she spots an old friend who greets her with caution. He's studying her, and she realizes he's looking at her to see if she has her nose and her arms and her lips.
ISHMAEL BEAH: During Sierra Leone war, there was a lot of amputation going on, where people were mutilated in different parts of their body. So, if you hadn't seen somebody for many, many years, when you saw them - and as you see in this character, this old man, he refuses to look at his friend. And when he finally found the courage to lift his head, he was checking to make sure if she was intact. And if she wasn't intact, if he was ready to take this burden of what she may look like, what she may be missing, into his memory.
And also, there's a question, that how do you move into the future while the past is still trying to pull at you very strongly? Because so many things have changed: so many images, so many ways people relate to each other. For example, before the war in this village, if a boy or a young man was walking on the path with a machete, it would be only looked at that boy was coming from a farm. But because of the war, now when you see a young person carrying a machete, people are afraid to pass them on the path, because holding a machete now has a newer way that you look at it. So, how do you change that image? How do you stop looking at it that way? But also the possibility of people find a way to come back together again with all of these difficulties, but it is not that easy.
MONTAGNE: Among the young people who show back up in this novel, one of the main ones is a teenage boy who calls himself Colonel, and he comes back leading a little troop of other kids. You can figure it out right from the beginning, he's been a child soldier. And he becomes the voice of justice for that town. Is that you? Do you see yourself in that character?
BEAH: I see a little bit of myself in that character, but also, it was one of the difficult characters to write, because I wanted to really have a little bit of a discussion through fiction about: What do you do with certain skill-set and certain habits and certain things that you've acquired during war?
Sometimes, some of these things don't need to be washed out of you, as most people will think whenever they see a former child soldier. They will think, oh, you need complete rehabilitation. You need to forget everything that happened in order to have a life. No, sometimes you don't.
Sometimes, actually, the very things that you've learned - for example, surviving - to survive requires a remarkable intelligence. Also, being able to know that when one is selfish, what it does to society when one wants everything for themselves - knowing that and not wanting that to repeat itself - also knowing how to just resist people trampling all over you as a human being and dehumanizing you. Some of these things can be used for positive force. Some of the things that young people learn during war - even though I don't want anybody to go to war - can be refocused in a positive way. So I wanted to play with that a little bit.
MONTAGNE: Well, Colonel, this young former child soldier, has a chance to stand up for his people when something like a second war comes to town in the form of a mining company. I'm wondering if you could read a passage. It's when everyone realizes this mining company wants their village.
BEAH: Yes. (Reading) The crowd started shouting: We own this land. No one consulted us. The officials, shielded from the people by their armed guards and police, got into their vehicles and left the townspeople to their quarrels. That evening, the usual layer of clouds that summoned night to cloak the sky were broken into many pieces and struggled to make their call. Thus, the night, too, arrived at a defeated pace that deepened the gloominess of the town. Even the birds didn't chant. They just went quietly into their nests as if they know that they would soon have to find new homes.
MONTAGNE: That is a hugely painful moment in this story. But it's a beautiful way to describe it, and it seems like, throughout the book, nature is another character. It engages.
BEAH: I mean, you know, I grew up in this landscape, and so I saw how nature behaved based on what was unfolding on the landscape itself, and particularly during the war. For example, also, when the gunshots were taking over the town - even the sounds in the atmosphere - the birds no longer sang, as they did in the morning. So you can feel that nature itself was afraid of what was unfolding.
MONTAGNE: In the book, you talk about language. You talk about, say, the expression a nest of air would be what you might call a soccer ball. Expressions that might be just a word or two in English are given these poetic renderings. What else would you hear when you were a child in your town?
BEAH: Sierra Leone has so many different languages, and most of these languages, the way they are spoken, are very image-driven. So things are said beautifully. The example that you gave, when you look at a ball, we describe the components that make a ball. So you say a nest of air, or a vessel that carries air. And so, as a kid, I already had a sense of narrative structure, orally. You have to capture the imagination of somebody to bring them to the landscape of the story, so that they can be there with you and smell, feel, hear and be a part of the experience very intimately. I'll give another example. You know, how you say night came suddenly in Mende - which is my mother tongue - you say: The sky rolled over and changed its sides. You know, so these are some of the expressions that you have as a kid that anybody would say.
MONTAGNE: This story - like, sadly, so many that find their way into the news - it doesn't seem able to have a happy, happy ending. But in the end, what seems to be important is that the tale gets told.
BEAH: Yes, certainly. The happy ending necessarily doesn't mean that, you know, everybody goes prancing in the sunlight and dancing. Sometimes it's the possibility of things about to change, or people's consciousness have changed to a certain extent, you know. And also, you know, what I try to say in this book is that people who live in certain conditions actually understand what true happiness is, and take that moment, whenever it is - even if it's one minute, 30 seconds - to actually be truly happy, because they know it's a rarity in many places. That actually to have it, to have that moment of peace, is precious. They understand that. And so when they're happy, they're genuinely happy. That's also a strength of my people. Otherwise, we would not be able to survive some of the things that have happened on this continent.
MONTAGNE: Ishmael Beah, thank you very much for joining us.
BEAH: Thank you.
MONTAGNE: The novel is called "Radiance of Tomorrow." You can read an excerpt at NPR.org. It's NPR News.
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We have heard many a story about how complicated signing up for the Affordable Care Act has been for people. Turns out buying dental coverage on the health exchanges - not so simple either. One aim of the new law is to protect the teeth of millions of children. It actually lists pediatric dental care as one of the 10 essential benefits health plans have to offer. But as NPR's Julie Rovner reports, a loophole means that in most states families don't actually have to buy the coverage.
JULIE ROVNER, BYLINE: Okay. Full disclosure here. It turns out that dental coverage under the Affordable Care Act is so confusing, it tripped me up. I said earlier this week that because dental coverage for children is one of the law's required benefits, it will be included in all health plans in state exchanges. That turns out mostly not to be the case, except in a handful of states, including Connecticut, which requires it.
JOE TOUSCHNER: It is very complex.
ROVNER: Joe Touschner is a policy analyst with the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. He's been tracking implementation of the pediatric dental benefit. He says the problem is that when Congress wrote the law, it was trying to satisfy two different goals.
TOUSCHNER: On one hand, they did make it part of the essential health benefits package. They said, you know, dental services are part of that.
ROVNER: But at the same time, he says, in part due to some strong lobbying from dental benefit providers, Congress also wanted to preserve a market that looked a lot like the current one.
TOUSCHNER: And in most cases now, if you have dental coverage, you get it through an employer, and it's offered separately from your health plan. You choose a health plan, but then you also choose a dental plan. So similarly in the exchanges, there's health plans and then there are separate dental plans.
ROVNER: So in some states there are only standalone dental plans and in some states there are both standalone plans and health plans that have children's dental benefits included. But there's another catch, says Colin Reusch. He's with the Children's Dental Health Project, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C.
COLIN REUSCH: We've got this loophole whereby families can choose not to purchase dental coverage for their children even though it's part of the essential health benefits. You know, we seem to have, you know, some disincentives to purchasing it.
ROVNER: That loophole was that while the law requires that pediatric dental coverage must be offered, families who don't buy it won't be penalized. And the disincentive? If a family buys standalone dental coverage, they won't get any federal subsidy even if they're eligible for help buying their overall health plan.
REUSCH: So if that plan doesn't include pediatric dental coverage, then you're getting no subsidy for dental coverage at all, period.
ROVNER: Another problem with dental coverage in the exchanges is it can be downright difficult to find. In a handful, it's not so hard, says Fay Donohue. She's president and CEO of Dentaquest, a dental benefits company that's providing standalone plans in some states and coverage that's part of health plans in others.
FAY DONOHUE: In some states, for example, Maryland or Massachusetts, you can go onto the exchange and shop just for dental and are able to pick a dental plan for yourself that makes sense and is a easy experience.
ROVNER: In other states, however...
DONOHUE: It is extremely difficult, in others pretty impossible.
ROVNER: Donohue says this is a problem not just for the bottom line of dental firms. Unmet oral health needs, particularly those of children, are a serious health problem. She says it's estimated that one in 10 children from low income families are in pain from untreated dental problems.
DONOHUE: How can you go to school and learn anything when you're in pain? You know, if you care about education, you've got to care about oral health.
ROVNER: That difficulty of finding plans extends to adults too. Under the health law, any adult who doesn't have dental coverage should theoretically be able to just go to the exchange and buy a plan. But Donohue says that's not happening either.
DONOHUE: In some you can. In some you can only buy a dental if you've already purchased a medical.
ROVNER: And in some, she says, dental plans are all but impossible to find. Meanwhile, children's advocates say their first priority is making sure families who do buy standalone dental coverage for their kids get subsidies if they're eligible. Julie Rovner, NPR News, Washington.
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And I'm Renee Montagne. Good morning. Walk through the produce section of your supermarket and you'll see things you wouldn't have seen years ago: fresh raspberries or green beans in January. Much of that produce comes from Mexico, thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement. It was 20 years ago this month that NAFTA went into effect. NPR's Ted Robbins begins his story of how NAFTA changed the way we get our fruits and vegetables among the produce.
TED ROBBINS, BYLINE: Jaime Chamberlain opens up a box of tomatoes for me.
JAIME CHAMBERLAIN: Nice Romas coming in from Culiacan, Sinaloa.
ROBBINS: Nearby in the J-C produce warehouse in Nogales, Arizona, zucchini, yellow squash and green beans - all ready to ship to grocery stores all over the U.S. Since 1994, the volume of produce from Mexico to the U.S. has tripled. Upstairs in his office, Chamberlain tells me why. First, NAFTA eliminated tariffs.
Cantaloupes, for instance, used to have a 35 percent tax on them when they crossed the border. No tariffs meant lower prices. Second, NAFTA encouraged investment. Companies like Jaime Chamberlain's have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Mexican farms. That has helped create year-round supply and demand for U.S. and Canadian customers.
CHAMBERLAIN: Twenty years ago, just in tomato items alone, you did not have 365 days distribution from Mexico to the United States, and now you have every single day of the year you will find Mexican tomatoes in the U.S. market.
ROBBINS: Availability is what seems to matter to shoppers like Garrett Larriba. Do you know where your produce comes from?
GARRETT LARRIBA: No. No, I don't.
ROBBINS: Do you care?
LARRIBA: Not really.
ROBBINS: But a number of people I spoke with at this Tucson Safeway do care. Like Larribas's companion, Christine Peterson.
CHRISTINE PETERSON: I try to eat local as frequently as possible and I do care where it comes from.
ROBBINS: Peterson says she wants to support local farmers, and justified or not she worries about food safety. There is another way to eat. By local season.
JOAN GUSSOW: I don't have much fruit in the winter, bluntly.
ROBBINS: That's Joan Gussow's answer. She eats mostly dried fruit in winter and whatever vegetables grow near her home in New York's Hudson Valley. Gussow is a food policy expert who's been called one of the founders of the eat-local food movement. By selling fruits and vegetables bred to travel long distances, Gussow thinks NAFTA has helped train people to value convenience over flavor.
GUSSOW: It's meant that people don't know anything about where their food comes from and they don't know anything about seasons, and so they really have settled, as they have with tomatoes, for something that is really like a giant orange golf ball and call it a tomato.
CHAMBERLAIN: I don't agree with that. I believe that produce and fresh fruits and vegetables should be available 365 days a year from as far, you know, west as San Diego to as northeast as Halifax.
ROBBINS: Jaime Chamberlain says the produce industry has made great strides in packaging and shipping more flavorful fruits and vegetables from Mexico. And Chamberlain says don't knock it availability, celebrate it.
CHAMBERLAIN: We should be teaching our children that nowadays you're able to enjoy strawberries even though you're in the dead of winter in January.
ROBBINS: Enjoy it or not, that's what we got from NAFTA. Now, getting your children to eat more fruits and vegetables is another issue altogether. Ted Robbins, NPR News.
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No one knows when humans first started using maps. One contender for the world's oldest map was found in Turkey in an ancient city that dates back 9,000 years. Some archaeologists say the map shows an erupting volcano looming over what looks like a schematic plan of the city. Others aren't so sure it's even a map at all. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports that a study of volcanic rocks provides a new clue.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: The prehistoric settlement in central Turkey is known as Catalhoyuk. Thousands of people once lived there in mud-brick houses that were crammed together like honeycombs. It was a huge town for a time when people were first transitioning from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. The British archaeologist who was excavating the site in the early 1960s made a dramatic find - a mural.
He said it showed a bird's eye view of the settlement's houses plus a distinctive volcano with two peaks, just like the one that lies about 80 miles away. This mural has often been called the world's oldest known map.
AXEL SCHMITT: In volcano textbooks or textbooks about cartography and mapping, they would always in their introduction mention this mural and that it's potentially, you know, the oldest map, and the oldest depiction of a volcanic eruption.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Axel Schmitt is a geologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studies volcanoes, and he was doing fieldwork in Turkey when he first learned of this mural. He also learned there was a controversy - that this may not be a map at all. The image of the so-called erupting volcano, which is covered with dots, looks a lot like paintings of leopard skins seen elsewhere at the site.
Plus, the so-called map of the city could be just a repeating abstract pattern, like the ones painted on other walls. Schmitt says, how could we ever really know?
SCHMITT: You know, these people that lived in Catalhoyuk 9,000 years ago, they are - you know, they're fascinatingly strange to us. There's always a danger in taking our views and knowledge and trying to impose it onto, you know, a culture that is that different from ours.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: But he knew at least one thing could be tested scientifically. If this was supposedly an image of the twin-peaked volcano erupting, it would be good to know if the volcano actually had erupted while people were living at the site. To find out, his team collected samples of pumice from the volcano's summit and flanks.
They used two different dating techniques to determine when those rocks formed in an explosive volcanic eruption. And lo and behold, they found that there was an eruption about 9,000 years ago.
SCHMITT: There was an eruption, you know, at the time people lived in Catalhoyuk. I think that is without doubt.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The uncertainty in all the measurements means they don't know whether the person who painted the mural was alive when it happened, but stories of a dramatic eruption could have been passed down for generations.
SCHMITT: You know, volcanic eruptions are very impressive events. Maybe there was some idea that the mountain was a volcano that's part of the lore of the people of Catalhoyuk.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The results are reported in a scientific journal called PLOS ONE and they have impressed Keith Clarke. He's a cartographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has a special interest in the world's earliest maps.
KEITH CLARKE: I can't say with 100 percent certainty but I would believe that the evidence is now in the favor of it actually being a map.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: This mural is from a period thousands of years before other accepted maps, but Clarke thinks ancient humans weren't as primitive as we think and that maps probably go back even farther. Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
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This week, and in the coming year, we're marking the anniversary of a famous declaration. It's been 50 years since President Lyndon Johnson called for an unconditional war on poverty in his first State of the Union Address after the assassination of President Kennedy.
Johnson described Americans living in, quote, "the outskirts of hope." A half-century later, there are new and even tougher economic problems that another Democratic president hopes to confront.
NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson reports.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: To understand the context for the war on poverty - that's an umbrella term for all the social safety net programs LBJ signed into law - it's worth listening to the president who came before him.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
LIASSON: Sheldon Danziger, a historian of the war on poverty, says John F. Kennedy's vision of a rising tide was a reality back then.
SHELDON DANZIGER: Johnson and his advisors knew that economic growth had been working in the quarter century after World War II. It really was true then that a rising tide lifted all boats. And yet Johnson, in his speech, says a growing economy is not enough. He sets out this very broad vision. We must do more. We're a rich country. We can afford to do it. It's the right thing to do and it will pay off in the long run.
LIASSON: Republicans and Democrats differ about the effects of the war on poverty. But David Wessel of the Brooking Institution says there's no doubt the programs made a lot of people much less poor.
DAVID WESSEL: What it means to be really, really poor in America was much worse in 1960 - infant mortality rates and the number of kids who get measles, and stuff like that. We have made progress against poverty in the United States over the last 50-odd years, and that's somehow getting a little bit lost in the debate, because we still, of course, have so much of it, and that's disturbing.
LIASSON: And it's not just poverty we still have too much of. Middle class incomes have been stagnant for 40 years. Now, more and more people worry not so much about the poor, but about falling into poverty themselves.
President Obama has declared rising income inequality the defining challenge of our times. In a recent speech, he promised to address the decline of upward mobility that is jeopardizing people's faith in the basic bargain of the American dream.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
LIASSON: But Mr. Obama's challenge is much harder than Johnson's. Poverty today may be less severe. Few places in America still lack indoor plumbing, for instance. But, says former Obama White House economist Jared Bernstein, President Johnson enjoyed a lot of advantages.
JARED BERNSTEIN: Back in Johnson's era, a certain amount of GDP growth was almost guaranteed to lift a bunch of people out of poverty, because the benefits of growth were more broadly shared. Today, when we get GDP growth, it does an end-run around middle and lower-income people, going straight to the top. And so it doesn't have the poverty reduction effects, because of all this inequality that it had 50 years ago.
LIASSON: In other words, the rising tide really worked to raise more boats in those days. And, Bernstein adds, Johnson also had something Obama doesn't: big Democratic majorities in Congress.
BERNSTEIN: Johnson had a larger pie and a more cooperative group in terms of cutting the slices. Obama has a smaller economic pie and a group that doesn't want to let him cut the slices at all the way he sees fit.
LIASSON: Some Democrats believe a new populist moment has arrived that will help them push proposals to address income inequality and declining mobility. President Obama will unveil some of them in his State of the Union address later this month. As a short-term solution, he wants to raise the minimum wage. Over the long term, he wants investments in infrastructure, research and early childhood education. But, says David Wessel, those proposals will all have a very hard time in Congress.
WESSEL: Among economists, there's a general, almost religious belief that early childhood education is an important recipe for growth and widely shared prosperity. But the president, of course, proposed, in the State of the Union address last year, universal pre-K. He was going to pay with it for a tobacco tax. And last I checked, it died about 15 minutes after he delivered the speech.
LIASSON: An economy growing too slowly, too few ladders of opportunity: There's a consensus that those are big problems, but not much agreement on what a new war on declining mobility might look like. Mara Liasson, NPR News, Washington.
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And let's dig into that disagreement a bit more. While Democrats talk about refining the war on poverty, Republicans say it needs wholesale changes. They generally see anti-poverty programs as a failure of big government. And they say states know best how to help the poor.
Here's NPR's Don Gonyea.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: It was a two-step move for Republicans at the Capitol yesterday: praise the sentiment on the war on poverty, but - well, here's Florida Congressman Steve Southerland.
REP. STEVE SOUTHERLAND: Today, we are here to mark the 50th anniversary of President Johnson's declaration of the war on poverty. And while this war may have been launched with the best of intentions, it's clear we're now engaged in a battle of attrition.
GONYEA: Michigan Congressman Dave Camp joined the news conference, as well, along with other members of the Republican Study Committee.
REP. DAVE CAMP: How do we grow this economy, create jobs, get people working again? Those are the policies that we need to be focused on. One of them is tax reform, and I think that is one that would actually bring us a stronger economy, more investment and the kinds of job creation that we need to see. And that means more people get hired.
GONYEA: The group dismissed statistics showing the poverty rate in the country down in the past 50 years, instead citing the increase, as the overall population has grown, in the total number of Americans living below the poverty line. The most expansive remarks yesterday by a leading Republican were those of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. He spoke in the LBJ room in the Capitol building. Rubio ran the numbers, pointing to job losses due to economic changes, resulting in the big decline of high-wage, low-skill work in the U.S. He said the economy needs lower taxes and fewer regulations. He described a failure to retrain workers to get the skills they need.
SEN. MARCO RUBIO: We have four million Americans who have been out of work for six months or more. We have a staggering 49 million Americans living below the poverty line. We have over twice that number - over 100 million people - who get some sort of food aid from the federal government. Meanwhile, our labor participation force is at a 35-year low, and children raised in the bottom 20 percent of national income have a 42 percent chance of being stuck there for life.
GONYEA: And, Rubio said, don't look to Washington for the answers. He proposed taking the federal money and giving it to the states.
RUBIO: Our anti-poverty programs should be replaced with a revenue-neutral flex fund. We would streamline the - most of our existing federal anti-poverty funding into a single agency. Then, each year, these flex funds would be transferred to the states, so they can design and fund creative initiatives that address the factors behind inequality of opportunity.
GONYEA: It's something Republicans have long favored, but critics counter that such block grants would be a way to starve programs of funding. Rubio says right now, none of this is in the form of proposed legislation. Look for that in the coming months. Don Gonyea, NPR News, Washington.
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During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt put hundreds of thousands of Americans to work in National Parks and forests in the Civilian Conservation Corps. President Obama's Secretary of the Interior wants to bring back that spirit, to create jobs and a new generation of conservationists.
But as NPR's Elizabeth Shogren reports, it's not the easiest thing to do in tight budget times.
ELIZABETH SHOGREN, BYLINE: Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has set an epic goal. She wants to create 100,000 new jobs for young people and veterans on the public lands she oversees and provide more opportunities to plant trees, repair hiking trails and hack away at invasive plants.
SECRETARY SALLY JEWELL: These young people, through their work on public lands, are getting a taste for what we, as human beings yearn for, which is a connection to nature and the outdoors that feeds our soul.
SHOGREN: The Civilian Conservation Corps - which planted millions of trees, fought forest fires and completed the Appalachian Trail - ended in the 1940s. Since then, private groups have created their own conservation corps that do work on federal lands. Jewell wants to invigorate this movement. Given the federal budget woes, she's trying to raise $20 million from private sources.
JEWELL: I didn't really expect to be doing a lot of fundraising in this new job, but I am.
SHOGREN: Jewell says public lands are hurting all over the country, and...
JEWELL: We're not getting support in the traditional way.
SHOGREN: From the federal budget.
Jewell's last job was CEO of REI Outfitters. American Eagle Outfitters is the first to make a pledge. It's putting up a million dollars. Jewell announced the donation at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, near the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
JEWELL: Young people working on public lands enhances those public lands, but it also gives people a sense of opportunity and hope and shows them what they can do, just like the CCC did for so many young men back in the '30s.
SHOGREN: These days, many more people want to participate than get to. The new money would create more opportunities for young people like Keisha Alvarenga. She works with Earth Conservation Corps, cleaning up the nearby Anacostia River and helping bring back wildlife.
KEISHA ALVARENGA: It changed me, because I'm a better person. I don't have a nasty attitude anymore, and I'm starting to believe again in myself, as far as not being in trouble with the law. And when I'm feeling down, I know I can come to work and feel happy.
SHOGREN: Keisha picks up trash from wetlands, plants, trees, and works with endangered birds of prey. She also visits local schools to teach children about nature and to keep the river clean. She says the hardest thing she ever did was get a raptor to sit on her gloved hand and feed it a mouse.
Did you always love animals and...
ALVARENGA: No. The surprising part about it, I was scared of animals. Now, I'm an animal freak.
SHOGREN: About 20,000 young people and veterans participate in conservation corps programs every year. Some get wages. Others get stipends and rewards to use for education. The Obama administration has talked a lot in the past about creating a 21st Century Conservation Corps. But so far, the numbers of participants haven't changed. The details of how Jewell plans to make good on her goals are still sketchy. But conservation corps leaders say she's already put more energy into this than other secretaries.
Before she became interior secretary, Jewell was on the board of the National Parks Conservation Association. Theresa Pierno, that group's vice president, says Jewell is the kind of person who gets things done.
THERESA PIERNO: And so I think she's going to look for ways to be able to make these things that we've been trying to do for so long, actually a reality.
SHOGREN: She says if anyone can create a 21st Century Conservation Corps in tough budget times, Jewell can.
Elizabeth Shogren. NPR News, Washington.
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The global recession hit Puerto Rico hard and left its budget in shambles. But some optimists say they can help solve the island's economic problems from the bottom-up.
Tim Fitzsimons reports from San Juan.
TIM FITZSIMONS, BYLINE: In the shadow of Castillo San Cristobal, a massive stone fort built by the Spanish in the 18th century, stands the Capitolio: Puerto Rico's seat of government. And on this December day, public school teachers were protesting on its steps.
(SOUNDBITE OF YELLING)
FITZSIMONS: Why were these teachers protesting? Because Puerto Rico's economy is in the dumps, and the government must reform its teacher pension system to avoid a credit agency downgrade of its municipal debt, which is currently just one level above junk status. Here in Puerto Rico, the situation is dire: the unemployment rate is more than double what it is on the U.S. mainland, and many young, educated people are moving away for better opportunities.
But not everyone on the island is pessimistic. A growing movement of globally minded Puerto Ricans see a silver lining in this crisis and are planning for future growth.
SOFIA STOLBERG: Well, this is Piloto 151, so welcome to our headquarters. We're the first co-working space in San Juan, Puerto Rico - actually, the first in Puerto Rico, to be exact. And...
FITZSIMONS: That's Sofia Stolberg. Back in September, she started Piloto 151, a co-working office for small businesses. From inside a renovated colonial building in old San Juan, aspiring entrepreneurs can set up shop to work on freelance projects, tech startups, or whatever else. Piloto 151 will help them incorporate and take advantage of the island's various tax and business incentives. Her idea is to cultivate businesses that work and think globally.
Stolberg says part of Puerto Rico's economic problem stems from its geographic isolation, what she calls an island mentality.
STOLBERG: We fail, sometimes, as a culture to look beyond our borders and to what the rest of the world is doing, and to what the best practices are. One day, I hope we have companies that do what Skype did for Estonia. All we need is one company to make it really big, and Puerto Rico will be a completely different destination and landscape.
FITZSIMONS: Tackling the task of professionalizing and globalizing the talent that already exists in Puerto Rico is one of the main focuses of an organization across town, in the business district of Hato Rey.
JON BORSCHOW: I'm Jon Borschow, the chairman of the Foundation for Puerto Rico.
FITZSIMONS: Jon is one of Puerto Rico's most successful businessmen. He sold his medical supplies company in 2008 in one of the island's largest-ever business transactions. He made his fortune in the medical supply industry that helped modernize Puerto Rico's economy during its boom in the mid-20th century.
BORSCHOW: So I've actually seen, during the course of my life, the entire trajectory of Puerto Rico, from poverty to First World success. As a consequence of that, I was able to see when the winds began to change
FITZSIMONS: Borschow hopes his organization can act as a catalyst to reorient Puerto Rico from an inward-looking business environment to a more dynamic, global hub.
BORSCHOW: What had really happened is that, in a way the very success that we had, had so insulated us from a lot of the changes that were taking place around the globe - you know, as we call it, globalization and internationalization - to a degree that we were really kind of a little self-contained economy.
FITZSIMONS: Borschow's foundation is supporting the development of a new kind of organization for younger Puerto Ricans. It's called ConPRmetidos. One of its goals is to take the brain-drain problem and turn it into a brain circulation advantage. The organization runs workshops to bring educated and successful Puerto Ricans who have left back to the island to share their skills.
ConPRmetidos co-founder Cristina Sumaza says since Puerto Rico's economic problems are so deep-rooted, focusing on the youth will ensure a brighter future for the island.
CRISTINA SUMAZA: It's a long way to go. Its something won't be able to change, you know, in a year or two years. But I think that little by little, we could tackle that young, millennial generation coming up. They're going to be choosing whether they stay here or whether they go. You close the gap, that opportunity divide, as we call it.
FITZSIMONS: At ConPRmetido's one-year anniversary gala, I spoke to Christian Padilla. After finishing his studies in Puerto Rico, he got an MBA on the mainland and now works for IBM in New York.
CHRISTIAN PADILLA: We need to work for our island. And, in a way, it's a way of creating - we have a word in Spanish that is patria, you know, like, your homeland. So it's a way of creating patria.
FITZSIMONS: These groups have their work cut out to boost the economy and improve Puerto Rico's reputation with investors. The government will have to raise money again in the bond market early in this New Year.
For NPR News, I'm Tim Fitzsimons.
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Workers at Boeing were in a difficult spot last week. Their employer offered a new contract cutting back retirement and health benefits. It came with what looked like a threat. The company said it might have to move important operations out of Washington state and hire new workers. Union members approved the contract - barely - and Boeing is staying put.
Journalist Hedrick Smith has written about the decline of the middle class. In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, he says Boeing just contributed to that.
Thanks for coming on the program. We appreciate it.
HEDRICK SMITH: My pleasure, David.
GREENE: I want to ask you, you wrote that this vote at Boeing had large implications for middle-class America. That's pretty sweeping language. Tell me what you mean.
SMITH: Well, people ask me, I wrote this book, "Who Stole the American Dream?"
GREENE: Right.
SMITH: Who stole the American dream, they'll say. Well, Boeing just stole a chunk of it. And what I mean by that is that the American dream consists of a good salary, a steady job, health benefits, some kind of retirement benefit, the ability to buy your own home and help your kids do better than you do. Well, Boeing has just imposed a tremendous cut in the retirement benefits for tens of thousands of Boeing workers. That's taking away a chunk of the American dream. And at the same time, Boeing management and its board of directors voted a 50 percent increase in the stock for the company and a $10 billion buyback of the company's stock, and company executives get paid in stock. So they've added to the economic divide, this great inequality that everybody's talking about; Boeing just added to that. That's what I mean by larger implications for the middle class.
GREENE: And specifically, when we look at this, I mean when we talk about, you know, pensions that people used to rely on for the long term, now their, the burden is on them to put more money into the retirement. The burden is on workers to pay more for their health insurance. You're seeing this just taking its toll on a lot of people in the country.
SMITH: Absolutely. It's hard to believe today. But if you go back to 1980, 84 percent, five out of six of American workers who work for companies of more than 100 employees - certainly, Boeing and GE and GM, and - but lots of other middle-sized companies too, had a lifetime pension paid by their employer from the day they retired until the day they died every month they got a check. That kind of security on top of Social Security meant that people who had worked for 35, 40 years for a company all their lives could be secure in their retirement.
When we switched over to 401(k)s - as companies began to do in the late '80s and the '90s, then the 2000s and now, the burden was shifted from the company's books to the pocketbooks and the checkbooks of ordinary Americans, and it makes an enormous amount of difference.
GREENE: Hedrick Smith, you've raised a philosophical debate in your book and mentioned that there are some people in this country - George W. Bush was one of them - who talked about an ownership society. The idea that, you know, some people don't believe in so-called corporate welfare. They believe that people, families should be on their own, to, sort of, lift themselves up.
Aren't there people, maybe some who aren't that wealthy in the country who would vote on that very thing and say, you know what, I don't need a lot of benefits these days from a big corporation, I don't need help from the government, I want to do things on my own?
SMITH: Sure there are. But what was interesting is when that choice was first put to the machinists, who were pretty average people in Washington State, they voted two to one against this. It was only when their leadership really put pressure on them to come along with this deal and the governor said we're going to lose jobs. And, by the way, Boeing had also sweetened the kitty; they added $1 billion worth of restoring cutbacks that they had wanted to do. Yeah, there are people who would say that. But we've moved, David. This is a point, maybe, that should be underlined about Boeing.
We've moved from an idea of stakeholder capitalism, where the leaders of GM and Boeing and General Electric believed back in the '50s, '60s and '70s in sharing the wealth. That a prosperous American middle class helped the American economy and helped the country to a notion of capitalism where the idea is maximum return to shareholders, boost your dividend, buy back your stock at the same time you're cutting workers' pay and workers' benefits. I mean that's a very different motion. Both of those are American capitalism. One is the traditional style, the other is the new economy. And my argument in my book, "Who Stole the American Dream?" is it's hurt the economy, it's lowering the economy and it's really crippled the middle class.
GREENE: Hedrick Smith, thanks so much for coming in and talking to us. We appreciate the time.
SMITH: I appreciate your being interested.
GREENE: Hedrick Smith is a former New York Times Washington bureau chief and author of "Who Stole the American Dream?" You heard his voice on MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.
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NPR's business news starts with layoffs at Macy's.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: Macy's has announced it's letting go 2,500 employees and closing five stores as part of a major reorganization. The company says it will save $100 million a year with the changes. It will also move hundreds of employees to its other department stores and to the company's online operation.
Word of the layoffs was good news on Wall Street. Macy's stocks rose over six percent in after-hours trading.
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In Dallas, the city's police chief likes to post things on Twitter - like the names of the officers and other employees he has recently fired. It all started as an effort to increase transparency.
But as Lauren Silverman from member station KERA's reports, the police officers union is now complaining about the practice, saying the chief has crossed the line.
LAURA SILVERMAN, BYLINE: On New Year's Eve, Dallas Police Chief David Brown used Twitter to announce the firing of five police officers calling each one out by name. In one tweet, he said an officer was sacked for public intoxication, damaging a person's property, and making offensive contact with a person.
CHRIS LIVINGSTON: Pandering to the public and to the media is what this is.
SILVERMAN: Chris Livingston is a private attorney for the Dallas Police Association. He says what Brown is doing is unprecedented and dangerous.
LIVINGSTON: He's not going ahead and taking the time, learning all of the facts and conducting a thorough investigation.
SILVERMAN: Livingston says it's standard practice to bring cases before a grand jury, instead, Brown is shouting out his decisions to 5,000 followers. And while the termination tweets have been clean so far, last week, Brown spiced up his feed with several swear words.
LIVINGSTON: His use of Twitter has, in some ways, violated the social media policy that he put into place. And has been something that we have warned officers not to do for the past several years.
SILVERMAN: Public reaction on Twitter has been mixed, but everyone's responded in 140 characters or less.
For NPR News, I'm Lauren Silverman in Dallas.
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A controversy over a traffic jam is turning into a full-blown political scandal for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Emails and text messages released yesterday seem to show that one of his top aides initiated the closing of two key lanes onto the heavily trafficked George Washington Bridge into New York City; also that other aides were in the loop on the plan. Those closures caused traffic mayhem for four days in September, with cars, buses and ambulances snarled for hours. The emails add fuel to allegation that the lane closures were retribution, politically motivated.
Matt Katz covers Governor Christie for WNYC and he joins us now. And Matt, give us the back-story. First of all, why would Christie or his deputies be involved in closing highway lanes onto a freeway in the first place?
MATT KATZ, BYLINE: Right. Well, Christie appointees are in charge of this agency that runs the George Washington Bridge, which is the busiest bridge in the world. And they said they ordered the lanes as part of this traffic study. But once other appointees from the agency started to come forward, it was clear that not only didn't anybody else know about this traffic study - including local officials, local police, the media - but no traffic study seems to even have existed.
And that's when Democrats got suspicious, thinking the local mayor of the town of Fort Lee, where the bridge sits, may have been punished for the traffic jam because he refused to endorse Christie's reelection.
MONTAGNE: And we learned yesterday a lot from these emails. They're very intriguing. Give us an example of just one or two.
KATZ: Sure. You know, you see Christie's campaign manager calling the mayor an idiot. You see a top Christie aide saying: Let's get that traffic jam started in Fort Lee. You see them saying: Oh, it doesn't matter about the traffic, that there are folks stuck in traffic jam, they're just children of Democratic voters; really like dismissing the fact that people were in four hours of traffic.
MONTAGNE: Four hours like sitting there on each of those days just to get onto the George Washington Bridge. Yeah. So questions about who closed the lanes and why that might have happened have dogged Christie for several months now. And over that time, he's responded in different ways to these allegations. Right?
KATZ: Right. In the beginning, when I first asked him about this more than a month ago, he laughed it off and gave a sarcastic answer at a press conference.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
KATZ: Then a couple of weeks later, when the controversy continued to swirl and a second Christie appointee was forced to resign, he was more contrite.
: Mistakes were made. And when mistakes are made, people have to be held accountable for them.
KATZ: Then yesterday he cancelled a public appearance. He was held up in private. And at the end of the day he released a statement that basically blamed a staffer or staffers who lied to him. He said: I am outraged and deeply saddened by this; it was completely inappropriate and unsanctioned conduct. And he said he knew nothing about it.
Now, remember, he had told us that all of his senior staff and campaign staff had nothing to do with this and had told him they had nothing to do with this. So yesterday's emails really flew in the face of that.
MONTAGNE: Well, we just should also remind listeners here that Chris Christie himself is not implicated directly at all, in any of these emails. None of them seem to go to him or come from him. But he is a national political figure. He's widely thought to be seeking the 2016 Republican nomination for president. This is the sort of scandal, do you think, that could sort of stick to him?
KATZ: Potentially. Christie has always framed himself as a straight shooter who roots out corruption. And now there's question about both of these claims. Political opponents could post a TV ad with pictures of him yelling at teachers and videos of him yelling at reporters, which is images we already have. And you couple it with this story of him allegedly seeking revenge on political enemies, and it makes him seem - it gives a caricature of this sort of New Jersey Tony Soprano type who operates in the politics gutter. And that could be a problem if he runs for the presidency in 2016.
MONTAGNE: Matt Katz covers Governor Christie for member station WNYC. Thanks very much for joining us.
KATZ: Thank you.
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It is among the most troubling calls a police department can receive: the report of an active shooter. It could mean a domestic dispute, or a gunman on the loose. We all remember Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo. Those events - mass shootings - have spiked in the United States, in recent years.
J. PETE BLAIR: In a nutshell, what we're looking at is instances of attempted mass murder. Somebody goes to a location with the intent to kill a lot of people. From about 2000 to 2008, you see roughly five attacks per year going on. And then in 2009, there's a spike, where it goes up; and since 2009, we've been averaging about 15 attacks per year.
GREENE: That's criminologist J. Pete Blair. He co-authored a new study on mass shootings with Terry Nichols, a former police commander, now with the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center, at Texas State University. Nichols helped found that center after the mass shooting at Columbine High School, in Colorado. Most of the victims there died while police were waiting outside the school for backup.
TERRY NICHOLS: Back in 1999, our standard response protocol for law enforcement patrol officers was to contain the situation and call specialized units to handle it, the SWAT teams. And what Columbine taught our profession was like, while cops are outside waiting for what we call the guys and gals of Velcro and hair gel to come solve this problem for them, innocent people are dying inside the school.
So we saw the need to train our first-responders to get in the door very quickly and solve this problem, so innocent people don't die. We don't have the luxury of waiting for SWAT teams.
GREENE: There's just a feeling I have of a single police officer going to an event like this. In the past, the protocol would have been for a single officer to call for backup. I mean, you're saying that a police officer should be ready to go right in and do whatever he or she can do, to stop this?
NICHOLS: Absolutely. And I think what you saw at Arapaho High School in Colorado, back in December, was that exact thing happened. You had a school resource officer assigned to that school; and when the shots rang out and the school went to lockdown, that one officer, by himself, went running to the sounds of gunfire, to go put himself between innocent victims and evil.
Now, we don't advocate telling cops to light their hair on fire and just go running in the building. We teach specific tactics to do this. But we are that thin, blue line. And we stress that to law enforcement. If you can go in by yourself and make a difference, you need to do that. But there's a way to do that as well.
GREENE: And what sort of training or weaponry is really critical for a police officer to have now - if this is the type of role they might have to play - that they might not have had to sort of have in the past?
NICHOLS: You know, there's a couple things here - and our data has proven this out - is one, more and more suspects armed with long guns, rifles. You know, we consider a handgun a defense weapon. I know this flies in the face with a lot of folks out there, and police administrators, that don't feel like patrol officers need a patrol rifle. That's a SWAT-team issue. But I will always take a police administrator and put him in a 100-yard long hallway in the school and ask him, could you save someone's life by using deadly force shooting a pistol down a 100-yard hallway?
The other thing we push is teaching police officers the medical skills they need to save lives before EMS gets into the scene. And then finally, we need to provide officers with the body armor that's capable of stopping the rifle round.
GREENE: Dr. Blair, let me bring you back into this conversation because the study that we're looking at found a surprising number of these incidents actually ended with the shooter being subdued by bystanders before police ever arrived on the scene. So tell me about that.
BLAIR: That's correct. It's about half the incidents are over by the time the police get there. The most common thing you see is that the attacker has stopped himself when the police arrive. And the most common way they stop themselves is to commit suicide. And the other thing we see, though, is that it's roughly 1 out of 6 attacks that the people on the scene take action, and stop the shooter themselves.
Dave Binky(ph), who is a teacher at a school in Colorado, had an incident like that. There was a guy with a rifle out in the parking lot who started shooting at kids as they were coming out of school. He was on parking lot duty. Because of the other incidents that had happened in Colorado, they had had some training. And he went over and tackled that guy, and stopped him from shooting anybody else.
So oftentimes, as a normal member of the public, you think, well, I can't face somebody with a gun. And certainly, you wouldn't choose to do it. However, the data here clearly shows that it is doable. And if the situation is you dying or you fighting, you can fight - and you can win.
GREENE: I mean, it's sort of amazing to think about the idea that everyone should be prepared to fight a gunman, but the civilian you're describing, who was on parking lot duty - I mean, should anyone who has a job like that, or perhaps just anyone be ready to do something like this and think about what their role should be if they're ever in an active massacre like this?
BLAIR: We talk about disaster preparedness in general. Just spending a few minutes walking through and thinking through your head, if this occurs, this is what I would do, can provide you with a script so that if an emergency happens, you're better prepared to act. You know, the federal government talks about run, hide, fight. We call it avoid, deny, defend - which means if you can, get away from the situation, get out of the building. If you can't avoid because you hear gunfire ringing out in the hallway, then we want to deny access to your location. So close and lock doors, barricade doors, that sort of thing. And as a last resort, if it comes down to it, defend yourself.
GREENE: Terry Nichols, as a police officer, is it dangerous even to suggest to civilians that they should get in the way of a shooter? Even if it's not in every case, but even suggesting that seems like you're telling people that they should think about playing a law enforcement role that maybe they're not trained for.
NICHOLS: I think instead of playing a law enforcement role, we're trying to get them to understand they have a role in their own survival. A 911 call from Columbine that we use in many of our training classes, from a teacher who was in the library that day - she was screaming at all the kids to get under the tables, get your heads down under the tables, kids. She had never really mapped out what she would do if. So she went with what she knew, and that was get down.
GREENE: I'm almost afraid to ask, but what happened to her at Columbine?
NICHOLS: She was shot initially. She survived. Tragically, most of the fatalities at Columbine happened in the library.
GREENE: You say that you use her story now in training. What, ideally, should she have done differently?
NICHOLS: Well, we always hate to second-guess people that are in the middle of tragedy like that, but can we learn from it? And she's asked numerous times by the 911 operator, can you lock the door? And again, she had never mapped out or done a script like we talk about, that what would I do if.
Again, we go to the avoid, deny, defend strategy. They couldn't get out of the library, so the next phase we'd want to do, what we would encourage them today to do, is barricade that door - and then be prepared to fight, if they had to.
GREENE: I want to ask you, if people hear our conversation, I could see several reactions - one being that these mass shootings are taking place with more frequency, which is alarming; and the other the sense that if you're saying training is necessary, sort of a fear that my community is really not prepared for this. Are those rational fears that people should have right now? Dr. Blair?
BLAIR: Whatever community they're in, the chances are their police department has been trained in some sort of rapid response tactic. And as far as your own preparation, all we want people to do is take a few minutes and just think through, you know, what could happen, and what I would do in those scenarios; so they have a script so if something occurs, they're ready to respond, rather than being in the situation and panicking, and not having any idea of what they should do.
GREENE: J. Pete Blair and Terry Nichols, thank you so much for talking to us about this. We appreciate the time.
NICHOLS: Thank you for having us.
BLAIR: Thanks.
GREENE: J. Pete Blair is a criminologist with Texas State University, and Terry Nichols is assistant director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center. You were listening to them on NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
This week we've been considering the fate of Edward Snowden. The former contractor at the National Security Agency is facing charges after he leaked classified details about surveillance programs. Yesterday we heard from a legal expert who believes that Snowden deserves clemency and that his actions inspired an important public debate about privacy and security.
Today we hear another view. Stewart Baker was general counsel for the NSA in the early '90s. He joined us in our Washington studios. Stewart Baker, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming in.
STEWART BAKER: It's a pleasure.
GREENE: So the government has some pretty serious charges against Edward Snowden. Do you think they're appropriate?
BAKER: Yeah. He did the crime. He should do the time. And I think he knew what he was doing. He portrayed it to all of us as an act of civil disobedience in which he took responsibility for what he had done. He should've - and I think did - understand that it was going to be treated as a serious crime.
GREENE: Was there any other way he could've started this debate? Or was that something that he just had to do if this was a debate he felt was necessary?
BAKER: Well, he certainly didn't need to steal thousands of documents to reveal this program. He could've stolen one or two.
GREENE: If he had stopped there - as you said, if he had released just a couple documents - would you feel differently than you do? Like that perhaps these charges should not be as strong and perhaps he should be shown some leniency?
BAKER: In light of the debate, I think I might feel differently. At this point he has created a debate that makes it clear that his reaction to what he knew is similar to a lot of other people's in the country. And disclosing this and getting that debate going is something that even the president has said that he welcomes the debate. I don't know...
GREENE: The president appointed a panel to look at changes in the NSA in the wake of this.
BAKER: So he would be in a different position, but I don't think that that was ever what he wanted to stop with. I think - and certainly the journalists that he has provided this to have no intention of stopping there. They're out to do the maximum damage, I think, to the National Security Agency, and probably to the United States.
GREENE: Many of the people who think that Snowden should be shown some leniency say that as much information as he has put out there, and as much as people in the government talk about how damaging it is, that no one has provided examples that he has actually damaged the United States and threaten our national security.
BAKER: Well, I'll give you one example that I think is a sort of slightly odd one, but even the people who care about privacy should be concerned about this. The recently released an entire catalog of exploits that the National Security Agency makes available to its intelligence operatives, so that if they've got a particular target, they can choose from hundreds of ways of getting access to them. Pretty...
GREENE: What do you mean by exploits?
BAKER: They will say: If you have access to this guy and you can get him to buy or accept a USB cable from him - just a simple USB cable like we all have 10 of - this USB cable will collect all of this crucial information and broadcast it to you. There are dozens of these exploits that have now been disclosed. The entire catalog has been made available.
There are probably 30 governments who are going through that catalog right now saying: I did not you could do that. And saying: Find somebody who'll give me one of these. Now there is a, sort of, proof of concept for every single one of those attacks. That means it's going to inspire not particularly attractive governments around the world to develop all of these tools that the United States put in an enormous amount of effort and expense into developing.
Now, thanks to Snowden, authoritarian governments all around the world are going to have new tools and our tools are going to be less effective. That I think is sort of a surprising but very damaging consequence of just one leak.
GREENE: Whatever happens to Edward Snowden, is the debate that he started a good one for this country to have?
BAKER: Frankly, I would have preferred we not have it because we have disclosed the existence of this program which will make it easier for people to get around it, or to avoid it. The period...
GREENE: The phone records program, we're talking about or...
BAKER: Yes, exactly.
GREENE: OK.
BAKER: So when that's the problem. You can have these debates, of course. But if you debate intelligence programs in the clear, the chances are they're not particularly effective programs, after they've been debated in that fashion. So I think it's a very damaging debate to have, but we're having it.
It is important in the long run that people have some sense of what their government is doing in their name, in order to protect them, and for there to be support for that, as a result of a debate. And so, while I wouldn't have chosen to have this debate, I think we ought to have it and that's why I'm participating in it.
GREENE: Stewart Baker, thanks for coming in. I appreciate it.
BAKER: Alright.
GREENE: Stewart Baker is a former general counsel for the National Security Agency.
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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
How would you like to be able to operate your stovetop from the comfort of anywhere in your house? Now you can, thanks to new technology unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show this week.
Tech journalist Rich Jaroslovsky is at the annual gadget extravaganza in Las Vegas. Good morning, Rich.
RICH JAROSLOVSKY: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: Why don't we start with that kitchen stove?
JAROSLOVSKY: The one that I spent the most time with is from a company called Dacor. And this looks to be a conventional stove except that it has a built in Android tablet, as a controller. So if you're standing at the stove, you can watch a how-to video, you can follow your recipe. If you're away from your stove and you've got your Smartphone with you, you can turn the oven on and off. You can check to see whether your food is done. If you've got a probe stuck into your roast, you could check to see what the internal temperature of the roast is while you're still at the office.
MONTAGNE: What else are you seeing there, at that electronic show, that is getting warmer, you might say, intelligent?
JAROSLOVSKY: One of the themes of the show seems to me to be connectivity being put into all sorts of devices; things like when you pull up to the house having the lights come on; the thermostat adjust; music playing when you walk in the door. That's kind of the fantasy and it is potentially achievable. But right now, these are all separate devices and they really don't work and play well together.
MONTAGNE: I'm going to guess that's the next thing to come along, something that takes all these devices and makes them whole, so to speak.
JAROSLOVSKY: That's exactly right. And in fact, a company called Revolve has a little thing that sits on a tabletop - it's a little bit bigger than a hockey puck - and it's crammed with all sorts of radios and technology to allow it to communicate with all different kinds of products. And then there is a single app that controls the Revolve device, which in turn controls everything else. And it works with things that are already showing some popularity, things like the Sonos wireless music systems; the Nest intelligent thermostat; the Philips hue-colored LED light bulbs.
But these products are proliferating so fast that I am kind of wondering how the Revolve people are going to keep up.
MONTAGNE: Well, let me ask you. I suppose the range is big but these devices that allow so much connectivity, are they terribly expensive?
JAROSLOVSKY: It's not as bad as you would think. Because the sensors and the radios that make that kind of connectivity possible are really, really coming down in price. One of my favorite things so far at the show is a Bluetooth connected toothbrush. So mom and dad can check to see if Jonny and Susie are doing a good job brushing, and to even set up competitions for whoever does the best and longest brushing job.
MONTAGNE: Tech journalist Rich Jaroslovsky speaking to us from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Thanks very much.
JAROSLOVSKY: Thank you.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
So, my dentist might be able to track when I brush. That is frightening.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne.
The polar vortex chilled the U.S. so much, even a polar bear had to stay inside at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo. In Brazil, it's been sizzling, so zookeepers in Rio brought in icy treats to help the animals beat the heat that reached 120 degrees. Primates cooled off with mango popsicles. The big cats got icy blocks of meat, and the zoo's brown bear chowed down on frozen grapes while lounging in his pool.
It's MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. We've reported on this program about instant meals. We cooked scrambled eggs and macaroni and cheese in a microwave, but maybe even that's too much work. Now a vending machine in L.A. makes breakfast for you - or lunch or dinner.
The Burrito Box just showed up at a gas station. For three bucks you get a freshly-steamed burrito in one minute. You can choose sausage, egg and cheese or chicken or beef. Even a side of guacamole. While it's cooking a music video plays. Move over, microwave. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Countries in Europe are struggling with the same controversy, though they've already taken in far more Syrians than the United States. That's making for what experts say is the largest refugee crisis in Europe in decades. Like the United States, some European leaders would rather take in fewer refugees. But Europe's cool reception is not stopping Syrians from risking their lives to get there. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports.
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SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: There are many smiling faces at the Friedland transit camp for refugees in lower Saxony, where Syrian children play outside pristine barracks on a warm winter day. A few Syrian men unwind nearby with an informal game of soccer.
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NELSON: One of those kicking the ball around is 23-year-old Ibrahim.
IBRAHIM: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: The sports teacher, who doesn't want to give his last name, says he spent everything he had and borrowed a lot more to pay smugglers $7,000 to get him here from Damascus. He says he traveled by boat from Turkey to Greece, where he and other refugees were beaten by police. Ibrahim got away.
He says he later traveled by train from Italy to the German city of Dortmund, where he turned himself into police and asked for asylum. Like many at the camp, Ibrahim is relieved to be among the lucky few who made it to Germany. And like them, he fears his luck will turn and that he'll be sent back to Syria.
IBRAHIM: (through translator) We hear a lot of good things about Germany and how they treat refugees. I'd like to work here and continue my university studies. But of course I'm worried they are going to kick me out.
NELSON: His concern is understandable. Germany is one of 14 European countries that last year deported dozens of Syrian asylum seekers. Officials cited a treaty that requires migrants seeking entry to Europe to be processed by the first EU country they arrive in. Most of them ended up in Bulgaria, which lacks the means to handle the influx and is widely accused of mistreating Syrian refugees. Dan McNorton is a UNHCR spokesman.
DAN MCNORTON: What we want here at the U.N. refugee agenc, to see, is for Europe to ensure that those people, those Syrians who are fleeing persecution, fleeing the desperate situation and the war in Syria, are given the protection that they need.
NELSON: Back at the German camp, even Syrians who came here legally through programs managed by the U.N. express fear about being sent back. One is Kassm al Kady, who arrived from Beirut the night before with his wife and four of his children on a chartered plane with other Syrian refugees. The packed planes are coming to Germany every other week.
KASSM AL KADY: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: He says he was told in Beirut that his family would be allowed to stay in Germany for two years, but had to agree to leave earlier if asked by German authorities to do so. The 58 year old engineer says he and his family try not to dwell on fear and are focusing instead on their new life.
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NELSON: That life begins here at Friedland, where refugees take German language classes. They also receive meals and medical care, as well as a small allowance they use to shop in the local village. The camp was originally set up by British allied forces at the end of World War II to deal with German refugees and prisoners of war returning from Eastern Europe. Since then, it's handled hundreds of thousands of refugees from subsequent wars, including in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan.
HEINRICH HOERNSCHEMEYER: (speaks German)
NELSON: Camp coordinator Heinrich Hoernschemeyer says at the moment, Friedland is home to 500 refugees from 10 countries, the largest group being Syrian. About half of the 10,000 Syrian refugees Germany has agreed to resettle will pass through here.
HOERNSCHEMEYER: (German spoken)
NELSON: Hoernschemeyer says that number is not enough. He likens it to trying to cool a hot stone with a single drop of water. Hoernschemeyer adds: My parents experienced war, and there were many Germans at the time who were happy to find refuge in other countries. We should remember that. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Berlin.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
When we hear from you, our listeners, you often tell us that you're tuning in from work. We know cab drivers listen to us, contractors at job sites, and also artists.
One artist who works away with NPR humming in the background is Maria Fabrizio. She's an illustrator based in Columbia, S.C., and when she tunes in, she listens extra closely for a detail or a story in the news that she can draw.
She's been doing a project called Wordless News every day for about a year now and next week, she's going to be doing drawings based on stories she hears right here on MORNING EDITION. Maria Fabrizio joins us from SCETV in Columbia, S.C. Welcome to the program.
MARIA FABRIZIO: Hi.
GREENE: So tell me the story that gave you the idea for Wordless News.
FABRIZIO: Well, it was last February, and the pope had decided to step down; and I wasn't too busy at work that day, so I just started drawing the really fantastic pope hat on just a pretty ordinary-looking hat rack.
GREENE: Ah. The pope hanging up his hat. Is that...
FABRIZIO: Yeah.
GREENE: Oh, nice. I get it.
FABRIZIO: So someone walked past my desk and laughed and said, that's a really smart idea. That's really great. So I posted it on Facebook, and I got a huge response of people just saying, you should do this tomorrow, and do it the next day. And so I just have been doing it ever since. It's a part of my daily routine now.
GREENE: When you say it's part of your daily routine - I mean, how big a part of the routine is it? I presume that you're doing illustrating as part of a job that you actually get paid for. You have to fit this in somehow.
FABRIZIO: Yeah. So I get up around 4:45.
GREENE: Early.
FABRIZIO: Early, yeah. Jump out of bed, and scan the news for great stories. And I actually work from a studio in my backyard, so I just make the long commute across the yard and get going. And I usually only spend from, you know, 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Wordless News because I have other clients, and graphic design is kind of my meat and potatoes. I mean, that's what I do for a living, so.
GREENE: Mm-hmm. Well, 5 to 10 a.m. is a good time to be listening to MORNING EDITION.
FABRIZIO: It is. It's a great time.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: Well, I just - I'm looking at one of the illustrations you did, and it came from a headline for a story that we actually had on the program here. In NASA's budget plans to, quote, "shrink-wrap an asteroid." Tell me about the drawing I'm looking at. It's very cool.
FABRIZIO: Well, I immediately thought of this giant space rock, and two astronauts trying to shrink-wrap it. And it felt like something you would find in, like, a kid's room, you know.
GREENE: Mm-hmm.
FABRIZIO: It almost seemed like a superhero moment. Of course, the real story, that's not how they're going to shrink-wrap it at all, but...
GREENE: So they're not going to be hanging there, holding onto...
FABRIZIO: No.
GREENE: ...to a rope with an asteroid on the other end. But yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
FABRIZIO: No, definitely not.
GREENE: Well, what do you think you accomplish that people who are using other ways to tell the news don't accomplish? What's special about this?
FABRIZIO: I think it's kind of a riddle. There's a way to subscribe to the blog so that you just get the email in the morning. And it just says the Wordless News and has the image. And then when you click on the image, it takes you to the news story. So a lot of people use it as just kind of a break in their morning at work.
And I think for me, it's just a way to grow conceptually and refine my style as an illustrator.
GREENE: OK. So you're going to be doing some illustrations next week for stories on our show. Any in particular that you're looking forward to? New stories that you have your eye on?
FABRIZIO: I'm going to be looking for you guys to pass along the content, so...
GREENE: You really do it on the fly.
FABRIZIO: Yeah. That's the plan.
GREENE: Well, Maria, thanks so much for talking to us, and we look forward to seeing your illustrations next week.
FABRIZIO: Thank you.
GREENE: Maria Fabrizio is an illustrator in Columbia, S.C., and the creator of Wordless News. And she's going to be drawing based on stories here on MORNING EDITION all next week. And you can find her drawings at npr.org.
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GREENE: This is NPR News.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. We walked, this week, into a vast building covered in reflective glass, the headquarters of the National Security Agency. We met there with John C. "Chris" Inglis. He's the agency's No. 2, its top civilian beneath the general who runs it, Keith Alexander. Inglis was in his final week at the NSA.
Do they have exit interviews for people who are leaving the National Security Agency?
CHRIS INGLIS: They do.
INSKEEP: And if he's asked in his exit interview what might change at the NSA, Chris Inglis says he'll suggest the NSA be more transparent. He spent his final months on the job defending the agency from the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Snowden disclosed the agency was gathering phone records of millions of Americans. Inglis says the revelations came out in a way that unfairly stained his agency. And that raises a question about running a spy agency in a democracy.
In retrospect, do you wish that some years ago, this agency had made some effort to disclose this program in a way that the public could debate it, in a way that it could be looked at fairly, from your point of view?
INGLIS: In hindsight, yes. In hindsight, yes. But if you had asked me on June 4th, say, just before all of this broke; if you said, are you concerned, Chris Inglis, about the 215 Metadata Program? I would have emphasized the controls that are imposed on it. And I would have described the participation of three branches of government in it. And I would have thought - I think naively, at this point in time - that it was sufficient that those three branches of government had stood in the shoes of the American public and made that determination
I think that what we found in the summer of 2013 is that it was insufficient.
INSKEEP: Now, the agency has been forced to defend what it is, and what it does. Chris Iglis' long agency career goes back to when NSA employees barely admitted the agency existed. Today, it's so different that Inglis recently gave a speech at the University of Pennsylvania.
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INGLIS: Thanks very much. If anybody hasn't turned their cellphone yet - off, just hold up your hand. I'll turn that off for you now.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHTER)
INGLIS: I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
INSKEEP: Thousands of military personnel and civilians work for this agency around the world. Their job is listening to terrorists or hostile governments, and protecting U.S. government communications. The NSA is not supposed to listen to Americans without a warrant from a special court. But after 9/11, the agency began gathering years' worth of American phone records.
The metadata program, for example - has it been worth it, given that part of the cost of it is that it got disclosed eventually?
INGLIS: I think so. Well, that's a great question that we've been debating as a nation for the better part of six months. You're probably quite familiar with the testimony that I, General Alexander and others have made before Congress about the number of plots that have been thwarted by the totality of intelligence capabilitiesthat NSA brings to bear in various venues. We've described that as 54 total plots.
INSKEEP: Fifty-four plots disrupted. But when we began to pick at that number, it became smaller. The information on the vast majority of those plots was gathered outside the metadata program. Inglis insists the phone records are still important.
INGLIS: And so it's, in a mosaic, useful to essentially inform other tools. But it's not a silver bullet in and of itself
INSKEEP: But this is what I want to go through. You initially said the agency said, and your boss Gen. Alexander said, 54 plots were disrupted. What you've just affirmed for me is that the vast majority of those involved Prism, a different program.
INGLIS: That's correct.
INSKEEP: And there may only be one case that you can point to, where you feel that the metadata program was significant. And in fact, the President's Commission - which looked into the NSA's operations, of course - didn't even endorse the one. They said it was hard to find any cases. And yet there's been this tremendous political cost from its disclosure. That's why I ask again, if it was worth it?
INGLIS: I do think so. Because I don't know that I'd want to go back in time and say that I would run the risk of not uncovering the one plot that I did, or to not have that tool that's an insurance policy to try to find something that crosses from a foreign terrorist plot to something that might then be inserted into the United States as an activity here.
There are other implementations of the 215 Program. The government doesn't need to hold the data; it could be held by a third party. You could compel others to essentially do the kind of search that today, NSA is authorized and charged to undertake. But the question remains as to whether you're going to have a capability to find something that is the connection of a foreign plot to a domestic extension of that plot.
INSKEEP: You just mentioned other ways to do this program. Are you now, as an agency, considering those other ways? Just leaving the information with the phone company, for example, and picking it up through a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance court, when you need it?
INGLIS: Certainly. We are open to other limitations. I think...
INSKEEP: So you are considering that?
INGLIS: We are considering that. But I think that we're not the policy agent that would decide whether or not we would then embrace one of those other choices. We would be a component of executing that choice.
INSKEEP: If the president or Congress changed the program, Inglis contends, it still needs to be efficient. It also has to protect Americans' privacy, which the agency insists it has always tried to do with the vast piles of records it collects.
INGLIS: I think most Americans would be surprised at how infrequently we actually look at that data. In all of 2012, there were less than 300 locations where we said what we had was reasonable, articulable suspicion - that's the legal standard that's applied here - to query that database; less than 300 times.
INSKEEP: Although it is interesting, though, the President's Commission, when it investigated this issue and wrote about it, said that yes, 288 times - I think - in 2012, you went to the metadata for a particular phone number. But then you're allowed to look at phone numbers that were called from that number...
INGLIS: That's true.
INSKEEP: ...and then numbers that were called from those numbers. And they outlined a scenario where one data request might cause you to look at a million phone numbers.
INGLIS: It could. But in all of 2012, we actually looked at 6,000.
INSKEEP: Six thousand numbers, is the number in 2012.
INGLIS: Six thousand numbers is what we actually then touched, all based upon the seeds that started with less than 300.
INSKEEP: If it's not clear by now, Chris Inglis lives in a world of numbers, at an agency filled with computer experts. Far more of those numbers have become public than the agency ever intended. Last summer, Edward Snowden disclosed an internal agency audit. Analysts just at NSA headquarters committed about 2,700 violations of the rules in a single year. Inglis has suggested only 711 violations were of real concern. And many of them were typos - entering the wrong phone number, say, in search of another,
He says that represents a tiny percentage of his analysts' work. Those numbers got us thinking, though, about just how vast the agency surveillance operations really are.
INGLIS: The accuracy rate at NSA is 99.99984 percent - which is a pretty good record.
INSKEEP: I was fascinated by that math; that 711 errors in a year means that 99.99984 percent of the time, you're right. And so I started doing the math and reversed it; tried to figure out well, how many communications are they monitoring, then? And when I did the math, I concluded that that means that you're monitoring - I wrote down - 44,437,500 communications in a year.
You're nodding - that's about the scale of your activities.
INGLIS: That's what that math would lead you to. But actually, it's not that simple. So let's say I'm interested in a particular terrorist. That individual might have dozens; might have, across a given year, hundreds of selectors. I'd kind of pick up and drop telephones - you know, like it's fast food.
INSKEEP: And the agency may look at each communication many times. In this way, Inglis suggests, the NSA is not monitoring so many individual people, though he never denied analyzing tens of millions of communications. The agency faces pressure now to accept reforms. The special court that issues warrants to monitor Americans operates in secret, and that presidential commission called for a public advocate to operate within the court as a kind of defense lawyer. Chris Inglis told us, quote, "We would welcome that."
During our long talk, Inglis referred many times to the man whose leaks prompted talk of such change - though he referred to that man in a particular way.
INGLIS: I thought it was interesting at around right the December timeframe, when one individual on the planet was saying that "I won." I donât think anybody who's NSA would ever think in those terms.
INSKEEP: This is a side point, but I notice you're not saying the name Edward Snowden. Is there a reason you donât say his name?
INGLIS: No. I can say that name.
INSKEEP: (Laughter) But you're not going to just now.
INGLIS: I think Mr. Snowden deserves, you know, his day in court. He has his position. He has his opinion. I'd like to see him get his opportunity to make his case.
INSKEEP: As much as you disagree with what he did, has he helped you since he brought about a public debate that you now say that in hindsight, you wish had happened before?
INGLIS: Yeah, in the same way that somebody who burned my house down has given me the opportunity to perhaps build it in a way that I would prefer.
INGLIS: That rebuilding will be left to Chris Inglis' successor. He retires today after running the day-to-day operations of the National Security Agency.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Hollywood is ready for its most uninhibited awards ceremony, the Golden Globes, this Sunday. And the most uninhibited movie nominated has got to be "The Wolf of Wall Street."
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GREENE: Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, a real-life former stock broker and conman. DiCaprio has had plenty of roles in his career, but there's something about this one that screams out this guy's come a long way from his innocence on the deck of the Titanic.
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GREENE: "The Wolf of Wall Street" is hilarious, at times, but it's so full of drugs and nudity that director Martin Scorsese barely escaped an NC17 rating. It's drawn criticism for its depiction of amoral wannabe masters of the universe, but DiCaprio says that was the idea.
: It's the exploration of greed, in a lot of ways. And, to me, it's the most destructive force in our modern era, and it's going to continue to be so.
GREENE: Well, if greed is such a destructive force, I mean, does that make greed good entertainment?
: Well, in this movie, absolutely. It's incredibly entertaining. The entire film is insane. It's hedonism at its finest.
(LAUGHTER)
: I mean, it's - I really came into this film with the attitude of doing a Roman emperor right before the fall of the empire. I mean, I looked at these people as people that had no real sensibility for anything around them except their own indulgences.
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: It's incredibly freeing, performance-wise, to have no moral high ground and nobody really in the film that I had to answer to.
GREENE: Speaking of moral high ground, some of the victims of these schemes, in theory, could've had the moral high ground. Did you and Scorsese make a decision that you didn't want to tell their stories?
: That was a specific choice on our part, yes. Absolutely.
GREENE: And why make that choice?
: Because, to us, the intoxication of this world is far more fascinating. I think everyone knows the ramifications of this sort of attitude, where people find the loopholes in our financial systems and take advantage of others. We've heard those stories. To us, it was much more important to explore how you can get so lost in a world where you're like the ship driving forward, and you don't even pay attention to the wake of your destruction. And the victims are irrelevant. And at the end of the film, you know, there's a great irony that I don't want to give away, but in the world that we live in, these people don't suffer or really pay the price.
GREENE: You wanted to really submerge in this so much that you spent a lot of time with Jordan Belfort himself to prepare to play him on the big screen. What's he like?
: What I got to experience in speaking with Jordan on a personal level was how incredibly forthright he was about how lost he was during this time, and how completely consumed by all these deadly sins. And when you have somebody that you can interact with on a personal level that divulges that much personal information, it can only improve your performance. So I worked with him for months, you know. I even had him rolling around, showing me what the Quaaludes were like on the floor. I videotaped him.
GREENE: So, he was literally on the floor showing you, hey, Leo, this is what it was like when I was all drugged up?
: Yes. Yes.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE WOLF OF WALL STREET")
GREENE: You even decided to make a promotional video for Jordan Belfort in his business...
: Mm-hmm.
GREENE: ...to promote him as a good motivational speaker. Why'd you decide to do that?
: The endorsement from me was a simple one. I see that he's done everything he possibly can to repay his victims, and since then, he's been trying to influence others to make the right decisions.
GREENE: Some people have a different take of Jordan Belfort. I mean, there have been prosecutors who have said that he hasn't done all he can to pay back his victims that he's been required to do under the law. Do you ever worry that you were conned by him, in a way, and that you have a too-glowing perception of him?
: Look, I mean, no. I don't believe that I'm conned by him at all. To me, this is not about Jordan Belfort. To me, he's a microcosm of a much bigger story. We wanted people to have a closer understanding of what this ride would be like. Why is screwing people over and giving in to your own indulgences and ultimately doing just what's right for you so seductive? And that's the movie that we wanted to do.
GREENE: Do you ever think back to the media tour during "Titanic" and, I don't know, perhaps that was more fun, because you weren't answering one question after another about the criticism of the film you're in?
: I'm actually happy to talk about it. You know, a little bit of controversy is amazing, because it shakes things up. To me, I'm incredibly proud that this film is taking chances, and I think that as the rest of history unfolds, we'll be looking at this film as something that was somewhat groundbreaking, in a lot of ways.
GREENE: I wonder if you could confirm something that I've read, which is that you got your name, Leonardo, at a moment related to a famous painter.
: From what my father tells me, yes, that's the truth. My father tells me that they were on their honeymoon at the Uffizi gallery in Florence, I believe. They were looking at a Da Vinci painting, and allegedly, I started kicking furiously while my mother was pregnant. And my father took that as a sign, and I suppose DiCaprio wasn't that far off from Da Vinci. And so, my dad, being the artist that he is, said that's our boy's name.
GREENE: This is a movie where you appear naked at times. There are sex scenes. There are drug scenes. Were your parents able to watch it?
: Of course.
(LAUGHTER)
: Granted, I am almost 40 years old now, so I'd hope that I wouldn't have to answer to them, even though I think that the perception of me is still the child actor that, you know, people would wonder what my parents thought. But to tell you the truth, it didn't faze them whatsoever. I mean, I was reading underground comics in the back of my dad's station wagon that were much more gratuitous than this at 10 years old. So nothing really affected them on that level.
GREENE: Leonardo DiCaprio, thanks so much for taking the time on the program. We appreciate it.
: Thank you so much.
GREENE: Leonardo DiCaprio. He has Golden Globe acting and producing nominations for "The Wolf of Wall Street." This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
It's Friday, which means we hear from StoryCorps. Today, memories of the writer and monologist Spalding Gray. Gray made a career talking about his life, delivering his monologues while seated at a desk with a glass of water. Here's an excerpt from "Slippery Slope," about learning to ski.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SPALDING GRAY: I find I'm only going left. I'm going left into the bushes, coming out the other side with branches in my mouth.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHTER)
GRAY: And it's left and crash, and left and crash - and then it happens, it's ineffable. I can't tell you how it happens. I suddenly turned right and then left, right, left; boom, down. But I was up again. Left, right, left.
People would ski by me real fast. I'd crash. People would ski by me and fall. I'd crash. I was in such empathy.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHTER)
GRAY: Or I'd be skiing and thinking, you're doing it. You're skiing. Crash. It was so beautiful. It was like Zen, but a little - not as subtle, you know.'
(AUDIENCE LAUGHTER)
GREENE: Ten years ago today, Spalding Gray went missing. He had been battling depression. After two months, his body was found - an apparent suicide. Gray's widow, Kathleen Russo, and stepdaughter Marissa Maier came to StoryCorps to remember the day he disappeared.
KATHLEEN RUSSO: I was leaving for work. He walked me downstairs and he goes OK, goodbye, honey. And I go, you never call me honey. And he goes, well, maybe I'll start. So I left for work that day being hopeful that there was a future for us, that he was really going to try to get better. Before he went out that night, was there anything you wanted to say to him?
MARISSA MAIER: No, because I didn't think it was the end.
RUSSO: Right.
MAIER: We went out to dinner and when we were home, he started pacing back and forth, which he usually did.
RUSSO: Which was normal for him then.
MAIER: And he looked really agitated, and then he told me that he had to go see a friend.
RUSSO: I remember I came home, and I asked where he was; and you said he went out with his friend Larry. And I called Larry and Larry said, he never called me. And then he was missing for two months.
MAIER: I remember that people would send us photos.
RUSSO: Right -Spalding sightings.
MAIER: Mm-hmm. And we would all sit around the computer and look at these photos, to see if it was him. Did you hold out any hope that one of these people would be him?
RUSSO: At first, I did. But he would never be that cruel to like, disappear into the world and let us think that he was dead, and start a new life somewhere else. What do you think you got the most out of your relationship with Spalding?
MAIER: How he taught me how to think, how to see the world. And I was reading one of Spalding's books and he wrote, I know Marissa will survive and thrive for her whole life. And that's such a gift - to have a parent write down how they feel about you. What are you most grateful for?
RUSSO: Oh, he opened up my world, too. I mean, I was a single mom with you - you were 3 - and just seeing the world through his eyes; it was never boring with Spalding. (Laughter)
MAIER: I can't believe it's been 10 years.
RUSSO: He was such a great part of our lives. I wish he was still here, but we were lucky that we had him for the short time that we did.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Predators at the top of the food chain - you know, lions and tigers and bears, for example - are relatively scarce in nature, which is normal, because if you have too many, they will eat themselves out of prey. But top predators are now so rare, that many are in danger of disappearing. NPR's Christopher Joyce reports that is creating ripple effects throughout the natural world.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: People who study ecology - the interplay of animals and plants in nature - say it's not rocket science. It's harder.
ROLF PETERSON: We're dealing with the most complicated systems in the universe, and we hardly even know what the moving parts are.
JOYCE: Rolf Peterson studies large carnivores. He and scientists like him are finding that as the number of big predators dwindles, everything around them changes. It's like a cascade down the food chain. Take cougars and wolves, for example. Fewer of them means their prey - deer and elk, mostly - multiply. More plant eaters means more plants get eaten, and everything that depends on those plants, from birds to butterflies, is affected. Carnivore biologist William Ripple from Oregon State University says even streams are affected, because armies of deer and elk can eat all the vegetation along the banks.
WILLIAM RIPPLE: The stream actually changes course. So, we're finding that the predator can actually affect the shape of the stream.
JOYCE: These cascade effects take all sorts of paths. Bears, for example, grab salmon out of rivers and eat them on the banks. The leftovers decay and add nutrients to the soil that help plants grow.
RIPPLE: It's just a type of connecting-the-dots in nature. And it shows the inter-connectedness.
JOYCE: Ripple and other carnivorists have published a study in the journal Science today that lists the benefits that predators provide. They note that where predators are reintroduced - such as in Yellowstone National Park - deer and elk and vegetation return to a more natural state. That may seem obvious. But Peterson, a biologist at Michigan Tech, says the extent of so-called carnivore benefits is not well-known, even as big carnivores disappear.
PETERSON: You know, we have trashed the large carnivores for sure, and they're becoming more and more scarce. And we don't even have the science to tell us what we're losing.
JOYCE: Scientific questions, such as: How many wolves or cougars or grizzlies do you need in, say, a national park to keep the other animals and plants under control? Peterson says the wolf has been an especially difficult case. It's made a comeback in the U.S. and Canada, but wolves sometimes prey on livestock. They compete with hunters for deer and elk. Many people have a deep-seated fear of them.
PETERSON: How do we live with these creatures, and how will we accommodate them? And what will stop their increase once we put them back? So, we are in the driver's seat.
JOYCE: Scientists are now calling for a global Large Carnivore Initiative to organize research on carnivore ecology, and, as Peterson points out, to illustrate just how predators has shaped our world.
PETERSON: It was the large carnivores, to a great extent, that maintained that fabric of life that formed us.
JOYCE: Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Odd as it may sound, a power struggle in Turkey has a lot to do with a man who's living in the mountains of Pennsylvania, the Poconos. He's a cleric named Fetullah Gulen, who left Turkey long ago, and has followers around the world, including, notably, in his home country. Gulen supporters are believed to include prosecutors and police leading a corruption probe into Turkey's government and angering the prime minister. Though he's denied any designs on power, Gulen is a constant subject of speculation and intrigue back in Turkey, where NPR's Peter Kenyon reports.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: It wasn't that long ago when writing about Fetullah Gulen was seen as a quick way to shorten a Turkish reporter's career. Journalist Ahmet Sik wrote a critical book in 2011 about the Gulen movement called "The Imam's Army." And before it could be published, both book and author were seized by the government. Gulen's critics have called him the shadowy leader of the world's largest Muslim network and Turkey's most powerful religious leader. His supporters are just as extravagant with their praise, calling Gulen a global force for peace and religious tolerance, an ideal counter to the extreme Islamists who tend to dominate the media. Columnist Asli Aydintasbas says it's not surprising Gulen attracts so much hyperbole.
ASLI AYDINTASBAS: I don't think there is a figure like him in the Muslim world, in the sense that here is a preacher who has a huge following, but he's essentially pro-Western and believes in Western-style education.
KENYON: Those who have heard of Gulen probably know of his charter schools. There are some 140 in the U.S. alone. If you include Gulen-linked media, think-tanks and other institutions, the movement is active in 150 countries around the world. That's according to Mustafa Yesil, president of the Gulen-affiliated Journalists and Writers Foundation in Istanbul. The Gulen movement - known as Hizmet, or Service - has been credited with having several million followers, but figures are hard to come by, because there's no such thing as a card-carrying Gulenist.
MUSTAFA YESIL: (Through translator) Hizmet does not have a membership system, and it's decentralized and non-hierarchal. It's locally organized, and it gets its power not from the number of its supporters, but mostly from the devotion of them.
KENYON: Even some of Gulen's critics acknowledge that both in deed, and for the most part in rhetoric, he's one of the most moderate Muslim leaders active today. Nevertheless, suspicions persist that he harbors dreams of controlling Turkey's levers of power. In one old video clip, Gulen speaks elliptically of patience, growth and maturity, ending with what some consider a call for his followers to infiltrate the Turkish bureaucracy.
FETULLAH GULEN: (Through translator) Until you can bring the whole world on your back, until you hold the real power in your hand, until in Turkey's structure and law, you hold constitutional power, until you bring it by your side, any big step is premature.
KENYON: Gulen later denied telling anyone to take over government positions. He was never convicted of any attempt to seize power, but moved to the U.S. anyway and has resisted all calls to return. The attacks against Gulen used to come from the secular and military old guard. But recently, it's the ruling AK Party, with roots in political Islam, that's accusing Gulen backers of launching a political power play against Turkey's devout Muslim Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Gulen supporter Mustafa Yesil says the Hizmet movement has survived such attacks for half a century.
YESIL: (Through translator) A secret agenda would reveal itself through our 50 years. Hizmet basically runs its activities in terms of promotion of peaceful coexistence, and no secret activity has been identified yet.
KENYON: Author and columnist Mustafa Akyol says time will tell which side will come out on top in what appears to be a political fight between Erdogan and Gulenists. But he's been encouraged to hear a few voices in the Islamic community say that this feud has been reconsidering their general opposition to secularism.
MUSTAFA AKYOL: Because when you have two Islamic camps saying that God is on their side in a political war, what are you going to say? Well, maybe you should remove this God is on our side argument from the picture and discuss political issues on a more mundane level.
KENYON: For now, however, Turks are watching fascinated, as powerhouses of the country's religious elite turn on each other. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep with a reminder to write legibly. A man walked into a bank in Antioch, California. At the counter, he gave the teller a note but she couldn't read the guy's penmanship. She called over her manager for help. Deciphering this communication took so long that the man who had written the note finally walked out of the door in frustration.
It was only afterward that the bank staff figure out the guy was trying to rob the place.
You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas includes companies that promise to revolutionize medicine as we know it. They're using sensors and systems like Wi-Fi Internet connections and Bluetooth to monitor the human body on a constant, real-time basis. Critics say this high-tech medicine is leaving security concerns behind.
Aarti Shahani reports from member station KQED.
AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: Teddy the Guardian is a little brown bear with a blinking red heart. Founder Ana Burica says the toy can record your child's heart rate, body temperature and blood oxygen levels and upload all that to a mobile app.
ANA BURICA: All the child has to do is take Teddy by the paw, hold him for three to five seconds, and this is the time definitely enough for the sensors to track the values.
SHAHANI: BodyCap is a little red and white pill that looks like Tylenol, but inside there's a chip. Marketing director Isabelle Lauret says a patient recovering from chemotherapy can swallow it and the pill will shoot off a temperature reading every 30 seconds.
ISABELLE LAURET: And the doctor can get on his iPad. So if there is a rise of temperature, he can call his patient and ask him to return to the hospital immediately to do all checks.
SHAHANI: And over at Beddit, founder Lasse Leppakorpi shows me sensors you can put under your bed sheet.
LASSE LEPPAKORPI: It automatically during the night analyzes your sleep quality, your heart rate, your breathing. And then it sends the information using Bluetooth to your mobile device.
SHAHANI: This all feels very, very intimate. So I ask: How do you handle security?
LEPPAKORPI: For the data?
SHAHANI: Yes.
LEPPAKORPI: So what kind of security you will need with your own sleep and wellness data, which is stored in your own mobile device?
MARK ORLANDO: I think we've all seen how secure mobile devices can be, which is to say not very secure.
SHAHANI: Mark Orlando is a cyber-expert with Foreground Security. And he's seeing a lot of start-ups jump into health and fitness; hire all the right engineers and coders. But he says these companies are not hiring a single data security expert or outside auditor.
ORLANDO: It's their product that's collecting and aggregating this data. So, you know, I think that they need to take responsibility, as opposed to kind of shifting the risk onto, say, a mobile phone manufacturer or, you know, an e-mail provider.
SHAHANI: There's a real spread in what companies can do and are doing to protect health data. Some encrypt it before it leaves the device and re-encrypt on the Cloud. So even if it's stolen, it's useless. Others don't ever encrypt. And many investors don't ask.
Listen to this candid confession from a leading venture capitalist Ping Li, who was talking at a Silicon Valley conference last October. He says that he pushes his startups to make a great product first, security comes later.
PING LI: I think you should push it earlier. But it's so hard to know when a startup becomes interesting enough to get attacked. And sometimes it's a weird thing. You get attacked and we made it - we finally are, you know, we finally are worthy of getting hacked.
(LAUGHTER)
SHAHANI: Experts say that with cybercrime is on the rise, and lots of health data out there, many more startups are going to find themselves worthy of getting hacked.
For NPR News, I'm Aarti Shahani in Las Vegas.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
On a Friday, it's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene.
Let's hear from someone who is fighting an uphill battle to help victims of the violence in South Sudan. That young African country gained its independence a few years ago with help from the U.S. government. Yesterday, the U.S. demanded that the warring leaders of South Sudan sign a deal to end fighting that has killed several thousand people just in the last month. Tens of thousands of people are flooding the gates of U.N. compounds or just scattering into the countryside.
One person trying to reach them is Elke Leidel. She's South Sudan Country Director for the aid agency Concern Worldwide. She talked to us from the capital, Juba. Leidel began by describing what she saw a few days ago in an embattled state in the northern part of the country that has the sadly ironic name, Unity. She was at a U.N. compound there in the city of Bentiu.
ELKE LEIDEL: Part of the compound is now inhabited by about 8,000 people that have tried to flee the fighting. They are scattered over a large, large place. They brought nothing with them. Most of them are sitting there with little to protect them from the sun, from the heat. And some tarpaulins were distributed. Some brave NGO colleagues and U.N. are providing drinking water. But the situation with regard to sanitation is quite desperate. There are very few latrines - 16 latrines for a population of close to 8,000.
GREENE: Well, can organizations like yours and others, can you get there and build more latrines and get food and shelter? Or is it just too dangerous right now to have a big relief effort?
LEIDEL: We are trying since two days to get access to Bentiu. Ourselves and colleagues from other agencies are trying to respond. We have two experts on standby to ensure that more latrines are built, to ensure that people have safe drinking water. But for the moment, it seems that fighting is imminent. The population there is very panicky. Since yesterday, more and more people are trying to get into the base. They try to shelter as many people as possible and everybody is being allowed in.
There is, of course a weapons search at the gate to ensure that there is no conflict inside the camp because there are people from all directions coming from all different tribal affiliations, as well.
GREENE: Use the fighting is imminent, not far away. I mean, can you tell me how - in how many places in the country this scene is repeated, where there's just thousands of people hiding out and trying to get by to escape the violence?
LEIDEL: Unfortunately the situation is similar in quite a few other places. Here in Juba, we have two camps - U.N. camps also, U.N. military bases actually of the peacekeeping mission that are full to the brim with more than 30,000 people now, gathering in both camps. We have really reached the capacity limits there. Our goal is, however, is to reach the population outside of camps. This is still very difficult. Access is almost impossible in most of the areas in Unity State at the moment.
And I do think that this is the plea that we all have to do - as aid organizations, as the international community - to ask for unhampered and unrestricted access to the population.
GREENE: So right now, people who are not able to get to camps, that they're just not getting the aid that they desperately need right now.
LEIDEL: It's sporadic aid that can be delivered, that can be dropped to them but it is very difficult to reach them if they are not gathered at least in some places.
GREENE: Elke Leidel is the South Sudan Country coordinator for the relief organization Concern Worldwide. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
LEIDEL: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It really wasn't that many years ago - the 1990s - when a power struggle waged by warlords in Afghanistan ended up bringing the Taliban to power in that country. Journalist Mujib Mashal was just a boy when the Taliban marched into Kabul. And in the January issue of Harpers, he writes about one of the more memorable characters in that repressive regime - the minister of intelligence. Renee Montagne reached him in Kabul.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Mujib Mashal calls the intelligence chief, Qari Ahmadullah, the "pius spy"; also, Mashal write, a spy who is rumored to still be alive even though he was reportedly killed as the Taliban fled Kabul.
Remind us of what it was like in Kabul. That is to say, what kind of power did he and his spy service wield over the average person's life?
MUJIB MASHAL: It was quite a controlling government. Actually years later, after the Taliban government fell, I ended up in a boarding school in the United States, and I read George Orwell's "1984." And I just kept smiling because so many of the images in Orwell's "1984" sort of resonated with me. All grown-up men - say, from above the ages of 13 and 14 - were required to report to the mosque for prayer five times a day. And these mullahs would, you know, look around in the mosque and if they saw somebody missing for too long, they would report it to the security agencies. There was an environment of fear where you couldn't distinguish between who is a government agent and who is not.
Ahmadullah's spy agency wrote an article, and the article concluded that sharing information with the government in the name of God brings rewards in the other world. It very eloquently, and very smartly, used religion to justify the surveillance on people's lives.
MONTAGNE: What about Qari Ahmadullah himself? What kind of person was he?
MASHAL: The kind of person he was, was largely shaped by his - where he grew up. Several members of his family were killed by the Soviets during the war. So he grew up with a lot of, you know, sorrow in the back of his head. And his brother and his family tell me that he was, you know, very quiet guy; he was a bit stubborn. But later, when he became a government official, Ahmadullah had a house in the diplomatic enclave in Kabul. You know, a lot of diplomats left, and these houses were taken over by - Taliban members moved in. So Ahmadullah had a house in this very posh neighborhood, but he would spend the nights with his soldiers at the ministry.
MONTAGNE: People would say he was humble. He gave his chair to an elder. He could cure a child. Clearly, he was a spy who left an impression. Now, for 12 years, he was widely believed - Ahmadullah - to have been killed in a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan. What led the U.S. and others to believe that he was, in fact, dead?
MASHAL: Part of his story is also a reflection on the chaotic environment in which this war began in. It began in quite a vacuum of information about the government of the Taliban. Even today, you can't find a picture of Ahmadullah on the Internet - or anywhere. And I think because it was one of the first victories the U.S. claimed in killing the senior leaderships, I think they were very quick to claim this victory without actually verifying on the ground.
The version that is put forward in Hank Crumpton's book - the former deputy director of counterterrorism for CIA, who was sort of coordinating the attacks in Afghanistan 2001 - he gives a version that we had information that Ahmadullah is in this house in eastern Afghanistan. We dropped a bomb on the house, and then satellite images showed one man trying to flee this house; and we dropped a second bomb on this one individual and, you know, he perished; we killed him. But if you read news reports, it says that a body was brought to Ghazni - identified and brought to Ghazni for burial.
What sort of raised the question to me is that if you drop one of those heavy bombs on one individual, how come there's a body left to be identified and then be brought to Ghazni? And then when I went to his family and Ghazni, and they said well, actually, there was never any burial for Ahmadullah. They laughed off the idea.
MONTAGNE: His family claims Ahmadullah is teaching at a seminary, somewhere. And what with the talk now in Afghanistan of reconciling with some Taliban, there may be no need to lie low if that's what he's really doing.
MASHAL: So for one, maybe Ahmadullah feels that there's not much risk to his life anymore by coming out now. But for another reason, he's still young. And if there ends up being a negotiated settlement with the Taliban, he probably has political ambitions.
MONTAGNE: Again, if he's still alive. Mujib Mashal's story is in the current issue of "Harpers" magazine. It's called "The Pious Spy: A Taliban Intelligence Chief's Death and Resurrection."
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Today's business news starts with trading places.
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GREENE: China might have just dislodged the United States from a position it held for decades as the world's top trading nation. The latest Chinese figures put the value of its overall trade at $4.6 trillion last year.
The United States will release its own 2013 data next month. But for the first 11 months of the year, its trade was worth $3.5 trillion.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And let's keep talking about international trade here. The American aluminum giant Alcoa and one of its subsidiaries will pay $384 million in fines to the United States government for engaging in corrupt practices overseas.
The payment is part of a settlement in a bribery case involving the royal family of Bahrain.
NPR's John Ydstie reports.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: Alcoa World Alumina, joined venture majority owned by Alcoa, admitted that it paid tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks through shell corporations to members of the Bahraini royal family. The bribes were made to insure the company's right to supply alumina, a raw material used to make aluminum, to a state-owned company in Bahrain.
The companies made separate settlements with the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The charges came under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which prohibits the bribery of foreign officials.
Alcoa CEO, Klaus Kleinfeld, told CNBC he welcomed the resolution of the matter.
KLAUS KLEINFELD: We have been able to negotiate it in such a way that it puts less on financial stress on the company, it's getting paid over four years. So that's good.
YDSTIE: Kleinfeld called the situation a legacy legal issue which the company can now put behind it. The bribes were paid as far back as 1989 and Alcoa has already settled another legal suit involving the corrupt activity.
Alcoa shares slipped following news of the settlement and an earnings report that was slightly below Wall Street's expectations.
John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
A federal government agency has taken and unusual step. They are suing the founder of a toy company over product safety concerns - and recently, he filed a countersuit. The Consumer Product Safety Commission says Buckyballs - if you're not familiar with them - these are clusters of magnetized balls, are a serious danger to children.
Ilya Marritz from member station WNYC has the story.
ILYA MARRITZ, BYLINE: Call them brainteasers, amusements, or gifts for dad, just don't call these little magnetic beads a toy.
CRAIG ZUCKER: Well, first of all, it was never a toy, so I wouldn't use that word; it was always an adult desktop gift item.
MARRITZ: That's Craig Zucker, CEO of the now-defunct company that sold Buckyballs.
What exactly is a Buckyball? It's a high-power nickel-plated magnetic bead.
ZUCKER: And they're really about -I would say - the size of a BB, is what I'd compare it to.
MARRITZ: Starting in 2009, Craig Zucker's Buckyballs started to appear in gift shops, in packs of 125 or more. They quickly became a hit, complete with YouTube videos.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And our Last Word In Business today is anonymous reviews - you know, those product reviews that people write on Amazon or Yelp.
Many customers rely on them and some people have even dramatized them online - like the actor who read this review by Shelley S., from the ratings website Yelp.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (Reading review) Our food was sub-par for such a highly rated restaurant. Overcooked fish, undercooked noodles, and one dish that wasn't labeled as spicy was so hot that my father refused to eat it. I won't be going back to this particular P.F. Chang's.
(LAUGHTER)
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
He even added music. Well, now, the anonymous nature of these critiques is being questioned. A court in Virginia says Yelp has got to release the names of seven critics who used their site.
INSKEEP: They gave a Washington, D.C., carpet cleaning service scathing reviews and now, the business owner wants to take them to court, saying they weren't really customers.
GREENE: OK, but we can't go without hearing just one more actor reading a review from Yelp.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (Reading review) He brought flowers for the moms at three of the five tables. And of course, I wasn't one of them. (Sighs) And now, I'm writing this bad review. How insensitive. (Crying) Do you think the other two table of moms weren't going to notice?
GREENE: And that is the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. MORNING EDITION'S theme music was written by B.J. Leiderman, and it was arranged by Jim Pugh. I'm David Greene.
INSKEEP: Indeed, you are. I'm Steve Inskeep.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This week, we're looking back at the legacy of the War on Poverty declared by President Lyndon Johnson 50 years ago. The weapons in that war included government programs like Head Start and food stamps, and Johnson also pushed to increase the nation's minimum wage.
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INSKEEP: Low-wage workers actually saw their purchasing power peak while Johnson was in office. Since then, the minimum wage has failed to rise enough to keep up with inflation. Which means that in real terms, minimum wage workers earn less today than in the late 1960s. NPR's Scott Horsley reports.
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SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: 1968 was a banner year for music and the minimum wage. Workers on the bottom rung of the economic ladder that year earned the equivalent of well over $10 an hour in today's money. Purchasing power of the minimum wage fell sharply in the 1980s, though. And it still hasn't recovered lost ground. Devonte Yates, who now works at a McDonalds in Milwaukee, says he sometimes struggles to pay for groceries and other bills.
DEVONTE YATES: I have heard a lot of things like, you know, fast food restaurants or retailers don't really deserve to make more than $7.25. But I feel that it's a job, just like every other job. So I feel that if we work so hard we should be able to afford basic things.
HORSLEY: Economist Larry Mishel of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute argues the problem for Yates and other low-wage workers is not a lack of productivity or effort. While economic growth has slowed since the 1960s, even today's modest gains are not finding their way in the paychecks of the poorest workers.
LARRY MISHEL: I believe we have a wage deficit, not a skill deficit. Low-wage workers are far more educated and productive than they were in 1968, yet their wages are less.
HORSLEY: Much of the recent debate over income inequality has focused on the outsized gains enjoyed by the richest one percent. While those fortunate few are racing ahead of the middle class, those at the back of the pack are falling further behind. In the late '60s, the minimum wage was about half of what an average employee made. Today it's dropped to just over a third. Mishel says boosting the minimum would help to close that gap.
MISHEL: We are never going to get a growing middle class and more people into the middle class unless we have broad-based wage growth. And this is the single, simplest direct instrument we have for obtaining that.
HORSLEY: Last year, President Obama called on Congress to increase the minimum wage, and add automatic cost-of-living adjustments. White House economic advisor Jason Furman says Obama is concerned by the twin problems of uneven distribution and sluggish growth.
JASON FURMAN: And that's why when the president spoke about the topic of inequality, he said the first thing you need to do is grow the pie more quickly. Increase your productivity growth. And second, you need to make sure that that pie is shared more fairly.
HORSLEY: A new Quinnipiac University poll shows more than 70 percent of Americans support raising the minimum wage. Furman notes that includes a narrow majority among Republicans.
FURMAN: This is a policy that has broad bipartisan support. The last time it was raised, it was signed into law by President Bush. The time before that it was enacted in the House by Speaker Gingrich. And that's why we would love to see bipartisan support for the minimum wage again.
HORSLEY: So far, though, congressional Republicans have shown little interest. House Speaker John Boehner warns raising the minimum could discourage employers from hiring additional workers. And Florida Senator Marco Rubio argued this week the focus should be on helping workers move up into higher-paying positions.
SENATOR MARCO RUBIO: Raising the minimum wage may poll well, but having a job that pays $10 an hour is not the American dream.
HORSLEY: McDonald's employee Devonte Yates does have his sights set higher. He's studying to be a probation officer and maybe one day a lawyer. In the meantime, though, he's dependent on his fast-food paycheck. And if it were a little bigger, he says, both he and his co-workers would have an easier time getting by.
: Well, it's not like people are trying to be greedy and want fancy cars and fancy clothes. No. It's just people work so hard, they should be able to have these basic things to be able to live.
HORSLEY: Twenty-one states already set minimum wages higher than the federal government's, though none as high in real terms as the national rate in 1968. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Supporters of a minimum wage say it can be especially important at a time of relatively high unemployment, when workers have little bargaining power. This morning we'll get a fresh snapshot of unemployment in the U.S. when the government releases new jobs numbers. NPR's Yuki Noguchi came by to talk about what to expect. Yuki, good morning.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: So where does the job market seem to be going right now?
NOGUCHI: Well, there does seem to be a warm front coming through, very slowly.
GREENE: Let's keep the weather metaphor going.
NOGUCHI: Keep it going. Surveys show economists expect a payroll number right at around 200,000. Now, that probably sounds familiar because it's almost exactly the same as November and only a little bit higher than the average for all of last year. But the reason there's talk that things are getting better is that the initial estimate for December was weaker.
This week a payroll processing company released its estimate of job numbers that surprised to the upside, so a lot of economists revised their numbers upward.
GREENE: So bottom line, though, I mean since you're saying they're familiar numbers, the job growth is about where it's been, right?
NOGUCHI: That's right.
GREENE: So what about the unemployment rate that we always keep our eye on?
NOGUCHI: Well, that fell more than expected in November to 7 percent, so it's not expected to decline further. But if it does, economists will be looking to see if that decline happened because of healthy job growth or because a lot of people left the workforce, which sometimes happens and isn't less of an optimistic sign. But now it's 2014, a new year, and there is some optimism that the market is improving.
The payroll report I mentioned showed growth in sectors that pay good wages and are considered high quality jobs. Also, the construction sector added more jobs than we've seen since the last housing boom, and those are the kinds of jobs that economists believe have a kind of multiplier effect.
GREENE: Yeah, this is because, I mean when we talk about construction, that can sort of multiply because it means more demand for things like furniture and appliances and all sorts of other products. It can have a good snowball effect.
NOGUCHI: Right, right, exactly. That speaks to the growing strength of the housing sector, which, as we know, dragged the economy down during the Great Recession. But now there's a lot of pent-up demand for new homes, and this year analysts expect to see a lot of backhoes and other on-the-ground signs we associate with economic growth, growth that has actually been quite a bit higher than many forecasters expected.
GREENE: Well, Yuki, let's draw some connections here. I mean we were talking a few months ago about the sequester, the budget sequester in Washington and other uncertainty maybe slowing down growth. It sounds like growth is steady, the third quarter GDP was over 4 percent. Often an economy growing means people are hiring. Does all that mean that we might see unemployment start to decline faster as we go forward in this year?
NOGUCHI: It could. Let's say the economy adds over 200,000 jobs a month in the new year, which some economists believe is realistic. Then, by the end of the year, the unemployment rate would be steadily trending lower, some say it could be around 6 percent. And if people are optimistic about the job market getting better, then consumer confidence will improve, consumers may spend more, and you'll have this kind of virtuous cycle.
But one thing that you have to remember, one caveat, is that the economy has been getting a lot of help from the Fed, extraordinary measures that make it easier to borrow, cheaper to borrow, and as things improve, the Fed is going to take some of that support away. It's promised to keep interest rates low for a long time, but we'll just have to wait and see how the economy and the job market responds to this kind of changing environment.
GREENE: Yuki, we should say a lot of debate in Washington right now, in Congress, about whether or not to extend long term unemployment benefits, which is a reminder that there are still a lot of people in this country who are still out of work and have been for a while.
NOGUCHI: Well, the fact that there are four million people who have been out of work for at least six months is definitely still a big problem for the labor market and for the economy overall. It remains hard to find a job, being out of work for such a long time; there are still, you know, three people for every one available job, so the market is not robust enough to absorb all the people who want work.
And, of course, it's unclear that Congress is going to extend those benefits again, in part because the job market is looking up.
GREENE: NPR's Yuki Noguchi talking to us about monthly jobs numbers that will be coming out later this morning. Yuki, thanks a lot.
NOGUCHI: Thank you, David.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie gave an epic press conference yesterday. It went on for almost two hours, almost as long as the traffic jams that prompted him to meet with the press in the first place. Gov. Christie denied knowing about the plan carried out by members of his staff to deliberately clog traffic going from Fort Lee, N.J., over a bridge to Manhattan.
The mayor of Fort Lee says he's taking the governor at his word. But as reporter Sarah Gonzalez, from New Jersey Public Radio, explains, not all residents are convinced.
SARAH GONZALEZ, BYLINE: City council members in Fort Lee got together with Mayor Mark Sokolich to watch Gov. Christie's remarks on the lane closures together. Christie said he didn't know that his staff orchestrated the traffic problem.
GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE: I am heartbroken that someone who I permitted to be in the circle of trust for the last five years betrayed my trust.
GONZALEZ: Internal emails show that a top Christie aide told officials at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to cause traffic problems in Fort Lee for what appears to be political retribution. The mayor of Fort Lee did not endorse Christie for re-election. Lanes to the George Washington bridge were closed for nearly a week without notice to police, commuters or city officials.
And it started on the first day of school in September. Fourteen-year-old Jennifer Yoon is a student at Fort Lee High. She passes a road that overlooks the George Washington Bridge on her walk to school, and says she has never seen so much traffic.
JENNIFER YUHN: It was really noisy, and I remember there were so many cars and so much traffic - and so much traffic, the cars wouldn't move an inch.
GONZALEZ: She said her classmates didn't get to school until the middle of the day; same with her teachers.
YUHN: One of the teachers couldn't make it till, like, third period.
GONZALEZ: Gov. Christie personally apologized to Mayor Sokolich, who now says he believes that Christie has no involvement in the lane closures. After the meeting, Christie shook hands with residents who gathered outside the municipal building.
CHRISTIE: Sir, I appreciate that very much.
GONZALEZ: Some were there to thank Christie for apologizing, but others came to air their grievances. Fort Lee resident Vadim Ratinov says he was expecting more from the governor's visit.
VADIM RATINOV: I was expecting that he's going to say something to the residents. Well, at least some kind of apology to the public for the traffic that was caused here - because he went in there and just came back out, got into his car and left.
GONZALEZ: He says he's still skeptical that the governor had no involvement.
RATINOV: I don't buy that he just was so, you know, blind that he had no idea that this was going on.
GONZALEZ: Elaine Scherzer, a New York City resident who was stuck in traffic during one of the lane closures, says Christie has to be accountable for his aides who ordered the traffic problems.
ELAINE SCHERZER: Absolutely disgusting, what they did to the people of New Jersey. And that should never have been allowed to happen.
GONZALEZ: The city of Fort Lee elected Christie in November, and many residents like Julio Lasvall, who voted for Christie, say they want to believe that Christie has a clean conscience.
JULIO LASVALL: You know what? I don't know. I hope that he has no involvement in it directly. So I think that if he doesn't - which is my hopes - that coming out like that and apologizing initially, right off the bat, is the right thing to do; and then assisting in the investigation that, you know, everything gets cleared up.
GONZALEZ: For now, they say there's not much else Christie can do except fire the people involved in the controversy.
For NPR News, I'm Sarah Gonzalez.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. You want to know why Pittsburgh Steelers fans are angry these days? Well, referees blew a call that may have let San Diego into the playoffs instead of the Steelers. In this litigious society, Steelers fan Daniel Spuck decided to act. He filed a motion asking for an injunction to keep San Diego out of the playoffs. Spuck has his own legal problems - he filed suit from a corrections facility. I'm giving him long odds.
I will say that ref's call made this Steelers fan nearly drive off the road. You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. As listeners to this program know, the Syrian civil war has created a vast refugee crisis. More than two million people have fled the country. Many have fled their homes inside that country. People are overwhelming the countries around Syria where they often live in crowded makeshift camps or fan out among the population.
GREENE: But most Western countries have been unwilling, so far, to help out by opening their doors. The United States, for one, has provided more than a billion dollars of aide for refugees in the Middle East but has allowed very few to actually come here. And that's drawn criticism from abroad and in Washington. At a hearing this week, Democratic senator Dick Durbin called attention to just how few Syrian refugees have been allowed into this country.
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SENATOR DICK DURBIN: For decades, the United States has received more refugees than any other country in the world and the American people have greeted these refugees with open arms and hearts. But the United States only accepted 31 Syrian refugees in the last fiscal year and the administration has said we are likely to accept a few hundred this fiscal year.
GREENE: That's Senator Dick Durbin speaking on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been making news all week with his forthcoming memoir. Gates recounts his years leading the Pentagon under both Presidents Bush and Obama during a time of two wars. Yesterday, Gates sat down with Steve. It was his first interview since his book exploded in the headlines, and he's arguing that the book is being misconstrued. We will be broadcasting the interview Monday, but thought we'd take a chance to preview it with Steve here in the studio.
And Steve, give us a preview here and a sense for what Gates says is wrong with the news coverage so far.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Well, this book has been described as just hammering President Obama and his administration. And let's be clear: I've read the book. It does hammer President Obama and his administration.
GREENE: Mm-hmm.
INSKEEP: But it also praises the president. Gates actually compares the president to Abraham Lincoln in his decision-making style, and Gates is arguing that some of the early reviews and news articles just kind of get his facts wrong in subtle, but important ways.
GREENE: Like what? Examples?
INSKEEP: Well, particularly the war in Afghanistan. The Washington Post wrote about this in a way that implies - if you read the article a certain way - that you might see that as saying President Obama approved a strategy to add troops in Afghanistan in 2009, believing the strategy would fail.
GREENE: A serious charge.
INSKEEP: That would be incredibly cynical for a president to do that. Gates says I never wrote that. I never believed that. I don't think the president ever did that. Gates says what happened here, really, was the president approved a strategy in 2009, added troops in Afghanistan, thought and hoped it would work, but became skeptical later on. And other people in the White House staff hammered on him and stoked his doubts, and that he became less and less confident in his strategy.
Overall, this is a nuanced picture of the president, part of a book of more than 500 pages, although it does accuse the president of a lack of passion in promoting the war in Afghanistan, and a lot of other things.
GREENE: Well, what about the people around the president? I mean, a lot of what Gates wrote about them has been making headlines, as well, surely.
INSKEEP: Yeah. Yeah. And he's also nuanced there. There's really interesting portraits - at least efforts at portraits - by Gates of people that he knew, but he's a lot harsher. He felt that a lot of people on the White House staff did not precisely know what they were doing, didn't know nearly as much as they thought that they did, didn't go through the regular channels in the chain of command, which seems to be really important to Gates.
He describes, also, a total focus on politics, that in his view, people inside the White House were far more concerned about domestic politics than in getting the foreign policy right. And he is especially brutal about Vice President Joe Biden.
GREENE: I mean, we've reported a lot about Robert Gates on this program. You've now read this book. You've spent some time listening to him reflect. Do you feel like you've learned something new about this man?
INSKEEP: You get a clear voice of Robert Gates when you read this book, for better or worse. And people will challenge, and already are challenging, his versions of events. But you have a guy who is writing this political memoir, in effect, who is completely unrestrained, it seems. He is profane on many pages. He said that's the way he wanted to be. It's the way real people talk. He is giving his brutal takes on people, in many cases, although he's also trying to be nuanced. This is a guy who says he wants to put it all on the line in this book.
GREENE: All right. Steve's interview with Robert Gates airs on the program on Monday. Steve, we look forward to hearing that conversation.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
We have a development, this morning, in one of the tragic conflicts we've been following in Africa. The president of Central African Republic resigned this morning. Local and international pressure had been building against President Michel Djotodia. He took power in a military coup last spring, plunging the country into a multi-sided civil war. Some of the fighting has just been bands of soldiers pillaging and killing civilians. Much of it, though, has also broken down into Muslim verses Christian violence. Thousands of people have died, hundreds of thousands have been uprooted. African and French troops are on the ground trying to bring calm, while peace talks are underway in neighboring Chad. We're joined now by NPR's Africa correspondent, Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, she's tracking events from Ghana. And Ofeibea, remind us, if you can, some of the background here. I mean, this interim president led an opposition movement, mainly in the minority Muslim population that they came to power last spring. What's happened since then?
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: Over the past ten years, or so, it had reached a plateau and had some sort of stability and an elected president. When the rebels, mainly Muslim rebels, in this predominantly Christian country started a fight. By March, Michel Djotodia, a former rebel and the country's first Muslim leader, was then the interim president of Central African Republic and a long-time opposition leader, who has also resigned today, became the prime minister. And then there was trouble. For decades, Christians have lived side by side in peace, David. But apart from pillaging, and looting and uprooting thousands of civilians, the sectarian aspect of this conflict arose, and that means Christians and Muslims have been killed in the fighting between former Muslim rebels and Christian militias who say that they set up vigilantes to protect the Christian community.
GREENE: Ofeibea, Djotodia has been under a lot of pressure to resign. Why is he stepping down now and is this possibly a step towards peace?
QUIST-ARCTON: Why is he stepping down now? Because regional leaders have realized there is no way that he can quell the violence that has become absolutely uncontrollable. We're talking about tens of thousands of civilians. Some, in the capital of Bangui, just alone, they are - they've taken refuge at the international airport, you know, under the wings of aircraft, because the French, the former colonial power, its troops are in charge of the airport. People are so terrified. And there was no way that this Muslim-led government was able to stop the violence. But, with the departure of Michel Djotodia and his prime minister, will it make a difference? It seems that this conflict has taken on a life of its own. And, of course, it's civilians who are caught in the crossfire. And, you know, people are saying, how come? How come this happened? We were living with our neighbors who we've known for years, Muslims or Christians, and now, suddenly, they have become our enemies. The people just want peace.
GREENE: Who takes over power now, Ofeibea?
QUIST-ARCTON: We're waiting to hear from this emergency regional summit across the border in Chad, what is going to happen. But even - I mean, whoever takes over, who can possibly control the situation? There's a big question mark about the future of the Central African Republic, but it is a devastating situation for the civilians who cannot leave.
GREENE: All right, we've been talking to NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton about the resignation of the interim president in Central African Republic. Ofeibea, thanks as always.
QUIST-ARCTON: Always a pleasure. Thanks David.
GREENE: This is NPR News.
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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
People order shoes, laptops, all kinds of stuff over the Web these days. But in the early 1900s, Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold kits to be made into homes. In Arlington, Va., one was set to be bulldozed. But an architectural firm is so determined to save it, the house is being given away for free. NPR's Allison Keyes explains.
ALLISON KEYES, BYLINE: Preservation buff Eric Dobson and architect Paola Lugli stood in the freezing cold on the lawn in front of the 960-square-foot house, flipping through a replica of a Sears catalog.
PAOLA LUGLI: You guys said it's a Wellington? I think it's...
KEYES: It is a Wellington, a style of homes sold by Sears in 1926 through its mail-order modern homes program. Dobson explains how it worked.
ERIC DOBSON: You'd order everything from your light fixtures to your lamp, the wall covering that would go on there, kitchen cabinets, the whole thing; whether you get a garage or not. And then it was just shipped to you.
KEYES: The house is small but cute; with a living room, dining room, two bedrooms and an unfinished basement. It's also got its original fireplace. Lugli's client bought the property for $750,000 but didn't want to live in the house. Architect Lugli and her business partner decided they wanted to preserve the bungalow rather than demolish it.
LUGLI: So we thought, why not move it? Let's move it.
KEYES: She says they were thinking of something more elastic then simply preserving it or demolishing it. Maybe someone could use it as a coffee shop or an art center.
LUGLI: We are from Italy, and we respect historic structure; and we want them to have continued life - new life, different life.
DOBSON: We have somewhere between 100 and 200 of these in Arlington County.
KEYES: Preservationist Dobson says the little houses date from a period when Arlington was a working-class community, but they're disappearing. What was then called Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold more than 70,000 of the mail-order homes between 1908 and 1940. Arlington County's historic preservation coordinator, Cynthia Liccese-Torres, explains that railroad lines are one reason the small bungalows were so popular in this area.
CYNTHIA LICCESE-TORRES: There was a train stop not too far from here. And so the materials would be delivered, and then whoever was purchasing the kit would have them shipped to the building lot.
KEYES: She thinks it's important to preserve the house because it's part of Arlington's character.
LICCESE-TORRES: This typifies the types of homes that were originally built here, and being able to reuse just shows how they're still viable even in the 21st century.
KEYES: But Lugli's partner, architect Paola Amodeo, says moving the house is a project.
PAOLA AMODEO: The house, as it is, gets lifted off. All the walls, the doors - everything comes with it. (Laughter) And you put it on a truck and move it.
KEYES: She says it won't be cheap, either.
AMODEO: Just to put it on a truck and move it locally, it's about $30,000.
LUGLI: It's 24 feet wide by 36 - about that - so it's feasible. Obviously, it's a little work involved.
KEYES: Just a tad.
(LAUGHTER)
LUGLI: Just a tad, but yeah.
KEYES: The architects say they've gotten nearly 150 emails, and they're scheduling meetings about the Sears house.
Allison Keyes, NPR News, Washington.
SIMON: This is NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Hayley Kincain is 15 years old and on the run with her father, Andy. He's come home from the war in Iraq, honored for his service, and haunted by it. He drinks and does drugs, can't hold a job, is unreliable behind the wheel of his 18-wheeler, and often seems to be the real adolescent in the family. Father and daughter try to stop running by moving back to Andy's hometown in upstate New York, but the war still goes on inside of him and threatens to make Hayley one more casualty.
"The Impossible Knife of Memory" is Laurie Halse Anderson's newest novel for young readers. Laurie Halse Anderson is one of the best-known writers of literature for young adults and children in the world, including the celebrated book "Speak," and a trilogy on the American Revolution that begins with the books "Chains" and "Forge."
She has twice been nominated for the National Book Award, and joins us now from our member station KUOW in Seattle. Thanks so much for being with us.
LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON: Thank you so much for inviting me.
SIMON: You say this book is personal. How so?
ANDERSON: This book is personal for two reasons. I started thinking about it when my nephew came home from his tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, and I watched his struggles to kind of reorient himself and slip back into life. And it brought back a lot of memories from own experience with my father, who was a World War II vet. His troops were sent to Dachau shortly after the concentration camp was opened in 1945, when my dad was 18. And what he saw and experienced there continues to haunt him. When I was a teenager, those memories and ghosts took over my family's lives for many years, and created a lot of heartbreak.
SIMON: Can you talk about that?
ANDERSON: Well, I had a lovely, wonderful childhood. My father was a college chaplain at Syracuse University. We had a lot of college students in our house, which is always fun when you're a little kid. And our life seemed to me - at that point - fantastic. I mean, it was joy and love, and lots of laughter. But my dad became more serious and began drinking, as, I think, the pressures of his job mounted.
Also, there was a lot of Vietnam War protest. So the concept of war and death was very much in our lives. And then, just as I was going into seventh grade, Dad lost his job as a minister because of his own issues - his drinking, and other problems. It felt like we were being kicked out of Eden. My dad didn't work for several years, and this man who I've revered and loved so much became a stranger. He was with us physically, but he wasn't with us emotionally.
And I think the worst part was - is that we couldn't talk about what was happening. We didn't discuss things like that in our family. And I was very confused. I was angry, and I was scared. You know, I was frequently thinking that he was going to be dead when I got home from school.
SIMON: Yeah. So how much does this blue-haired, whip-smart handful who is Hayley Kincain resemble Laurie Halse Anderson?
ANDERSON: Well, I don't have blue hair. And whip-smart is probably up for discussion. But I think she is what I wish I had been. She's much braver than I was, as a kid - and tougher, too. You know, she confronts her dad in a way I never had the courage to.
SIMON: When you write from inside the skin of a teenager, how do you keep your impressions fresh?
ANDERSON: People who knew me back in the day say that I haven't changed much since I was 15. If I have a secret weapon, I think that might be what it is. I have this theory that adolescence is a repeated experience. You go through a second adolescence - sadly, I think - when you hit your middle age. You know, and then your kids leave home, and then there's these giant rounds of transition in our lives. You know, you find you're sort of experiencing the same kinds of things; concerns about your body and your place, and your identity in the world.
SIMON: Can Hayley understand her father and - I don't mind saying - the hell he's seen in war any more than he can understand the daughter who is this teenage girl, and the hell she's seen in him?
ANDERSON: Wow. That's a wonderful question. I think that's sort of the path that they're trying so hard to walk down together, you know. The memories that have trapped her father have also trapped Hayley, and I think this is something that vets struggle with mightily - 'cause not only do they have their own pain that they're processing, but they love their children; and to see their pain infecting their kids is devastating. I don't think, you know, Hayley doesn't have the maturity to fully understand what her father is experiencing, which is why she gets angry at him, and why she's disappointed. But her painful memories are the good ones. She remembers that dad who loved her and could take care of her. And sometimes, it hurts to look back on the good days when the days that they're in right now are so bleak.
SIMON: Do you feel that kind of support wasn't there for your father?
ANDERSON: No. It didn't exist. It didn't exist at all. We didn't even - I don't even think the phrase post-traumatic stress disorder had been discussed. It certainly wasn't discussed when he came home from World War II. I think we began to talk about it when the Vietnam soldiers began to come home. But, you know, that greatest generation, they were supposed to come home and put those memories in their footlocker and get on with life. And they tried; they really did try. But there's an awful lot of them who were broken.
SIMON: You recently helped your father get resettled into a home.
ANDERSON: Yeah.
SIMON: What's his life like now? What's he like?
ANDERSON: It's interesting. He's a little disoriented. He's a very independent man. We moved our parents back up north about 10 years ago because they had gotten to the point where they needed some help. And caring for my dad - my mom passed away in 2009 - has been a remarkable experience, really lovely. And all my old frustrations with him are gone. They just faded away. And seeing that even today, you know, at 86, he's still struggling with his memories of his war experience is pretty profound. His memory is fading; he's beginning to have some dementia. And it's interesting because I got him a book the other day about the P-51 bombers that he used to work on - he was also a mechanic - and when he was paging through the pictures of the young men working on the planes, he became very emotional. Those months and years when he was 18, 19, 20 are more vivid in his mind than pretty much any experience he's had since.
SIMON: Laurie Halse Anderson - her new novel, "The Impossible Knife of Memory." Thanks so much for being with us.
ANDERSON: Oh, this has been really fun. Thank you very much.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. A story now about religion, racism and redemption in the deep South. For generations, the bathroom building behind Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church in Vacherie, Louisiana was little more than a shack. Hurricane Rita almost knocked it down in 2005. It was finally torn asunder in October. Some members of the parish say that was long overdue. From member station WRKF, Amy Jeffries reports.
AMY JEFFRIES, BYLINE: Anita Battis is 76 and has been a parishioner at Our Lady of Peace her whole life. Her grandfather helped build the church back before the days of indoor plumbing.
ANITA BATTIS: Let me tell you something maybe not too many people know. As long as I've come to this church, I've never, ever used the restroom - never.
JEFFRIES: When the bathroom building went up in 1959, one set of doors was painted white and one another color. Ushers would follow black parishioners outside to make sure they entered the right door.
BATTIS: This was I would use the word, a slap in my face, you know. If I can't go in any one of the doors, I just as soon don't go in any.
MARGARET CORTEZ: My name is Margaret Cortez. I love God and I love my parish.
JEFFRIES: Margaret Cortez used to pile into a station wagon with her eight siblings to get to Mass as a kid. Growing up in the 1960s and '70s, Cortez never thought about why the doors of that bathroom were different colors before they were painted over.
CORTEZ: I never looked it at is as a separation of people. And I couldn't understand when people would talk about why it meant so much. It's just a bathroom.
JEFFRIES: It was just a bathroom, until Cortez joined a discussion group with Anita Battis and others from the church to talk about racism in the community. And that inspired a special Wednesday night Mass.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
JEFFRIES: After the Our Lady of Peace Gospel Choir warmed up the crowd, Father Michael Miceli set fire to pieces of the old bathroom building.
FATHER MICHAEL MICELI: Let us acknowledge the mistakes, the decisions, the policies, the rules the evil, the sins we committed...
JEFFRIES: And, from the pulpit, the priest apologized.
MICELI: Especially our African-American brothers and sisters both living and deceased. Please forgive us.
(APPLAUSE)
JEFFRIES: Some parishioners sent letters to Father Michael and the bishop of the Baton Rouge Diocese arguing racism is gone from Vacherie and that the priest is just trying to stir things up.
MICELI: As time goes by, we'll see how many people show up at church, the collections and stuff like that. But I don't worry about any of that. When you do the right thing the Lord will make a way.
JEFFRIES: At a gathering right after Father Michael's apology, Anita Battis told him it felt like a burden had been lifted.
BATTIS: And it just was an awesome feeling that I accepted that apology from him for all the injustice that was done in the church.
JEFFRIES: The next morning, a bulldozer tossed the old bathroom building into the air. And later this month, the group discussing racism in the church will meet again to keep the conversation going. For NPR News, I'm Amy Jeffries in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Jimmy Heath called his autobiography "I Walked with Giants." The saxophonist made his first recording in 1948 and has been a prolific composer, arranger and bandleader working with some of the biggest names in jazz for the past 65 years. At the age of 87, Jimmy Heath is still playing. His latest record called "Togetherness," is due out next week. Tom Vitale has his story.
TOM VITALE, BYLINE: In the room he uses as a practice space and office in his apartment in Corona, Queens, Jimmy Heath recalls a hit record from long ago.
JIMMY HEATH: It's a song Bill Farrell, a popular singer, had it years ago. (Singing) You changed. You're not the angel I once knew. No need to tell me that we're through. It's all over now. You've changed.
VITALE: Then the five-foot-three musician with the big sound picks up his tenor and blows.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VITALE: When "You've Changed" was a hit song in 1949, Jimmy Heath was a 23-year-old bebopper - a disciple of the new jazz pioneered by alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Heath played alto then, and already had his own big band in Philadelphia. John Coltrane was a sideman in Heath's band. At the end of 1949, they both joined the orchestra of their idol, Dizzy Gillespie.
HEATH: The jazz scene in Philadelphia - we were actually second-string beboppers. Because we had heard Dizzy and "Bird" and they had set such a high curve to all of us who wanted to be like that. Trane and myself, we all were trying to be like them.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VITALE: Because he played alto in the style of Parker, whose nickname was "Bird," and because he's small in stature, Heath became known as "Little Bird."
HEATH: I liked the idea at first. But I wanted to be Jimmy Heath.
VITALE: When he left Dizzy's band, he switched to tenor saxophone.
HEATH: I wanted to get away from being called "Little Bird." So, I say, well, I get the tenor and try this, and you know, lo and behold, I still sounded like Bird on tenor.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VITALE: Jimmy Heath is more than an instrumentalist. He composes, arranges and orchestrates.
PHIL SCHAAP: He is one of the most important and essential soldiers in the armies of jazz's greatest players.
VITALE: Phil Schaap is a curator of jazz at Lincoln Center.
SCHAAP: He wrote a piece that Charlie Parker used called "Fiesta." He doesn't get too much credit for that, just like he doesn't get credit for the "Serpent's Tooth" that he did with Miles Davis. His compositions are great.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCHAAP: Think about his translating the innovations of Bebop into orchestral music. It's not an easy thing to do. And he's done it now in several decades, the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s and teens.
VITALE: On his new album, "Togetherness," Jimmy Heath leads a big band at the Blue Note Club, performing his original compositions.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VITALE: Heath's affinity for big band music goes back to a time when the big bands were the biggest acts of the day. He heard them all, and played with many of their star soloists. His 2010 memoir is called "I Walked with Giants" - a reference to Coltrane and Gillespie, Clifford Brown, Milt Jackson and Miles Davis. Heath never reached the level of fame achieved by those jazz greats, but he's OK with that.
HEATH: They're dead, and you become an icon when you're dead. I always say I'd rather be an acorn and be alive.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VITALE: At 87 years old, Jimmy Heath looks around his office - at his saxophones and flutes, at the stacks of sheet music, at his recordings and concert posters - and says there's no secret to his longevity.
HEATH: I love it, man. It's love. It's nothing but love all around here, man. Music. See my closet? Full. All of that's all music I wrote - music. I've been in it all my life.
VITALE: Jimmy Heath says he's going to be in it, as he puts it, until he leaves. For NPR News, I'm Tom Vitale in New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. EJ Leiderman wrote our theme music. I'm Scott Simon.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Operas are often centered on tragic heroines who die or take their own lives at the end of the story. But "Thumbprint," a new chamber opera, takes that formula and turns it around. This opera is based on the true story of a young, illiterate Pakistani who was the victim of a terrible honor crime. Jeff Lunden reports she took on the system and ultimately triumphed.
JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE: Mukhtar Mai is from a small tribal village in Pakistan. In 2002, her brother was accused of sexually molesting a woman from a wealthy landowning clan. What happened next was horrifying, says Kamala Sankaram, who wrote the music and plays the lead role in "Thumbprint."
KAMALA SANKARAM: For retribution, the village council decided that Mukhtar should be gang-raped by four of the men of this clan. And what is supposed to happen for a woman after this has taken place is that not only has she shamed herself, she's brought dishonor to the rest of her family as well. She's shunned from her village, and the only course of action for her to take is to take her own life.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC FROM THE OPERA, "THUMBPRINT")
LUNDEN: Far from being the end of Mukhtar Mai's story, in many ways it was just the beginning.
SANKARAM: Not only did she defy tradition by choosing not to kill herself, she actually, despite the fact that she's illiterate, despite the fact that she had no knowledge of the laws of her country, she took her case to court and she won.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC FROM THE OPERA, "THUMBPRINT")
LUNDEN: Sankaram and her librettist Susan Yankowitz both came to Mukhtar Mai's story separately. Sankaram had written a song cycle based on Mai's autobiography, while Yankowitz wrote a monologue about her for Seven, a theatrical evening sponsored by Vital Voices Global Partnership, an NGO that works with women leaders around the world.
Cindy Dyer is its vice president for human rights.
CINDY DYER: What she experienced is actually very common. Women are being violated and brutalized even today, and the problem is that many women do not have access to help and they are afraid to seek help. And so her courage in seeking help is so inspirational to others.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC FROM THE OPERA, "THUMBPRINT")
LUNDEN: In telling Mukhtar Mai's story, Kamala Sankaram has taken elements of Hindustani music from Ragas to Qawwali devotional songs and fused them with Western operatic forms.
SANKARAM: So, there are flavors of India and Pakistan in there even though it's still written for Western opera singers.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC FROM THE OPERA, "THUMBPRINT")
LUNDEN: The title, "Thumbprint," comes from a pivotal moment in Mukhtar Mai's story when she goes to the police to report the rape, says librettist Susan Yankowitz.
SUSAN YANKOWITZ: When she's there, she realizes she does not know how to sign her name to the document. And it has never really occurred to her that this was a disadvantage in any way, that this was a problem. But in the context of the police and the judge and a court, she understands how important it is. She does sign the document with her thumbprint, and in doing so, she understands the power and importance of education.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC FROM THE OPERA, "THUMBPRINT")
LUNDEN: With the money she won from the settlement, Mukhtar Mai set up schools and a foundation to serve the impoverished people in her community. But Cindy Dyer of Vital Voices says...
DYER: Different entities have use every tool in their arsenal to try to shut this organization down and try to silence Mukhtar Mai.
LUNDEN: And that's why librettist Susan Yankowitz says it's important to tell Mai's story.
YANKOWITZ: Because of the fact that she - one single person, one body, one voice, made this enormous change in Pakistan. She was really the first. She's the first woman to ever bring her rapists to court.
LUNDEN: After today's matinee performance of "Thumbprint," Mukhtar Mai will speak to the audience herself via Skype. For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC FROM THE OPERA, "THUMBPRINT")
SIMON: You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
"August: Osage County," the movie, has just opened. An all-star cast - including Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch and more - play various members of the Weston clan, who converge on their Oklahoma home when the patriarch, Beverly - who's a poet somewhat past his rhymes - goes missing while his wife, Violet, gobbles pills; some of which are for the pain of mouth cancer, and some of which are just because. At some point, there is a funeral dinner.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY")
SIMON: Tracy Letts, who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his play, has adapted it for the screen. He's also won a Tony for starring on Broadway in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" He plays a U.S. senator in the latest season of "Homeland," and is a member of Chicago's Steppenwolf ensemble. Tracy Letts joins us from Chicago. Thanks so much for being with us.
TRACY LETTS: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: You know, such a well-known play, but I'm afraid I don't think I've ever heard the story of how you came to write "August: Osage County."
LETTS: It's based on family history. My grandfather - my mother's father - committed suicide when I was 10 years old. And my grandmother descended into years of downer addiction, which had a horrible impact on my family and has ripples in my family even to this day. And watching all of that unfold as a 10-year-old certainly had an impact on me.
And after I became a dramatist, it certainly seemed like ripe material for a play. And I just thought about it for a really long time before I thought, OK, I think I've got the right container for this story. I think I know the way to tell this story in a way that's personal for me, and yet not so personal - not too personal, you know.
SIMON: So, I wonder, the character Beverly, the poet, the - I think we refer to him as the patriarch of the clan - who was, as I recall, even your father played him, didn't he...
LETTS: Yeah.
SIMON: ...when the show premiered in Chicago, and I think he even went to Broadway with it.
LETTS: Sure did.
SIMON: Well, forgive me, can he ever be just a character to you?
LETTS: Well, that character, for instance, is very much a work of fiction. My grandfather - the one who committed suicide - was a laborer and not a poet at all. That was completely my creation. That's a good example of where autobiography ends and creativity, I suppose, takes over.
But the character of my grandmother is very much drawn from life. She's very much based on my memories of my grandmother. Perhaps not her use of language so much but in attitude and inclination, she's very much based on my grandma.
SIMON: Can you make Oklahoma, the state, a character in the film in a way that's harder on stage?
LETTS: Yeah, I think the landscape is pretty evocative just by itself. You know, when John Wells was scouting locations - John Wells directed the film - when he was scouting locations for the movie, John realized when he saw Oklahoma, he said, well, we have to shoot it here because no place else looks like this. There's a quality to the light that's unlike anywhere else. And it's really true. The landscape is very particular to Oklahoma, and I think it is very evocative. It certainly - well, it's certainly evokes a lot from me, since I'm from there.
SIMON: I'm left with a couple of overall impressions after watching the film. One is that the people we know weren't always the age by which we know them now.
LETTS: Well, I think that's absolutely true, and I think that's one of the things the play is getting at. These people have histories. But yeah, I think that's absolutely true.
SIMON: And the other is we sometimes grow up to resemble the person we swore we never would. (Laughter)
LETTS: Well, sometimes. Maybe we always do.
(LAUGHTER)
LETTS: I think perhaps the sad truth is, we always do. I think, though, that one of the things the story provides - it introduces a question, right? The question is: Do you have a choice? Are you your brother's keeper? I mean, when does your responsibility to your family end, and when should your responsibility to yourself take over?
SIMON: You got married recently.
LETTS: I did.
SIMON: In a hospital.
LETTS: Yeah.
SIMON: Can we ask for the story about that? I mean, you didn't go out of your way to get married in a hospital. I guess in a sense, you did - right?
LETTS: (Laughter) We had applied to get married in Illinois. We had 60 days. We were never in the same town. My wife showed up, and we had one day left; and she walked in the door from Los Angeles, and I suddenly grabbed my stomach. I said, boy, I'm not feeling well. She said, you're not getting out of it that easy. But we wound up going to the emergency room. I had my gall bladder removed.
And she - my wife went and found the chaplain at Northwestern - a Lutheran chaplain who'd never performed a wedding before. She came to our room and performed the ceremony, just the three of us. It was a lovely, personal, intimate ceremony. And immediately after the ceremony, I took some pain medication and peed in a cup.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: Well, that's one way to say l'chaim, isn't it? I made a short list: addiction abuse, adultery, abandonment, imminent incest and just plain old hatred. So is every family is a little bit like the Westons of Osage County?
LETTS: What we have seen by doing this play is that the story of this family is pretty universal. And the dinner scene alone, in the theater - I can tell you that some people are howling with laughter, and other people are in tears and crawling under their seats. They find it very upsetting to watch because it hits pretty close to home.
SIMON: "Fiddler on the Roof" with the F word?
(LAUGHTER)
LETTS: That's one way to look at it.
SIMON: Tracy Letts, the playwright and actor who has written the screenplay for the new movie of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "August: Osage County"; speaking with us from Chicago. Thanks so much for being with us.
LETTS: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: And you're listening to WEEKEND EDITION, from NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
When - how - does our brain become our mind? Our heart? Us - whatever we are. And how do we live with memories when they begin to burst inside? E.L. Doctorow's new novel is "Andrew's Brain," and it plunges inside the brain of a man who tells the story of a man who is trying to outrun the memories rattling around in there; of a disaster he blames on himself, a daughter he couldn't hold close, and an indelible crime that overwhelms his world. E.L. Doctorow is one of the most honored novelists in the world, the author of "The Book of Daniel," "Ragtime," "World's Fair," "Billy Bathgate," and many other novels. He joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
E.L. DOCTOROW: It's my pleasure.
SIMON: I gather you've got a personal memory of something that happened to a friend that set off this idea for a novel in your mind. Can you talk about that?
DOCTOROW: Yes. Many years ago, I worked for a man, a good decent man in the movie business. And he told me one day that years before he had been feeding medicine to his infant child with an eye dropper and it was the wrong medication. And as a result, the child died. And he had a couple of other stories that made me realize that he was an inadvertent agent of disaster, leaving a wake behind him of terrible events. And I also had the image in my mind - I don't know where it came from - of a girl with colored pencils drawing on a pad and then she sees an adult trying to see what she's done. And so she takes the pencil in her hand and scribbles over what she's been so carefully doing. And those two images somehow combined in some sort of evocative way and got me writing this book.
SIMON: Your protagonist, Andrew, is a cognitive scientist. Now, this doesn't seem to be the same thing as trying to write a novel from the mind of a man who is a bus driver. How do you write convincingly from inside the mind and skin of a cognitive scientist?
DOCTOROW: The ideal way to get involved in this sort of work is to write in order to find out what you're writing. You don't start with an outline and a plan, you start from these images that are very evocative to you. And in this case, it's the first line in the book, where's Andrew's saying I can tell you what I'm about to tell you, but it's not pretty. And suddenly you find yourself with your character. And it occurs to you that he's a cognitive scientist. I don't know why, but it just does. The book is constructed as someone mostly talking and someone mostly listening - sort of like radio. And he's talking to someone who might be a shrink or some sort of questioner, and telling the story of how he's got into this mess.
SIMON: You are so celebrated for best-selling historical novels - and there is some gripping history here in the scenes following September 11th, but why did you want to try to this forum?
DOCTOROW: Well, I know some people think of me as a historical novelist. I don't agree with that. I think all novels are about the past, the near past, the far past. Some of them have a wider focus and include more of society and recognizable events and people. The historical novel seems to me a misnomer. And many of my books take place in different places - in the Dakotas, or down south in Georgia or the Carolinas - so it's just as valid to call me a geographical novelist as an historical novelist. I think of myself really as a national novelist, as an American novelist writing about my country.
SIMON: Can I ask you a couple of biographical questions?
DOCTOROW: Sure.
SIMON: So, you went to Kenyon with Paul Newman?
DOCTOROW: Well, Newman was a senior and a veteran when I got there as a freshman. And only when he left Kenyon that I began to get some decent roles in the drama club.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: So, you were under consideration for, like, "Cool Hand Luke" and "The Hustler" and all that stuff?
DOCTOROW: At that time, I wanted to be playwright, and I thought I should really get on the stage and feel what the experience is when I was an actor. But we knew Newman was the real thing. We all knew that.
SIMON: Yeah. And then you were also, I gather, an editor who worked with both Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand.
DOCTOROW: That is correct. I was a young editor. And Fleming was a charming man. I liked him enormously. I liked him better than I liked his books actually. He had my first novel and was very, very kind to me about that. Ayn Rand was another case all together. She and I really didn't get along. But she was a tough cookie.
SIMON: Among the many question this novel keeps raising is it invites the reader to try to figure out what are we really? And it's asking what's the position of the novel, the story, not even just the novel as a forum, but the story.
DOCTOROW: What I've learned doing this kind of work is that fiction is the most conservative of the arts. If you think historically what has happened in music or among the poets - Whitman in the 19th century just destroying romantic poetry and building a whole kind of new thing. The ideas carried along by the artists who keep changing, keep looking for more, or for something truer, something greater. But generally speaking, the insistence on storytelling of a realistic nature has predominated and continued in the old ways. So, what I'm guided by - perhaps it's futile - is Ezra Pound's injunction. When he was talking to the poets, he said make it new, make it new. And that's what must have been provoking me when this book came along.
SIMON: Well, E.L. Doctorow. His new novel, "Andrew's Brain." Thanks so much for being with us.
DOCTOROW: It's my pleasure. Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gate's new book, "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War," paints a picture of a White House suspicious of military leaders and their motives. As NPR's Tom Bowman reports, Mr. Gates' memoir is a case study of civilian military tensions that's as old as the republic.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Gates takes the reader inside the White House. A debate was on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. Senior officers were pushing for tens of thousands more. They were making their case publicly. Obama was furious, convinced they were trying to box him in. Do they resent me that I never served in the military, Obama says, according to Gates. Do they think that because I'm young I don't see what they're doing?
PETE MANSOOR: I don't think it speaks very highly of the president.
BOWMAN: Retired Colonel, Peter Mansoor is an Iraq war veteran who worked closely with General David Patraeus. He now teaches at Ohio State.
MANSOOR: To think that the military was purposely trying to jam him means that he knows very little about military leaders. They were giving their best military advice.
BOWMAN: But the Pentagon press has never been shy about pushing their own agenda in Washington, everything from policy issues to weapons systems, even with presidents who were veterans. Peter Feaver served on the White House National Security Council under both Presidents Clinton and George. W. Bush. He says the Obama Administration suspicion of the military is not surprising.
PETER FEAVER: When you have Democrats coming in, that can be intensified because of the perception that the military as an institution leans in the Republican conservative direction.
BOWMAN: And that suspicion intention has a long history. Lincoln was openly belittled by his army commander, George McClelland. Harry Truman famously dismissed General Douglas McArthur for insubordination. Richard Kohn studies civilian military relations at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He says as the military as modernized, so too has a wariness of civilian leaders.
RICHARD KOHN: Rarely have administrations come in since World War II without some suspicions of the military; their power, their influence, the senior people that desire to shape the outcome of decisions and policies.
BOWMAN: Kohn says he's surprised that Gates would come out with a book now. The norm in Washington is to hold off writing a book until a president leaves office.
KOHN: It speaks of something of a betrayal of trust. It simply weakens the president and if Mr. Gates wants to serve in the military he loves, he wouldn't weaken its loyalty and its ability to do its duty for this commander-in-chief for the next three years.
BOWMAN: For his part, Gates says he didn't want to wait until Obama's term is up in 2017. Too many of the issues need more immediate attention - Afghanistan, military spending, a dysfunctional government.
FEAVER: Certainly he's raised fair criticisms that should be aired.
BOWMAN: Again, Peter Feaver, the former White House staffer. He says a book will only lead the Obama Administration to be more wary of the military.
FEAVER: Because now they're looking at everyone else in the room and wondering who they should leave out of the room because that person might be in the process of writing a savage critique of them.
BOWMAN: Gates acknowledges in his book that the civilian military relationship is often a tense one. He criticizes admirals and generals who seek what he calls a high public profile, talking too much about politically sensitive issues. Gates can't imagine why they Tweet and blog. But he faults political leaders for using the military as props to sell their own policies, knowing those in uniform are popular with the public.
Politicians, even in the White House, he writes, can't have it both ways. Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
SIMON: And on Monday's MORNING EDITION, Steve Inskeep will speak with Robert Gates in the first interview conducted since details of Mr. Gates' book became public.
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SIMON: You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Members of Congress are keenly aware of the unemployment numbers because, of course, their jobs are on the line when voters go to the polls in November. Many Republicans hope that popular discontent with Obamacare will help them stay in their jobs. Many Democrats hope that a lot of Americans are concerned with those still struggling by. And now many Republicans say that they also care about the plight of the poor. NPR's David Welna has this report.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: All this week, majority leader Harry Reid declared over and over on the Senate floor that there's a downside to this recovering economy.
SENATOR HARRY REID: It's true. The rich are getting a whole lot richer and the poor are getting poorer.
WELNA: That observation may not be surprising coming from a Democrat, even though his party controls the White House and half of Congress. Less expected, perhaps, is a similar lament made the same day by the Senate's Republican leader, Mitch McConnell.
SENATOR MITCH MCCONNELL: We all know the stock market's been doing great, so the richest among us are doing just fine. But what about the poor? What about working-class folks?
WELNA: Those comments came the same week as studies showed that more than half the members of Congress are millionaires. Still, Susan Collins, the Senate Republican up for reelection in Maine, insists members of both parties are compassionate and that they do agree...
SENATOR SUSAN COLLINS: ...that income inequality is a real issue, that the lack of jobs is a serious problem. The question is what do we do about it?
WELNA: The two parties' deep differences over dealing with these issues were readily apparent on Wednesday, the 50th anniversary of President Johnson's declaration of war on poverty. Hawaii Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono called that effort a success.
SENATOR MAZIE HIRONO: The national poverty rate has gone down from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012. Without safety net programs, the poverty rate would have climbed to 29 percent.
WELNA: But Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio marked the anniversary with a speech in Johnson's old Senate office highlighting the continued problems of poverty.
SENATOR MARCO RUBIO: It will not be solved by continuing with the same stale Washington ideas. Five decades and trillions of dollars after President Johnson first announced a war on poverty, the results of the big government approach are in.
WELNA: And in an interview with NBC's Brian Williams, another Republican, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan was asked what grade he'd give the war on poverty.
REPRESENTATIVE PAUL RYAN: I would give us a failing grade. It has failed. We should have done better than this. We can do better than this.
WELNA: Both Ryan and Rubio want more local control over anti-poverty programs. Meanwhile, the Senate is debate whether Congress should restore jobless benefits to more than a million long-term unemployed people who lost them two weeks ago. GOP McConnell voted to block that aid.
MCCONNELL: Because it's only when you believe government is answer to all of your problems that you talk about unemployment insurance instead of job creation.
WELNA: Most Senate Republicans voted to block extending the unemployment payments. They did so invoking fiscal rectitude. John Hoeven is a Republican from North Dakota, the state with the nation's lowest unemployment.
SENATOR JOHN HOEVEN: You've got to find a way to pay for these programs so we don't keep increasing the debt and deficit, which hurts the economy.
WELNA: Democrats say extending unemployment benefits actually helps the economy, as well as those who receive them. Their next goal is to raise the federal minimum wage. That won't be forgotten come election time, says New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer.
SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER: The issue of which party can address the needs of the middle class and a decline in income and the need for better-paying jobs is going to win the election, plain and simple. Not this party that's, you know, figures out the best solution on Obamacare and not the party who figures out the best solution on the deficit. This is the issue. The world is changing.
WELNA: It's a different world, he adds, than a year ago. David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
DENNIS RODMAN: (Singing) Happy birthday to you...
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There's been a publicity circus trailing Dennis Rodman to North Korea to present a big, bouncing birthday present of a basketball game to Kim Jong Un. But did you see the score of the game? The U.S. team of former NBA players lost the first half 47-39 before the sides were combined. Well, if you play a team sponsored by a ruthless leader who recently had his own uncle iced, losing is probably the smart move.
I happen to like Dennis Rodman. I saw him close-up when he played for the Chicago Bulls and was one of the great rebounders for all time. He was famously flamboyant but also often disarmingly frank about the frailties and insecurities he developed growing up as an abandoned young man on the roughest streets of Dallas. He seemed to call anyone he met his friend - nice quality until you meet the despot.
This week, Dennis Rodman apologized for suggesting that Kenneth Bay, the American man being held in a North Korean prison, must deserve being locked up for hostile acts against the state. I had been drinking, Dennis Rodman said in his statement. I embarrassed a lot of people. I'm very sorry. Several other players who joined Mr. Rodman in North Korea, including Kenny Anderson and Vin Baker, have had drinking problems that shortened their pro careers. The dear leader's birthday bash might have been their last chance at a big payday. NBA commissioner David Stern told CNN this week he thought the players had been blinded by a flash of North Korean money.
Dennis Ross, the longtime U.S. diplomat, told us he believed that Dennis Rodman, quote, "is being used by North Korea," but adds, "someone ought to talk to the group about who and what they saw because even small details of the crowd at that birthday basketball bash might offer insights into a bizarre and murky leadership."
Ping-pong might have helped the U.S. and China break barriers in the early 1970s, but has Dennis Rodman's mystery tour through North Korea then sports diplomacy or propaganda? With 16 million North Koreans in need of food according to a U.N. report and 130,000 being held as political prisoners, you might wonder if U.S. and North Korean athletes need to recognize their common humanity on the basketball court so much as the North Korean regime needs to see the humanity of its own people. But is Dennis Rodman available for kids' birthday parties?
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(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HAPPY BIRTHDAY")
SIMON: And you're listening to NPR News.
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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. Yesterday's jobs report came as something of a surprise after several months of positive economic news. Employers added just 74,000 jobs. Economists had been expecting businesses to generate nearly three times that many. A few people were heartened by the fact that the unemployment rate fell to 6.7 percent, the lowest since October of 2008. As NPR's Chris Arnold reports, the numbers reflect that many of the long-term unemployed have simply given up looking for work.
CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: First, we should say that this latest jobs report could be kind of a fluke. There were private-sector reports that found just the opposite - much stronger job growth. So Friday morning, analysts were flummoxed. Randall Kroszner is a University of Chicago economist and a former governor of the Federal Reserve Board.
RANDALL KROSZNER: This is an odd report, and a very disappointing number for December. There's a lot of volatility in these numbers, very large revisions that occur over the next month or two. And so we really have to wait and see.
ARNOLD: We reached Kroszner after his flight got delayed at the Chicago airport. That's been happening to lots of folks lately. And Kroszner says bad weather doesn't just foul up travel. It can foul up employment data, too. For example, construction workers get told to stay home because it's too cold to work with certain materials.
KROSZNER: We've had unusually snowy and cold weather in December, and so that certainly contributed to some of the oddities in the numbers.
ARNOLD: But this, we do know: About 4 million Americans are looking for work, and have been looking for more than six months. This situation with long-term unemployment has been getting a little better, but it's still basically the worst that it's been since the 1940s. And that means that a lot of regular Americans, often through no fault of their own, have fallen into a seemingly never-ending twilight zone where they just can't find a job.
MICHAEL KOCHER: Altogether, I ended up spending, I guess, 16 or 17 months unemployed.
ARNOLD: That's Michael Kocher. He's 29 years old and when he got out of the Marine Corps a year and a half ago after serving in Iraq, he didn't expect it to be this hard to find work. He first moved back to his home state of Alaska.
KOCHER: I got out thinking, like, oh, I'm a veteran, you know, it's going to be easy. I'm going to find a job.
ARNOLD: And Kocher has a college degree, six years' experience in the military, a job before that. But things just didn't work out so well.
KOCHER: I mean, it got bad because like, my unemployment ran out. I had no money coming in, and there was a period of time where I actually was living in my - I was living in my truck, my Chevy Tahoe.
ARNOLD: Actually, it was Kocher and his dog.
KOCHER: And I'm a pretty big guy. You know, I'm 6-foot-8 and about 270 pounds. And it was me and my 80-pound chocolate lab, living in my Tahoe. (Laughter)
ARNOLD: After a while, Kocher moved to California to look for work but no luck there, either. He had worked in radio communications in the military, so he applied to cellphone and electronics companies and anything related to that that he could think of. But with so many job seekers, employers can be choosy, and they told him that he just didn't have the right experience. So Kocher lowered his sights.
KOCHER: Oh, yeah. I mean, I tried to apply to sell, like, electronics at Targe; I tried applying at both UPS and FedEx; random, you know, restaurants to do, like, pizza delivery.
ARNOLD: But, Kocher says, nobody would hire him. Labor experts say ironically, it can actually get harder to find even entry-level jobs like this the longer you're not working because employers start to think, well, maybe there's something wrong with this person. In Kocher's case, though, just a few weeks ago, he finally landed a job. Working from home in San Jose, he's now doing product testing for a company that's making a privacy software. It's called Virtru. Kocher says he's doing the job well and getting money in his pocket again, and that means a brighter future for him and his long-term girlfriend. They've been living at her parents' house for a while now.
KOCHER: Just now, you know, I can think positively about the future again. I can think about things like getting married and having kids again. And it's just like everything in my life is better now that I'm employed with a real job, with a company I can see going places.
ARNOLD: Every month that goes by, more Americans are finding jobs. But there are still three times as many unemployed people as job openings.
Chris Arnold, NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Neil Harbisson is an artist who was born with total colorblindness. That means he sees only in shades of black and white. But a sensor attached to his head has expanded his world by translating colors into sound frequencies. And for this reason, Mr. Harbisson considers himself to be a cyborg. Neil Harbisson joins us now from the studios of the BBC in London. Thanks so much for being with us.
NEIL HARBISSON: Thank you.
SIMON: Why do you consider yourself a cyborg and not just a guy who wears a device?
HARBISSON: Well, at the beginning, I felt that I was wearing a device but slowly the software started to feel more and more as an extension of my senses. And there was a point where I couldn't differentiate the software from my brain. I started to dream in color so my brain was reproducing the sound of the software. And I started to feel that the antenna was no longer a device that I was wearing but a part of my body.
SIMON: Well, let me get you to explain that device, if you could. This is something that's actually been implanted.
HARBISSON: Yes. So, first of all, in 2004, this was attached to my head, so it was a camera and headphones and a computer that I was wearing 24 hours a day and the antenna was attached on the surface of my head. Then I started to use a pressure to my bones so that I could hear colors through bone conduction. And then a couple of months ago, this was actually drilled inside the bone.
SIMON: So, how has hearing color affected your life?
HARBISSON: Well, it's changed many, many things - color's absolutely everywhere. So, wherever I look there's music now. Going to the museum now, I can listen to an Andy Warhol, I can listen to a Picasso. And when I listen to music, it happens the other way around. I feel color, so it's changed the way they perceive not only (unintelligible). So, daily places, such as supermarkets, 'cause there's many, many colors there.
SIMON: Mr. Harbisson, you co-founded the Cyborg Foundation. What do you do and what do you mean when you list one of the goals of the organization to defend cyborg rights?
HARBISSON: Well, now, cyborgs are a minority group. There are no laws defending the right to use technology as a part of the body. And then we want to defend the right of anyone who feels their right of wearing technology as part of the body has been in danger. In cases like not being allowed into a shop, for example, or not being allowed in a cinema, 'cause they think that they might be doing something illegal, or just the simple fact of being able to appear on your passport photo with your cybernetic extension if it appears on your head.
SIMON: Now, I gather you can now appear that way on your passport photo?
HARBISSON: Yes, but it took quite a long time to convince them that I felt that this was a part of my body and it should be allowed on the passport photo.
SIMON: I don't want to anticipate a lot of arguments that may or may not be made or that may or may not amount to anything, but where do you draw the line between someone like you who feels that they need that device to participate fully in the world and, you know, and some guy who never takes the ear buds out of his ears?
HARBISSON: I think it's, there's a difference between wearing technology and feeling that you are technology. That's, I think, the difference.
SIMON: I mean, on the one hand, if it helps people who can't walk walk or people, for example, like you who have some sort of visual impairment, if it helps them see the world more fully. But isn't there a concern - and maybe science fiction films fuel some of this too - that we would be on the verge of inventing some kind of super-strong human beings with, you know, arms as strong as machine pistons that could do ill in the world?
HARBISSON: Well, I think we should all have this wish to extend our senses and our perception 'cause I personally am comparing myself with other animal species and perceiving sound through bone conduction, which is what I have now. It's also very normal in nature. There's dolphins that can perceive through bone conduction, having an antenna attached to the head is something many animals have. So, I think that we can learn a lot from other senses that already exist in nature and we can apply them to humans.
SIMON: And does that make us human beings with some enhanced component parts or does it make us robots with some human parts?
HARBISSON: I think it makes us human. I think this is something extremely human, to create technology and then apply it to ourselves is something only humans can do so. I feel much more human now that I have technology in me.
SIMON: Neil Harbisson is an artist and co-founder of the Cyborg Foundation. Thanks very much for being with us, sir.
HARBISSON: Thank you.
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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Big aviation news this week: the red-necked phalarope is one of Scotland's rarest breeding birds and was thought to migrate to its winter grounds in the Arabian Sea. This past week, it was reported that a new tiny tracking device reveals that the phalarope actually flies across the Atlantic Ocean down to the Caribbean, all the way to South America. So, is the phalarope a Scottish bird or a South American one? Malcie Smith is from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and he joins us from Scotland. Thanks very much for being with us.
MALCIE SMITH: Hi. How you doing?
SIMON: Fine, thank you. Well, I haven't been flying for, what is it, 16,000 miles or whatever.
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SMITH: Yeah. We like to think of it as being a Scottish bird but, of course, they're only here for about, well, two, three months of the year. Most of the year they're out at sea and turns out they're actually close to the States than they are to the U.K.
SIMON: So, why didn't we know this until now?
SMITH: Well, it's a really hard thing to try and discover, to be honest. Only recently this technology's become available that enables us to find out in some detail where these birds are going.
SIMON: It's a small bird, having seen some pictures.
SMITH: Yeah.
SIMON: To my knowledge, I've never seen a phalarope, so how small is the tracking device?
SMITH: Oh, it's tiny. It's only .6 of a gram, so it's about 11 millimeters square and wafer-thin. So, it's a really tiny, little device.
SIMON: And how's it work?
SMITH: It's fitted with a battery and a light stalk. Now, this records sunset and sunrise and day (unintelligible). And, as any 18th century navigator will tell you, that all you need to know to work out roughly what your latitude and longitude is.
SIMON: I'm told these birds are - how do I put this - well, they're kind of like penguins in the way they arrange their society and parental responsibilities.
SMITH: Yes. Their breeding behavior is pretty unusual. They display what we call reversed sexual role, where the male is a quite a small, dowdy little bird; the female's much bigger, much brighter, much bolder, and more aggressive. When they pair up for a short time during the breeding season and the female lays her four eggs, she leaves the male to do all the incubating and all the care of the chicks while she goes off to look for another mate.
SIMON: This is not a happy love story, is it?
SMITH: Well, not as far as he's concerned. But it does mean that Mrs. Phalarope can go off and get two broods of chicks off in one short breeding season.
SIMON: Well, I guess we should say good for her.
SMITH: Absolutely.
SIMON: Malcie Smith of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Mr. Smith, I've learned a lot. Thanks very much.
SMITH: You're very welcome.
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SIMON: And this is NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. Fifty years ago, the first Surgeon General's report on smoking and health came out, and said that smoking is bad for you. So much has changed since then. Cigarette jingles and commercials, gone now from the airwaves. Warnings are on cigarette packs; taxes on cigarettes are huge in many states.
But millions of people still have died from what are figured to be smoking-related causes and about 20 percent of Americans still smoke. We're joined now by Kenneth Warner, professor of public health at the University of Michigan. He's co-authored two new studies on the impact of tobacco-controlled policies. Professor Warner, thanks so much for being with us.
KENNETH WARNER: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: So 50 years ago how common was smoking?
WARNER: It was incredibly common 50 years ago. Well over 50 percent of adult males were smokers. More than a third of women were smokers and that number was rising and would have continued to rise. And it was essentially the norm.
SIMON: Did the change occur quickly?
WARNER: It took a few years for it to kind of kick in, but if you look at adult per capita cigarette consumption, which is total cigarettes divided by the adult population, you'll see that that rose almost every single year from 1900 through 1963, and then it fell in 1964 and started to reverse course. Since 1973 that has fallen every single year.
SIMON: So what's worked and what hasn't?
WARNER: We know a number of policies that work very well. The single most important one is raising the price of cigarettes and doing so substantially. That is the policy that will get us the largest reduction in smoking as quickly as possible. It also is the most effective policy for reducing smoking among young people.
SIMON: So raising the price has been a more effective deterrent to smoking for young people than all those commercials?
WARNER: The commercials are very important. If you look at the Truth Campaign out of the American Legacy Foundation, that has been documented to have reduced smoking. But I think it is pretty much unarguable that price is the single most important variable in youth smoking. I would say that the messages you've seen in the mass media, like the Truth Campaign, are the second most.
And actually we have a great deal of difficulty knowing exactly what to do to get kids not to smoke once you get beyond those two policies or interventions.
SIMON: What do you think of e-cigarettes?
WARNER: E-cigarettes are something of an anomaly. They are a very interesting, novel product. We don't really know at this stage what difference they're going to make in either direction. The worry about e-cigarettes is that they're being marketed currently to encourage what we call dual use. They're being used to encourage adults who can't smoke at work to use a product like e-cigarettes so they can tide themselves over between the times when they can smoke.
By the same token, there's no question that by itself an e-cigarette is inherently less dangerous - that's not to say not dangerous - but much less dangerous than cigarettes. There's nothing other than combusted tobacco that really creates an enormous hazard to health, so the cigarette in other forms of combusted tobacco really need to be the target.
SIMON: Since we have you here, based on your experience and research, do you have strong opinions about nicotine gum, cigarette patches, anything like that?
WARNER: We know that all the nicotine pharmaceuticals and other techniques for quitting help some people to quit. When you talk about something like nicotine gum, we have the unfortunate fact that many people don't use it properly, so many people take the word gum literally and they chew it. And if you actually chew it, it doesn't work. You need to bite into it and let the tingle last for a while till that subsides and then bite it again.
That's something that very few users of the produce understand. In fact, it's something that relatively few physicians who will tell their patients to use the product understand.
SIMON: Professor Warner, what do you think's important in the next few years as far as you're concerned?
WARNER: One of the most important issues is worrying about how smoking relates to the mentally ill. We know that 40 to 50 percent of cigarettes and possibly 40 percent or more of smokers have a concurrent mental illness or other substance abuse problem that's diagnosable within the last 30 days. That's something that we in tobacco control mention and then forget all about. It deserves a lot more attention.
The other issue that's critically important is that smoking has become increasingly concentrated in the low income, low education populations. I'm always fascinated that we in public health talk about disparities in health and how important they are and then we tend to forget about smoking. Smoking may well be the single most important behavioral factor in health disparities between the rich and the poor.
SIMON: Kenneth Warner, public health professor at the University of Michigan. Thanks so much for being with us.
WARNER: Thank you very much.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
We took to Facebook to ask people who smoke why they do, despite knowing what we do about the hazards. Jon Vlaskamp, of Seattle, says smoking helped him through a crisis.
JON VLASKAMP: When I was 16, I was essentially forced out of town for being gay. And having come out and after all that emotional trauma, smoking really became an emotional crutch for me.
SIMON: We heard from many people who said they smoke to clear their minds. Bob Sundwick of Toledo, Ohio, said he started smoking when he was a fraternity pledge in college.
BOB SUNDWICK: Now in my work life, a lot of times I'll take a smoke break after a meeting or a phone call, to get my thoughts together before I write a nasty email just to get the phrasing right,so it doesn't come off bad.
SIMON: Loretta Owens of Harrison, Ark., told us she started smoking as a teenager, when her father offered to buy her a pack of cigarettes. She quit when she became a parent, but it didn't last. Four years later...
LORETTA OWENS: I decided to start smoking again when I lost my brother in a car accident. It made me think that I could die any day and that if I wanted to smoke, I should smoke.
SIMON: Melanie Loucks, of Tulsa, is 37 and has already suffered some effects from smoking, including pulmonary embolisms and deep vein thrombosis. She's tried to quit many times, knowing that another blood clot could kill her.
MELANIE LOUCKS: It feels like I'm a ticking time bomb. And many people, I'm sure, who may hear this will have absolutely zero sympathy. And I understand that; I understand that completely.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
So people still smoke in spite of the many good reasons not to. It certainly is addictive, but the cigarette also has a certain allure. Think of a man leaning into to light a lady's cigarette, or the pack preferred in a tense moment. Cigarettes are part of our culture. Richard Klein has written a book about that, "Cigarettes are Sublime." He joins us from New York City. Thanks so much for being with us.
RICHARD KLEIN: It's my pleasure.
SIMON: One of the things people notice when they see an old movie these days is that everybody's smoking. And in this book you talk about "Casablanca," for example, which a lot of us grow up thinking is a kind of a common cultural experience.
KLEIN: "Casablanca" is a kind of dictionary or sort of encyclopedia of ways of smoking. But the film begins, you may recall, with a smoking cigarette in an ashtray and all of a sudden we see a hand sort of pick it up and bring it to the lips of Humphrey Bogart who takes like a really deep puff on this cigarette and then you see him sort of fight off the nicotine high and then blow out this gorgeous stream of smoke at the beginning of the film, and that tells you everything you need to know.
SIMON: Yeah. And it's hard to think of Rick's Cafe without seeing smoke.
KLEIN: Oh, absolutely. It's smoking, and as you pointed out, there's that remarkable silent moment when two very beautiful people stand in profile against the hazy background of the smoky nightclub and the man lights a match and the woman's face is suddenly illuminated and they look into each other's eyes and smoke sort of fills the screen. It's a gorgeous moment.
SIMON: And I guess we should remind ourselves, too, there was a time in popular entertainment when, let's say in a medical drama, somebody noticed a spot on a lung in an x-ray. The doctors would get together and talk about it while smoking.
KLEIN: Innocently, absolutely. In "Dr. Kildare," which was an early TV series, in the very first episode Dr. Kildare goes dashing up the steps of the hospital and before he opens up the main doors he stops to get a pack of cigarettes from the machine that's in the lobby there. And at every crucial moment, the doctors can be seen to be smoking.
You know, doctors have known for hundreds of years, they can see the difference between their patients who smoke and the patients who don't. One of the great poets in the 19th Century who considered himself to be a cigarette dandy spoke about this murderous pleasure. He knew already that it was bad for his health.
SIMON: Danger is part of the allure of which we speak.
KLEIN: And that's precisely what allowed me to say that cigarettes are sublime. It wasn't sort of intended to be a joke. It was intended to refer to the strict philosophical definition of the sublime as you find it in Kant's "Third Critique" where he associates a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure with the experience of a danger overcome, of a confrontation with mortality with infinity that you nevertheless survive. And what I try to argue is that every time you take a puff you're ingesting a small bit of poison, but it's that poison that you quickly learn to love.
SIMON: I think a lot of people listening to us might wonder, well, if smoking's so all fired - pun intended - great, why did you give it up?
KLEIN: It's bad for you. It's poison. It's not good at all. But on the other hand, it's got a lot of advantages and a lot of benefits and it does a lot of things for you at certain points in your life, I found. But the older you get, the more it hurts your body. And eventually, I think, most people will find the pain outweighs the satisfactions. But that doesn't mean there aren't satisfactions and pleasures associated with it.
SIMON: Richard Klein who is a professor emeritus at Cornell University and author of the book, "Cigarettes are Sublime." Thanks very much for being with us.
KLEIN: Thank you very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "CASABLANCA")
SIMON: And tomorrow on WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY, we'll hear from a country where smoking is as popular as ever - Greece - where more than 40 percent of the population lights up even though smoking is banned in bars and cafes. And you are listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. I'm going to take this moment to remember the life of Ariel Sharon, Israel's former prime minister. Mr. Sharon suffered a devastating stroke in 2006 at the height of his political power. He died today after spending years in a coma. Former ambassador Dennis Ross has played a leading role in shaping U.S. policy on Israel and the Middle East and he first met Ariel Sharon in 1982, and joins us now. Mr. Ambassador, thanks very much for being with us.
DENNIS ROSS: Nice to be with you. Thank you.
SIMON: Ariel Sharon's autobiography was called, "Warrior," not prime minister. He was a military man, he was in five wars before he entered politics. How do you think his military background shaped his leadership?
ROSS: Well, it gave him a sense, in the most fundamental way possible, what's important. It made him feel that Israel was in a fight for survival and, you know, he saw a lot of his comrades die in terms of ensuring that the state would not only emerge but survive and sustain itself. And I think it gave him a perspective that he always needed to be thinking strategically.
I think that Ariel Sharon was a chess player, not a checkers player. He was always thinking about how he could position Israel in a way that would make it more secure. For a long time that was through the lens of creating facts on the ground and through how you build Israel's military strength, and then during his period as prime minister, it was how you could secure Israel from a standpoint of security and peace.
SIMON: Facts on the ground, a kind of euphemism for the settlements. So how do we understand - here was a man who was often identified as the architect of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, later shifting his position to become the prime minister who removed settlements from those areas.
ROSS: Again, I think you have to - it may seem cynical to say it, but I think the facts on the ground were him - were designed to build Israel's leverage. And its leverage could ensure its security, but if he felt that that leverage could be used to get what Israel needed from a peace standpoint, he was prepared to do that as well. What motivated him more than anything else was his view of what it took for Israel to survive in the long run and he was always thinking in a longer period of time. That was a perspective that he almost always brought to bear.
SIMON: How do you assess his relations with Palestinian leaders? He often pointed out that he grew up speaking Arabic as a native born Israeli. How did he - what kind of accommodation or working relationship did he have with Yasser Arafat and maybe later Mahmoud Abbas?
ROSS: Well, he was, you know, he was a complex personality, to say the least. On the one hand he could go out of his way to be ingratiating with Palestinians, to be understanding of their predicament, to talk about their need for dignity. On the other hand, there was a fundamental distrust, and he would tell me, you know. He grew up with a very profound sense that your neighbors could be friendly to you at one moment and then they could literally stab you in the back at another.
And that was a kind of mindset that he brought to bear. When we were at Wye River in 1998, he would not shake Yasser Arafat's hand. On the other hand, he negotiated at Wye River with Mahmoud Abbas, Abu Masnan and Abu Allah. And he was extremely forthcoming to them on both the idea of an airport for the Palestinians and even a seaport within Gaza.
So he was someone who could be extremely pragmatic. He wouldn't shake Yasser Arafat's hand and yet when he became prime minister, he sent his son to see him in a backchannel and told him, now he's an older man you have to respect him, treat him with dignity. So there was a duality to Ariel Sharon. With those Palestinians he felt he could deal with, he was prepared to be quite responsive. Abu Allah, who was the lead Palestinian negotiator during the 1990s, he quickly created a bond with him and was prepared to, I think, negotiate quite seriously with him.
So he was a man who had, as I said, a kind of duality to him and you saw it oftentimes in terms of his broader behaviors as well.
SIMON: But what kind of figure do you think he winds up being in the history of Israel? There was certainly a time in the 1980s after the report on Sabra and Shatila when you wouldn't have thought he'd ever serve in parliament again, much less be prime minister. And then he becomes the prime minister.
ROSS: I think for a long time he sought to, in a sense, rebuild his image and to recoup from the Kahan Commission report that found him, at least not guilty by what he did actively, but by an act of omission, as opposed to commission. I do think that he saw himself at someone who had a responsibility to the state and I think he was someone who saw himself as wanting to be seen as a kind of giant figure in the history of that state, not simply because he wanted it as a kind of legacy, but because he felt, you know, he committed his life to it.
And, you know, I'm struck by the fact that when he became prime ministry, one of the things that he told people was, look, I'm not here just to occupy this seat; I'm here to do the things that will serve the long term well-being of the Jewish state. I think that was, you know, that was kind of an emblem for him and it guided him very much.
SIMON: Former U.S. ambassador Dennis Ross who spent many years in contact with Ariel Sharon. Thanks very much for being with us, sir.
ROSS: My pleasure.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This week, the war in Syria jumped two borders - East into Iraq and west into Lebanon. And the combatants come in at all three countries, but belong to an extremist group affiliated with al Qaida, know by the name ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria. Now, they claimed a car bombing in Lebanon and seized parts of two towns in Iraq's Anbar Province. But in Syria, the homegrown rebel groups mounted a surprising challenge to the extremists, kicking them out of some safe havens in Northern Syria.
I'm going to try to step back now and look at ISIS and ask some basic questions. Joined now from Beirut by NPR's Deborah Amos, who's been watching regional developments there. Deb, thanks for being with us.
DEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: Thank you, Scott.
SIMON: Most basic question. Who are these guys?
AMOS: ISIS is an Iraqi-based al-Qaida affiliate. They've gained strength in the past two years since the U.S. military pulled out of Iraq. These militants have been wreaking havoc in Iraq, terrorizing the population with almost daily suicide bombings. So the group has its roots in Iraq, but they first appeared in the Syrian conflict last year as a rebranded al-Qaida affiliate. Now they call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham.
And it's the name that explains their ideology. Sham means greater Syria. All of this means they don't recognize the borders set more than 100 years ago. What they want to do is set up a radical Islamic state. The chaos in Syria has given them a huge boast. Here's how Chris Looney, a Washington-based analyst, describes their goals.
CHRIS LOONEY: ISIS views this conflict not as an Iraqi front and a Syrian front. It's the same conflict that transcends borders. That's what they're looking to do, is establish a safe haven, an area of control that goes across the Iraq-Syria border.
SIMON: Now, this is a group, of course, that this last week has taken over parts of Anbar Province, Ramadi, Fallujah, places certainly that U.S. troops fought to try and subdue al-Qaida. What happened there? How did they gain a foothold?
AMOS: We'll do a little history. The battles in Fallujah started in 2004. The U.S. military dealt a devastating blow to al-Qaida in 2007. The U.S. military also worked with Sunni Muslims in Anbar Province and they built an alliance. It was called the Sunni Awakening. Iraqi Sunnis turned on al-Qaida, they worked with the U.S. military, but by 2009 the Iraqi government, which is a Shiite-dominated government, reversed that relationship with the Sunni Awakening.
Iraqi Sunnis feel marginalized by this government. They see it as a puppet of neighboring Iran, which is also a Shiite power. So al-Qaida, this Islamic state of Iraq, started to make a comeback. They could say to these aggrieved Sunnis, we hear you and we'll protect you. But al-Qaida was also doing other things like carrying out sectarian targeted bombing. And again, listen to Chris Looney. He describes them.
LOONEY: Out of all the al-Qaida affiliates, ISIS is probably the most anti-Shia. It is the most sectarian and it has shown that in Iraq with this string of suicide bombings that have taken place almost daily throughout this year and killed upwards of 6,000 people.
AMOS: The U.N. figures are even higher. So this is a death count that is approaching the worst days of Iraq's civil war. So the Maliki government, with a lot of U.S. pressure, has been reaching out to Sunnis in Anbar because Maliki is finding out that he can't combat al-Qaida with military power alone. He needs the support of these Sunnis in Anbar.
SIMON: Of course, Secretary of State Kerry has been talking about the inroads that ISIS has made in Iraq. He said this is a fight that belongs to the Iraqis. The U.S. has certainly kept its distance in Syria. There have been no U.S. casualties as a result, but are there other consequences?
AMOS: What we are seeing is that both conflicts are feeding on each other. There has been a surprising development in Syria. This week, Syria's homegrown rebels have turned on ISIS and they appear to be routing them from some of those safe havens in the north. In fact, the Western-backed Free Syrian Army that a lot of people were writing off just a month ago as a spent force has been revived. They've been horrified that ISIS has stolen their revolt, and also kicked them out of some of these towns that they took from the regime. The problem is, Scott, that these extremists, as they are being kicked out of Syria, will most likely go back to Iraq.
SIMON: NPR's Deborah Amos in Beirut. Thanks so much.
AMOS: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. Time for sports.
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SIMON: Two NFL playoff games today. Will the Colts run out of luck - ha, get it? - against Tom Brady's Patriots? Will the Seahawks sink the Saints? And over on the other side of the world, will Serena serve herself into history again? Howard Bryant of ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine joins us now on the phone from New England Public Radio. Thanks so much for being with us, Howard.
HOWARD BRYANT: Good morning, Scott. How are you? Only for you would I try to break my neck on all the ice out here. I hope you're appreciative of this.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: Thank you. I do appreciate it. No, I do. And so do millions of listeners who want to hear you talk about the Hall of Fame. Three stars came in. Two pitchers who were inducted with just about universal acclamation. Let's talk about them first: Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux. Both were in the heart of that great Atlanta Braves rotation.
I will point out, Mr. Maddux won his first Cy Young Award, of course, and to me some of us will always be a Chicago Cub. What made them great?
BRYANT: Well, obviously what made them great was their consistency. And I think the thing that I love most about them, teammates, 14 straight division titles and a World Series as well, and both of those guys pitched in during an amazing as we all know as well, incredible era of offense and to be able to control the plate, to be able to keep all those steroid-laden hitters off balance and to do what they did during this time period was pretty remarkable.
SIMON: Which brings us to Frank Thomas, one of the great baseball nicknames of all times: The Big Hurt. Frank Thomas of the Chicago White Sox, the slugger who wouldn't juice.
BRYANT: That's right. And we talk a lot about steroids, obviously over the last 10 years, 15 years, and we give a lot of criticism to the players that had to go kicking and screaming in front of Congress, including the commissioner, including the union. And Frank Thomas was the only guy to volunteer to say, look, I have nothing to hide, this is bad for the game.
And that meant a lot for me as a Hall of Fame voter. And not only did he do that but he also organized essentially civil disobedience in the White Sox clubhouse - which you never seen from ballplayers - to essentially force baseball to have drug testing by making his teammates not take drug testing, to push the threshold of positive tests, to guarantee that drug testing would be part of the game.
He did that. I gave him a lot of credit for that especially because it wasn't necessarily a popular move with his teammates, but that showed leadership to me.
SIMON: And should we take a few seconds...
BRYANT: And he's a great player too.
SIMON: He's a great player. And should we recall the fact that there were people that thought in the steroid era, what's wrong with Frank Thomas. How come he's not hitting 60 home runs? Turns out 'cause he was honest.
BRYANT: Exactly. And he actually had the career arc of somebody who was actually human.
SIMON: Who do you see - what do you see happening as the Saints head to Seattle and the Colts take on the Patriots?
BRYANT: Well, if you think about what happened before when the Saints went up there and got their bells rung, I mean, it was pretty bad. The Seahawks are the best home team in football. The crowd is unbelievable. The team plays much better up there. But the Saints did something nobody thought they could do. They went up into Philadelphia in the cold conditions and the won a football game, and I think that's going to give them a lot of confidence to play this game.
I feel like if they can get out to the second half and still be in the game, it's going to be pretty good. But if they come in slow, they're going to get demolished. Seahawks are the best team in football.
SIMON: OK. And I've got to ask you, earliest rounds of the Australian Open, all eyes on Serena?
BRYANT: It starts Monday. Serena Williams is making a championship run towards history; wants to catch Martina and Chris Evert at 18 Grand Slams. She's one away and believe me, she's playing like Hank Aaron played in the '70s, to break that record, and that's really important to her. And I think it's great for tennis, too. Everyone talks about the American men not being as good as they used to be, but Serena has held up her bargain for the end for the American women and for the country. She's terrific.
SIMON: Howard Bryant of ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine. Howard, thanks so much for being with us.
BRYANT: My pleasure.
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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.
The biggest show in Vegas this week wasn't Celine Dion or DJ Afrojack. It was the Consumer Electronics Show. The annual show where buyers, journalists and consumers get a first look at new tech products that are about to hit the market. Snoop Dogg was there, Secretary of Commerce Pritzker was there. And so was NPR's Steve Henn, who joined us as the show was packing up, from the floor of the Consumer Electronic Show on Friday. Steve, thanks so much for being with us.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: Oh, my pleasure.
SIMON: Twenty thousand new products there?
HENN: Yes, 20,000 new products were unveiled. There were hundreds of thousands of products. You know, the show took up more than two million square feet of space. It filled the Las Vegas Convention Center and spilled over into four hotels. It's just - it's enormous.
SIMON: I gather they're connecting everything to the Internet these days. What I read, onesies for babies...
HENN: Right.
SIMON: ...and toothbrushes. I'm very envious because that I don't have one yet. Why would you connect a toothbrush to the Internet?
HENN: This actually was designed by a father who was wondering whether or not his kids were actually brushing their teeth when they said they were. But he's hopeful that an Internet-connected toothbrush will also give people a little bit of data about how well they're brushing their teeth and could actually allow folks to brush better over time.
So, there's a real interest in this idea that we can collect data about every aspect of our lives and optimize it.
SIMON: And why is the onesie connected to the Internet?
HENN: So, it has a variety of sensors in it. One that monitors breathing, so it can send an alert to your cell phone if you're child were to stop breathing. They're connecting this onesie to a bottle warmer so the onesie can sense when your baby wakes up and turn on the bottle warmer so when you go in to pick up your baby and it's their feeding time, the milk or the formula is ready for them.
SIMON: So, this opiates the need for a baby to scream, is what you're suggesting.
(LAUGHTER)
HENN: Right, exactly.
SIMON: And technology is becoming wearable?
HENN: Right. You know, many sensor are getting smaller. The ability to connect to the Net is now embedded in chips that are just tiny and can be built into things like clothing. And this is really allowing technology companies to get data about us that is really very, very intimate. And that raises a number of questions about privacy and the security of that data, and then how these companies are going to use it in the future. Really, almost anything about your life could be monitored by the technologies that were unveiled here.
SIMON: We mentioned about 20,000 new products. Just based on your experience in the industry, Steve, two years from now will we be talking about, what, a dozen of them that survive the cut?
HENN: I think that would be perhaps a bit optimistic. But what I think we will be talking about are some of the technologies that those products touched on. I mean, for example, one that I think is going to really change the way we interact with computers and smartphones and the world in the coming years will be the ability to map our surroundings in three dimensions. There are sensors now that can clip onto a tablet that allow you to scan your room and create a perfect model of that. And I think that technology will actually form the basis of computing to sort of extend in new ways into our world that will probably change the way we live.
SIMON: NPR's Steve Henn, on the Consumer Electronic Show.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In the South, taking a pilgrimage to a civil rights site is a growing industry. One of the most popular destinations is the restored Lorraine Motel in Memphis where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. It's called Heritage Tourism. But in smaller towns, it's often a challenge to find the resources to save lesser-known landmarks. NPR's Debbie Elliott has this story of efforts to save an historic African-American church in a place called Helena, Arkansas.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: The towers framing the majestic roof of Centennial Baptist Church reach for the heavens near downtown Helena. The elaborate red brick church stands out in a neighborhood that's seen better days given the boarded-up homes and businesses nearby. A closer look reveals the century-old church has seen better days as well. Bricks are breaking apart and falling away. And a huge metal structure abuts the back wall.
PHYLLIS HAMMONDS: OK. This is actually holding up the building. This iron railing or scaffolding is holding up the rear end of the building.
ELLIOTT: That's Phyllis Hammonds, executive director of the foundation that owns Centennial. She was baptized and married in this church and is now carrying on her late mother's mission to save it. We walk along the side wall where pigeons have torn through netting intended to keep them out of a window.
HAMMONDS: Oh my God. It is broken out. Is it? Yeah.
ELLIOTT: Inside, pigeons roost along the hardwood floors and pews where parishioners once worshipped. Beer and whiskey bottles litter a corner. And more scaffolding holds up the high-pitched roof. This isn't just an endangered beautiful building from the turn of the last century. Centennial Baptist Church is a National Historic Landmark.
HAMMONDS: The history is so rich. Two former slaves collaborated and built this structure.
ELLIOTT: Those men were a Baptist pastor, the Reverend Elias Camp Morris, and Henry James Price, a self-taught architect. Price's grandson, Harold Jefferson, says he was a skilled woodworker by trade.
HAROLD JEFFERSON: He was a furniture maker.
ELLIOTT: Jefferson is a longtime member of Centennial Baptist and is now a member of the foundation preserving its history. He says the congregation met in a house in the late 1800s until Reverend Morris asked Price to build a new, more regal house of worship in 1905.
JEFFERSON: And Dr. Morris went to Europe and he wanted to find a picture, he wanted to see about a building that he wanted to bring back to Helena, Arkansas. Grandmother told me he brought it back and showed it to Price and said can you fix this like this picture?
ELLIOTT: He did, and Centennial became a source of pride for the African-American community in segregated Helena, once a bustling port on the Mississippi River. Historian Bobby Roberts, director of the Central Arkansas Library System, says Centennial is a prime candidate for preservation.
BOBBY ROBERTS: One, it is a monumental building, just in terms of size. Two, it's a major piece of African-American history. So it really is a unique structure I think not only in the Delta, but in Arkansas and the South to see something like that.
ELLIOTT: Reverend EC Morris rose to national prominence as the first president of the National Baptist Convention, the largest historically black denomination. Centennial had 1,000 members when he died in 1922, but by turn of this century, the active membership had dwindled to double-digits. Roberts, a Helena native, says that reflects the hard times in the Delta as people left the region to find work. Maintaining the church was an uphill battle.
ROBERTS: The congregation couldn't keep it up, and it was too big for them. And so they turned it over to a foundation with the idea that the foundation would be able to save the church.
ELLIOTT: The EC Morris foundation got started with state funding to shore up Centennial in the 1990s. Little Rock architect Tommy Jamison drew up the plan, and recalls when he first stepped inside.
TOMMY JAMISON: It was somewhat frightening from a structural standpoint. But it was magnificent. I mean, the architecture's incredible - the soaring spaces. It's forty feet up to the ceiling. It's a wonderful space and incredibility intact, unchanged substantially.
ELLIOTT: Jamison estimates it will take more than $2 million to restore the church. And the foundation would need even more to operate the cultural center they envision. That's proven to be a daunting amount of money to raise. And in Helena, Arkansas, Phyllis Hammonds says it's hard to garner support when issues like education, violence and poverty are more pressing.
HAMMONDS: People are about surviving. Many folks don't understand the significance of restoring this facility because they're so busy trying to survive. And I can understand that.
ELLIOTT: But the restoration project has also faltered because of a clash of personalities and age-old racial mistrust. In 2006, the foundation teamed with local preservationists to win a $300,000 Save America's Treasures grant. But the partnership soured before the required matching funds were met. Phyllis Hammonds accuses white preservationists of trying to co-opt Centennial's history.
HAMMONDS: I view as plantation mentality. You give me the information and we'll tell your story.
ELLIOTT: She objected when a community development bank put conditions on the foundation that she feared would take Centennial out of the hands of black church members.
HAMMONDS: But I would rather see it fall and say put up a sign: Here Centennial Stood. At least we would still be in control.
ELLIOTT: Her group lost the federal grant, and the preservation effort stalled.
CATHY CUNNINGHAM: Sometimes you have to share a dream to make it a reality.
ELLIOTT: Cathy Cunningham is an historical development consultant who once worked with the Centennial Foundation.
CUNNINGHAM: I don't know of anyone that's trying to take church away. I would hate to think that the church will fall down. But, you know, I don't know.
ELLIOTT: The apparent power struggle is frustrating for former church members. Retired educator JJ Lacey, Jr. was a member of Centennial in the 1960s. He says the foundation needs to mend relationships with the local preservationists who have been successful restoring Helena's Civil War-era landmarks.
JJ LACEY, JR.: They're in the catbird seat, you know, just being blunt about it. They have the purse strings.
ELLIOTT: Arkansas historian Bobby Roberts agrees, but he says jumpstarting the restoration of Centennial Baptist Church means treading touchy historical ground.
ROBERTS: The exploitation of African-Americans in the South and in the Delta's been notorious. And even though that's in the distant past, those wounds and hurts, I think, are still there and there's a feeling of distrust, understandably, I think, if you only look at the past. You have to get over that fear.
ELLIOTT: Roberts says a national treasure is at stake.
ROBERTS: Nobody loses if that church gets saved. Everybody loses if it falls down.
ELLIOTT: Debbie Elliott, NPR News.
MARTIN: This story is part of NPR's Southward Partnership with Oxford American magazine. To see images of Centennial Baptist Church, go to npr.org.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The Golden Globes are tonight. And one of the nominees is a film from Iran called "The Past." It's directed by Asgar Farhadi, who became an international sensation after his film "A Separation" won an Oscar two years ago.
But as NPR's Bilal Qureshi reports, Farhadi is less interested in being known as the it Iranian filmmaker and more interested in the work of peeling open relationships that have collapsed.
BILAL QURESHI, BYLINE: "The Past" opens as a woman picks up her soon to be ex-husband from the airport, in the rain.
(SOUNDBITE OF RAIN FALLING)
QURESHI: She brings him to the house they once shared, a house she's now renovating with her new boyfriend.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE PAST")
QURESHI: It's the kind of twist that makes Asgar Farhadi a master storyteller, says Columbia University's Hamid Dabashi. He teaches literature and Iranian studies.
HAMID DABASHI: His cinema is just like an onion. You peel one layer and there's another layer fresh, ready for you. You think, well, that's it and then yet another layer is opened.
QURESHI: Like his last film "A Separation," Asgar Farhadi's "The Past" is about domestic conflicts. It's about the fractures between husbands and wives, between parents and children. And it's about the way the past casts shadows on those relationships.
The one thing "The Past" does not offer is easy answers.
ASGHAR FARHADI: (Through Translator) When I'm watching a movie, I don't like to watch a movie that the director is trying to give me all the answers. Or kind of some cinema that seems a bit preachy to me. I like to participate in cinema and to be interactive. And I think the only way to create that situation is to create questions for the audience to be able to participate.
QURESHI: Farhadi challenged himself by leaving his familiar surroundings in Tehran and settling in Paris for two years. He was an immigrant, an outsider finding his way like many of the characters in "The Past."
FARHADI: (Through Translator) I thought I need to find characters that could help the theme of my film which is the past. And in some ways those immigrants, where they come to France, they are already leaving behind their past so this helped accentuate my theme because they were already leaving something behind of them.
QURESHI: The small details of his characters' new lives, the almost claustrophobic interiors of their homes, and the way Farhadi shoots close ups all bring us into their lives, says Hamid Dabashi.
DABASHI: He's exquisite in his details, exquisite. I don't know of any other Iranian filmmaker who is so particular about getting the layered, emotive universe of a character, all of it at the service of his dramatic realism.
QURESHI: Like the way an angry child hacks at an ear of corn...
(SOUNDBITE OF HACKING CORN)
QURESHI: ...or the way the sound outside a pharmacy comes and goes as the automatic doors open and close.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOORS OPEN AND CLOSE)
QURESHI: Farhadi does not use any background music in his film.
FARHADI: (Through Translator) I have to compensate for this gap by using the sound design. For example, just the ambient sounds, the rain, we have the trains - I'm using this to fill the gap that the music is not filling.
QURESHI: And Asghar Farhadi prefers to keep his stories narrow in a way you'd associate with a play, not with a cinematic epic.
FARHADI: (Through Translator) Before I went actually to the university, I was very much into novels and reading Iranian, especially Iranian stories, and that helped me look into the society. And the second thing was that when I went to the university and I started to study theatre and stage, I realize how important drama is. and the mix of the drama with this literature that was my background helped me to bring what you can see is being created.
QURESHI: What Farhadi creates is a story that could happen anywhere. He doesn't like to dwell on the fact that he's a filmmaker from the Islamic Republic of Iran. When he accepted the Oscar for "A Separation" two years ago, tensions between the US and Iran were running high.
FARHADI: I proudly offer this award to the people of my country, a people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment. Thank you so much.
(APPLAUSE)
DABASHI: I'm very happy that he doesn't allow himself to become a political football because that would be the end of him as a filmmaker.
QURESHI: Columbia's Hamid Dabashi says it's important for Americans to know Iranian artists and their culture, because one day the political confrontations will fade.
DABASHI: Because the day after there is an American embassy opened in Tehran, which I hope is soon, the question is what sort of contact will Americans and Iranians have with each other beyond the banality of daily politics. And when that happen and a more free flowing of Iranian-Americans into each other's society has happened, filmmakers like Asghar Farhadi will be there waiting for them.
QURESHI: And Farhadi's rise to the international stage with films like "A Separation" and now "The Past" means he's already building those bridges.
FARHADI: (Through Translator) I don't want to become a political spokesman. That's not what I do. I'm a filmmaker. But whenever possible, in my films, if I can allow and help the situation for people to understand each other, for cultures to come together, I would do that.
QURESHI: Bilal Qureshi, NPR News.
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MARTIN: You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Artis Henderson never imagined she'd end up a military wife. She had dreams of becoming a writer and traveling around the world. Settling down with a conservative church-going Army pilot who was never anything she'd imagined for herself. But that is what happened. Henderson struggled to fit into military life and culture, but it was a sacrifice she was willing to make. Then in 2006, weeks after their wedding, her husband Miles was killed in Iraq.
I spoke recently with Artis Henderson about her new memoir, an "Unremarried Widow."
ARTIS HENDERSON: He wasn't what I thought was my type.
(LAUGHTER)
HENDERSON: He was very conservative. But I guess it turned out he was exactly my type in the end.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: You two obviously, you hit it off and you start a serious relationship. You commit to each other. And then you move immediately because Miles is transferred to another base; he's getting ready to deploy to Iraq. And you move to Texas. Were you a little apprehensive about making that move? Or did you just say, OK, this is what life with this guy is going to be like?
HENDERSON: I was very apprehensive. You know, we had spent about six months at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and that was really - it was tough for me. It was tough to find a job. It was tough to make friends. And I had just kind of settled in, you know, I had just found a job. I had just started making a group of friends and then it was time to move. And that's part of military life and maybe eventually I would've gotten used to it. But gosh, that early on, it was still - it was a shock.
MARTIN: So, you go to Texas where you're taken into this group of military spouses. Even though you're not married at the time but you're considered part of that group. What were your first impressions?
HENDERSON: It was a tough group of women. Military wives are so tough. I mean they have to be. But I was maybe in a different place in my life. I was a little bit younger. I didn't have kids. We weren't married. So this sort of things that we might talk about, I didn't have a lot in common with them, not at that point.
MARTIN: Why was that just assumed that, yes, of course, you will come and you will be part of our group, and that's just to be expected?
HENDERSON: That's something I didn't actually realize until, really until he deployed or maybe just before you deployed. Because, you know, I was so resistant to that idea that of, yes, that we, these military wives, we would be this strong-knit community. And I just couldn't understand that. You know, I thought that my friends would be outside the military. That I would make, you know, friends from work. But I kind of saw over time that with a military lifestyle that those are your friends. That is your support network. And the soldiers are gone so often that the community becomes the other wives. And sometimes that's all you have.
MARTIN: After her husband deployed to Iraq, Artis moved back to Florida to live with her mom. That's where she was when she found out Miles had died along with his unit commander when their Apache helicopter went down in a dust storm.
A lot of people know that when a member of the military dies, uniformed officials visit the home to relay that news. You write about this in the book. Can you recount that scene? You were living with your mom at the time in Florida?
HENDERSON: That's right. We had moved me home when he deployed. I had come home from work. In hindsight, I had this odd feeling that something was off. Like, when I pulled in the garage there were no lights on - and my mom would always leave the lights on for me. I went upstairs and I put my key in the lock and the lock was unlocked, and that we always have the door locked. And I pushed the door open and my mom was in the living room.
And she was sitting in the middle of the living room, which made no sense. And there was this soldier standing behind her and another one next to him. And as soon as I saw them I knew. But it felt like such a betrayal because that's not how it's supposed to happen. They're supposed to knock on your door...
(SOUNDBITE OF WEEPING)
HENDERSON: ...but they were already there.
MARTIN: How did you see yourself fitting into the military community after Miles' death? What could it be to you?
HENDERSON: I'm so proud to be part of this community. I regret that it took losing him to realize that. The military widows I've met, some of my best friends are military widows. I just have so much respect for them.
MARTIN: You longed for another kind of life in some ways when you were with Miles. Are you living that now?
HENDERSON: In a way I am. I've done a lot of the things that I talked about doing when we were together. And I think it's just, after he died, I just...
(LAUGHTER)
HENDERSON: ...I wouldn't let anything stop me.
MARTIN: Artis Henderson. Her new memoir is called "Un-Remarried Widow." She joined us from our studios in New York. Artis, thanks so much for talking with us and sharing your story.
HENDERSON: Thank you for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. And if the weather this past week put your brain in a deep freeze, have another cup of coffee to get the defrost going because it's time for the puzzle.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Joining me now is Will Shortz. He's the puzzle editor of the New York Times and he is WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle-master. Good morning, Will.
WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: OK. Let's just get right to it. Will, what was last week's challenge?
SHORTZ: Yes. I asked you to name something in five letters that's generally pleasant, something nice to have. And I said to add the letters A and Y and rearrange the result, keeping the A and Y together as a pair. And the answer is a seven-letter word that names an unpleasant version of the five-letter thing. What is it? Well, the five letter thing is a dream - nice thing to have. Add an A-Y, do that reshuffle, and you get a daymare, which is like a wakeful dream, which is - and it's like a nightmare during the day. Not a nice thing.
MARTIN: I had never heard of a daymare, but makes sense. Sounds terrifying. So, we got over 200 correct answers this week. Our randomly selected winner is Susan Lynn of Portland, Oregon. She joins us on the line now. Congratulations, Susan.
SUSAN LYNN: Thank you.
MARTIN: Have you ever had a daymare, Susan?
LYNN: I don't think so.
MARTIN: But you still managed to figure this one out.
LYNN: Yes. I got it from dream but I don't think I would have come up with the word daymare.
MARTIN: And what do you do in Portland?
LYNN: I'm a pastry chef.
MARTIN: Ooh, delicious. So, do you have a specialty?
LYNN: I like making pies probably the best. But pretty much anything. I love making creme brulees and cream puffs.
MARTIN: Oh man. Sounds dangerous. What is the key to a good pie crust, Susan?
LYNN: You need to chill the ingredients.
MARTIN: All the ingredients, OK.
LYNN: I do it in a mixer, like, with a paddle. It's better not to use your hands.
MARTIN: That's where I think I'm going wrong. So, are you ready to play the puzzle, Susan?
LYNN: I'm ready.
MARTIN: All right. Let's do it, Will.
SHORTZ: All right, Susan. You're making me hungry. Every answer today is a word that begins and ends with the letter A. I'll give you an anagram of the letters between the A's. You tell me the words. For example, if I said ern E-R-N, you would say arena.
MARTIN: OK.
SHORTZ: Starts and ends in A. Number one is rot R-O-T.
LYNN: Aorta.
SHORTZ: That's right. Number one is pen P-E-N.
LYNN: Apnea.
SHORTZ: Apnea, good. Clap C-L-A-P.
LYNN: Alpaca.
SHORTZ: That's it. Dram D-R-A-M.
LYNN: Armada.
SHORTZ: Uh-huh. Laze L-A-Z-E.
LYNN: Azalea.
SHORTZ: Good. Mine M-I-N-E.
LYNN: Anemia.
SHORTZ: Good. Deng D-E-N-G, as in Deng Xiaoping.
LYNN: D-E-N-G?
SHORTZ: That's it.
LYNN: Agenda.
SHORTZ: Excellent. Ice dam I-C-E D-A-M.
LYNN: I-C-E D-A-M.
SHORTZ: Yeah.
LYNN: Academia.
SHORTZ: Academia, good. In sheets I-N S-H-E-E-T-S, like the rain comes down in sheets.
LYNN: Let's see.
MARTIN: They're getting harder.
SHORTZ: Suddenly they get longer, yeah.
LYNN: Anesthesia.
SHORTZ: Anesthesia, I'm impressed.
MARTIN: Susan, good one.
SHORTZ: Now, your final three answers are all geographical names. And your first one of these is crime C-R-I-M-E.
LYNN: America.
SHORTZ: Good. Renting R-E-N-T-I-N-G.
LYNN: Argentina.
SHORTZ: That's it. And your last one is rituals R-I-T-U-A-L-S.
LYNN: Australia.
SHORTZ: Australia. Susan, that was so fast.
MARTIN: I mean, that was amazing. Are you a word person? Do you do this a lot?
LYNN: I do the New York Times crossword every day and I love puzzles.
MARTIN: Wow. That was well played.
LYNN: This is a dream come true for me.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Well, you exceeded all of our expectations - not that they were low to begin with, but you just did great. Congratulations.
LYNN: Thank you.
MARTIN: And for playing the puzzle today, you get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin and puzzle books and games. You can read all about it at npr.org/puzzle. And before we let you go, what is your public radio station, Susan?
LYNN: KOPB in Portland, Oregon.
MARTIN: OPB. Susan Lynn of Portland, Oregon. Thanks so much for playing the puzzle, Susan.
LYNN: Thank you.
MARTIN: All right, Will. What's up for next week?
SHORTZ: Yes. Name a familiar form of exercise in two words. Switch the order of the two words then say them out loud and the result phonetically will name something to wear. What is it?
So, again. A familiar form of exercise in two words. Switch the order of the two words, say them out loud, the result phonetically will name something to wear. What is it?
MARTIN: You know what to do. When you've the answer, go to our website. It is, of course, npr.org/puzzle, and click on the Submit Your Answer link. Limit yourself to one entry per person, please. And don't forget, our deadline for entries is Thursday, this week, January 16th at 3 P.M. Eastern Time.
Please include a phone number where we can reach you at about that time. Because if you're the winner, we will give you a call, and then you'll get to play on the air with the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle-master, Will Shortz.
Thanks so much, Will.
SHORTZ: Thanks, Rachel.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
Four years ago today, a powerful earthquake hit Haiti, leveling its capital Port-au-Prince along with much of the surrounding area. Foreign aid poured in to meet basic needs, like housing.
And yet today, nearly 150,000 people still live in temporary camps in Port-au-Prince, with nothing more than a tent to shelter their families. And many of those displaced Haitians now worry that this temporary solution will become permanent.
Reporter Peter Granitz brings us the story.
PETER GRANITZ, BYLINE: If you walk around the capital, you look at a Haiti that looks like it almost once did. Most of the tent camps are gone. The streets are loaded with overcrowded tap-taps and women selling vegetables on the corner.
(SOUNDBITE OF A VEHICLE)
GRANITZ: Most of those whose lives were upended by the quake are back in some kind of home. Most of the rubble has been cleared from the streets. The severely damaged presidential palace is being razed, and the government is rebuilding its ministries downtown. But for nearly 150,000 people, life has not moved on. They still live in the temporary plastic and plywood structures built after the disaster.
GREGOIRE GOODSTEIN: It's the worst place to be in Haiti.
GRANITZ: Gregoire Goodstein is the mission chief for the International Organization for Migration. He says these are difficult cases.
GOODSTEIN: We're talking about the higher hanging fruit, people who are not able to get out of the camp system because they really don't have any other solutions for themselves.
GRANITZ: Goodstein says it's possible the final resettlements could wrap up next year. But that depends on major factors, like hurricane season. And Haiti hopes to hold parliamentary elections; there's fear electoral violence could overtake the city slowing down all government functions. The government says there's one major obstacle to resettling the final 150,000 people - money.
Harry Adam heads the Haitian government agency that's spearheading the reconstruction.
HARRY ADAM: We will need at least $800 per person to put them out of the camps. So it's quite a big amount of money.
GRANITZ: Some of that $800 goes to residents as rent subsidies, cash to help them get into a safe home.
Two hundred-seventy-one official tent camps dot the region. The Haitian government recognizes these sites, and each tenant has been registered by NGOs. They're perched on dangerously steep mountainsides and pack busy street corners. There's a cluster of tents in view of a Porsche dealership.
Rosemary Durvessaint lives north of Port-au-Prince in a hodgepodge of corrugated tin, cardboard and tarps that read: USAID From the American People. Since May, she's lived in Titanyen, a growing cluster of villages about 20 kilometers from Port-au-Prince. Titanyen is an unsanctioned camp. It's on land the government declared free to the public and thousands have taken advantage, creating new homes along its dusty, dry mountainsides. Ramshackle houses and tents climb up a treeless mountain.
Durvessaint walks us into her hovel she shares with two children.
(SOUNDBITE OF STRONG WINDS)
GRANITZ: As the wind rips through and the structure struggles to hang on, it's hard to see this as safer then before the quake. Durvessaint says the government has done nothing for the people out here.
ROSEMARY DURVESSAINT: (Through Translator) We don't have water. We don't have light. We don't have electricity.
GRANITZ: What attention Titanyen does get from the government comes mostly from work at the mass grave here. In the days following the powerful earthquake, tens of thousands of people killed in the disaster were trucked to this site and buried here.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONSTRUCTION)
GRANITZ: In preparation for ceremonies marking the disaster anniversary, masons patch a cement wall surrounding the burial site.
Peter de Clercq is the new humanitarian coordinator for the United Nations. De Clercq says international donors have moved on to other crises and Haiti needs to transition away from relying on outsiders.
PETER DE CLERCQ: And starts demonstrating more clearly and visibly to the international community that it's capable of taking care of these basic services.
GRANITZ: Basic services like water and sanitation, services not guaranteed in Port-au-Prince, let alone Titanyen, yet residents there say they're likely to stay permanently.
And that's OK to Harry Adam. He says Titanyen and the new villages will one day be the northern stretches of Port-au-Prince. And he's pledging $6 million in aid for water and sanitation projects there.
For NPR News, I'm Peter Granitz in Port-au-Prince.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Tonight is one of the biggest nights in Hollywood. The glitz and glam, the speeches, the fashion, as stars from film and television gather together in one place for the Golden Globes. The awards celebrate the best writing, acting and production of the past year. And this year's nominations are being hailed as the most diverse yet, with a significant number of minority actors up for awards. That includes Kerry Washington for the series "Scandal," created by Shonda Rhimes. Washington plays a political power player who happens to be a black woman.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SCANDAL")
MARTIN: Kerry Washington is part of a new crop of black actors and writers making their names in film and TV. But it's still a tough road for a lot of minority actors, as you'll hear from Jasika Nicole Pruitt.
JASIKA NICOLE PRUITT: There have actually, also, been times where a role said that they were looking for open ethnicities, and I was submitted; and then they wrote back and said we decided not to go ethnic this time - which means that they're going with a white woman. I don't wake up and go ethnic every day. I am ethnic. This is, you know, the color of my skin and my experience in the world. It just seems so dismissive of anybody who has an experience of living in skin that isn't white.
MARTIN: We're going to spend the next few minutes talking about diversity in television - what's better, what's not, and how Hollywood is trying to fix it. But first, we turn to NPR's television critic Eric Deggans to talk about what we can expect to see from the Golden Globes tonight.
ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: It is a landmark year, in one sense. We are seeing more people of color nominated for major awards than we have in the past. But one of the things that's interesting is, we're finding certain actors nominated in multiple categories. So we have Idris Elba and Chiwetel Ejiofor, both nominated for major awards in film and television - which gives you the sense that there are certain actors who have been embraced by Hollywood - certain actors of color who have been embraced by Hollywood. And maybe it's time to sort of spread that wealth around a little bit, and get a wider range of actors involved in these big projects.
MARTIN: This past week, "Saturday Night Live" announced that they have hired an African-American woman - named Shasheer Zamata - to join their cast. They were under a lot of pressure to do so. So "SNL" held a casting call explicitly for the purpose of finding a black woman for the cast. What's your take on this? Is this a good way to go about diversifying a show; just owning it and saying, OK, this is a casting call explicitly for a black woman because that's what we need?
DEGGANS: Yeah. I do think it's a good development because those of us who have worked to diversity media and television know that it's very hard to diversify these areas unless you specifically go out and try to find people. That doesn't mean you're being unfair. It just means that there's a reason why a certain area is lacking in ethnic diversity. You have to go out there and find those people, and give them opportunities and ways that don't necessarily naturally occur for other people.
I would also say that I know some people want to feel like there was this hue and cry about diversifying "Saturday Night Live"; and they've added a black woman and now, the conversation's over. But if you ask me, if they added a black woman because they needed someone to play black female characters, and because the show needed to reflect the diversity of America, well then, they're just getting started because there are no Latino cast members on the show. There's no Asian cast members on the show. You can make an argument that they need to hold those kind of casting calls for other ethnicities as well. So this is the beginning of a conversation, as far as I'm concerned, not the end of it.
MARTIN: Shawn Ryan is a TV executive producer, who's been in the business for a long time - more than 20 years. Like "SNL's" Loren Michaels, he makes decisions every day about how to diversify his staff - on screen and off. In one instance, Ryan cast CCH Pounder, an African-American woman, in a role he had originally written for a white man.
SHAWN RYAN: I'd love to say that it was a thunderbolt of brilliance, on my part. But it wasn't. It was really the lesson that gave me a whole new perspective on the role, and taught me how to be this way in the future.
MARTIN: What about lead roles? Are you starting, now, to see more minority actors getting those big, plum roles where they are carrying a TV show?
RYAN: I would say sadly, no. What I think you see more and more is in Hollywood, we have these things called call sheets that tells everybody where they need to be on the day of shooting. And No. 1 on the call sheet is your lead actor or actress, and 2, and so on down. And so I think what you have now is a lot of networks and studios who want to have diversity in roles 3, 4, 5 and 6. But there's less so, in terms of No. 1 and No. 2 on the call sheet.
MARTIN: So why is that the case?
RYAN: I think there's a belief - whether this belief is correct or not - that a minority in your lead might not lead to bigger viewership numbers. I'm not saying that's correct. I'm saying that I think there is a worry; hopefully, a worry that's going away with the success of a show like "Scandal."
MARTIN: I'd like to shift the conversation and go behind the scenes a little bit to talk about the writer's room, which is really your domain. What is the landscape like there, when it comes to issues of diversity?
RYAN: It's tough because a writer's room is the place where you bake up all these stories that are going to appear on your television screens months later. For a while, it was hard for some diverse people to get their foot in. And if you can't get your foot in, then you can't spend the years learning the craft. There have been some good-faith efforts by the networks and studios...
MARTIN: Explicit jobs that are diversity hires...
RYAN: Yes. But there's a feeling amongst many that, are those people being viewed with the same kind of respect? Or are they being looked down upon as people that are being put in here, that wouldn't otherwise make it? I don't think that's the case, but I think there's certainly a lot of debate about whether that is leading to the result of creating more Shonda Rhimeses.
My personal opinion is that we want that diversity, and that there is a color blindness. When you read a script from someone, you're not seeing the face of that person who wrote the script. And so I think that in some ways, it's a very fair setup here. If you're a great writer, I think you will be eventually be discovered in Hollywood, and you will get an opportunity. That's my feeling.
MARTIN: All of CBS's six new shows this season were created by white men; the same is true for Fox. All 12 of NBC's new shows are created by white men, and five of seven for ABC. Those are pretty staggering numbers. You've been doing this a long time. Does it just go back to what you've said, that this is just a really hard world for minority writers to get into?
RYAN: I think it's easier now than it used to be so hopefully, those numbers will change, going forward, and be more reflective of the population. It's also up to people like me to train that next generation. But when you're working on a TV show, it's a crazy experience. And the better the writers you have working for you, the sooner you can get home at night to your family.
So I don't believe that anyone is purposely not hiring someone who would be better qualified. Now, that's not to say that maybe the agents, the networks, the studios, the showrunners can't do a better job of seeing the bigger pool of candidates.
MARTIN: Beejoli Shah is a journalist and TV writer. She wrote a piece for the online blog Gawker about those good-faith efforts Shawn Ryan referred to, where every major TV network sets aside money for a diverse position on each show's staff. Shah says that system is flawed.
BEEJOLI SHAH: It's usually the last position that's hired for, on a show. It's generally the lowest-paying one. It's recognized as a job that someone earned simply because the network wanted to have diversity. So they're looked down upon by their fellow writers. in that way.
MARTIN: What about you? Would you be OK taking a diversity hire job?
SHAH: Even if I was the best young TV writer since kingdom come, a network would probably still pay for me out of their diversity slush fund rather than a show's budget, just so that the show can put those dollars elsewhere. So in that respect, I am able to sleep at night going up for diversity jobs, knowing that it would happen regardless.
On the flip side, it does make me very uncomfortable; that there's some jobs that I've been put up for simply because I'm Indian, because I'm female. When I met for the CBS show "We Are Men" last summer, they had said to my agent: Perfect; we need someone that can write for both the teenage daughter and for Kal Penn. So your client is great because, you know, she's Indian and a girl.
MARTIN: What do you think is to account for this problem? I mean, are showrunners, are head writers - is the tendency just to hire people who look like them, who share some of the same perspective and life experience?
SHAH: I think that a lot of it comes from television - and Hollywood - is a very, very who-you-know business. So you tend to see this funnel effect of specifically, white writers moving forward 'cause there are already a ton of white writers in the industry. So it's easy to pick up the phone and make a phone call to someone you know. And so that just keeps perpetuating itself.
And on top of that, I think that something that struck me as another reason why this keeps happening is that there is a sort of subtle socioeconomic barrier to entry - to be able to say, you know, I'm going to come to Hollywood and I'm going to work for five years as a very, very underpaid production assistant, in hopes of making the right connections to get my foot in the door. I don't think that everyone can afford to take that on as a luxury. While I don't advocate, you know, holding two spots for upper-level black writers and one spot for an Indian female, and so on and so forth, I think that the more diversity you try to have at every level, the better your room is going to be. It's just a natural fact of having varied opinions.
STEPHEN WEST ROGERS: My name is Stephen West Rogers. I'm 35 years old. And my father is of Scotch-Irish and English descent, and my mother is Taiwanese. I've never had an audition for the lead in anything. I think that Asians are maybe looked at as smart, so we'll be playing maybe professors or people in the medical field, things like that. I also have visible tattoos, so I guess that takes me out of the running for being a doctor. I can only go so far up that ladder of helping people.
MARTIN: Jason George is an actor who had a recurring role on the Shonda Rhimes' show "Grey's Anatomy." He's also chairman of the Screen Actors Guild Diversity Advisory Committee. And George says that for some actors of color, there has been real progress.
JASON GEORGE: God bless them. Like, Sidney Poitier is an idol of mine but, you know, he was the perfect black man for the longest time. Bill Cosby was the perfect father. And God bless them because without them, there is nothing else. But eventually, you get to a point where Don Cheadle can do "House of Lies," where he's kind of a bastard.
MARTIN: (Laughter) He is.
GEORGE: But he's a fun bastard, you know, and that's the thing. We're allowed to be full human beings now on television, not just representing an entire community. There are two - kind of camps of diversity these days. One is what Shonda does best, which is - be it "Grey's Anatomy" or "Scandal." These people are top surgeons, top political operatives, top of their game; and they just happen to be...
MARTIN: Happen to be, yeah.
GEORGE: ...gay, happen to be Latino, happen to be black, etc. And the fact that their racial or sexual identity is not the point, is the point. The fact that it's not the defining factor of them - it is a factor. And then the other version is kind of the "Lost" or "Heroes," where the person's racial or ethnic or sexual identity is distinctly a part of who that character is, and that plays a fundamental role into the show. And the result is that you really get a sense of true global diversity.
MARTIN: And you think both are important, moving forward.
GEORGE: I really do think both are important. But I would say, if I had to choose one of them, I think that at the end of the day, the model where people are people first, and you have to meet them where they're at; and then find out about their racial background or their sexual background.
MARTIN: What about behind the scenes - writers, creators, showrunners?
GEORGE: That's the world. Shonda Rhimes is an incredibly high-powered creator.
MARTIN: But is her model catching on?
GEORGE: I think it is, because I think that we're starting to realize that there's dollars behind it. At the end of the day, television sees green. And if you see the green, they will make it happen. But you got to show it to them. I mean, if you have two shows - both good shows - of equal quality, a minority might be more inclined to watch the one that has a minority lead or a minority in a significant, regular role. And so given that, if you can get a foothold in a bunch of different communities, that can only help your show.
Studio and network heads have started to hear this. I've heard several times them making speeches to all their show creators and saying, you know, diversity is the key to you getting on the air. Show me diversity. And that's phenomenal to hear, but it takes a bit of time between that and actually getting on screen because everybody knows what should happen. But then when push comes to shove and you're trying to figure out where the dollars go, you go with what you know is safe.
And I think that's where people default back to things. And people, I think, in the past have had a horrible tendency to kind of look for the easy scapegoat; like, you know, we did a show and there were African-American leads, and it didn't take. Well, maybe it failed because it was bad writing. Maybe it failed because it was a bad idea. Because, you know, "Scandal" has a black lead who's having an interracial romance, and it's the hottest show on television right now.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: That was the actor Jason George. And that hot show he's talking about - with Kerry Washington - along with the rest of Hollywood's up-and-comers, will all get their chance tonight at the Golden Globes.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Our show's theme music was composed by B.J. Leiderman. This is WEEKEND EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
RACHEL GARLINGHOUSE: A lot of people like to tell us that kids don't notice race until they're much older. That's not true. My 2-year-old...
(LAUGHTER)
GARLINGHOUSE: ...when she had recently turned two had told us things like, I'm brown and you're pink. So maybe they don't notice race, but they definitely notice color. I mean children learn their colors at very early ages and they can see that we don't match.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
That is the voice of Rachel Garlinghouse. She and her husband, both white, adopted three kids who happen to be African-American. Transracial, as its known, has been in the headlines as of late after MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry made a quip Mitt Romney's adopted black grandson. She later apologized for the remark. But the cable news kerfuffle drew new attention to the bias against mixed-race adoptions.
As the adoptive mother of three young black kids - ages 5, 3 and almost 1, Rachel Garlinghouse told me she has to make a real effort to fill in the spaces of her children's black identities.
Rachel Garlinghouse is our Sunday Conversation.
GARLINGHOUSE: My kids love transportation - the trash truck and the school bus and things like that.
(LAUGHTER)
GARLINGHOUSE: So we talked about Rosa Parks and how Rosa Parks rode a bus and what happened when she was discriminated against. So we take the opportunities we can based on their interests at the time. They need to know their history as African-Americans. They are not white and we should not pretend that they are white.
MARTIN: So because of that, I mean that's just the reality of your situation. As a result, have you recognized that there are limitations to what you can be for your kids?
GARLINGHOUSE: I think that part of being a transracial adoptive parent is being humble and being realistic. I'm not black, I will never be black and my children will never be raised with black parents. Therefore, there are certain things that we need to do to help supplement that. So, for example, we hired an African-American female Christian mentor for our girls. So she comes in, serves as a positive role model for our children,
And then we also have neighbors who are an African-American retired couple who have adopted three children when they were younger. And we use them as kind of our go-to people to talk about things like discrimination and just being adoptive parents in general.
MARTIN: You hired a mentor. What were those conversations like? How did you explain it? What did you want?
GARLINGHOUSE: I mean I think that we did it purposefully because we wanted successful black Christian female to have a close, tight-knit relationship with our girls. And in order to make that happen, we did have to hire someone. It's not like most people have a lot of free time to just come hang out with our family. But it's just been so positive because not only have I made a friend but my girls have developed a close relationship with this young woman.
I pray she stays at school close to us for many years to come because now I feel like I don't know what we would do without her.
MARTIN: Has it ever been frustrating for you and your husband at the beginning of this process, perhaps when you realized that you alone are not sufficient as parental figures?
GARLINGHOUSE: I think at times I feel my childs'(ph) loss for the biological family members. At the heart of it, of course, you never want a biological family separated. But when it happens, you do the best job that you can. but I'm not their biological parent so we've just tried to embrace the fact that we have three open adoptions. It's complicated. It's bittersweet. But it's been well worth it.
MARTIN: What's the town like where you live? You live in the Midwest outside St. Louis. Is it a racially diverse place?
GARLINGHOUSE: Yes, it is. We have a university in our town, a large university. So it brings a lot of diversity to the area. We're also a traveling family so our kids have been to the Civil Rights Museum, things like that. So though people may argue that our kids are a little young for those things, we again, want to normalize those activities within our household.
MARTIN: Did you go to a lot of civil rights museums before you had these kids?
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: I mean, how has this changed your own life, your own experience in how you see the world?
GARLINGHOUSE: I've always been interested. I was an English major, so I've always been interested in African-American literature and African-American experience. But what's changed dramatically for us for certain is that now when we go somewhere, we get double-takes everywhere we go. Because people try to figure our family out. Why are these two white parents out with these three black kids?
You have to look at discrimination in a whole new way because maybe, myself, I've never been completely discriminated against because of my race. But now because we are a transracial family, we face more discrimination. So it's an interesting position to be in and every day is a surprise, really. We never know what's going to come our way.
MARTIN: Can you give an example of that, of a time when you have felt, as a family, discriminated against in some way?
GARLINGHOUSE: Sure. Absolutely. We were traveling once and we stopped at a restaurant to get some food and every single person in the restaurant was staring at us. And I don't even remember specifically where we were, I believe somewhere in the South. And Steve and I felt incredibly uncomfortable. And our children didn't really notice. We only had the two girls at the time and they were just eating and being children. I just thought I really don't know how to react.
Or we get a lot of questions about stereotypes, maybe surrounding African-Americans. So we have been asked were their parents on drugs, for example. So those questions are very hurtful to her children - if not detrimental to them.
MARTIN: What do you hope for your kids? They're going to get older. There's going to be, I imagine, more situations that are challenging for them where they think about their race in relationship to you, as being different. How do you hope that they see themselves and are able to manage those situations?
GARLINGHOUSE: I mean I hope that first and foremost, any person sees themself(ph) for themselves. We are a Christian family so I want them to see themselves as a child of God who has a wonderful purpose for their life. Whatever that might be, I hope they're able to fulfill it.
I do anticipate that we're going to, as the children get older - especially my youngest, who is a black boy, who is going to be a black man - that I'm very fearful of what he is going to experience in his future. But I also know that we will remain strong as a family, continue to utilize our resources and hopefully, they will grow up to be strong, confident black people.
MARTIN: Can you say more about the specific fears you have for your son?
GARLINGHOUSE: I'm, of course, fearful that, you know, just the things of he's going to be followed in a mall, where I've never had that experience. Or he's going to get pulled over and we're going to have to teach him what to do in that situation. I think anyone who watches the news or is a family of color, as we are, knows that those fears are very, very real. And we are going to have to handle ourselves carefully. And we're going to have to educate our son in the best way that we can.
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MARTIN: Rachel Garlinghouse, she's the author of "Come Rain or Come Shine: A White Parents Guide to Adopting and Parenting Black Children." Thanks so much for talking with us, Rachel.
GARLINGHOUSE: Thank you for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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This is WEEKEND EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. We're going to begin this morning with a look at a resurgent al-Qaida. Sunni leaders in Iraq are trying to retake control of two important cities in Anbar Province. Fallujah and Ramadi have been under siege by insurgents linked to al-Qaida. That is raising fears in Afghanistan, where al-Qaida operatives still reside near the border with Pakistan, and the U.S. is preparing to pull all combat troops by the end of this year.
To tie these strands together, we called David Ignatius. He's an author and columnist for "The Washington Post." And I started by asking him what it means that territory hard won by the U.S. in Iraq is now under threat again.
DAVID IGNATIUS: First, I think it's really painful for any American soldiers and Marines who served in Anbar province, who fought in the battles to suppress al-Qaida in Fallujah and Ramadi, to see that these areas - the whole of the Euphrates Valley, really - has been retaken. The U.S. is saying to the Iraqi government: Work with the Sunni tribes of this area. Don't try to send the Shiite-led army in to drive these forces out; that will only alienate the population. They've had some success in Ramadi, which is a less militant town, in using the tribal fighters to push al-Qaida out.
So Ramadi is now largely back in control of the tribal sheiks. Fallujah isn't, and Fallujah is going to be a tough battle. The U.S. is trying to help the Iraqi government - trying to help them with technology, with hardware, with advice - as they try to fight the same battle the U.S. fought, to get al-Qaida out of these Sunni towns.
MARTIN: I'd like to turn to Afghanistan now. Afghan President Hamid Karzai missed an important deadline this past week, refusing to sign a new agreement that essentially, defines the U.S. military role in Afghanistan beyond the end of 2014. And then in another apparent snub, he released dozens of Afghan prisoners who the U.S. views as threatening to American national security interests. What's going on?
IGNATIUS: Well, I think President Karzai has grown to take a kind of pleasure in snubbing, driving crazy President Obama and the U.S. administration. Relations are so bad. They've been bad, really, since Obama came into office, but they get worse and worse. Karzai's term as president is set to expire this year. And so in a sense, the only leverage he has remaining is to make trouble. I mean, the minute he signs the basic security agreement, which would provide for a residual U.S. force in Afghanistan and stabilize the situation, his powers, leverage, disappears. I think as American officials look at what happened in Iraq when we really pulled out, when we didn't leave a residual force, there's going to be much more reluctance to do the same thing in Afghanistan. And people really will fight, despite all of Karzai's machinations to find a way to keep some American troops there, which appears to be what most Afghans want.
MARTIN: How does the U.S. leave these countries to fight their own battles but stay involved enough to further American national security interests, especially when it comes to counterterrorism? Where's that balance?
IGNATIUS: If you look at Iraq, look at Ramadi. As al-Qaida fighters rolled in a week and a half ago - I'm told they had 75 trucks with machine guns, hundreds of fighters; took over all the police stations. And they were beaten back. And the reason they were beaten back is that the Iraqi people in Ramadi didn't want them there. And I think that the evidence is pretty strong that most places where al-Qaida and the Taliban operate, people end up not wanting them to govern.
You know, we should understand that the people who are going to have to fight them, and keep them out, probably are willing to do that if they get a little help and good policy. The second thing is that even though it's obvious that sending American troops into these battlegrounds is probably a mistake - that we create as many enemies as we take down - there are many things the U.S. can do to help the governments and people that don't involve sending troops, and that are worth doing. You know, a residual force that trains armies in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan; that bolsters, you know, people who are more moderate than the extremists, and gives them some confidence that helps them get the kinds of weapons they need to defend themselves - I think those policies make more sense, the more we look at the way things are playing out; not less.
MARTIN: David Ignatius - he's a columnist for "The Washington Post"; he's also the author of a new, forthcoming novel titled "The Director." Thanks so much for being with us, David.
IGNATIUS: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to stay in Afghanistan, and look now at a 2005 Navy SEAL mission in a remote part of that country. The aim of the mission was to capture or kill a leading Taliban member, but the team was ambushed by dozens of Taliban fighters. When a rescue helicopter was sent in, it was shot down. All 16 passengers on board were killed.
Three of the SEALs on the ground eventually succumbed to their wounds. Marcus Luttrell, who had been shot, had a broken back, was rescued by local Afghan villagers. He was the only American to survive. Luttrell wrote a book about his experience, called "Lone Survivor." His account has now been turned into film starring Mark Wahlberg, which opened in theaters around the country Friday. Marcus Luttrell spoke with us from member station KUHF in Houston, Texas, and described that deadly firefight.
MARCUS LUTTRELL: We did have an uneasy feeling, going in. The intel on the numbers kept changing. And then when we got overrun, it was such a large force that - the numbers have been speculated, anywhere from 60 to 80, to 80 to over 100. And it was all of that. I have recently talked to one of the villagers who saved my life. And he was in constant contact with the Taliban. And he says that there was over 100. I'm sticking with the latter, from 60 to 80.
MARTIN: The team commander was Lt. Michael Murphy. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, which is the military's highest award, for his actions on that day. As a way of understanding what happened, can you describe what he did?
LUTTRELL: We had been pinned down. We had actually been pinned down multiple times, but we had managed to get out of each one of them. And then after Danny had been killed - Ax(ph) had been shot multiple times, one time in the face; I was hit; Mikey was hit. And we were - it was towards the tail end of the engagement, and we were - they had us dead to rights; they had us pinned in a hole pretty good. And Mikey, just with total disregard for his own life - I mean, he knew what he was doing, he knew it was the end - that he pulled out our satellite phone, crawled to an open area in the ravine, and stayed out there until he got in contact with our QRF. And he crawled out and was hit a couple of times during the phone call, but kept the lines of communication up until he was killed.
MARTIN: The film that's just come out is based on those events. It tells the story of your unit and that mission. I assume you've seen this. What did you think of it?
LUTTRELL: I thought they did a great job with what they had to work with. He cut it down to just the bare bones of what it was supposed to be. And I think it plays out real well in the film.
MARTIN: Was there anything in there that was embellished or just not true but made for a better movie; they needed to change something for the narrative?
LUTTRELL: I think - I noticed one of the liberties that Hollywood took in the movie that I just kind of - I remember sitting back in my chair and was like, why would you put that in there? - is when at the very end of the movie, they have the Taliban working me over pretty good...
MARTIN: Uh-huh.
LUTTRELL: ...well, that happened in real life, but I didn't kill anybody with a knife. And I remember sitting back and laughing. I go, why did you put that in there? What does that have to do with anything? I mean, the story itself, I think, is enough to where you wouldn't have to embellish anything.
MARTIN: You survived because an Afghan sheep herder found you, took you in, nursed back to health, told the Americans at a nearby base where to find you, which is an incredible part of this story. The film says he acted out of honor in the name of something called pashtunwali, which is the Afghan code of sorts, that says you protect your guests. What he did was really extraordinary, though. Was there more to it than that? What were his motivations?
LUTTRELL: No, that was it. Just basic barebones - that's what it was. It was just an honorable thing to do and he did it, and stuck to his beliefs. I mean, a lot of people would have folded under the pressure like that - especially when their village members started dying, his family members started dying; he's been shot, his car's been blown up, his house's been burnt down. And still, to this day, he'd tell you straight up; he goes, if I had to do it all over again, I'd do the same, exact thing. And I say the same thing. If I had to go through it all over again, we'd play it out just like it played out. But yeah, no, there was no alternative motives or anything like that. I mean, he didn't want anything out of me, or anything like that. He just did it because it was the way he lived his life.
MARTIN: What happened to that village? I wasn't just him; it was other people who lived there. They all protected you.
LUTTRELL: Sure. Still, I mean, they're persecuted to this very day. I mean, Gulah's(ph) got a bounty on his head that's...
MARTIN: That's the man who...
LUTTRELL: ...that won't come off. And I'm in constant contact with him and we, you know, we're family. And I'm a blood debt - I mean, a life debt. So I'm a member of that village, and he's a member of my family, and it will be that way until one of us dies. And...
MARTIN: So the Taliban knew you were there and they were holding the village - siege?
LUTTRELL: Oh, yes, ma'am. No, the Taliban was on top of me when Gulah found me. That part didn't make it into the film right away, but there was a constant threat. I couldn't peek my head out a window or anything like that, due to gunfire.
MARTIN: It's been nine years since this happened. You wrote a memoir about it. It's now been turned into a major motion picture. Are you ready to be done?
LUTTRELL: Absolutely. I can't wait. Yeah, no. People always - they're asking - I've had some people tell me that this changed my life. No, it hasn't. It hasn't done anything like that. This is just something that happened in my life. It doesn't define me as a man. But I do. I can't wait to get back to the ranch and go back to easy living.
MARTIN: What does that look like for you? What are you doing now?
LUTTRELL: Just that. I spend most of my time at the ranch with my family, and enjoy life - watch the sun come up, watch it go down, thank God for another day and just be happy.
MARTIN: Marcus Luttrell - his experience is the basis of the new film called "Lone Survivor." He joined us from member station KUHF in Houston, Texas. Thanks so much for talking with us, Marcus.
LUTTRELL: Yes, ma'am. Thanks for having me.
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This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. If you use a credit card - and most of us do - it's hard not to be a little concerned. Discount retailer Target continues to apologize for a massive security breach over the holidays. And just yesterday, the high-end retailer Neiman Marcus disclosed that shoppers at its stores have been compromised as well. Independent investigative reporter Brian Krebs was the first to report on both these security breaches. He joins us to talk more. Welcome to the program, Brian.
BRIAN KREBS: Hi, Rachel.
MARTIN: So, what do you we know about this most recent security breach at Neiman Marcus? What type of data was taken?
KREBS: Well, we don't know a lot. What we do is that the banks that issue credit cards, some of them started seeing some funky charges that they trace back to cards that had all been used at Neiman Marcus. And they got notified in the middle of December by their credit card processor that something wasn't right. They're still trying to figure that out and they really didn't have too many details to share about how broad this is, how many cards may be affected, how the bad guys got in, that kind of stuff.
MARTIN: This Neiman Marcus breach comes on the heels of this major security breach at Target, where potentially millions of Americans were affected. Are these happening more often or are we just hearing about them more?
KREBS: Yeah, I think it's fair to say we're just hearing about them more. My sense in talking to folks in the financial industry, I'm surprised that many of them are a bit nonchalant and some of them have told me, you know, I don't know why everybody is so upset about these. You know, these things happen all the time and they never get reported. Well, if people really know how many there were, nobody would feel comfortable using their cards anywhere. And I think that the industry as a whole doesn't like talking about these things for that very reason.
MARTIN: So, what is the latest on the investigation into what happened at Target?
KREBS: Target is not saying too much. This is being treated by almost every corner of the regional industry as a unknown zero-day threat. 'Cause everybody looks at Target and says, well, if it can happen to them, it can happen to us. So, that's a good distinction here. Are the retailers or victims of cybercrime under any kind of obligation to disclose this - and they are - but they're not under any kind of obligation to disclose how they got hacked, which is a really, really important thing because other folks can learn from this stuff and hopefully not become victims coming forward.
MARTIN: So, you've been looking at this. You broke both of these huge stories. What are the solutions that are being proffered to try to curb this kind of security breach?
KREBS: The solutions are moving to a chip and pin, which is where that little chip that gets encoded into the card makes it expensive and more difficult to duplicate that card for bad guys. So, you know, that's kind of a solution but it doesn't really solve the problem. So, I think, Rachel, we can look forward to a lot more of these disclosures going forward.
MARTIN: Brian Krebs is the author of the blog KrebsOnSecurity.com. Brian, thanks so much for talking with us.
KREBS: Thank you, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
To Greece now, a country with one of the highest percentages of smokers in the world. At least 40 percent of the population over the age of 15 smokes, leading, of course, to rising rates of lung disease and lung cancer. Several years ago, the Greek parliament banned smoking inside restaurants, bars and public buildings. But it's rarely enforced. And even a new tax on cigarettes doesn't seem to be deterring Greek smokers. Joanna Kakissis has the story from Athens.
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JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: Antigoni Papaconstantinou started smoking two years ago when she 19.
ANTIGONI PAPACONSTANTINOU: (Foreign language spoken)
KAKISSIS: I was working at a bar, she said, and everyone smoked.
PAPACONSTANTINOU: (Foreign language spoken)
KAKISSIS: Antigoni explains that you practically can't go out in Greece unless you smoke. Going out for a drink also means going out for a cigarette.
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KAKISSIS: I met Antigoni at Booze Cooperative, a cafe-bar and art space in central Athens. Young hipsters play chess as they puff on cigarettes.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KAKISSIS: The grey-haired owner, Nikos Louvros, smokes five packs a day. (Foreign language spoken)
NIKOS LOUVROS: (Foreign language spoken)
KAKISSIS: I ask Louvros if he's worried about his health. I'm almost 59-years-old, and I've never had to go the hospital, he says. I take an aspirin a day, and I'm just fine. The smoking he allows at his bar is a violation of the country's ban, but he's never had to pay a fine. He circumvented it by starting a pro-smoking political party.
LOUVROS: (Foreign language spoken)
KAKISSIS: This bar is party headquarters, he says, so the constitution protects us.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHATTER)
KAKISSIS: A few blocks away, there is a place that welcomes the smoking ban. It's Avocado, a vegetarian bistro that offers meditation classes. One of the owners is a glowing yogi named Vivi Letsou.
VIVI LETSOU: Word is out that this is a strictly non-smoking place. They can smoke outside in our tables on the sidewalk. They wish that we had more tables and chairs outside to accommodate the smokers.
(SOUNDBITE OF LIGHTER FLICKING)
KAKISSIS: Outside, Anastasios Papapavlous, a businessman in his 50s, is lighting a cigar after dinner.
ANASTASIOS PAPAPAVLOUS: (Foreign language spoken)
KAKISSIS: The ancient Greeks used to say that moderation is best, he says. I smoke cigars occasionally but I don't want the smoke to bother anyone.
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KAKISSIS: Back at the Booze Cooperative, Antigoni Papaconstantinou and two young friends talk about quitting - or at least smoking less.
PAPACONSTANTINOU: (Foreign language spoken)
KAKISSIS: Anastasia Malikovska, who works on yachts, says her father was a heavy smoker for years and only quit when he thought he had cancer. And yet, she says, she's still smoking. Despite the health warnings, the ban, even the tax, Greeks are still struggling with a habit that many here say is part of the culture. For NPR News, I'm Joanna Kakissis in Athens.
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MARTIN: And you're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Social media has become a form of customer helpline, allowing us to compliment and complain. And increasingly, enormous global companies, that would probably keep you on hold for hours on the phone, respond. But what about creating an ongoing Facebook friendship with an Applebee's? Seem a little crazy? Well, that's exactly what Steve Murray did. He goes by the name Chip Zdarsky as a comic artist and on his online profiles. And we had to ask him why, so we called him up in Toronto. Thanks so much for being with us, Chip.
CHIP ZDARSKY: Oh, thanks for having me.
MARTIN: So, before we go any further, you have to explain how this whole thing started.
ZDARSKY: Well, I don't know if you have parents that are on Facebook. And I saw one day that they had both liked a photo of a hamburger on their hometown Applebee's Facebook page. So, I thought that was really funny, just both of them retirees sitting at home going I like this hamburger. Afterwards, I started scrolling through their Facebook page, and it was just post after post after post of them trying to connect with people and no one responding, which is...
MARTIN: Applebee's the restaurant.
ZDARSKY: Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a local chain. It's not even like Applebee's Canada. It's Applebee's Barrie, which is my hometown. And somehow it struck me as kind of sad. Twice a week they'd post a photo of an appetizer and pose a question like does this look yummy to you? And nobody responded, so...
MARTIN: So, you decided to respond. So, in that case you would say, yes, yes, Applebee's, it does look yummy.
ZDARSKY: Yeah, exactly. And then part of the humor kind of stems from the idea to get them off the playbook. You know, like there was one where I kind of had them on about Halloween and then I asked them for a suggestion of a costume. And they were like how about Batman? I'm like that sounds good. It's so innocuous but it's so funny to get, like, a faceless company to interact on that level.
MARTIN: This stopped being ironic to you. You were just engaging with someone who is behind that account.
ZDARSKY: Yeah. I mean, it was all still towards the joke. But I became a bit protective of them because they did seem so kind of pure and sweet and maybe a little naive. When Applebee's, when they would say something like, you know, wow, thanks, Chip. You know, this means a lot to us, like, I would get a weird lump in my throat, like it means a lot to me too. But it's weird. It shouldn't. It absolutely shouldn't.
MARTIN: Well, and now you might get, you know, pretty good service, maybe a free hamburger every once in a while at Applebee's.
(LAUGHTER)
ZDARSKY: Yeah, yeah. I like to play the long game, you know. Wake up early just for nine months with an Applebee's restaurant tugging at some deep fried shrimp appetizers for free.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Chip Zdarsky. He's a comic book artist in Toronto and a good friend of Applebee's on Facebook. Chip, thanks so much for talking with us.
ZDARSKY: Thanks a lot. I had a good time.
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Nominations for the Academy Awards will be announced this coming week. One film widely expected to make the list is the documentary "The Act of Killing." It was just released on DVD and digital platforms last week. The film is about a massacre of communists in Indonesia in the 1960s. But rather than hearing from the victims, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer takes an unusual perspective. He shows the perpetrators reenacting their crimes. The result is haunting, even revolting at points and hard to describe.
So I asked Oppenheimer how he explains the film.
JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: In 1965, there was a military coup in Indonesia in which shortly afterwards up to a million or even two million opponents of the new military dictatorship were killed by the new dictatorship. And the people who did it included civilian death squads and the army. These people have been in power in one form or another ever since. And when they talk about what they've done, instead of apologizing for it, acting ashamed about it, they boast about it.
And to understand the nature of their boasting I let them traumatize what they've done in whatever ways they switched and filmed the process.
MARTIN: So this is a film about the making of a film. Was it your suggestion to these murderers, really, that they act out their crimes in the form of a film?
OPPENHEIMER: Well, actually I began making this film collaborating closely with a community of survivors of the 1965 genocide. And when the army found out what we were doing, the army would no longer let the survivors participate in the film. And the survivors said, OK, before you give up, why don't you fill some of the perpetrators? Living around us in this village or the aging death squad leaders who killed our relatives. Maybe they'll tell you what they did, how they did it because, in fact, we don't know the details.
I didn't know if it was safe to speak to the killers at all about what happened. But I found that every single perpetrator in this village and in this area was openly boastful about what they'd done, inviting me to the places where they killed, launching into spontaneous demonstrations of how they killed, often with a smile on their face often in front of their families, their wives, their children, even their grandchildren.
And trying to understand what's going here, I started to screen some of that material back for them, and found that they always looked dissatisfied with what we filmed and would propose sort of improvements - if you like, embellishments. And so, I started to propose to the perpetrators I was meeting, look, you want to show me what you've done so go ahead and show me what you've done, in whatever way you wish. I will help you create any reenactments you want to make.
But I will also film you and your fellow death squad veterans discussing what you want to show, what you want to leave out and why you want to show things. And thereby hopefully create a documentary of it shows how you want to be seen by the world and how maybe you really see yourself.
MARTIN: They go to a village and re-create the burning of these homes and torture of these people.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "THE ACT OF KILLING")
MARTIN: It's a horrific scene. At that point your main character, Anwar Congo, does he start to question what they're doing?
OPPENHEIMER: He does. But I think its first important to say that we don't go to a village and burn down houses. We build a movie set. And the violence, the chaos, the pain is made to feel as real as we were capable of making it because it starts, as you said, to have a real effect on Anwar - the main character of the film.
Watching the chaos unfold, he said: I never imagined that this would look so awful. And he starts to see in the mirror of the movie really what he's done.
MARTIN: There's one particular scene I'd love for you to be able to recount. It's a Chinese man, who is Anwar's neighbor, has agreed to be part of this project. And he's playing victims in the film, in the scenes that they're shooting. And in a moment of real candor starts recounting his own tale. Can you describe that scene and how Anwar responds?
OPPENHEIMER: Yeah. This neighbor of Anwar's decides to open up. He then goes on to tell the story of how killers came to the house late at night, knocked on the door and his stepfather went out. And all the family heard was a scream and they never saw the stepfather alive again. He, as an 11-year-old boy, had to bury his stepfather with his grandfather.
The amazing thing about this moment is that Anwar's fellow death squad member, Adi, is watching this reenactment as it unfolds. And seeing the force of the emotions that come to the surface here, he recognizes suddenly what this film will do and, indeed, what it has done in Indonesia; which is that it will turn the official history on its head. It will show that the perpetrators were wrong and undermine the perpetrators position of power in society. And he warns everybody to stop making the film.
MARTIN: Did his concerns spread? Did Anwar share those concerns?
OPPENHEIMER: No, I think Anwar decides to continue because he's, in fact, not making the film in order to look good or to burnish his image as a hero. I think Anwar actually is making the film because finally, for the first time in his life, he's been given an occasion to deal somehow with his pain.
MARTIN: Are you still in touch with any of the men you interviewed, in particular Anwar Congo, your main character?
OPPENHEIMER: When Anwar saw the film, he was silent for a long time. He was tearful. Finally he said: Josh, this film shows what it's like to be me. And he and I remain in touch and perhaps always will because we've been through a very painful, long and intimate journey together that we'll spend the rest of our lives trying to understand.
MARTIN: Joshua Oppenheimer. His documentary "The Act of Killing" is on the short list for Best Documentary at this year's Academy Awards. He spoke to us from our studios in New York.
Joshua, thank you so much.
OPPENHEIMER: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News, I'm Rachel Martin.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
The body of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is lying in state in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, today. He died yesterday after eight years in a coma. Ariel Sharon was a soldier-turned-politician who believed in hard-line military solutions, but who also looked beyond force to try to bring peace in Israel.
For more about the impact Sharon had on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, we got in touch with Ari Shavit. He's a senior correspondent at Haaretz newspaper in Israel. We started by talking about Sharon's impact on the modern day peace process.
ARI SHAVIT: Sharon had the ability because of his national authority, so to speak, because of his heroic task, he had the kind of authority that enabled him to defend the settlements without real bloodshed. I think that had we not lost him eight years ago, there's a good chance that he would've started dealing with the settlements in the West Bank, as well. And he was more able to do that than anyone else. And one of the troubling questions now is whether we have such a figure in the future.
And it's not clear where the younger Israeli politicians who don't have this kind of (unintelligible). They're not iconic, they are not part of Israel's long tail of establishment and existence; whether they will have the ability to do what Sharon could have done.
MARTIN: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has made the Israel-Palestine peace process a key issue for the Obama administration. And for him personally, he's been to Israel 10 times since becoming secretary of state, and he traveled there again this coming week. And yesterday, Kerry released a statement commemorating Sharon, saying, quote, "Ariel Sharon's journey was Israel's journey." What does it mean to you that he said those words in particular?
SHAVIT: Well, first of all, he's right. I agree totally with Secretary Kerry's statement that Sharon is in many ways, again, one of the last true iconic Israelis whose life story is our story. But I would like to touch about the irony behind Secretary Kerry's statement.
It is in many ways what Secretary Kerry's trying to do these days - and I wish him all the luck in the world - which is to bring total or comprehensive peace between Israelis and Palestinians within a relatively short time. This is exactly what Sharon opposed. Even when he became a moderate, Sharon did not believe that there was an ability to solve the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians.
So there is some - a degree of irony to the fact that Sharon dies just as Secretary Kerry reaches the peak of his attempt - of his benign and courageous attempt - to bring the peace that Sharon believed would never happen. So Kerry in this sense, Secretary Kerry and Ariel Sharon, actually their approaches to peace are exactly opposite. In many ways they contradicted each other.
MARTIN: Sharon, as we have discussed has, of course, had been on life-support for eight years. Still, is it possible that there will be some kind of psychological letting go of his perspective on the peace process now that he has died?
SHAVIT: That remains to be seen. That's an interesting question. He was a very chromatic, energetic person who influenced our lives in many ways. But in many ways, we said farewell to Sharon eight years ago.
MARTIN: Ari Shavit, he is an Israeli journalist and the author of the book "My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel." Thanks so much for talking with us.
SHAVIT: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
On Tuesday, Tunisia will celebrate the third anniversary of its revolution. Tunisia is the country that inspired uprisings across the Arab world. Since then, that country has gone through tough times but it seems to have found its way again. Opposing sides have drafted the new constitution together. It will be ready in a couple days, and new elections are set for this year. That sets Tunisia apart from neighboring Egypt and Libya, where the Arab Spring uprisings have brought violence and political upheaval.
NPR's Eleanor Beardsley sends this report.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTESTERS)
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Striding through a Tunis street market, I see a look of optimism on people's faces. That's in stark contrast to a year ago, on my last visit, when fear and uncertainty ruled. Tunisians, like businessman Soheil Ben Abdallah, say the country is back on track again.
SOHEIL BEN ABDALLAH: I feel optimistic, frankly, because two years ago, I mean the situation was a disaster. Tunisia today has a vision.
BEARDSLEY: That vision, says Abdallah, comes from the creation of a roadmap, their new constitution. He's also relieved that the government has agreed to step down in the coming days, making way for a non-partisan caretaker government to oversee new elections this year.
2013 was a horrible year for Tunisia. The Islamist-led government was seen as ineffective and inexperienced and the economy continued to deteriorate. On top of that, there were terrorist attacks and two political assassinations. But many say last year's crises may have actually saved the country.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTESTS)
BEARDSLEY: After a second secular politician was gunned down in July, allegedly by Islamist extremists, Tunisia reached a tipping point. For a solid month, young people, women, all segments of secular civil society poured into the streets, demanding that the Islamist-led government resign. That mobilization, plus the military coup against Egypt's similar ruling-Islamist party, shook Tunisia up, says Mounir Khelifa, a professor at Tunis University.
MOUNIR KHELIFA: What happened in Egypt certainly is not a cause for mirth or rejoicing. But it put the Islamists in Tunisia under strong pressure to compose with other political forces and actors of the country in order not to have the same scenario.
BEARDSLEY: Fear changed Tunisians. For the first time in three years, Tunisians no longer seem starkly divided between a secular and religious vision of their country's future, says Laryssa Chomiak, director of Tunisian-American research institution CEMAT.
LARYSSA CHOMIAK: Those two radically opposing views no longer represent the Tunisian political landscape right now, which is somewhere in the middle because they are proud of a process that seems to be working.
BEARDSLEY: Compromise, not conflict, is the Tunisian way, many people tell me. And Tunisians of all stripes clearly feel hopeful today. Even though it's small, what happens here in Tunisia is important for the Arab world, says Monica Marks, a doctoral student from Oxford University.
MONICA MARKS: Ultimately having the example of an Arab democratic country is going to be crucial for the region. No longer could people from the outside, or people from the inside say, that Arabs need a strong hand. You know, you hear this kind of discourse. No longer can people say that, because you have an example. And Tunisia can be that example.
(APPLAUSE)
BEARDSLEY: Members of Tunisia's constituent assembly broke into applause and sang the national anthem this week, after passing a hard-fought article guaranteeing men and women equal rights under the new constitution. Tunisian father Hassen Zargouni brought his two young daughters to the assembly to watch history being made.
HASSAN ZARGOUNI: When they see how a young democracy like Tunisia is building like a wall, brick by brick. I'm proud to bring them here. It is a memorable moment that they will never forget.
(SOUNDBITE OF SINGING)
BEARDSLEY: Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Tunis.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Insane Clown Posse is a rap group known for its violent lyrics. Two years ago, the U.S. government designated its fans, known as Juggalos, as gang members. This past week, the band and several fans sued the FBI, demanding they be removed from the list. The band says the designation unfairly subjects Juggalos to police harassment. We spoke to Patrick Flanary, a freelance journalist who's written about the case for Rolling Stone magazine. And we asked him to explain how fans became targets of the FBI.
PATRICK FLANARY: The Juggalos has always been a term of endearment among the fans of the group ICP, Insane Clown Posse. In fact, it was a rallying call from the stage by the front man, Violent J, several years ago. And since 2011 since this threat assessment came out by the FBI, there's been this whole stigma associated with fans of the group. As the ACLU lawyers pointed out to me, you wouldn't pull over a Beatles fan just because a Beatles fan last night somewhere in America committed a violent crime.
MARTIN: What's the nature of these crimes and do they have anything to do with the band?
FLANARY: Nothing to do with the band whatsoever. According to the lawyers now for the group and with the ACLU of Michigan, what happened was there were only two crimes that were cited by the FBI study back in 2011. One had to do with a violent home invasion, where a Juggalo was suspected and later convicted; and there was another violent crime associated in 2012. But as lawyers pointed out, this doesn't apply to every person who claims he or she is a Juggalo. It isn't fair just because this group depicts violent images, talks about very crude murder scenarios.
MARTIN: We should say, the lyrics are downright offensive in many cases, incredibly misogynist, violent.
FLANARY: They are. And the band admits as much, and so do the attorneys. But that isn't reason enough to pull over a fan of the music, just because he might have an ICP bumper sticker on his car. As Violent J, the front man of the group told me, hey, we're trying to be the Stephen King of music. We're just telling horror stories. It's no different from what Rob Zombie has done in the film and music world. We are entertainment.
MARTIN: Is this unusual, do you know, Patrick, for the FBI to designate a band's fans, followers, as gang members? Has it happened before?
FLANARY: It's never happened before. Now, outside of Madison Square Garden, just a couple of weeks ago, for New Year's Eve, where the band Phish plays its annual four-day residency, people were targeted outside for selling or using psychedelic drugs. However, these people are not labeled as gang members. So, yeah, this is the first case of its kind.
MARTIN: Patrick Flanary. He's a freelance music journalist. He joined us from New York. Patrick, thanks so much for talking with us.
FLANARY: My pleasure. Thanks.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: This is NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. And it is time for sports.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: The Baseball Hall of Fame's new class of inductees was announced this past week and it caused quite a stir. The biggest controversy may not even be about who got in, but the actual voting. Also in baseball, A-Rod's suspension - the longest ever for doping in baseball history, although it has been reduced. NPR's Mike Pesca joins us to mull all of this over. Good morning.
MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Hello. I shall mull.
MARTIN: Mull, please. So, the day that the Hall of Fame class is announced is supposed to be this great day in baseball, but did the shadow of steroids loom even larger than usual this year?
PESCA: Yeah, it has been in the last few years. And Glavine, Maddux, Frank Thomas, the inductees - everyone agrees - these were great and valuable guys. But, of course, we're talking about the steroid era, although we're not really even talking about whatever years we thought the steroid era were, because here's Alex Rodriguez. He's been suspended for now 162 games - not the 211 he was charged with. He did his - this recent batch of steroid use wasn't even steroid use - it was human growth hormone. It was after baseball supposedly cleaned up its act.
So, voters, people who vote for the Hall of Fame, it's very hard to know how to process this. You have guys who they think clearly did steroids. You have guys who they strongly suspect clearly did steroids. You have guys who they think, even if they didn't do steroids, might make the Hall of Fame. You have guys who they say, well, but for the steroids he probably wouldn't have made it, but how can they possibly know? And with so many different people having so many different opinions and there's no real basis, there's no list of, well, here's how you make your decisions, I mean, everything's just so tumultuous about the process, it is just very angsty(ph).
MARTIN: And this one guy, this important guy, was banned from the voting, right, this sports journalist?
PESCA: Yeah, Dan Le Batard, who has a vote because, in addition to being an ESPN personality, he writes a column. And what happened was the website Dead Spin said we're going to buy a Hall of Fame voter's vote. That didn't happen. But Le Batard said I'll take you up on the second half of what you are trying to do. Your voters voted for who they want in the Hall of Fame and Le Batard just kind of gave him ballot over to them. So, the Hall of Fame has, like, banned him for covering games and voting for 10 years.
But he was engaged in sort of a civil disobedience exercise. He wanted to point out that only sports writers vote for the Hall of Fame and that's wrong. And there are hundreds of them and so many are unqualified and there's just no real, there's no real science to it and there's no real rules. So, everyone's very upset at everyone else. And they're throwing around charges of sanctimony. Yeah, Dan Le Batard calls the Hall of Fame process sanctimonious. His critics say he's sanctimonious. He wants all the credit.
MARTIN: You say that's a problem...
PESCA: It think it is.
MARTIN: ...the overuse of this word.
PESCA: Well, you know, I looked up the world. Here's how it works. I think it kind of does get down to what we're talking about. So, you know, originally, it has the same roots - sanctimony has the same roots as sanctity and sanctuary, so it was kind of holy. But somewhere around, like, 400 years ago. I mean, Shakespeare started using sanctimonious in "Measure for Measure" in a pejorative way. And it just seems to me that something you hold really serious that I don't, I call you sanctimonious and you call it sanctimony. So, it's two people who are at each other's throats, or two groups, and not at all seeing the other points of view. That said, I think all the Hall of Fame ballots should be public so even if people make crazy votes, they should be held accountable.
MARTIN: I don't really know what just happened, but I like it. OK. NPR's Mike Pesca. Thanks so much, Mike.
PESCA: You're welcome.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
On a Monday, it's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. Today in Your Health, we report on the most common reasons people go to the doctor - back pain. More than 1 of every 4 adult Americans say they've recently suffered lower back pain, and that figure is on the rise. Billions of dollars are spent every year treating that problem.
But many specialists say less medical treatment is usually more effective. As part of our occasional series Less is More, NPR's Richard Knox and Patti Neighmond take a closer look.
PATTI NEIGHMOND, BYLINE: Let's start with a cautionary tale about how not to deal with back pain. It involves a guy who knows what he's talking about.
DR. JERRY GROOPMAN: I suffered back pain almost 20 years.
RICHARD KNOX, BYLINE: Dr. Jerry Groopman is a Harvard cancer specialist who writes about medicine for The New Yorker. When I went to see him, he told me his story. Thirty-two years ago, he was a young marathon runner when back pain struck. He says it was a bolt from the blue.
GROOPMAN: I couldn't run. It was difficult to sleep. And I was totally fixated on it. I wasn't confined to bed, but I was hobbling around.
KNOX: Groopman wanted the problem fixed right away. So he found a surgeon who removed a damaged disc, but he still had pain. Then, one day during brunch at a friend's house, something happened that would change his life.
GROOPMAN: I stood up from a chair and just had an explosive electric shock through my lower back; basically, fell to the floor and couldn't get up.
KNOX: His previous pain was severe, but this was over the top. Groopman could hardly move.
GROOPMAN: And I was so desperate after almost three weeks that I found a neurosurgeon and orthopedist who said: You have spinal instability. We'll fuse you and in three weeks, you'll be playing football.
NEIGHMOND: In a spinal fusion, surgeons weld together adjacent vertebrate with a bone graft. It's an increasingly common operation.
KNOX: But for Groopman, doing more made things worse.
GROOPMAN: I woke up from the surgery in excruciating pain and basically, could hardly move my legs. And I remember the orthopedic surgeon coming by and saying, well, I don't know why you're having so much trouble - and so on. He said, but you know, if it doesn't get better in a few weeks, we could re-operate.
NEIGHMOND: In fact, 1 in 5 patients who have had surgery for back pain do end up having more surgery. For some, like Jerry Groopman, it doesn't help at all. And yet surgery for back pain has been on the rise for the past few decades, along with other treatments such as steroid injections and use of opioid painkillers.
Dr. Richard Deyo is a professor of evidence-based medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University.
DR. RICHARD DEYO: Certainly, there is good reason to think that we are overprescribing painkillers, overprescribing injections, overprescribing back surgery.
KNOX: Deyo says one reason invasive treatments for back pain have been rising is MRI scans. These detailed, color-coded pictures showing a cross-section of patients' spines are a technological tour de force. But they can be dangerously misleading.
DEYO: Seeing is believing. And gosh, we can actually see degenerated discs, we can see bulging discs. We can see all kinds of things that are alarming.
KNOX: That is, they look alarming. But they're most likely not the cause of the pain. Lots of people who are pain-free actually have terrible-looking MRIs. So being less aggressive can sometimes bring more benefit.
NEIGHMOND: Now, surgery can help for certain conditions such as a herniated disk with leg pain, called sciatica. But most age-related back pain usually can't be fixed with surgery.
Dr. Jim Rainville is a rehab specialist at New England Baptist Hospital, in Boston. He says research is showing that the problems often have nothing to do with the mechanics of the spine, but the way the nervous system is reacting.
DR. JIM RAINVILLE: It's a change in the way that the sensory system is processing information so that normal sensations of touch, sensations produced by movements, are translated by the nervous system into a pain message. That process is what drives people completely crazy - who have back pain - because so many things induce discomfort.
KNOX: It's a totally different way of thinking about pain. Normally, pain is an alarm bell that says stop what you're doing right now, or you may hurt yourself. But for some people, that pain is a false signal. It's not about looming danger; it's actually caused by hypersensitive nerves.
Rainville says many patients with chronic back pain get stuck in an endless loop of pain.
RAINVILLE: In about 25 percent of people, the sensitization of the nervous system persists.
NEIGHMOND: Some people may be genetically prone to it. But Rainville discovered these patients can actually learn to ignore this pain.
(SOUNDBITE OF BACKGROUND CHATTER)
LISA CHILDS: Let's warm up first on the rotary torso, just to get you going.
NEIGHMOND: Lisa Childs is a physical therapist at a back pain boot camp Rainville developed. She's teaching back pain patients how to rethink their pain.
CHILDS: I'm just going to ask you: Is it easy, moderate, difficult?
JANET WERTHEIMER: Moderate.
NEIGHMOND: Childs is working with 61-year-old Janet Wertheimer, who's had severe back pain on and off for 10 years. Most people with chronic back pain couldn't imagine doing what Wertheimer's doing - using her back to lift 100 pounds of lead weights.
CHILDS: Do you feel like you could do five pounds more, or 10 pounds?
WERTHEIMER: You can try 10, and I'll see what happens.
(SOUNDBITE OF WEIGHTS)
WERTHEIMER: And if I can't make it, I'll go back to five.
CHILDS: OK.
WERTHEIMER: Oh! That did hurt.
CHILDS: OK.
NEIGHMOND: Wertheimer has a sharp twinge in her back. But Childs says that's OK. She's building strength. And along the way, she's learning not to be afraid of the pain.
WERTHEIMER: It is learning not to fear the pain, learning that you can live with pain; understand what that pain is, but then put it aside.
NEIGHMOND: Eventually, after a few months, most patients in Rainville's boot camp and similar programs find that the pain lessens and sometimes even goes away.
KNOX: Even patients like Jerry Groopman, whose back pain was worsened by surgery, can unlearn their pain. For years after his spinal fusion, Groopman was never without back pain. He tried a long list of things, without success. Then a friend suggested he see Rainville. Groopman was skeptical, but he decided to give Rainville's boot camp a try.
GROOPMAN: He was really tough. And he said to me: You are worshiping the volcano god of pain. And I thought, what is this about? (Laughter)
KNOX: Rainville explains.
RAINVILLE: In primitive cultures, if you lived near a volcano and the volcano started smoking and looking like something was going to happen, well, it was obvious because gods were mad at you. And you'd start doing silly things - sacrificing chickens or goats or whatever, thinking that that would appease the gods.
KNOX: In a strange way, Rainville says, people with chronic back pain do something very similar.
RAINVILLE: Oh, my God, I'd better sacrifice this. They stop playing golf, or they stop playing on their softball team, or they stop their running; and then they're really careful of carrying groceries. And they keep putting things onto this altar, thinking that that's going to change the situation.
NEIGHMOND: Patients get so afraid of pain that they do anything to avoid it. But for most people, it doesn't work. Instead, they just lose strength and flexibility. And remember, this kind of pain is a false signal. It doesn't mean you're going to do permanent damage if you don't stop.
KNOX: Eventually, that message sank in with the skeptical Dr. Groopman.
GROOPMAN: It took about two months for me to really buy in that this was the way to go.
KNOX: Sometimes, like when he bent over to pick up a plastic crate filled with lead weights, he had a flare-up of back pain. But the therapist talked him down from it.
GROOPMAN: Just let it go. Don't pay attention to it.
KNOX: Basically, doing is believing.
GROOPMAN: Doing is believing. And after about nine months, I was basically without any back pain.
NEIGHMOND: It doesn't work that well for everyone. Janet Wertheimer still has some back pain. But now, she says, after boot camp she can pretty much do anything she wants - ski, mountain hike, walk her dogs. And the pain? Most of the time, she says, she blocks it out and moves on.
I'm Patti Neighmond.
KNOX: And I'm Richard Knox, NPR News.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Some other news.
In Little Rock, Arkansas today, a federal judge is set to consider a deal that would end one of the longest running and most notorious school desegregation cases in the nation. The state, its largest school districts and lawyers representing black students, have all agreed to settle a complex lawsuit over unequal education.
NPR's Debbie Elliott reports.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Little Rock has long been the symbol of the South's violent reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. the Board of Education ruling in 1954 that struck down racially separated schools.
In 1957, an angry white crowd confronted the nine black students who tried to integrate Central High School.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD)
ELLIOTT: President Eisenhower sent federal troops to force integration back then. And just about ever since, federal courts have been involved in school affairs here. That oversight is poised to end pending Monday's hearing before U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall.
ERNIE DUMAS: It is the last sequel in a lineage of cases going back nearly 60 years.
ELLIOTT: Political columnist Ernie Dumas says this moment is symbolic for the country.
DUMAS: This somewhat a measure of the success of Brown vs. Board of Education. The Supreme Court said at the time that you've got to desegregate and end these disparities and take us forward to a glorious day when education will be equal for all Americans. As we know in Little Rock, and the rest of the South and the rest of the country, it hasn't really happened quite that way.
ELLIOTT: What happened instead was white flight from cities, so that by the 1980s, new, affluent and mostly white suburban schools developed in a ring around Little Rock. Attorney Chris Heller represents the city school district.
CHRIS HELLER: We could not continue to have any level of integrated education, racial or socioeconomic.
ELLIOTT: Little Rock sued the state and the districts around it for maintaining a segregated education system. Court-ordered remedies expanded the district's boundaries to catch some white flight and established inter-district transfers and magnet schools, with the state picking up much of the tab.
If the judge approves, the settlement would phase out those programs and the state's $70 million a year payments, even though the makeup of Little Rock schools hasn't changed much. It's about 66 percent black, with more than 70 percent of students getting free or reduced-priced lunches.
JOHN WALKER: This is not a joyful day for African-American people in America.
ELLIOTT: Attorney John Walker represents black students in the desegregation case. He acknowledges there have been pockets of progress in Little Rock, where the district has retained more white students than other southern cities. But Walker says the state has not lived up to its constitutional obligation to provide an equal educational opportunity.
WALKER: The only thing that's been achieved here is that the laws are gone. There's nothing that overtly allows students to be segregated on the basis of race. What we have had was a legal system which has now been replaced by a de facto system.
ELLIOTT: Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel pushed for the settlement. He argues that the desegregation case itself sparked a new wave of public school flight.
DUSTIN MCDANIEL: If there's one thing we know about parents is that they're nervous about putting their kids into schools where there's ongoing turmoil, uncertainty, litigation, tension. They want to go where things are comfortable and certain, and they're focused entirely on educating their kids rather than fighting their own financial or legal battles.
ELLIOTT: The federal judge is expected to approve the settlement. But one school district, in the county that surrounds Little Rock, will remain under the court's scrutiny. Pulaski County Superintendent Jerry Guess says his district struggles with ongoing racial disparities in facilities, academic achievement and discipline.
The desegregation case has been a great safety net for students, he says, but can't solve the underlying issue: race.
JERRY GUESS: I have had a lot of people comment about their kids going to schools where black students are and not wanting to. And I believe that's unfortunately still a truth about human nature.
ELLIOTT: A truth, he says, that courts don't have the ability to change. Debbie Elliot, NPR News.
INSKEEP: And later today on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, we hear what students at Central High say about desegregation. It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
The animated movie "Frozen" is having a huge January. Last week, it was the number one movie in the country and the soundtrack is the biggest-selling album in the United States. That might have something to do with this...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LET IT GO")
GREENE: "Let it Go," it's the big inspirational ballad in the movie, sung here by Idina Menzel. She's the voice of one of the movie's animated characters. And here's the amazing thing. This and another poppier version of the same song are both on Billboard's Hot 100 list right now.
We've brought in NPR's pop music critic, Ann Powers to talk about how rare this is. Ann, good morning.
ANN POWERS, BYLINE: Good morning, David. Are you frozen today?
GREENE: Not as frozen as I was a few days ago.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: But we're talking about "Frozen," so maybe the memories are going to come back. Before we get to the song, can you just remind people what this movie is about?
POWERS: "Frozen" is an animated musical about two sisters who live in a far northern country. One of them has a kind of tragic gift, everything she touches turns to ice - beautiful ice but ice that isolates her from everyone else. The song we're talking about, "Let it Go," is her big moment when she claims her talents and decides that she is going to be herself.
GREENE: Is it really unusual for a movie to have two versions of the same song doing so well on the charts?
POWERS: It is unusual but it's not unprecedented in Disney movies to have a pop version and then the version that appears in the film. Idina Menzel, of course, is a Broadway star and to sell the song to the tween audience, they enlisted Demi Lovato who's one of the biggest stars among the 8 to 12 set.
(SOUNDBITE OF "LET IT GO")
GREENE: So, Ann, did Disney probably expect that this poppier version would be the one that would do well, and they might be surprised if actually the one sung by the animated character that is actually higher up on the charts?
POWERS: I think they might have. The whole "Frozen" soundtrack is doing well. And I think all the songs together kind of hang together as this narrative of not only self-empowerment but love between sisters. So those are themes that resonate heavily with tweens. And parents love this music, too.
GREENE: You being a parent, as I understand it, right?
POWERS: Oh, yes. I think as my daughter and I were walking out of the movie, she declared her new favorite song having displaced a Beyonce ballad.
(LAUGHTER)
POWERS: And she's also invoked it in arguments. You know, when she feels she can't talk to me about something and we've just reached the limit, she's actually said, Mom, just listen to this - put on the song and walked out of the room.
GREENE: Wow.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: So telling you, Mom, let it go.
POWERS: And she's going to let it go. She's going to be herself. You know, my daughter says there are three kinds of songs: songs about romance, songs about standing up for yourself and songs about everything else.
GREENE: I gather your daughter would put this in the standing up for yourself song category.
POWERS: Absolutely, David, and that's the central category in the tween anthem style. Some people have heard "Let it Go" as a coming out anthem and, in fact, have read the whole movie as a celebration of LGBT liberation. But what I hear is the fact that every 10-year-old girl is coming out of her shell and coming into her own, and she needs this kind of song to grab onto. It's really important that it not be overly sexual or sexy. And these are girls who have been heartbroken by Miley Cyrus and her transformation. They need these kinds of pure emotional songs.
GREENE: All right, we've been talking about the song "Let It Go" from the movie "Frozen," with NPR's pop music critic Ann Powers. Ann, thanks as always.
POWERS: Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LET IT GO")
GREENE: This is NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
It's tempting to view this next story as just a window into the mechanics of the Senate, but in reality it's a big constitutional fight involving the balance of power between the president and Congress. At issue is whether the president's power to make temporary appointments during a Senate recess can be curtailed by the use of super-short Senate sessions where no business is conducted.
Now, the third branch of government is getting involved. The Supreme Court hears arguments today. Here's NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: From mid-December 2011 until January 20th of 2012, during the holidays, the Senate did not meet as it usually does. Instead, it formally convened and adjourned multiple times. Indeed, each time it adjourned, it stipulated that when it reconvened three days later, no business would be conducted. Here's a typical session on January 6, 2012, with a nearly empty chamber.
(SOUNDBITE OF SENATE SESSION)
TOTENBERG: That was the whole thing, 30 seconds. But the legality of the session is the heart of the dispute before the Supreme Court today. The president contends that these sessions were, in essence, fakes, a legal pretense, that in fact the Senate was really in recess. Therefore during that period he nominated three people as recess appointees to fill long-vacant seats on the National Labor Relations Board. They would serve until the end of the following year or longer if confirmed.
Part of the reason President Obama used the recess appointment mechanism was that Senate Republicans had dragged their feet on so many appointments that the board charged with enforcing labor law didn't have a quorum to do its job. When the recess appointees took their seats and began hearing labor cases, a soda pop bottling company named Noel Canning challenged an adverse ruling, contending that the labor board's members were unconstitutionally appointed.
The company won in the lower court and today at the Supreme Court, backed by 44 Republican senators, the company will argue that the Senate makes its own rules, that the Senate was not in recess, and that therefore the president had no power to make recess appointments.
Article II of the Constitution says, quote: The President shall have the power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, and that the appointment shall last until the end of the next session. Now, as Texas A&M Professor George Edwards points out that, when the framers wrote the Constitution, there was transportation by horse and carriage, not planes, trains or automobiles.
GEORGE EDWARDS: Until the 20th century, the Senate was in session less than half the time, so there would be substantial periods when the Senate was not there to advise and consent to a presidential nomination. And the Founding Fathers didn't want there to be gaps in the administration of policy, so they provided for recess appointments.
TOTENBERG: Today, in contrast, senators can come to Washington quickly, but the nature of government is also dramatically different.
EDWARDS: The founders could not have conceived of government on the scale that we have it today.
TOTENBERG: Again, Professor Edwards.
EDWARDS: Government is much larger now. There are many more people in appointed positions and so many more vacancies occur.
TOTENBERG: Indeed, since the mid-1800s there have been more than 600 recess appointments to civilian jobs, and many, many hundreds more in the military. Even some Supreme Court justices were first recess-appointed. Chief Justice Earl Warren was recess-appointed after the sitting chief justice died in September of 1953. Warren served for six months before being confirmed in March of 1954.
In modern times, three appeals courts have upheld the president's power to make midsession recess appointments - that is, within one year of a two year congressional term. But in this case, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reached a contrary conclusion, siding with the Noel Canning Company, which is represented by lawyer Noel Francisco.
NOEL FRANCISCO: These are very significant appointments, which is precisely why, for offices like this, the primary method that the Constitution requires is Senate advice and consent. That's precisely why the recess appointments power was meant to be a narrow emergency power.
TOTENBERG: But White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler counters that the way Senate Republicans managed to keep the Senate in session was by using a legal fiction.
KATHRYN RUEMMLER: It was not conducting any business and did not intend to conduct any business during those pro forma sessions. It didn't serve some other function of the Senate. It was solely employed, and members of the Senate have been quite clear about that, for the purpose of preventing the president from making recess appointments.
TOTENBERG: In making these recess appointments, she says, the president was carrying out his duty.
RUEMMLER: It is not a bypass of the Senate confirmation process. It is a way for the president, again, by express authority in the Constitution, to ensure that laws are faithfully executed.
TOTENBERG: Something that she says could not be done if many top federal agency positions were allowed to remain unfilled. Ruemmler contends that if the Senate Republicans prevail here, the recess appointment power will likely be dead for all practical purposes. The Senate, after all, could eat up every recess with pro forma sessions to prevent presidential appointments. Lawyer Noel Francisco readily concedes the point.
FRANCISCO: The fact of the matter is that in today's day and age, the Senate is virtually never incapable of providing advice and consent, given modern transportation and modern communications. So yes, the Senate can render itself perpetually available to provide advice and consent, and if it does so, then the president is not empowered to make a recess appointment.
TOTENBERG: There's a second question in today's case. When does the vacancy have to arise? Those opposing President Obama contend that when the founders said that the president can make recess appointments for vacancies that may happen during the recess, that it meant the president can fill vacancies that occur during the recess, not those that existed at the time of the recess.
The Court of Appeals agreed on that point too, creating such a narrow time window as to make recess appointments practically impossible. For now, it is President Obama who wants the ability to make recess appointments, but it will not always be thus, nor has it been in the past.
Indeed, as Professor Edwards observes, recess appointments began growing when government did in the 20th century.
EDWARDS: Particularly since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan made a number of intra-recess appointments.
TOTENBERG: Edwards notes that in a time of political polarization, the Senate and the president both are looking for political advantage and often resort to what seems to be arcane procedures. Now the Supreme Court will weigh in on the question of recess appointments. On one side of the argument is the original intent of the founders.
On the other is the pragmatic question of how to run a large modern government and how that has been accomplished for the last century. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
We've marking the anniversary of the war on poverty, declared 50 years ago by President Lyndon Johnson. Today, more than 46 million Americans are still poor.
The government has a complex formula for defining poverty. Financial writer Tim Harford says roughly, it means a single American making less than $30.52 per day is considered poor. Harford has a new book out this week. It's called "The Undercover Economist Strikes Back." He describes how difficult it is to define poverty.
TIM HARFORD: In the United States, the definition is an idea of absolute poverty. And what that means is we're looking at how much money you need to support a particular standard of living, to buy a certain number of calories, a certain amount of vitamins, to buy a certain standard of housing.
GREENE: Mm-hmm.
HARFORD: And how much does that cost? And somewhat controversially, that is based on a basket of goods that was worked out by a researcher called Mollie Orshansky over 50 years ago, and while the prices have been tweaked, what's in that basket of goods hasn't been tweaked at all.
GREENE: It's things like potatoes, right? I mean, how many potatoes you can afford to buy.
HARFORD: Yeah, potatoes, onions. So it's actually based on food, and then there's a rule of thumb that says if this is how much the food costs then you need another allowance for accommodation and for clothes and so on. It's all about the basic standards of living, but it doesn't incorporate any changes in the economy that have happened since the early 1960s.
GREENE: OK. So it's adjusted for the change in prices in objects, like potatoes. The problem is it doesn't include things like cell phones, televisions. Which leads to something that you write about in the book, and that is that poverty can really be a social condition. Explain briefly what you mean by that.
HARFORD: Well, this goes back to Adam Smith writing in the late 18th century. And Smith said that a man would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt. And then he pointed out that, you know, the Greeks and the Romans - even the emperors - didn't have linen shirts. His point is that poverty is partly about not having enough money to buy what society expects you to have. And if you don't have enough money to meet those social expectations, people will think of you as poor and you will think of yourself as poor. That's not to say that poverty is totally relative, but it is saying it's subjective - it's a social condition. And he's got to be right in some fundamental way about that.
You're really tapping into something fundamental about what we mean when we say that somebody is poor.
GREENE: It's important though, I mean you certainly don't need a television or a cell phone to survive. But you're saying today, you know, just being able to afford potatoes might not put you in the social place you want to be.
HARFORD: Yeah. Absolutely. It's about more than survival. It's also about: Can you participate in social conversations? Are you ashamed to be seen in public or not? And, of course, there's some controversy as to whether that sort of thing should count for the poverty line or not.
GREENE: What role does inequality play as we're looking at things like poverty and the state of a country's economy?
HARFORD: Well, poverty and inequality are connected. Income inequality is just some kind of measure of the gap between the rich and the poor. And it's very contested because there were just so many different ways to think about it. Are you comparing the very richest to the very poorest? Are you looking at the assets that people have? Or are you just looking at their income? What we can be reasonably confident of saying is that inequality has been rising.
GREENE: And what is the damage - if any - that can be done to a country and its economy when there is a lot of inequality?
HARFORD: Yeah. Why should we care, I guess is the question. So one reason that you might want to care is just to say well, someone who is on the bread line, they could use the dollar much more than someone who is a millionaire.
GREENE: Right.
HARFORD: And I think that's pretty intuitive. Whether inequality really damages a country as a whole is less clear. I think the main argument that it's a problem is that it starts to corrode your political system. As you get fewer and fewer people with more and more money who were able to have a disproportionate influence on political priorities through their campaigning, their lobbying, they're political donations. And if that happens, then you're moving further and further away from the ideals of a democracy.
GREENE: One thing that you wrote about that really struck me. You said that people who are looking for a job when an economy is not doing well, there can be a lasting impact on that person for many years in their career and in their life. What do you mean by that?
HARFORD: What we've discovered is that if you graduate during a recession, that could be a problem for you for five years, for 10 years, even after the economy has recovered because what's happened is you've had to make compromises, you've had to take a career that really didn't suit you, and now you're starting to build up skills and contacts that this was never what you plan to do. And that's absolutely down to bad luck, bad timing.
And the second issue is that if you are unemployed for a long time, you start to be very, very difficult to employ. So, there was a fantastic study done quite recently, where a student called Rand Ghayad, mailed out resumes. And he tweaked these resumes. So some had loads of relevant experience and some didn't have relevant experience. Some had recent employment and some were long-term unemployed. And what he found was the employers cared more about whether you had recently had a job than they cared about whether you had any relevant experience or not.
GREENE: Even if you didn't necessarily have skills; if you had a job recently they might hire you over someone with the right skills but who has been out of work.
HARFORD: Absolutely. These are people who could work, who want to work, who have the skills to work, and yet employers don't want to give them a second glance. Big problem.
GREENE: Tim Harford is the author of "The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run or Ruin an Economy."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's take a musical road trip through the American South. Think of yourself crowded into the back of the car, next to the guitar case. The driver is Rosanne Cash, whose new album was inspired by her Southern travels in the Mississippi Valley.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A FEATHER'S NOT A BIRD")
ROSEANN CASH: (Singing) I'm going down to Florence going to wear a pretty dress. Sit on top the magic wall with the voices in my head...
INSKEEP: Her album is called "The River and the Thread." The travels that produced it began when Rosanne Cash visited the Arkansas home where her father Johnny Cash grew up during the Great Depression.
CASH: It was part of a New Deal project, built in 1935: 500 cottages, with 40 acres and a mule to each cottage. And the Cash family was desperately poor - just saved their life.
INSKEEP: I'm trying to picture it. I'm assuming it was, you know, reasonably well-built but extremely simple. Was that...
CASH: Extremely simple, small but brand new. My dad said his first memory - at three years old, moving into that house - was there were five cans of paint sitting in the front of his freshly-painted new home.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SUNKEN LANDS")
CASH: (Singing) Five cans of paint in the empty fields. The dust reveals. The children cry, the work never ends. There's not a single friend...
INSKEEP: How many rooms were in that house?
CASH: Maybe four.
INSKEEP: And how big was the family?
CASH: Seven children.
INSKEEP: Ouch.
CASH: Yeah. My grandmother, you know, the work was so hard it was almost medieval.
(LAUGHTER)
CASH: She raised seven children. She picked cotton. She cooked on a hot stove, you know, in 100-degree temperature. It was a hard life.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SUNKEN LANDS")
INSKEEP: Rosanne Cash traveled beyond her father's boyhood home to Nashville and to Florence, Alabama. In a single short drive in Mississippi, she encountered the grave of bluesman Robert Johnson, the place where Emmett Till was murdered during the Civil Rights Era, and the Tallahatchie Bridge, which inspired a legendary song.
CASH: There's a mythic quality to that part of the South. You know, it's so dense - the music and literature that came out of it. I mean we met a 90-something-year-old man in Marigold, Mississippi, who knew Bill and Estelle Faulkner. And who said Eudora was a lovely woman.
(LAUGHTER)
INSKEEP: Not William Faulkner, Bill.
CASH: Bill. So, you know, the past is alive in these places.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WORLD OF STRANGE DESIGN")
INSKEEP: So consuming that Rosanne Cash said she had to leave the south to actually write her songs. She needed to gain perspective on what she saw and felt.
CASH: I don't think I could've written some of these songs if I'd lived in Money, Mississippi.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WORLD OF STRANGE DESIGN")
INSKEEP: Now, there is a song on this album called "Master Calls the Roll."
CASH: Yes.
INSKEEP: ...I want to ask you about - but first lets listen to a little bit of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHEN THE MASTER CALLS THE ROLL")
INSKEEP: What's happening in that song?
CASH: My son, who was in eighth grade last year, was studying the Civil War. And I said to him, you know, you have Cash ancestors on both sides. And I went on the Civil War database to show him and this picture came up of William Cash. He was a Union soldier from a Massachusetts regiment. I got taken with him. I looked up in our own genealogy for a woman who might have been around 20 years old at the start of the Civil War, and I found Marry Anne Cash.
INSKEEP: Hmm.
CASH: So I put them together.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHEN THE MASTER CALLS THE ROLL")
INSKEEP: Wow.
CASH: ...you know, I have flaming red hair so that was even doubly great.
(LAUGHTER)
CASH: And then, you know, they wed. Then in the middle of the song he has to leave her as he goes off to war, because there are bands of brothers falling. And then, of course, he has to die in the end. And the only way he returns to Virginia is to buried.
INSKEEP: Even though it's made up, it's moving to hear you say that.
CASH: I don't know that it's made up, to tell you the truth. There were women Cashes who died in the war. And there were women Cashes who never married after the Civil War, so you have to think they lost their lover.
INSKEEP: Hmm.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHEN THE MASTER CALLS THE ROLL")
INSKEEP: What have been some of those things for you?
CASH: Well, Tennessee, you know, in a large sense, and the South in an even larger sense. Like, I just thought it was too claustrophobic - I had to get away. Now, seeing the richness of it, the beauty, the connectedness, you know, it's amazing. It moves me to tears when I think about it. And the fact that these songs came from it - ah, it's been the greatest gift of my life, besides my children.
(LAUGHTER)
INSKEEP: Roseann Cash, thanks very much.
CASH: Thank you, Steve.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHEN THE MASTER CALLS THE ROLL")
INSKEEP: The new album by Roseann Cash is called "The River and the Thread."
INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
On a Monday, it's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene.
A much-debated memoir by former Defense Robert Gates still is not quite for sale, but that has not stopped widespread commentary about its contents. And this morning, we'll hear Gates describe it in his own words.
INSKEEP: Gates - who is Republican - took over the Defense Department late in the administration of President Bush. He remained for two-and-a-half years under President Obama.
Much of the early attention paid to this book is focused on Gates' complaints about the Obama White House and its, quote, "total focus on politics." Gates really did write that in the book called "Duty," but he points out that he wrote more, and tried for a nuanced portrait of the Democratic president.
ROBERT GATES: Domestic politics had a role in the debates about national security issues that I had not previously experienced. But I also go on to write that, at the end of the day, President Obama made decisions based on what he thought was in the best interests of U.S. national security. So his decisions to increase troops in Afghanistan were decisions taken against all of the advice of his domestic political advisers, White House staff and the vice president.
GREENE: But that early debate over whether to raise troops in Afghanistan also exposed a problem in the new administration. As defense secretary, Robert Gates was representing the military in administration debates.
INSKEEP: So he keenly felt a gap in trust between the president and military leaders.
GATES: What started to get things off track was the military leadership pressing for a substantial increase in the number of troops literally days after the Inauguration, and when it came to Afghanistan, fed a suspicion that the military was always trying to box the president in and force him into significant troop increases, and so on.
And so, looking back, I always tried, at the time, to persuade the president that this was no plot, that the military didn't have a plan, if you will, to try and box him in. And, frankly, I don't think I was ever able to persuade him that that was not the case.
INSKEEP: It's remarkable, this exchange that you record here on page 369. You're in a private meeting with the president and Admiral Mike Mullen, the president's top military adviser, and you quote the president asking a number of really direct questions: What is wrong? Is it the process? Are they - meaning the military - suspicious of my politics? Do they resent that I never served in the military? Do they think because I'm young that I don't see what they're doing? That's a remarkable series of questions to hear from a man who, outwardly, has always been quite confident.
GATES: Well, I think he was trying to figure out why the military was trying to put him in this position, trying to box him in.
INSKEEP: We should explain to people that, at this time, there were generals giving interviews, and testimony indicating that more troops were needed, particularly the commanding general in Afghanistan at the time. That's what we're talking about when we talk about the president feeling boxed in.
GATES: Well, and basically saying publicly that no other alternative would succeed.
INSKEEP: You seem considerably less respectful of the president's staff than you were of the president himself.
GATES: Well, I had a lot of battles with those folks. And frankly, my attitudes were shaped by the fact that I worked in the White House on the National Security Council staff and as deputy national security adviser for nearly nine years, under four presidents. And let's just say that the way it worked in the Obama White House was not anything like I had seen before.
I'd worked for probably three of the most significant and toughest national security advisers in our history: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. And there were things that went on in the Obama White House that, under those three guys, I'm confident would have been a firing offense, such as direct calls from NSC staff members to four-star generals, and so on. That just wouldn't have been allowed.
INSKEEP: Oh, they should have gone through the chain of command, you think, or through the hierarchy.
GATES: Absolutely, absolutely. Some of the young people in senior positions on the White House staff and the National Security Council staff had probably been in college or even in high school when I was the director of CIA. So we just had a different world outlook and a different experience.
INSKEEP: Have you been surprised by the strong response to the early reviews of this book, which you haven't said everything that's in the book, but have noted your criticism, in some cases, of the president, the vice president and others?
GATES: Well, frankly, the only thing that has really troubled me a little bit is that some people who have a narrative on Obama and the war got out there early with their take on what I've written, and I think shaped their discussion of the book to support their narrative of what had taken place.
INSKEEP: You're talking about the fact that you wrote that you felt the president lacked passion about the war in Afghanistan. Is that the comment you think was...
GATES: No. I think it was more focused, was the reporting that I felt he came to have doubts about, whether his own strategy could succeed. And I think that some of the early reporting suggested that he made the decision in December, November 2009, believing it wouldn't work. I don't believe that for a second. President Obama would never do that, in my view. I think when he made that decision in November 2009, he believed that strategy would work. I think through the course of 2010, in significant part, due to continuing pushing on him by the vice president and by others in the White House, his doubts about whether this strategy could succeed would grow, leading, ultimately, in March of 2011, to the comments that I made that I felt that the president didn't trust his commander, and didn't like Karzai and had lost faith in his own strategy.
INSKEEP: Why did you write that Vice President Biden, in your view, has been wrong about every many foreign policy issue for 40 years? That's a pretty scathing line.
GATES: Well, two things. First of all, I think it's fair to say that, particularly on Afghanistan, he and I were on opposite sides of the fence on this issue. And he was in there advising the president every day. He was, I think, stoking the president's suspicion of the military.
But the other side of it is, frankly, I believe it. The vice president, when he was a senator, a very new senator, voted against the aid package for South Vietnam that was part of the deal when we pulled out of South Vietnam, to try and help them survive. He said that when the shah fell in Iran in 1979, that that was a step forward - or progress towards human rights in Iran. He opposed virtually every element of President Reagan's defense buildup. He voted against the B-1, the B-2, the MX. He voted against the first Gulf War. So, on a number of these major issues, I just - I frankly, over a long period of time, I think he'd been wrong.
INSKEEP: Did you have any moment, when writing this book or preparing to publish it, of wondering if you really wanted to make all these remarks about a sitting president, particularly while a war is still underway?
GATES: You know, I did think about that, but the reality is if you look at the book as a totality, it's about war, it's about getting into wars, how you get out of wars, about the risks of launching military operations, whether it's in Libya or Syria or Iran. It's about dealing with China. It's about relations between the president and his senior military. It's about defense reform and how we ought to be spending our defense dollars. It's about the role of the Congress in all of this, and the impact of the dysfunction in Congress in all of these areas. These are all contemporary issues, and having worked for eight presidents and being a historian, I felt I had a unique perspective. And these issues are with us today. These are not issues that can wait to be written about in 2017. And so that's the reason that I decided to go forward with the book.
INSKEEP: You're very media-savvy. You must have known some of the lines that would get attention. Did you have a moment of hovering over the delete key and almost deleting them?
GATES: And actually did on several occasions.
INSKEEP: That's former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. His new book is called "Duty," and a bit later, we'll hear why Gates left the Pentagon.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's hear a little more from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. We've been talking about his critique of the Obama administration that he once served. His memoir "Duty" also offers a personal glimpse of Gates' growing distress while doing his job. He writes that during four-and-a-half years at the Pentagon, under two presidents, he became deeply, emotionally attached to the troops. He identified with them so strongly that he now wants to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, near fallen troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Gates says, in the end, he was too attached, which is why he retired.
ROBERT GATES: I was focused on the strain on our troops and on their families. They'd been at war for 10 years. And I came to realize, in the early spring of 2011, that my preoccupation, my priority had become protecting them from further sacrifice, perhaps at the expense of hard-headed objectivity in terms of the use of our military.
INSKEEP: You are talking about something that is difficult to say outright. But you're essentially saying that if you're going to be a national official in a position of authority, you have to be prepared to get some of your troops killed, maybe many of them, if you feel that serves the national interest.
GATES: Well, and I was prepared to do that. If there were an outright threat to the United States or to our interests or our allies, I would be the first in line to argue for the use of military force. It just seemed to me that some of the areas where we were looking at potential conflict were more in the category of wars of choice. And it was those that I was trying to protect the troops from.
INSKEEP: What happened when you, as any secretary of defense would have to, began sending notes to the families of service members killed in action?
GATES: Well, I was determined that these young people would not just become statistics for me. And so I started out by handwriting parts of the condolence letters, and even then that wasn't enough, I felt. And so then I started asking every time one of these packets came to me, that it have a picture of the soldier or sailor, airman or Marine who'd been killed, along with the hometown news, so that I knew, you know, what their coaches and their parents and their brothers and sisters and teachers were saying about them, so I felt like I had some personal knowledge about each one of them. And I would write those condolence letters every evening.
INSKEEP: And that became difficult after a while?
GATES: Well, it didn't take too long. I think that, quite honestly, in those evening sessions, writing the condolence letters, there probably wasn't a single evening in nearly four-and-a-half years when I didn't weep.
INSKEEP: I want to ask about that broader question of the cost of war. You write about one decision you were involved in that you felt - although it's hard to prove - that it had life and death consequences for people. What was the decision you faced?
GATES: Well, it was really, when the surge was launched, there were two choices. We didn't have enough troops, so the question was whether you shortened their tours at home, or whether you lengthened their tours in the combat zone. And in one of the toughest decisions I made as secretary, I made the decision to lengthen the combat tours to 15 months. And I knew what the costs of that would be for the troops and their families.
INSKEEP: And let's be explicit about the costs. You linked this, in your mind, to the increase in suicides, of the problem with suicides in the military.
GATES: Well, I have no statistics to prove it, but I believe that those 15-month tours had to have aggravated the post-traumatic stress problem and probably the suicide problem.
INSKEEP: Previously, it had been a year or 13 months or six months, depending on the branch of service. And it was just a little longer, and you think that made a difference in wearing people down.
GATES: I think, as one of my junior military assistants put it, 15 months brought into play the law of twos: you miss two Christmases, two birthdays, two anniversaries and so on. And I think that had a consequence.
INSKEEP: What is the lesson, then, of decisions like that that you had to make that future decision-makers should take away from your experience?
GATES: I think it goes back to the very beginning of our discussion, and that is: You do have to be prepared to make the hard decisions, knowing what the consequences will be for the troops, whether it's sending them into battle or extending their tours. Part of the job of being secretary of defense in war is having to be strong enough to make the decisions that are important in terms of achieving our national security objectives and protecting us.
INSKEEP: Is there any decision you'd take back from those four-and-a-half years?
GATES: Well, I'm as critical of myself in the book as I am of anybody else. I also point out that I think we all did a disservice to President Obama, because the debate on Afghanistan became so divisive, that the opportunities to reach across those differences, I think, were missed. And I fault myself for not reaching more to the vice president to see where we could find common ground. Because at the end of the day, in a number of important respects, I don't think our positions were that far apart. But because of the environment, because of the suspicion, because of just the flavor of the debate and the difficulty between the Department of Defense and the National Security Council staff, I think that those edges were sharper than they needed to be, and that's partly my responsibility.
INSKEEP: Secretary Gates, thanks very much.
GATES: Thank you.
INSKEEP: His new book is called "Duty." And you can find a transcript of our interview with Gates and NPR.org.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And let's get the latest now from Israel, where former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will be buried today. Sharon died Saturday, after spending eight years in a coma. Here's NPR's Emily Harris.
EMILY HARRIS, BYLINE: The memorial service for Ariel Sharon opened with a prayer.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Singing in foreign language)
HARRIS: Israel's political elite and foreign dignitaries, including Vice President Joe Biden, sat near Sharon's coffin, which was draped in the white and blue colors of the Israeli flag outside Israel's parliament. Israeli President Shimon Peres eulogized Sharon.
PRESIDENT SHIMON PERES: (Foreign language spoken)
HARRIS: We are saying goodbye to you today, Peres said. He called Sharon the shoulder on which Israel's security rested. Israeli Itzhak Dugo visited Sharon's coffin yesterday.
ITZHAK DUGO: (Foreign language spoken)
HARRIS: We wanted to pay our respects to the man who led us a commander and prime minister, Dugo said. He's one of the leaders who gave us the chance to live here. Today, the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that leaked documents show Sharon was considering moves towards a peace settlement with the Palestinians when he fell into a coma. He had pulled Israeli soldiers and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005. But Palestinians remember Sharon as a man of war. Ahmed Rady is a Palestinian living in Gaza.
AHMED RADY: I don't hate him, but I feel sorry for a soul like Ariel Sharon, who caused so much death and suffer for a lot of people.
HARRIS: In Gaza, some people handed out sweets to mark Sharon's death Saturday. Ariel Sharon's final resting place will be on his family ranch in southern Israel. Emily Harris, NPR News, Jerusalem.
GREENE: This is NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.
Colorado officials might have seen this coming. The state legalized marijuana. The number 420 is associated with marijuana culture, and so it was time to protect Mile Marker 420. The sign has been repeatedly stolen from I-70; it's a rare find since most interstates are not long enough to need a Mile 420 sign. Officials hope they've now secured the highway. The mile 420 sign has been replaced by a new one, reading: Mile 419.99.
It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
NPR's business news starts with a little German engineering.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: Volkswagen has announced plans to invest $7 billion in its North American operations. It's part of an effort to boost sales in the United States, which slid 7 percent last year. A new seven-seat SUV designed specifically for the American market is a central part of the new investment plan.
It is believed the new vocal will be built at VW's plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And our last word in business is: Limobilizer or maybe it's limo - bilizer.
There are many kinds of stretch limos on the road - stretch Cadillacs, stretch Hummers, stretch BMWs.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Now you can add stretch mobility scooter to the list. A British company has just entered the Guinness Book of Records for the world's longest mobility scooter. These are the four-wheelers that many seniors use to get around.
INSKEEP: The Limobilizer is a three-seater - room for two passengers and a chauffeur. It features a mini bar, ice bucket and sound system.
GREENE: Of course, it does. It might be a little hard to maneuver when you're turning corners in a crowded store, but you do have the chauffeur for that. And given some running room, this thing can reach top speeds of four miles an hour.
INSKEEP: Woo.
GREENE: That's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
INSKEEP: I'm Steve Inskeep.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene.
In New Jersey, state lawmakers are expected to issue subpoenas today to former top aides of Governor Chris Christie. This is over their role in a massive traffic jam in Fort Lee, New Jersey last fall. The traffic was apparently political payback against the city's mayor for not endorsing Christie's reelection bid. In one long press conference, the governor distanced himself from the staff members responsible for shutting down lanes to the George Washington Bridge. This story was all over the weekend political talk shows.
The question raised by Democrats and some Republicans was whether Bridgegate, as it is of course come to be known, will derail Christie's campaign to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
And for more, joining us as she does most Mondays, is Cokie Roberts. Good morning, Cokie.
COKIE ROBERTS, BYLINE: Hi, David.
GREENE: So I think one thing we should note from yesterday is there are a lot of Republicans who are coming to Christie's defense. Did this surprise you?
ROBERTS: Well, clearly the talking points had gone out.
GREENE: On message.
ROBERTS: When you hear everybody saying exactly the same thing, you know, that they are - that they have been instructed. And what one Republican after another said was: Well, look, you know, President Obama says that he didn't know what was going with the IRS scandal when the IRS was investigating various political groups, and Benghazi and all of that. And the liberal media is emphasizing this much too much. And it didn't cover - the liberal media didn't cover Benghazi and the IRS, which I think you can make a case that just the opposite was true.
But so that was what one person after another said. But there was also a caveat, as Rudy Giuliani - who was one of the defenders - yesterday said, if something comes out that shows that Christ Christie actually was involved with this closing of the George Washington Bridge - or the lanes to it - that his political career is over. So that caveat was out there.
GREENE: An important caveat - a big if but an important if. I mean it sounds like part of it, it wasn't just talking points. The message was, you know, try to distract from this actual topic and talk about other things that the Republicans would rather talk about.
ROBERTS: Well, sure. But this is going to go on because there are these state legislative subpoenas. There could be a Justice Department investigation. So more shoes could drop and that's a big problem for Christie - investigations tend to take on lives of their on.
GREENE: Sure.
ROBERTS: And you never know what will turn up, just ask Bill Clinton.
And the can drag on forever with little tidbits constantly in the press. And here, David, we are dealing with the New York press corps and this is a breed onto its own. They are very, very tough and will really, you know, hold onto to something and not let go - particularly the tabloid newspapers.
A while back, quite a while back, I remember when the ABSCAM scandal happened, which is now back in the news with the movie "American Hustle." But the - one of the people involved was a New Jersey senator and the entire New York press corps showed up and thought that we in Washington were a bunch of wusses because we were polite.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: This is our scandal, it's a New Jersey political scandal, we'll cover it - you don't know what you're doing. You have to be aggressive.
ROBERTS: Right, exactly. The other problem here is that this is so understandable to everybody. Everybody knows what a traffic jam is...
GREENE: And we can relate to being in a traffic jam.
ROBERTS: ...what emergency vehicles are - exactly. And so I think that, you know, that this is something that doesn't go away because people get it. But, you know, frankly, I think Christ Christie has a huge problem being nominated the Republican presidential candidate anyway.
GREENE: Mm-hmm.
ROBERTS: I think he's the darling of the moment, the darling of the Republican establishment to the degree that it exists, the darling of the press corps to some degree. But winning that nomination as a perceived moderate from New Jersey is a very tough lift.
GREENE: A tough lift but one that Republicans are at least trying at this point to give him the chance to do.
Cokie, always good to talk to you.
ROBERTS: You too, David.
GREENE: Cokie Roberts joins us most Mondays.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Greene, David Greene. Just doing my James Bond there. A lot of things in those movies not so realistic. Could those gadgets really do that? Is any man really that suave? Well, here's a reality check that you might not expect. Actual British law prohibits intelligence officers from speeding.
In other words, a real life Bond could be pulled over for driving over 30 miles an hour in a city. This is changing now - if spies are willing to take a high-speed driving course. Aston Martin not required. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The U.S. Figure Skating Championships were held in Boston over the weekend. At stake were national titles and tickets to next month's winter Olympics in Russia. Asma Khalid reports from our member station WBUR.
ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: Just 30 seconds into her performance, the two-time national champion, Ashley Wagner, stumbled and fell. The audience gasped. And then she fell again. At the end of her routine, Wagner turned to her mom and mouthed I'm sorry.
ASHLEY WAGNER: I just was really embarrassed.
KHALID: Wagner says the nerves crushed her.
WAGNER: As soon as they called my name, my legs turned to lead. And I'll admit it. I didn't pull through at the National Championships when I felt the pressure.
KHALID: But skating officials believed in her anyway, and named her to the Olympic team. Wagner knows she danced with danger this past weekend, but she doesn't think she'll screw up at the Olympics, because she says there's less pressure for her on the global stage.
WAGNER: Going into the Olympics, it will be a totally different type of pressure because it's icing on top of the cake. I'm at the Olympics, I've made it. I can really just let myself skate instead of having to worry about whether or not I'm going to literally watch my dreams fall apart.
KHALID: Typically, whoever wins gold, silver and bronze at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships goes on to compete in the Olympics. But because Wagner was added, the bronze medalist Mirai Nagasu lost her chance. It's a controversial decision, one that's only been made a handful of times before, like when Nancy Kerrigan was whacked in the knee before the 1994 Olympics.
But in the past the exceptions were for injuries, not because the golden girl botched her performance. The president of the U.S. Figure Skating Association, Pat St. Peter, defended the decision. She says the championships are not an Olympic trial. Instead, ice skating looks at an athlete's overall body of work during the last year.
PAT ST. PETER: So if you look at Ashley Wagner's record and performance, she's got the top credentials of any of our female athletes.
KHALID: The other two ladies chosen were 15 year old Polina Edmunds and the skater with the perfect Olympic name, Gracie Gold. But none of these women are favorites to medal in Sochi, according to experts like E.M. Swift - the former Olympic Sports Illustrated writer.
E.M. SWIFT: Our top skaters are still a little bit, to my eye, unpolished, not as refined as the real great champions of yesteryear.
KHALID: The days of Kristi Yamaguchi and Michelle Kwan are long gone. At the last Olympics, for the first time since 1964, no American women medaled. As the popular image of the ice princess has melted, ice dancing has somehow developed into American's best bet for gold. Meryl Davis and Charlie White from Michigan are the reigning World Champions.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "SCHEHERAZADE")
KHALID: They scored a perfect over the weekend as they performed to "Scheherazade" and captured their 6th national title. No American team has ever won an Olympic gold medal in ice dancing. Still, White is optimistic.
CHARLIE WHITE: Obviously we're going into these games with very high expectations. We feel like we've put ourselves in a really great position to come home with the gold medal.
KHALID: And if they do slip up, there is one more hope for a medal - the new team figure skating event. It's debuting at the Sochi games. For NPR News, I'm Asma Khalid.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene. In and around Charleston, West Virginia there are some 300,000 people who are still waiting to be able to use their tap water. The water was ruled too dangerous for anything other than flushing down the toilet after a chemical leaked into the system Thursday.
Hundreds of businesses closed and many schools remain closed today. And there are questions now about whether regulation was too lax on the company that stored this chemical which is used in processing coal. It reportedly had not been inspected since the early 1990s. We're joined on the line by Ashton Marra, who has been covering this story for West Virginia Public Radio. Ashton, good morning.
ASHTON MARA, BYLINE: Good morning.
GREENE: So do we know when people are going to have their water back?
MARA: You know, we don't know specifically, but we have some sort of idea that things are moving in the right direction. We're hoping that maybe just a few more days we'll be experiencing this.
GREENE: What exactly needs to happen before officials actually give a green light and tell people they can start using their water again?
MARA: So basically the National Guard and a team of chemists had to come in and set up a methodology for testing the water. So now we're in the process of testing within the water treatment facility itself where the water is taken in from the river and throughout the entire distribution system to make sure that level is at an approved threshold before they can begin then flushing all of the water through all of the pipelines. And it's a nine county area, so that's a long process as well.
GREENE: OK. So they have to do this testing and once they decide it's safe, they'll use water to actually flush out the system and tell people that it's a go. They can start showering and doing laundry again.
MARA: Yes. What we do know about the chemical is that it's highly water soluble. So just flushing it out with water through the system, they say, is going to be able to take care of the problem.
GREENE: And this chemical, it's used in coal processing, as we said. We know that it can be dangerous because there have been people hospitalized during this whole process.
MARA: There have been people hospitalized, but that number has been very low. Six people at this point have been admitted to the hospital. The symptoms are nausea, vomiting, trouble breathing. We're also in flu season and they're similar symptoms so our State Department of Health and Human Resources secretary says she isn't prepared to say that those are because of chemical exposure, but there will be an intense review of all of the charts of these people who have been admitted into hospitals.
GREENE: Can you tell me what it's been like for people living? I mean it's, I can imagine a lot of frozen dinners, a lot of going without showers. What's life been like?
MARA: I think frustration is the easiest word to use in this case. It's an inconvenience, honestly. You obviously can't cook, you can't clean, you can't bathe in any of that running water that you typically use. So first the number one priority was obviously finding a secondary source of water for everyone. But then on top of that, businesses are still open so people are still having to go to work.
So to have clean clothes, to be able to take a shower, some people are having to drive maybe even as much as 40 minutes to find another place to do these things where the water is still running and they're still able to use it.
GREENE: A big added inconvenience when you have your daily routine trying just to get to work on time. You know, Ashton, let me just ask you about the coal industry. I mean it's so important to West Virginia's economy and to so many livelihoods in the state. But there are questions now about whether this is a sign that the industry needs to be better regulated.
MARA: You know, I think that when you think of West Virginia, you think of coal. And a lot of people in the state are proud of that, but this storage facility itself is not owned or maintained by a coal company. This chemical itself is used in a process to clean the coal. So the site is not currently regulated by the state or federal government. It's not monitored by our State Department of Environmental Protection because it's simply a storage facility.
Nothing is being manufactured. So the governor is talking about introducing some type of legislation to regulate these sites that we've obviously been missing in the past.
GREENE: All right. That's Ashton Mara from West Virginia Public Radio. She's been covering the story and also, like many people in West Virginia, living without water. So we hope you get the water back soon, Ashton. Thanks for talking to us.
MARA: Thanks so much.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President Obama is expected to announce Friday how he wants to reform surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency. Those previously secret programs were exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. American technology companies are among those pushing hardest for change. Having been caught up in the surveillance controversy, they are braced for battle. NPR's Tom Gjelten dubs that battle the NSA versus the techs.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: Here's the conflict. Technology companies want to protect their users' data, so they encrypt it, using secret codes, so snoopers can't read it. But the NSA wants access to that data, to keep track of people who threaten U.S. security. If the data's encrypted, the NSA will want to break the encryption. The result: a race between the techs' efforts to encrypt and the NSA's efforts to decrypt. And both sides think the other is ahead in this technology competition.
In an interview last fall, NSA chief information officer, Lonny Anderson, told NPR the tech companies have the research advantage.
LONNY ANDERSON: As a matter of fact, IBM spends more on research than our budget. Cisco spends more on research. Intel spends more on research, Google, Amazon - you pick all those companies. They spend more on just research, what they're doing next, than our entire budget.
GJELTEN: So you don't want to get in an arms race with them.
ANDERSON: We won't win. We can't win.
GJELTEN: The tech companies, on the other hand, say whatever little advantage they may have is offset by the NSA having all the authority of the U.S. government behind it.
James Lewis, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, puts his money on the NSA in this race.
JAMES LEWIS: NSA has been in the business a long time. They've got 300 of the best mathematicians in the world. They've got the world's most powerful computer. Hmm, that's a hard hand to beat.
GJELTEN: Lewis says the tech companies actually thought they were holding their own in this competition, until recently. When Edward Snowden disclosed that the NSA had managed to undermine the companies' secret codes, he says, they were shocked.
LEWIS: You know, companies assumed that they were the ones who were the tech wizards and the government was sort of bumbling. That whole world view has been stood on its head.
GJELTEN: At stake here, is the entire tech business model. Customers use these companies only if they think the data they share with the companies will be kept private. But now people hear the NSA can break the companies' encryption. Plus, it turns out some companies have been secretly ordered to share data with the NSA. When customers no longer trust the companies, they're less inclined to do business with them.
Next month, the tech security firm RSA holds its big annual conference. Tech industry analyst Richard Stiennon says the NSA-tech conflict will get a lot of attention.
RICHARD STIENNON: The NSA's encroachments on our security technologies should be the number one topic. That should be the theme. And I think that's actually going to be the case. Everybody will be discussing how to technologically thwart the sorts of things the NSA is doing and what position the industry should take.
GJELTEN: Of course, there's only so much the tech industry can do. Allan Friedman, a senior cyber security fellow at George Washington University, says it's up to the U.S. government to be more transparent in its surveillance.
ALLAN FRIEDMAN: We want to move from an environment which really feeds the conspiracy theories: The NSA is reading everything we do, to an environment where it's, OK, there is law enforcement but we trust that it's not being abused.'
GJELTEN: The tech companies in this case would be able to give their customers a better idea of when and why they do work with the NSA.
FRIEDMAN: It would allow them to say: Listen, we're cooperating but we don't cooperate that much - we only do it for bad guys.'
GJELTEN: NSA leaders are moving to address their issues with the tech companies. In an interview last week with NPR's MORNING EDITION, the agency's outgoing deputy, Chris Inglis, acknowledged that relations with the companies have been strained, in his words, and need to be repaired.
CHRIS INGLIS: As those companies have been described as being inappropriately in collusion with various governments, not least of which this government, they've taken some, I think, unfair hits. I think when you look into it, those companies are responsible. They're a source of benefit to anyone who would avail themselves of their services. And they therefore deserve to have the record set straight.
GJELTEN: President Obama has not yet signaled how he'd change NSA surveillance programs, but officials say he is likely to say they should operate more openly.
Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And some news from the Supreme Court this morning: The justices have decided not to intervene in a legal battle over abortion in the state of Arizona. Earlier, an appeals court said the state's law banning most abortions after 20 weeks was unconstitutional. The high court's decision today not to review the case effectively blocks that ban from coming into place in Arizona.
NPR's Julie Rovner joins us to talk about the implications of this. Hi, Julie.
JULIE ROVNER, BYLINE: Hey, David.
GREENE: So remind us again what this law would have done, if it came into place.
ROVNER: Well, like about a dozen states, Arizona was trying to ban abortions after a certain point in pregnancy, on the contested scientific theory that fetuses can begin to feel pain at about 20 weeks' gestation. But all these states are measuring pregnancy slightly differently. Arizona's law, in fact, measured pregnancy such that it really would have banned abortion at what most medical professionals considered 18 weeks of pregnancy, rather than 20. And the appeals court last spring said that conflicted with what it called a, quote, "unbroken stream of Supreme of Court authority" that says states can't ban abortion prior to fetal viability - which is also a contested point but clearly, several weeks later than 18 or even 20 weeks of pregnancy.
GREENE: Well, so you mentioned that there are other states who have these 20-week abortion bans. Does this decision tell us anything about the constitutionality of those, and what the Supreme Court might do with other states' laws?
ROVNER: Well, I think it tells us something, but not a whole lot. The general consensus was that Arizona was kind of an outlier, because its ban was really a couple of weeks earlier than the others. So we'll have to see if the Supreme Court decides to take up another one of these state laws, once one of them gets to that point.
GREENE: All right. NPR's Julie Rovner, thanks so much for coming in.
ROVNER: Thank you.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Fairly often we bring you stories of beloved species that are disappearing and the people who are trying to save them. It could be poison arrow frogs in the Amazon or polar bears in the Arctic. Today, we have story about a disappearing species with a bit of a twist.
Here's NPR's Ari Shapiro, reporting from London.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: I'm watching a London icon in its native habitat. Tourists who've traveled from thousands of miles away are snapping photos. But this icon is severely endangered, not because of habitat loss or climate change. Here is the real threat to this creature's existence.
(SOUNDBITE OF RING TONES)
MARK JOHNSON: Mobiles have taken over and call usage has plummeted in that time.
SHAPIRO: This is Mark Johnson. He works for British Telecom, as the man in charge of payphones.
Now, if you're under a certain age, you might not know that a payphone is like a great big cell phone that lives in a box on the street. You drop in a coin and make a call.
In London, the crimson red telephone box is a beloved icon, as much as the black taxicab or the double-decker bus. But people still ride black cabs and double-decker buses. Payphone calls have dropped 80 percent in the last five years.
JOHNSON: In 2002 we had 92,000 payphones. We've now got 48,000 on the street.
SHAPIRO: The phone booth we're standing in front of is the most photographed in all of London. It's right at the foot of Big Ben.
JOHNSON: Everybody comes up to it. They have a photograph, you know, with Big Ben in the background. And a lot of them are actually holding up the mobile phone up to their ear rather than making a phone call. I wish everyone that used this made a single call out of it, because it would be absolutely the best used kiosk in London.
SHAPIRO: Just because they're no longer useful as phones doesn't mean they're completely obsolete. Mark Johnson says he's pulled phones out of the booths, so locals can transform them into all sorts of things.
JOHNSON: We have had libraries, art galleries, notice boards, school projects. We even had a pub in one for one night, which was called The Dog and Bone which was absolutely fantastic.
SHAPIRO: How many could fit in that pub?
JOHNSON: Not many. No, just the barrel of beer and they were serving out of it.
SHAPIRO: Software developer Laurie Young is a Londoner who admits that he hasn't used a payphone in at least 15 years. But if they were to disappear?
LAURIE YOUNG: It would definitely be a big loss. It would be like losing the Empire State Building from New York.
SHAPIRO: But it seems they have no function any more. I mean what if the Empire State Building were to be sitting empty for 20 years?
YOUNG: It's not just a matter of function. It's a matter of what it looks like, what it symbolizes.
SHAPIRO: A few thousand of these phone booths are actually listed on Britain's register of historic places. That's partly thanks to the work of a group whose mission is to preserve 20th century buildings.
CATHERINE CROFT: Yes, I'm Catherine Croft and I'm director of the 20th Century Society here in London.
SHAPIRO: It may sound like a stretch for a group that focuses on buildings to preserve phone booths. But Croft says there's actually a really good reason for it. The phone booth's designer was a man better known for cathedrals, bridges, and power plants.
CROFT: I guess most people would perhaps assume it was a product designer or - I don't know - a furniture designer, maybe. But no, Giles Gilbert Scott was a really important British architect.
SHAPIRO: Catherine Croft and I visited one of Sir Gilbert Scott's smaller works in a historic market. Up close, the booth has echoes of an ancient temple: Fluted columns down the sides, a low curved dome at the top.
CROFT: Yeah. And then that's very deliberate.
SHAPIRO: Really?
CROFT: Yeah. No, absolutely. He was a, you know, scholar of classical architecture.
SHAPIRO: Can we both fit inside?
CROFT: Just about.
SHAPIRO: OK. Ooh, there's a little puddle on the floor - careful.
CROFT: It's authentically smelly in here as well...
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
Oh, wait a minute. I didn't even notice, just above my head in this telephone booth and it's - I'm a tall person so this is hard to read. In the dark it says: This telephone as designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott is a listed building. We are in a historic building right now.
Fortunately, we were able to decipher the plaque's writing by the light of a cell phone.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, London.
(SOUNDBITE OF THEME MUSIC, "DR. WHO")
MONTAGNE: By the way, we'll be hearing a lot more from Ari who is now based in London.
And you're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Many states put a lot of effort and money into getting the word out about the new insurance options - setting up tables at churches, flea markets, and colleges. One place where you can almost guarantee that you will run into an uninsured person is in the hospital. Reporter Sarah Varney went to a hospital in California to see how much people in an emergency waiting room knew about their new options.
SARAH VARNEY, BYLINE: Of the many people I met in the emergency department waiting room at O'Connor Hospital in San Jose, California, most patients appeared to have the flu, bronchitis, pneumonia. One guy had gout on his leg. Want to see it, he asked me.
(SOUNDBITE OF COUGHING)
VARNEY: Sitting across the room is Angela Felan. A blue surgical mask covers her nose and mouth, and a sweatshirt is pulled snug over her head.
ANGELA FELAN: I just kind of decided to come in because my roommate had pneumonia and I just really wanted to make sure I didn't have that.
VARNEY: Angela first came into the emergency room a few days ago with what she thought was bronchitis. The doctor prescribed the 31-year old an inhaler which cost her $56. She works part-time in retail and hasn't had insurance for at least a decade.
FELAN: It's just been too expensive, and unfortunately, even not having insurance is just as expensive.
VARNEY: She's heard of the state's insurance exchange - called Covered California - but she worries coverage will still be pricey. She's unaware that she might quality for subsidies for private insurance, because of her low income, or even Medicaid.
FELAN: As far as today goes, I'm expecting another large bill from the hospital. Previously, when I would come in uninsured, I would get like a $200 or $300 bill for just one visit.
VARNEY: About 5,000 uninsured people come into O'Connor Hospital's ER each year, and now it's Araceli Martinez's job to help them find insurance. She runs the Health Benefits Resource Center just down the hall from the ER which has beefed up staffing and hours in response to the Affordable Care Act. She says prior to 2014, uninsured patients had few options to pay off hefty hospital bills or enroll in health coverage.
ARACELI MARTINEZ: Now they have a bill, because they came in through emergency room, they see things that's going on in the news, and at that time they're saying, well, maybe I can afford something.
VARNEY: Still, patients remain thoroughly befuddled. About half of uninsured adults who could get policies now through the health insurance marketplaces have never done so before. And, in California, about half of poor adults don't know they would qualify for Medicaid. Martinez estimates seven out of ten of the uninsured patients she sees can now get coverage, if those patients follow up and apply.
Hospitals are motivated to sign patients up. For those who qualify for subsidized, private insurance, the reimbursement rates are welcome revenue at a time when hospitals are facing step cuts from Medicare. As for Medicaid, 26 states have opened it up to most poor adults, and that means if an uninsured patient, like Angela, is found eligible, hospitals can get paid - retroactively - for medical treatments going as far back as three months.
RENEE HSIA: I think the emergency department waiting room is one of those places where you have low hanging fruit.
VARNEY: Renee Hsia is an associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
HSIA: And if they're waiting, they might as well be filling out some application form, or at least learning about the process.
VARNEY: The president of O'Connor Hospital, Jim Dover, says he wants to get patients insured, so they don't have to come to the ER for common problems.
JIM DOVER: Let me use this metaphor: A person is coming down the river and they're drowning, and you jump in and pull them out. And then they come down again, and you jump in. The next - two - three - four - five. At some point, you have to go up the river and take care of the spot where they're all falling in.
(SOUNDBITE OF HOSPITAL)
VARNEY: The crowd staring blankly at the TVs in the emergency department waiting room - or corralling sick and grumpy children - did not seem to be in the mood to sign up for health insurance. Angela emerged from seeing the doctor clutching a stack of papers. The doctor told her she had a worrisome ear infection and needed antibiotics.
Did anyone talk to you about your insurance options when you checked out?
FELAN: Last week, no. But today, someone said they would give me a financial packet, and I could call the number on that and somebody would go over financial options with me.
VARNEY: Calling later sounded good to Angela. She had spent enough time in the ER and was ready to rest.
FELAN: It's kind of like you just want to go home and just relax and not have to deal with anything 'cause your head is pounding. And you just don't feel good and you don't want to deal with everything.
(SOUNDBITE OF COUGHING)
VARNEY: For NPR News, I'm Sarah Varney.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The movie "12 Years a Slave" thrusts slavery into the national discussion, and this morning, we're going to take that discussion a little further. For those who haven't seen it yet, the film is the story of a free black man from Upstate New York who was kidnapped in the 1840s and sold to a series of plantation owners.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "12 YEARS A SLAVE")
INSKEEP: That was Chiwetel Ejiofor, playing the lead character, Solomon Northup. The film is based on a true story, and it has brought more true stories to our attention, because it has increased the number of submissions to the Race Card Project, which we hear about regularly on this program. At that project, our colleague Michele Norris has received several six-word stories from people who've tried to uncover their own family connections to slavery, and we're going to hear from some of them this week. For many of those people, the search can be difficult and the discoveries can be excruciating.
ROBERT GOINS: My name is Robert Goins, and my six words are: found my ancestors and grief too.
INSKEEP: That's Robert Goins. Michele Norris joins us now to talk about Robert Goins' story. Welcome back, Michele.
MICHELE NORRIS, BYLINE: Good to be here, Steve.
INSKEEP: So, wow, found my ancestors and grief, too. I guess he's talking in a large sense here about grief.
NORRIS: It's a bit of a metaphor. But Robert Goins was researching his ancestors. He was going through a ledger on microfiche, and as he was going through that ledger, he quite literally stumbled upon grief.
GOINS: I found my great-grandfather's family and some notes held at the North Carolina Archives. The family lived in Belews Creek and Sauratown. Sauratown sounds like sorrow. I found a ledger with the name of the overseer of the plantation written in it. When I first read it, it looked like grief. I actually think the overseer's name was Greif, but I could not help but see it as Grief. Grief is here. Grief will not let me go any further until I acknowledge it. Finding grief stopped me in my tracks.
INSKEEP: Stopped him, but it sounds like he probably went on. He forced himself to go on.
NORRIS: But it was difficult. And this was one of the submissions that actually stopped me in my tracks. And I should say, just from the outset, Steve, this was a really difficult conversation for him. He made these discoveries 10 years ago, and it still affects him.
INSKEEP: You can hear it in his voice.
NORRIS: He's having a really, really hard time with this. And he went back and described that moment as he's rolling his fingers across this microfiche and looking at the names of his ancestors, men and women who are listed there along with livestock and farm implements. And the level of detail was really difficult for him. And maybe to understand better the way it affected him, it might be good for you to actually look at this. We have something here that we brought into the studio. And perhaps you want to read a bit of what he discovered.
INSKEEP: OK. This is from a record that I gather that he found, and it's just a description. And it says a man of color personally appearing in court and producing satisfactory evidence of his freedom. It is ordered that the following be entered as his register: to wit, aged 23 years, five feet, eleven and a half inches high, of light complexion. No scars. No marks perceivable, all of which is ordered to be certified. Which is, in its way, a horrifying document. Even though this is a certification of freedom, this is someone who's going to have to go through extraordinary lengths, maybe, at some point soon, to prove his freedom to somebody.
NORRIS: Right. And you don't imagine going to any sort of government building and being subjected to that kind of examination.
INSKEEP: Yeah, yeah. So, what did he do with this information?
NORRIS: One of the ways that he coped with the difficulty of finding these details - I mean, it was difficult for him because of what he found, because of how it affected him and because it was all so much more complicated than he expected it to be. He knew there were probably slaves in his background, but we're seeing the details that really affected him. And one of the things that kept him going was almost this - he was like a swimmer who needed to find air. He needed to keep going until he could find air, get his head back above water. And so he kept digging and kept digging until he found the story, the narrative that literally met his psychological needs.
GOINS: I needed stories where my family wasn't the slave. I needed stories where they were, you know, they were autonomous, they were doing things, they were living, they had children, you could see their movement. They weren't put on a place and said you had to stay here.
INSKEEP: Did he find what he was looking for?
NORRIS: He did. And that record that you read earlier was evidence of that. He found an ancestor - his three-times great-grandfather, who was born in Virginia, lived as a free man there. He found quite a bit about this in something called The Order Book, which was almost like a government census to keep track of free black people in the Commonwealth of Virginia. And in that portion that you read, you learn something about his physical presence, but he learned quite a bit more about what he did for a living, all kinds of things. Let's listen.
GOINS: His name is Michael Goins. I wonder about him all the time.
NORRIS: What do you know about his life?
GOINS: He was a coalminer. He was a coal hauler. He lived to be 80. He moved from Ohio to Michigan during the run-up to the Civil War, and moved back to Ohio after the Civil War. His wife died a few months before he did. He was born in 1805 or 6 in Albemarle County.
NORRIS: And he went on and talked a little bit more about his life. But, Steve, that discovery of an ancestor who lived to a ripe old age - 80 - was significant at that time. A lot of people didn't live to the age of 80. And lived in a - was born in a state, the state of Virginia, where 90 percent of black people were enslaved, and yet who managed to obtain his freedom. That meant everything to him, the fact that he worked and earned wages, that finally made him feel like his head was above water.
GOINS: I felt grounded. I felt like, wow, this is - why didn't I know this all of my life? This is what I needed. I needed this to help me in difficult times. I needed to hear that they survived, and that I could survive, as well.
NORRIS: Steve, it's not exactly a happy ending, because he still feels burdened by this discovery. He still knows it's difficult to talk about this. He wants to share this with some of his family members. They're probably going to hear this on the radio, so, you know, it's interesting that that's how they might learn about it. And it's something that we see in these submissions to the Race Card Project concerning slavery, especially when people go digging. Tomorrow, we'll hear from someone wrestling with this from the other side, upon discovering that her family members purchased slaves.
KATE BYROADE: It's really hard to bring it up in conversation. Oh, my ancestors, they owned slaves. You know, what an icebreaker.
INSKEEP: Well, we're going to break that ice tomorrow with Michele Norris. Michele, thanks for coming by.
NORRIS: Always good to be here, Steve.
INSKEEP: She curates the Race Card Project. And this week, we are having conversations on the history of American slavery. And on Thursday, by the way, we're going to speaking with John Ridley, the screenwriter of "12 Years a Slave."
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And on Sunday, the movie won a Golden Globe for Best Drama.
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It will be 10 more months before mid-term congressional elections. But clearly, it's never too early to start the attack ads. One race that's attracting early advertisers is in New Hampshire, where Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen is seeking a second term.
NPR's Peter Overby has more.
PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: Republicans say their goal is to tie Shaheen and every other Democrat to the Affordable Care Act, which they hope will sink them.
REINCE PRIEBUS: It is going to be the number-one issue in 2014.
OVERBY: That was Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus last week in a conference call with reporters. But right now, that anti-Obamacare message is being delivered mainly by outside groups. Two tax-exempt social welfare organizations have been pounding Shaheen in New Hampshire. They're both based in northern Virginia.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT)
OVERBY: This is from Americans for Prosperity, where President Tim Phillips says the ad isn't about the Senate race.
TIM PHILLIPS: These are not electoral ads. They're issue ads, designed to work toward the eventual repeal of Obamacare.
OVERBY: That's because Americans for Prosperity, as a social welfare organization, isn't supposed to focus on partisan politics.
PHILLIPS: We don't have any view at all on the potential candidates who may get into different races.
OVERBY: So why not run the ads in, say, Vermont and Maine? Phillips says it makes sense to run issue ads where people are paying attention to politics.
PHILLIPS: We have found that senators and House members who have to face the voters in the near future are more responsive on issues.
OVERBY: He says that between the ads, printed materials and voter contact, AFP is spending several hundred thousand dollars in New Hampshire. The group was among the biggest TV advertisers in the 2012 election cycle. Social welfare groups, unlike political committees, don't have to release lists of their donors. AFP isn't the only social welfare group on the air in New Hampshire. The other one is called Ending Spending.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT)
OVERBY: And the kicker at the end...
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT)
OVERBY: Brian Baker, president of Ending Spending, says they regard this ad as explicitly political. That's legally allowed if Ending Spending is primarily devoted to social welfare. Baker says the social welfare mission is working for a balanced budget and smaller federal debt.
BRIAN BAKER: And we think the only way you're going to do that is to elect fiscally responsible leaders. So, you know, we know what the election date is, and we kind of work back from that.
OVERBY: Many Republicans in New Hampshire hope that Shaheen will be challenged by former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, who recently moved into the state. National and state Democrats have run a few ads sniping at his old Senate record. Baker says Brown fits the Ending Spending idea of a fiscally responsible politician.
BAKER: The TV ads against Senator Shaheen are definitely a part of the Draft Scott Brown effort.
OVERBY: And while Ending Spending and Americans for Prosperity say their main missions are social welfare, New Hampshire Republicans are glad to see their six-figure ad campaigns linking Shaheen to Obamacare. Ryan Williams is an adviser to the New Hampshire GOP.
RYAN WILLIAMS: This is going to be a long-term issue that will continue to dog Shaheen into Election Day. It makes sense to bring up this message now, to hammer it home, and to damage her numbers and to continue to make the case that she doesn't deserve to be re-elected in November.
OVERBY: But some outside analysts say ads this early in the season are essentially worthless.
STUART ROTHENBERG: This happens over and over again. They're after the attention.
OVERBY: Stuart Rothenberg tracks political contests nationwide. He says early advertisers have self-serving agendas.
ROTHENBERG: Please contributors, appeal to future contributors, and overall, get a reputation that they're players in the political world.
OVERBY: Now it's a world where outside groups and their hidden donors can't wait to weigh in on the next election. Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.
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Neiman Marcus is the latest retailer to disclose it has large troves of customer information stolen. This comes after a major data breach at Target. Security experts say other prominent U.S. stores may have had credit card data hacked as well. The attacks point to growing vulnerabilities in cyber security. NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Avivah Litan says she's hearing from sources at retailers that the data breaches last holiday season were not limited to the 70 million-plus Target customers and untold number of Neiman Marcus shoppers.
AVIVAH LITAN: It's clear that there is a new bout of attacks.
NOGUCHI: Litan is a security analyst at Gartner. She says remember the data thieves who struck several years ago at T.J. Maxx, J.C. Penney and Target?
LITAN: Well, they're back. It may be a different gang, it's not limited to Target. It's not limited to Nieman Marcus. It's per basis.
NOGUCHI: Litan blames, in large part, the magnetic payment strip system, which she says is more vulnerable than systems used by other countries around the world which have smart chips embedded in credit cards. David Burg, leader of cybersecurity at PricewaterhouseCoopers, adds that part of the problem is rapid innovation.
DAVID BURG: As we use more and more technologies to collaborate among businesses, or to connect with consumers using things like mobile devices and other kinds of applications that allow the consumer to interface with various corporations, what you have is an attack surface that keeps increasing in size and complexity, making it very hard to secure.
NOGUCHI: Burg says while there is a lot of pressure on retailers to alert consumers, regulatory and law enforcement officials quickly, often there are delays because criminals work hard to cover their tracks.
BURG: It's very hard to figure out what happened and how it happened and what the impact was.
NOGUCHI: Tom Kellermann is a managing director at Alvarez & Marsal, a professional services firm. He says the latest round of attacks indicate that even companies that invest heavily in sophisticated security systems are seeing new vulnerabilities from new sources, namely rogue hackers who are buying readily available software tools on the black market.
TOM KELLERMAN: There is a massive consulting and software-based industry that supports the shadow economy that is making it far easier for people who are not sophisticated to leverage these types of attacks.
NOGUCHI: Kellermann says organized crime syndicates, especially in Eastern Europe, not only make money selling the malware, they also then use the hackers' channels to their own ends. They prod at a company's network, often hanging out for months undetected, and then plan their attack.
KELLERMAN: These targeted attacks from someone who has investigated major breaches in the past, I am suggesting that this campaign in particular definitely went on for months.
NOGUCHI: The loss to the consumer is often time, getting reimbursement from their credit card company. But for the retailer, Kellermann says...
KELLERMAN: It is incalculable.
NOGUCHI: It costs about $200 per lost record to cover legal expenses and fines. In addition, as Target recently saw, a retailer's reputation takes a hit, and its stock can fall. Doug Johnson oversees risk management policy for the American Bankers Association and he says banks sustain losses as well. He says forensic investigations, as the FBI and Secret Service are conducting now on the Target and Neiman Marcus breaches, take a lot of time.
At the end of it, it's often difficult to prove where the data leaked, so banks often end up holding the bag.
DOUG JOHNSON: 'Cause it's going to be the financial institution that reimburses the customer for that fraud.
NOGUCHI: Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel apologized to customers on CNBC yesterday, saying Target would pay for credit monitoring, and he vowed to make things right for the consumers. Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
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New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gives his State of the State speech today. It comes at one of those awkward moments in the life of a politician.
MONTAGNE: Christie is considered a presidential prospect for 2016, which guarantees scrutiny of everything he does. His administration faces questions about politically-motivated closing of lanes over the George Washington Bridge to New York. And Christie faces another high-profile investigation.
INSKEEP: This one focuses on how his administration spent millions of dollars in federal relief funds on a marketing campaign.
As NPR's Joe Rose reports, post-Hurricane Sandy, tourism ads featured Chris Christie and drew criticism because they aired during his reelection campaign.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: If you were watching TV in or around New Jersey last summer, the ads were hard to miss.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT)
ROSE: The 30-second ads featured the governor and his family. They used federal funding to promote tourism. They aired so often, that even Christie joked he was getting a little tired of the campaign's theme song, "Stronger Than the Storm."
: If you think it's stuck in your head...
(LAUGHTER)
: ...you can only imagine how stuck it is in my head.
ROSE: Democrats were not amused that the Republican governor was essentially getting free airtime in the middle of a reelection the campaign. But Christie defended the ad campaign this way.
: The reason for that program is pretty simple: There's still lots of people around who didn't believe we'd be ready for the summer. And while not everything is perfect, by a long shot, we didn't want to let businesses in this state go down the tubes because nobody knew that we were here and ready to welcome them.
ROSE: Christie's critics were even angrier when they learn that his administration got bids from two different advertising firms and picked the more expensive bid, which happened to feature the governor and his family in the ads. That campaign cost $4.7 million. The other firm's bid came in at two-and-a-half million, but that one did not include the Christies on camera.
The governor's opponent in last year's election, Democratic State Senator Barbara Buono, believes those ads have a real impact on the outcome.
STATE SENATOR BARBARA BUONO: Clearly, these commercials didn't help. It had the governor out there in a very visible way, you know, reminding people of the, you know, his calling card to his popularity, in my opinion, which is how he handled Sandy. Now even that is being called into question.
ROSE: It was announced yesterday at the Department of Housing and Urban Development - which allocated funds for the marketing campaign - is launching an audit of how the money was spent.
In a statement, a spokesman for Governor Christie says the ad campaign helped New Jersey get back on its feet after the storm and called the federal review, quote, "routine." But Democratic Congressman Frank Pallone, who requested the audit back in August of last year, says there is nothing routine about it.
REPRESENTATIVE FRANK PALLONE: I don't see any reason why the governor had to appear in the ads. But beyond that, we would've saved over $2 million if they hadn't and they'd used the other firm. It raises an issue of impropriety that should be looked into.
ROSE: Pallone says the timing of the HUD announcement is a coincidence. Still, it could hardly come at a worse time for the Christie administration. The governor denies knowing about politically-motivated traffic jams at the George Washington Bridge until last week, when he cut ties with two close aides. But Democratic lawmakers in New Jersey are not convinced.
PALLONE: This has become larger than a transportation issue, and that's the reason that we're creating this supercommittee.
ROSE: Yesterday, Democrats in Trenton announced a new committee created specifically to investigate possible abuses of power by the Christie administration. Chairman John Wisniewski says he still has plenty of unanswered questions.
ASSEMBLYMAN JOHN WISNIEWSKI: When you have so many people in his upper-level senior circle that received information about the fallout, the traffic jams and the efforts to spin the traffic jams, in the context of a governor running for reelection, it strains credibility to say that all of these senior people whose job it is to communicate and keep the governor informed did absolutely nothing with these emails.
ROSE: One of the committee's first acts may be used to issue subpoenas to former members of Christie's staff who were intimately involved in the lane closures. It's against that backdrop that Governor Christie will give his State of the State speech today and lay out the agenda for a second term that suddenly looks very different than it did just a few weeks ago.
Joel Rose, NPR News.
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Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep with another revelation by Edward Snowden. The former NSA contractor allegedly struck again. The Iranian news agency FARS says so. The semi official agency repeated a conspiracy theory on the Web. The story claims that according to Snowden, space aliens have taken over the United States, running America since 1945, having previously run Nazi Germany.
The article is illustrated by pictures of President Obama, Hitler and an alien resembling ET.
It's MORNING EDITION.
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Getting through a tough winter can be especially challenging for elderly or disabled people living alone in rural areas. Medical emergencies can go unnoticed. There aren't always neighbors right next door who can pop by. And the lack of human contact can breed a deep, pervasive loneliness. In one Maine county, a small group of shut-ins has agreed to call the county's 911 center every morning to check in.
Here's Maine Public Radio's Jay Field.
JAY FIELD, BYLINE: The calls start coming in around day break.
(SOUNDBITE OF A RINGING PHONE)
FIELD: Most people phone around the same time. Mike Larivee, a 911 dispatcher in Waldo County, on Maine's mid-coast, takes a call at little after 8. It's Alonzo.
MIKE LARIVEE: So what are you doing today, Alonzo? I was getting worried about you. Its past 8 o'clock, you haven't called.
FIELD: Larivee gets an update on Alonzo's health...
LARIVEE: Ah, you better get it looked at.
FIELD: ...on his favorite sports teams.
LARIVEE: Red Sox need him? Yeah, well.
FIELD: Alonzo will talk as long as Larivee will let him. But this is the emergency command center for the entire county.
LARIVEE: Alonzo, I've got to run.
ANDY CARDINALE: He's a very friendly Friendly Caller.
FIELD: Andy Cardinale is another Waldo County dispatcher. He's has had many long talks with Alonzo, one of 17 elderly and disabled residents taking part in the county's Friendly Caller program.
CARDINALE: In a rural area, you might have a house that your nearest neighbor is a mile away.
FIELD: Cardinale says that can be a dangerous situation, especially during the long winters here.
CARDINALE: During the ice storm, especially when there was power outages, we got rides for them to shelters. And that's our goal, is to make sure they're safe every day.
FIELD: Allowing older residents to stay in their homes isn't an expressed goal of the program, though officials acknowledge it may be byproduct of all the daily calls. Routine checking up on shut-ins has historically been left to nonprofits and social service agencies. It doesn't cost Waldo County anything to run the Friendly Caller program. Callers simply sign up and agree to contact a dispatcher by 10:00 a.m. every morning.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Hello.
KATY DAKIN: How are you?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Not too bad.
FIELD: It's a little after 10 on a snowy Friday and dispatcher Katy Dakin is on the phone with the Belfast, Maine Police Department. One of the Friendly Callers hasn't called.
DAKIN: Can you go check on Lorraine Page for me?
FIELD: Twenty minutes later, a police cruiser pulls into Page's driveway. Officer Wendall Ward heads for the front door.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
FIELD: No answer.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
FIELD: Suddenly, a small woman in an overcoat walks out from behind the house.
OFFICER WENDALL WARD: Hi, Lorraine. Did you forget to call today?
LORRAINE PAGE: No, I didn't forget.
FIELD: Lorraine Page's phone, it turns out, got temporarily disconnected. Page, who's 66, says her many health problems are a big reason she decided to become a Friendly Caller.
PAGE: I have diabetes. I have a decaying spine. I have fibromyalgia, an ulcer...
FIELD: And a lot of lung problems.
PAGE: At times I just can't breath. And I could be laying here, struggling for breath or even unconscious because the lung problems are acting up. And I could, at any moment, become even unable to use a phone to call for help. And knowing that they're, you know, they're looking out for me, it makes all the difference in life.
FIELD: Waldo County dispatchers say they could handle as many as 40 Friendly Callers a day. They say the 911 center has also been getting calls from other states expressing interest in the program.
For NPR News, I'm Jay Field.
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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
U.S. and Iranian negotiators say they're making progress in nuclear negotiations. Last weekend, Secretary of State John Kerry said they'd worked out the details of a temporary nuclear deal.
SECRETARY JOHN KERRY: For the first time in almost a decade, Iran's nuclear program will not be able to advance. In fact, parts of it will be rolled back.
MONTAGNE: In exchange, the U.S.-led economic sanctions that are crippling Iran's trade with the world will ease.
INSKEEP: But permanent nuclear deal is still to be negotiated. And the stakes are very high for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. He's the man who won a surprise election last year on promises to improve relations with the world, and expand freedoms at home.
New York Times Tehran Bureau Chief Thomas Erdbrink has been following Rouhani's progress. He says Iranians are anxious for further benefits and expecting Rouhani to keep more promises.
THOMAS ERDBRINK: All his promises on domestic policies are still matters that people are waiting for.
INSKEEP: What do you mean?
ERDBRINK: Well, for instance, something very simple and something very normal for people here back in the States. But he promised to open up Facebook. Now, you should know that Facebook is blocked in Iran. When you go online to Facebook, you get a message that, "this website is bad for your health." And...
INSKEEP: Bad for your health, that's a quote?
ERDBRINK: That is a quote, "is bad for your health," that's for your mental health.
(LAUGHTER)
INSKEEP: That's like a threat of some kind, this website is...
ERDBRINK: Yeah, the quote keeps on changing.
INSKEEP: ...bad for your health.
ERDBRINK: Exactly.
INSKEEP: OK.
ERDBRINK: But at the same time, you know, young Iranians are incredibly connected. They use special software to go online. But it's just not the same thing. For instance, when I - with all my resources - try and access Facebook, I get the site but not the pictures, and this goes for many people in Iran.
INSKEEP: And that is a subtle reminder that even though this man is the elected president of the country, he is not necessarily in charge. He can't even get Facebook opened up to the public.
ERDBRINK: He can't even get Facebook opened up to the public, and there is a reason for that. In Iran, of course, the leadership tries to control basically everything from the cradle to the grave. And they also control the media. Facebook, like in many other countries, would open up a stage for people to have free discussions. Now, Mr. Rouhani came out very clearly, I want to open up these websites. But now, seven months down the line, nothing.
INSKEEP: Are there other promises that he made that have also not been kept?
ERDBRINK: Of course, there's also the matter of the opposition leaders. In 2009, they were protesting Iran. The two men: the former presidential challengers, Mr. Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, were later placed under house arrest for playing a role in those protests. They've been under house arrest for a thousand days by now. Nobody knows how these people are doing. And it's been a main demand of people to get these two men released.
INSKEEP: So is this man in danger of being discredited?
ERDBRINK: I think he's doubling down on his foreign policy. Now, let's just paint a picture of Iran. Iran has been under sanctions over the last year. Their national economy has been ravaged. The national currency has lost over two to 300 percent. People have lost track how much value it has lost. You go to the supermarket. You buy a carton of milk. It's twice the price it used to be a month ago. People don't like this kinds of things.
Now, Mr. Rouhani has been preaching that any real nuclear deal with the world powers - and especially, of course, with the United States - will herald in, you know, the coming of Western companies, more jobs, better relations with other countries and, of course, the ability for Iran to sell its oil again.
Now, people are still patient enough to wait for this. And at the same time, in their opinion, the deal for the nuclear case is taking too much time. They want to see things move at a faster pace, is what they're saying.
INSKEEP: OK. Suppose the deal does fall through or it just - negotiations dragged on and on. Is Iran in a position where he can last, where it can sustain itself economically for months and months or years and years?
ERDBRINK: It's funny. When you talk to Iranian economists or even people within the Iranian government, they admit privately that there's no money in the bank. They're out of money. They have trouble paying certain people. At the same time, the Iranian government is sort of an enigma. There's a big underground economy, there's a lot of trade that we don't know about. They will manage to mug along for a very long time; compared in a way to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had a lot of issues with its ideology. Their economy had been bankrupt for decades but still they managed to survive. Well, I don't see a reason why Iran is not able to survive. Will the people like such a situation? I don't know. But they've put up with it in the past, so why not in the future?
INSKEEP: Thomas Erdbrink, of The New York Times, always a pleasure to see you.
ERDBRINK: Thanks for having me, Steve.
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Boeing just extended its contract in Washington, keeping more than 10,000 jobs in state, partly by adjusting employees' pension plans. Last week, we heard on this program how these kinds of deals can cripple the middle class as corporations shift benefit costs from their books into the pockets their workers.
Today, Jacob Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics offers a counterpoint to David Greene, beginning with a breakdown of what that means for workers.
JACOB KIRKEGAARD: There's no doubt that the Boeing deal was a rough one for many Boeing workers. I mean Boeing is not a company that is in immediate financial troubles yet. The company basically told the workers in Washington State that look, either you sign on the dotted line, including significant reductions in your pension and a bunch of other changes, or we move your work elsewhere. And by the way, you're still under contract so you can't strike - sort of gunslinger negotiating style, no doubt about that.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
I want to ask you about some of the specifics that we were talking about. One of them is a shift from a defined benefit pension to a defined contribution-style retirement plan. Can you briefly just tell me the difference in those two things?
KIRKEGAARD: Basically, the defined benefit plan is characterized by that the benefit that the worker receive is fixed or is guaranteed, so to speak.
GREENE: The traditional pension, you know how much you'll get when you retire.
KIRKEGAARD: You know what you get every month. The defined contribution plan is the opposite. The company guarantees you a certain payout every month while you're working, but then it's up to you to invest that money wisely so that your nest egg grows - which, of course, means that any investment risk is actually shifted from the company to the worker.
GREENE: And why is that? So tell me why a company like Boeing has to make this decision and shift that risk to its workers?
KIRKEGAARD: Basically, the reason for it is the same reasons that pension systems are in trouble everywhere. People live longer. And remember, that if people live five years longer, that's the company having to pay that worker a guaranteed monthly benefit for another five years. This is the so-called longevity risk. And then, of course, many companies used to be much bigger. Now the company has shrunk because of competition, because of innovation, because of shift in technology, etcetera. So it's a much smaller company contributing to a pension plan for a company that used to be much bigger.
GREENE: Let me ask you, you seem to acknowledge what many people are angry about the Boeing plan acknowledge, which is that companies like Boeing are shifting more of the risk and more of the burden to the worker. But you make an argument in your book that people have been far too worried about this than they really need to be. Why is that?
KIRKEGAARD: Well, I think first of all, you know, when people say that, you know, they're taking a chunk of the middle class, they're destroying the American dream - I mean there is a sort of mythical belief that, you know, back in the 1950s or the '60s, everybody had a defined benefit plan. But I think, you know, those times were not quite as rosy as many people think because we have to remember that not everybody had these types of defined benefit plans. You know, you didn't have them outside the unionized industrial sector. Women typically didn't have them, minorities rarely had them. So it was really a certain segment of American society that clearly had these pensions.
GREENE: What is your message to people who look at this and they say, look, these are these wealthy companies who are shifting the burden to workers, it's really hurting the middle class.
KIRKEGAARD: No. I mean I think that this was a victory for Boeing shareholders and a defeat for workers. I would at the same time say that if we believe that somehow it's part of the American dream that you have this type of pension and that you can retire with a defined benefit plan, you know, before you're 60, that dream is probably an illusion, because it's simply unsustainable.
GREENE: Jacob Kierkegaard co-authored a book called "U.S. Pension Reform: Lessons From Other Countries." Jacob, thanks so much for coming in.
KIRKEGAARD: My pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
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NPR's business news starts with a change in the weather.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: Things are looking a little bleak for the Weather Channel. Visibility is low. Its contract negotiations with DirecTV fell through. The satellite broadcaster dropped the Weather Channel last night after the two companies could not agree on a new distribution deal.
DirecTV is the largest satellite TV distributor in the United States with over 20 million subscribers. And DirecTV has now replaced the Weather Channel with Weather Nation - which we're told, offers 24/7 weather reporting and updates.
Recently, the Weather Channel has diversified its programming from continuous weather coverage to include reality TV shows and documentaries, a change that DirecTV said its subscribers were concerned about.
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Google just paid over $3 billion for a company that makes smart thermostats and smoke alarms for homes and offices. Nest Labs has been more successful than Google at getting into people's homes with these Internet-connected home devices. Some analysts say that's exactly why Google wanted it.
NPR's Laura Sydell reports.
LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: Google's been trying a bunch of experiments to collect more information about us beyond knowing what we look for online.
FRANK GILLETT: You can't really think of Google as a search engine company any more. They're really trying to organize the world's information.
SYDELL: That's Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research. He says Google's attempts to get into the home, say, through Google TV, hasn't done so well. Nest's Internet smart thermostats, which make adjustments based on your habits, are selling well.
GILLETT: Because it can tell when you're home and when you're in the room, it will notice maybe that you shifted to an earlier time to leave for work and turn off the heat sooner.
SYDELL: Nest can also be adjusted from an App on your smart phone. And that's part of its appeal to Google, which sees it as a way to draw more people to mobile devices that use its Android operating system.
Nest was founded by Tony Fadell, one of the first engineers on the iPhone team at Apple. In a statement, Fadell said that both his company and Google share a vision of letting technology work behind the scenes so people can focus on more important stuff.
For now, Nest says it will continue to honor the privacy policies it has in place and its thermostat will still work on Apple mobile devices.
Laura Sydell, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Ah, the North American International Auto Show begins this week begins this week in Detroit. At least 50 new car models will make their debuts. Ford Motors is unveiling its highly anticipated makeover of the F-150 with a body made in part of aluminum - an aluminum truck.
Recent advances have made aluminum, which is lighter than steel, of course, viable on a large scale for manufacturing.
One of our favorite correspondents, NPR's Sonari Glinton, reports on what that means for the car industry.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Before I got to the Detroit Auto Show, I wanted to get a refresher course. There was all this talk about aluminum in trucks and I wanted to find out, well, what that meant.
MARGARET WOOLDRIDGE: It's all fuel economy. So there's two ways of address fuel economy. You can either make the vehicle lighter or your can improve the power train efficiency.
GLINTON: That's Margaret Wooldridge, she's a professor in the University of Michigan's Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department. She's going to talk about the materials you can use building a car, and in this case, aluminum.
WOOLDRIDGE: So aluminum is significantly lighter, it has a lower density than steel. So this is a practice that's called lightweighting vehicles, and that's exactly what the purpose is, is to make the vehicle lighter and improve the fuel economy.
GLINTON: Not only was aluminum lighter - about a third as much - but it was about three times as expensive. Margaret Wooldridge says it was also more difficult to work with. But she says in the last few years, there's whole host of slow, incremental innovations that's made aluminum easier to use in manufacturing and new fuel economy standards added an incentive despite the expense.
WOOLDRIDGE: But now, you need to meet fuel economy regulations, and so you go after technologies that are more expensive but give you that payback in terms of fuel economy.
GLINTON: OK. So back here at the auto show, all the carmakers are scrambling to make their fleets more fuel efficient in different ways. Ford decided to make its best-selling and most important vehicle, the F-150, several hundred pounds lighter.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Ladies and gentleman, let's take a look at the all new F-150.
GLINTON: Ford has been experimenting with aluminum in vehicles for years. But with its best selling truck, Ford is making a clear statement by something other carmakers aren't doing on a large scale.
Alan Mulally, the CEO of Ford, says the company is not going to stop with the F150.
ALAN MULALLY: I think over time we'll see more and more aluminum across our entire product line. But clearly, the real value, initially, is on the larger vehicles because you can take the most weight out. But over time, we'll see aluminum go across the whole product line. Absolutely.
GLINTON: Ford executives admit that there was a learning curve in dealing with aluminum but they promise a new truck in showrooms in the fourth quarter.
Meanwhile Jake Fisher with Consumer Reports says in many ways aluminums has its advantages. But he says there are still questions to be asked before the trucks go mainstream.
JAKE FISHER: The issue, of course, is going to be crash damage. It's a better material so it's going to weather better, probably not going to rust as much, aluminum doesn't. But if you get into a wreck, it going to be interesting to see what the replacement panels are going to be. Also, if you go to a normal body shop, are they going to have the materials to work with in aluminum?
GLINTON: Fisher says cost could be an issue for customers.
FISHER: If you buy a Tesla at $90,000, you might expect that it might be expensive to buy those body panels. If you buy an F-150, which is the best-selling car in America, you might be surprised to have to pay a lot of money for a new fender.
GLINTON: But Fisher says if the gamble on the F-150 goes well, you could be making your morning commuter in an aluminum body car.
Sonari Glinton, NPR News, Detroit.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And our last word in business today is: Pope on a Hog.
(LAUGHTER)
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Of course it is.
(LAUGHTER)
MONTAGNE: Stop. There have been many famous owners of Harley Davidson over the years - Elvis Presley, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hells Angels, - but Pope Francis might be the holiest roller yet.
INSKEEP: Almost by definition. He's the proud owner - the pope is - of a Harley Davidson Dyna Super Glide, which was given to him as a gift.
But His Holiness will auction the hog to help raise money for a soup kitchen and a hostel for the homeless in Rome.
MONTAGNE: The motorcycle is signed Francisco on its tank and is worth as much as $20,000 at auction. Pope Francis already owns a decidedly less pimped-out Ford Focus.
INSKEEP: And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News, the one program that manages to get the phrase pimped out into a story that is about the pope.
I'm Steve Inskeep.
MONTAGNE: And I'm Renee Montagne.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
In the next few minutes we're going to take a look at two countries, Egypt and Tunisia, both facing turning points in revolutions set off by the Arab Spring. We start in Cairo, where Egyptians begin voting today on a new constitution. That country is deeply and violently divided between supporters of the military-led government and the Islamists who back ousted President Mohammed Morsi.
NPR's Leila Fadel has been talking to voters and joins us now from a polling station. Welcome.
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Thank you.
MONTAGNE: So tell us generally what you're seeing and hearing there in Cairo.
FADEL: Well, right now I'm standing at the end of a very long line at one polling station in central Cairo. People are out voting, saying that a yes for this constitution is a yes for the future of this country. There are a lot of Egyptians that aren't voting today, who have decided to boycott, supporters of the Islamist ousted President Mohamed Morsi and others who say right now human rights are not being respected and the path to democracy is in danger.
MONTAGNE: And when you say people are saying you must vote yes for a constitution, that constitution is the constitution of this military-led government. And in recent months we've seen the government crackdown on dissidents, jail hundreds of Islamists and even journalists. So Leila, in that atmosphere, can there be any opposition campaign really to this constitution?
FADEL: I think that's really the question. There was one party here in Egypt called the Egyptian Strong Party, who was mobilizing a no campaign, asking people to vote no to the constitution. And yet they kept getting arrested for campaigning that way. And so now they also are not participating today. The only posters that we've seen on the roads, the only advertisements are telling people to vote yes. And even a minister we happened upon at one of polling stations this morning, said: If you're really an Egyptian, then you'll vote yes to the constitution.
MONTAGNE: That is to say a minister of the state, right?
FADEL: Right, so the question here that critics are pointing out is: Is it really a choice if critics are being silenced and arrested?
MONTAGNE: Well, what is the difference between this draft constitution that's being voted on and the one that the Morsi government brought to Egypt? Is there a big difference?
FADEL: Well, I mean there aren't huge differences but there are important differences. And a lot of rights groups say this constitution is better when it comes to women's rights, when it comes to children's rights, when it comes to minority rights. It also lessens the role of religion. The role of religion is still very important but doesn't make it conditional on things like women's rights and other things.
But it also further enshrines the military's role in Egypt's political life. The Minister of Defense will be chosen by the military for the eight years to come; military justice upheld for civilians, so there are concerns about that.
MONTAGNE: And, Leila, is this vote today also a referendum on the coup that the military carried out last year? And on the general who is functionally running the country right now?
FADEL: Yeah, that's right. Speaking to a lot of analysts and also voters today, when they say they're going to vote yes, they say they're voting for, in support of the military - the military-backed government. Many saying they hope that this will lead to General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the head of the military, to run for president. A lot of Egyptians saying he's the only man that can unify and stabilize the country at a time like this.
Many Egyptians saying a vote yes is a vote for - to endorse what's happened over the last six months. Which is a concerning idea for a lot of rights groups who are concerned about human rights violations that have been going on.
MONTAGNE: Leila, thanks very much.
FADEL: Thank you.
MONTAGNE: That's NPR's Leila Fadel speaking to us from Cairo, where Egyptians are voting today and tomorrow on a new constitution.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This is also a landmark date in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began. Three years ago today, Tunisia's long-time ruler stepped down in the face of a popular uprising. His departure sparked both celebration and uncertainty. A nation that blended European, Arab and African cultures became a scene of contention where Islamists took a growing share of power. But unlike other countries in the Arab Spring, Tunisians seemed to be overcoming their religious/secular divide.
NPR's Eleanor Beardsley is in the capital, Tunis, on the Mediterranean coast.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Sixty-two-year-old Mounir Khelifa is dining with his friends at a fashionable restaurant on the beach. Khelifa is part of Tunisia's significant secular population. Most live on the coast and look across the Mediterranean toward Europe. Khelifa is a literature professor. He is Muslim but he doesn't want religion to play a role in Tunisia's new democratic government.
MOUNIR KHELIFA: OK, let's raise a glass. Here's to you.
BEARDSLEY: Before the fall of the dictator in 2011, when overt religion was discouraged, Tunisians didn't fully know each other's beliefs. Khelifa and his friends were convinced that the majority of Tunisia's 11 million people were secular-minded like they were. When the moderate Islamist party, Ennahda, won 42 percent of the seats in an elected constituent assembly in 2011, they were stunned. Khelifa says he and other secular Tunisians don't trust the Islamists.
KHELIFA: The government that is dominated by the moderate Islamists was getting its hands on all the apparatus of the state and we feared that they would move towards an authoritarian, bureaucratic system of government.
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BEARDSLEY: The call to prayer rings out five times a day over Tunis. Only the most pious go to the mosque at 6:30 in the morning. Forty-three year old Nabil Rezgui is one of them.
NABIL REZGUI: (Speaking foreign language)
BEARDSLEY: Afterwards, Rezgui heads to work as he manager of a sports apparel store. Rezgui voted for the moderate Islamist party Ennahda.
REZGUI: (Through interpreter) I wanted a democratic government that was also Islamist. I want both. The party had a lot of good ideas, but I admit they made some mistakes.
BEARDSLEY: The inexperienced party was inept at governing. The economy got worse and people say the trash doesn't even get picked up. And the Islamist-led government was accused of letting radical Salifis wreak havoc. It was the last straw in 2013, when two secular politicians were gunned down in broad daylight, allegedly by Salafis.
After the second assassination, women, students, trade unions protested for weeks demanding that the Islamist-led government step down. Meanwhile, the military coup in Egypt ousting an Islamist party there sent shivers through Ennahda. They agreed to sit down with the secular opposition to draft the country's constitution.
Attia Fattoum is an Islamist member of Tunisia's elected assembly. She says the party did right to compromise.
ATTIA FATTOUM: (Through interpreter) There's a mix of everyone in Tunisia, and it's not because we have a religious movement now or the secular people are going to go away. We've got to live together and respect each other.
BEARDSLEY: Ennahda has also agreed to step aside for a nonpolitical caretaker government and new elections this year. That process has already started. People here can watch their lawmakers write the constitution on the Tunisian equivalent of C-SPAN. There have been hard fought battles, like the one to enshrine equality between men and women.
When Article 45 on equality did pass, assembly members rose to their feet to sing the national anthem. Though each side is hardly getting everything it wants, it's this constitution, a roadmap for the future, that reassures both Rezgui in his sport apparel shop and Khelifa in his restaurant.
KHELIFA: I feel hopeful and optimistic, both that secularists and Islamists and activists from civil society all got together and worked out a solution which is possibly not a perfect one, but a workable one.
BEARDSLEY: As Tunisians celebrate their anniversary today, many say that for the first time since the revolution, they feel confident they're building a democracy. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Tunis.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Federal investigators from the Chemical Safety Board arrived in West Virginia to examine that massive chemical leak into the Elk River. Tens of thousands of people still cannot drink their household water after this leak from a tank owned by Freedom Industries. NPR's Daniel Zwerdling has been following this story and tracking some of the history in recent years of chemical spills. Hi, Danny.
DANIEL ZWERDLING, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: So what happened last week?
ZWERDLING: Thursday morning, apparently a chemical used in the coal industry leaked from a tank, an above-ground storage tank. Thousands of gallons leaked on to the ground, then leaked into the nearby river. And lo and behold, oops, it turns out the intake pipes for the water treatment plant for the area are right downstream.
INSKEEP: Now, this is bad enough, but you've tracked more than one problem over the years with above-ground storage tanks, including a huge disaster in Texas.
ZWERDLING: You know, federal statistics suggest that there are more than 2,000 leaks every year from above-ground storage tanks. And just last April you might remember, right - in West Texas, a fertilizer tank exploded, still nobody knows exactly what happened. But that was a much more serious case where 15 workers were killed, more than a 150 injured, more than 150 buildings, including homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed.
And the troubling thing about all this is that the Chemical Safety Board keeps investigating some of the worst above-ground storage tank leaks and explosions around the country. And they keep finding some of the same things.
INSKEEP: Well, let's make sure we understand what that is because we're talking about different materials. You mentioned fertilizer. It was a substance used in coal mining in West Virginia. There are other things. Is that the pattern?
ZWERDLING: So it turns out that there are many, many laws that govern the storage of chemicals and the use of chemicals at these facilities. There are many agencies that have some sort of overview. The Chemical Safety Board keeps concluding that the problem is that when you look at the fine print of all these laws, there are lots of gaps, not loopholes necessarily, just gaps.
For example, the Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to regulate the storage of above-ground tanks with oil. Well, in 2001, more than 1 million gallons of sulfuric acid spilled from an above-ground storage tank in Delaware. People were injured. The community was contaminated.
INSKEEP: EPA have nothing to do with it.
ZWERDLING: Because it was not oil. In 2008, 2 million gallons of fertilizer spilled into a river in Virginia. And again, EPA had nothing to do with it. And I could talk about the Labor Department has some overview. The Homeland Security Department has some overview. But they're - they don't coordinate very well. And the Chemical Safety Board keeps saying we've got a problem here.
INSKEEP: And do these problems apply to this latest spill in West Virginia?
ZWERDLING: I talked to a top official at the Chemical Safety Board yesterday. And he said, you know, it's too early to tell specifically, but, yes, you know, the themes definitely apply, probably. In fact, three years ago the Chemical Safety Board issued a report on another accident involving above-ground storage tanks in West Virginia. This had to do with an accident in 2008 at a Bayer pesticide plant. Two workers were killed.
And the Chemical Safety Board report three years ago said to West Virginia, look, no matter what the federal government is or isn't doing, you guys - you guys need to have your own very tough program to inspect and make sure that above-ground storage tanks are safe and inspect these above-ground storage tanks, make sure the companies are doing what they have to do, make sure there's, you know, all kinds of emergency plans. Anyway, very tough recommendation.
INSKEEP: Well, what did West Virginia do?
ZWERDLING: Nothing.
INSKEEP: And now we have this West Virginia spill. Let me just ask you, Daniel Zwerdling, regardless of who regulates chemical tanks in advance - storage tanks in advance, are there laws that provide consequences? If you pollute, you get in trouble.
ZWERDLING: The Clean Water Act says, if you - if you, company, you know, you violate the law, the Justice Department can haul into court, and they do haul people into court. But public health specialists and even some government officials tell me it's not much of a deterrent.
INSKEEP: NPR's Daniel Zwerdling, thanks very much.
ZWERDLING: Thank you, Steve.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. The planning for next week's peace conference on Syria must be going well. At the Paris meeting Secretary of State John Kerry presented his Russian counterpart with two Idaho potatoes, a gift. Which prompted Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to wonder if the potatoes might symbolize a carrot and stick approach to Syria. Actually, the long and pointed potatoes do look a little like carrots, but Kerry insisted no hidden meaning, no metaphor, just potatoes. It's MORNING EDITION.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Pope Francis continues to shake things up in the Catholic Church. On Sunday, the pope announced 19 new cardinals, many of them from the developing world, and concerned, like Francis, with poverty. Joining us now to discuss what many have termed the Francis Revolution is John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter. Good morning.
JOHN ALLEN: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: Let's start with the new cardinals, including the first cardinal from Haiti. It's a group very much in the mold of the pope. What does this mean for the Church?
ALLEN: Well, the first takeaway, obviously, is Francis, of course, is the first pope in the history of the Catholic Church to come from the developing world and there clearly is an embrace of the developing world in these appointments. I mean, in addition to the relatively small number of four Vatican officials and two residential cardinals from Europe, the others come from Africa, from Asia, from Latin America. Strikingly, two cardinals from the Caribbean, a region often overlooked in Catholic life.
But if you drill down, I think the really interesting thing about these appointments is how many of them come from what we might call the periphery. I mean, in Haiti, for example, as you say, we have the first-ever cardinal from Haiti. Strikingly, not from one of the country's two dioceses but from one of the smaller and more impoverished dioceses.
The same thing is true in the Philippines. Even in Italy the pope bypassed the traditional cardinal sees of Venice and Turin to lift up the archbishop of Perugia. So clearly in these appointments Francis is trying to underscore what he has said over and over again, which is he wants the Church to reach out to the peripheries of the world, both the geographical and the existential peripheries.
I would say that the consistory on February 22nd, which is the event in which a pope creates new cardinals, that profiles as the consistory of the periphery. And I think that's one of the signature touches of the Francis Revolution.
MONTAGNE: Well, one thing. In his state of the world address yesterday Pope Francis made a very strong reference to the horror of abortion. Now, this seems like a shift from some of his earlier comments about focusing on poverty rather than social issues like abortion. Is this any kind of evidence that Francis might not be quite, you know, as what you might call revolutionary as he seems?
ALLEN: No, I don't think so. I mean, Pope Francis has, time and time again, when asked for his personal views on abortion insisted that his views are those of the Church. So there never was any indication of a rollback. I think there was, perhaps, a shift in emphasis, a determination by Francis to lift up what's often called the social gospel, that is the Church's concerns for the poor, for war, for the environment, to give those issues similar emphasis to its teaching on abortion and gay marriage.
And then strikingly, yesterday, that reference to abortion which came in the context of his annual speech to diplomats, the 180 countries that have diplomatic relations with the Holy See, that line on abortion, Francis coupled it to a concern with child soldiers and also with human trafficking. I think that's another element to the Francis Revolution - seeing the Church's pro-life teachings as part of the continuum that also include these other social concerns.
MONTAGNE: Now, John, we only have about 30 seconds here but just very briefly, the Vatican has launched its own criminal investigation of an archbishop accused of sex abuses. Is that very unusual?
ALLEN: It is. In the past, the Vatican has subjected churchmen accused of abuse to internal ecclesiastical processes that could lead to them being deprived of their priesthood. What's unusual in this case is that there's also a criminal process that could, in theory, end up with this archbishop behind bars much like the papal butler who was accused of stealing papers off the pope's desk.
MONTAGNE: Mm-hmm. Right.
ALLEN: The difference in this case is the pope would be unlikely to issue a pardon.
MONTAGNE: Well, John, thanks very much.
ALLEN: You're welcome.
MONTAGNE: John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. The math for Obamacare is improving but still not quite adding up. New numbers from the federal government yesterday show that 2.2 million Americans signed up for private health insurance by the end of the last year under the Affordable Care Act.
MONTAGNE: But not so many of those enrolled are in the demographic the government really needs. That's younger people between 18 and 34 years old. They are the people who tend to be healthier and pay insurance premiums without needing much care.
INSKEEP: Fewer than a quarter of those enrolled are in that younger category - not nearly as many as the program needs to stay financially sound.
MONTAGNE: People in the 55 to 64 age group make up the largest percentage of those who have enrolled so far. The administration says it's ramping up outreach efforts. Open enrollment runs through March 31st.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
The number of people who have enrolled in the Affordable Care Act may be up but many of them are uncertain whether their enrollments actually went through. They're still waiting for I.D. cards and confirmation.
As Fred Mogul, from member station WNYC reports, many of the complaints are focused on WellPoint, one the nation's largest insurers.
FRED MOGUL, BYLINE: Just after the new year, Rob Cuillo got a nasty stomach bug.
ROB CUILLO: I was sick as a dog, puking my brains out...
MOGUL: After a couple days, Cuillo began thinking it might be time for a trip to the emergency room near his home on Long Island.
CUILLO: Because I was so dehydrated, I was thinking if this goes on another day I might need maybe an I.V. to give me some liquids...
MOGUL: But lying in bed, Cuillo had another thought.
CUILLO: I'm like, wait. I don't have the Empire - I don't have a card.'
MOGUL: Cuillo enrolled last month through the New York State health exchange in Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, a unit of Indianapolis-based WellPoint. But Cuillo's enrollment couldn't be confirmed until he paid his first premium - and he never got the bill. A couple days after his stomach virus ran its course, Cuillo got a letter in the mail, telling him how to pay the premium online. But the website wouldn't open.
CUILLO: I can mail it in to them. But I feel a little uncomfortable sending a check in the mail to people that don't answer phones. How do I know it'll even get there?
MOGUL: People have been complaining for months about crashing web pages, long wait times on phone lines and spotty customer service. But in recent weeks in New York, most companies appear to be processing enrollments smoothly
Elisabeth Benjamin, from the Community Service Society, says now complaints are centered almost exclusively on Empire Blue Cross.
ELISABETH BENJAMIN: I think we were all surprised that New York's blue-ribbon carrier is the carrier that's had, apparently, the most bumpy of rollouts.
MOGUL: Benjamin's organization helps New Yorkers sign up for health insurance.
BENJAMIN: I think a lot of folks enrolled in Empire, because of its incredible reputation. And everybody is a little flummoxed about why these problems are occurring.
MOGUL: Empire Blue Cross would not go on tape for this story. In an email, a spokesperson blamed an overwhelming and unanticipated number of applications. And said the high number of complaints in New York was because Empire is the state's biggest player. According to figures released yesterday, Empire has 18 percent of the new exchange plans, only slightly more than the next largest insurer.
Neither Empire nor state officials would disclose how many people have been affected by enrollment glitches. Donna Frescatore is the head of the New York State exchange.
DONNA FRESCATORE: I don't have a ballpark number. But I certainly think we've heard it enough time to know that it's an issue that needed immediate action.
MOGUL: The Empire Blue Cross statement says the company has added phone operators, expanded business hours and mailed out letters to customers telling them they'll receive invoices and ID cards as soon as possible.
But Sean Hayden, in Manhattan, says that's too little too late.
SEAN HAYDEN: We're done. Definitely.
MOGUL: Since November, Hayden has been trying to confirm his and his partner's enrollment with Empire. Last week, they gave up and went with a plan from a rival insurance company, with a lower monthly premium.
HAYDEN: I came in $60 cheaper. And the annual deductible, while still a little hefty, is a little bit less than what we were paying with the Empire plan.
MOGUL: And Hayden and his partner will be able to see doctors and hospitals in-network that Empire eliminated. Enrollees have until the end of March to sign up for 2014 coverage.
For NPR News, I'm Fred Mogul in New York.
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MONTAGNE: Our reports from Fred Mogul and Sarah Varney comes to us through a partnership between NPR and Kaiser Health News.
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MONTAGNE: You are listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
With the Winter Olympics approaching in Sochi, Russia, one of the world's fastest skaters trains far from the limelight. His routine has remained the same for years. He's even been criticized by some skaters, for his dedication to the same coach in Milwaukee.
Marge Pitrof of member station WUWM reports.
MARGE PITROF, BYLINE: Brian Hansen realized long ago that he'd be alone with the sport he loved.
BRIAN HANSEN: I'd ask the kids when I was little, if they knew who Dan Jansen was and they'd say no. And then I'd say you don't know who Dan Jansen is? He's the fastest speed skater in the world.
PITROF: Ever since, the 23-year-old has been working to become the fastest. At first, that meant commuting a couple hours from his home in Illinois, to the Olympic-size oval at the Pettit Center in Milwaukee.
HANSEN: We started driving up here, you know, a couple times a week. And it's always been so successful that, you know, I decided to stay here and not move out to Salt Lake City.
PITROF: Salt Lake City where many of his teammates have trained. There's not much hoopla surrounding speed skaters at the Pettit Center.
So this is where they're training?
HANSEN: Yup, they're training out on the oval and...
PITROF: Brian Hansen is one of the few people here every day, along with the center's Marketing Director Kevin Butler.
KEVIN BUTLER: They're going upwards of 30 or 40 miles an hour at peak speed. All for what? You know, it's just chasing their dream and the Olympic dream.
PITROF: Lap after lap, a break for water, more laps - slower, faster. A sleek, colorful flash whizzes by. The coach hollers.
NANCY SWIDER-PELTZ, SR: Nice, really good. Nice.
PITROF: Hansen has also stayed with the same coach.
SR: Alright, pretty good.
PITROF: That's not the norm, especially at the elite level.
HANSEN: We worked well together as a team and, you know, I kind of just stuck with it.
SR: A multiple Olympian once said to me: When are you going to let your skaters move on to a real coach.
PITROF: That's Nancy Swider-Peltz, Senior, Hansen's coach. She's been to the Olympics as an athlete and as a coach, with Hansen in 2010, when he won silver in team pursuit. Swider-Peltz says you won't see many long trackers with female coaches, or even the same coach as last time.
SR: In the world's opinion, people tire of things. They get, you know, I want to try something else. But on our level it's are you producing results?
PITROF: Brian Hansen is now among the best in both the 1,000 and 1500-meters. He's confident the familiar will work for him at the Olympics, along with his Spartan routine: eat, train, sleep.
HANSEN: And there's no other crazy element. It's just, who can skate the fastest.
PITROF: Hansen is glad it's nearly that time, when his former schoolmates may pay attention to his sport.
For NPR News, I'm Marge Pitrof in Milwaukee.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
The U.S. Supreme Court today hears arguments in a case testing the Constitutionality of buffer zones at abortion clinics. It was 14 years ago that the high court upheld floating buffer zones to protect patients and staff going in and out of these clinics from protesters. Now the issue is back before a new and more conservative court. NPR's legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg went to one of the clinics at the center of the case in Boston.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: We're standing outside the Boston Planned Parenthood health center, and there's this yellow circle, semicircle, around it, and the buffer zone essentially extends from the front door to the end of the curb right in front. And at each critical place on this circle, on this very snowy, cold, wintry morning, there is somebody trying to encourage people not to have an abortion.
ELEANOR MCCULLEN: Hi, good morning. Can I give you our information this morning?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Sorry. Probably on the way out. I'm just getting birth control. I'll get it on the way out.
MCCULLEN: We're available if you have any questions.
TOTENBERG: That's Operation Rescue's Eleanor McCullen, the lead plaintiff challenging the Massachusetts law that imposes a 35-foot buffer zone, about the length of a school bus, around the entrances to abortion clinics. McCullen looks like the stereotypical cheery grandmother.
MCCULLEN: I have pictures on my refrigerator of many babies.
TOTENBERG: She's out here every Tuesday and Wednesday on her mission to prevent women from having abortions.
MCCULLEN: I need them here and safe. Let's just talk a minute before you rush in. You rush in so quickly, and then you come out in tears.
TOTENBERG: But she says the buffer zone interferes with her mission and is a violation of her First Amendment rights.
MCCULLEN: It's America and I should be able to walk and talk gently, lovingly, anywhere, with anybody.
TOTENBERG: You seem to be able to do a fair amount of that despite the yellow line, yeah?
MCCULLEN: Fair amount, but guess what? Could do more.
TOTENBERG: Inside the clinic we meet nurse practitioner Teresa Roberts.
TERESA ROBERTS: The vast majority of what we do is primary care, contraception, cancer screenings, and people generally feel safe. The buffer zone is one of the things that has helped patients feel safe, I believe. Okay, let's go take a look.
TOTENBERG: She takes us past a security guard, metal detector and several layers of electronically keyed access doors. And when we get to an atrium, there's a stark reminder of the darkest days for Planned Parenthood in Boston: In 1994, when a gunman killed two clinic personnel and wounded five others people.
Nurse Roberts reads a plaque honoring those killed.
ROBERTS: The tree in this atrium honors the memory of Shannon Lowney(ph) and Leeann Nichols(ph), dedicated December 30, 1997. That was the third anniversary of their deaths.
TOTENBERG: Eventually, we end up at the office of CEO Marty Walz.
MARTY WALZ: Hi, Marty Walz.
TOTENBERG: This is a new job for her. In 2007, while in the state legislature, she co-sponsored the buffer zone legislation at issue in the Supreme Court today. She knows that in Massachusetts and many states there are buffer zone laws to protect people going to funerals, political conventions and polling places.
WALZ: In Massachusetts there's 150-foot buffer zone around every polling place in the state. There's even a buffer zone around the Supreme Court.
TOTENBERG: Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court bans all demonstrations, vigils, picketing and speech-making on its 252-by-98 foot plaza, allowing demonstrations only on the adjacent public sidewalk.
MARK RIENZI: What the court has said is that that plaza is not a traditional public forum.
TOTENBERG: Lawyer Mark Rienzi represents the anti-abortion demonstrators in Massachusetts.
RIENZI: Public sidewalks are places that people are supposed to be free to exchange information and exchange ideas, and the evidence in this case shows that it is much more difficult to engage with women when you half to stand behind the line and either raise your voice to reach them or run around the line to try to catch up with them.
TOTENBERG: If demonstrators are such a threat to people at the clinic, he asks, how come there have been no criminal prosecutions for harassment or violence?
RIENZI: In a situation where over seven years you don't even have a conviction of somebody getting within six feet of somebody without their consent, that you don't have that big a problem.
MARTHA COAKLEY: But that begs the question, you see. The statute has been effective so there has been no need to do it.
TOTENBERG: That's Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley explaining why there have been no prosecutions under this law or the previous law. She says that prior to the current law, the situation outside clinics was often unsafe.
COAKLEY: On a day-to-day basis there was an issue of safety, of people trying to get in the clinic being approached, harassed, physically harassed.
TOTENBERG: Lawyer Mark Rienzi sees the issue very differently.
RIENZI: Things like violence and obstruction and intimidation and harassment are already illegal. The only new thing that this law gets is the peaceful speech.
TOTENBERG: Not so, asserts Planned Parenthood's Walz. The 35-foot buffer zone is a reasonable time, place and manner regulation of speech, akin to regulating how loud you can play music at night.
WALZ: Nothing else in our 30-year history has worked.
TOTENBERG: Prosecuting people after they've violated criminal statutes doesn't solve anything, she says, because it happens after the fact.
WALZ: What you want to do is create an environment where people can get health care when they need it, when they have an appointment. Rather than have them leave because they're afraid or they're blocked from getting in the door, and then seeking a remedy.
TOTENBERG: At the Supreme Court today there will essentially be two questions. First, does the Massachusetts buffer law go too far, or is it permissible under the court's 2000 ruling allowing some buffer zones? Second is whether the court should reverse that 2000 decision entirely? The vote in that case was 6-3, with the court ruling that in situations like those at abortion clinics, unwilling listeners have some right to be let alone.
The dissenters, however, were furious.
JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: Does the deck seem stacked? You bet.
TOTENBERG: Justice Antonin Scalia.
SCALIA: Our longstanding commitment to uninhibited, robust and wide-open debate is miraculously replaced by the power of the state to protect an unheard of right to be let alone on the public streets. I dissent.
TOTENBERG: Scalia and his fellow dissenters are still on the court. But most of the majority justices from 2000 are gone, replaced in some cases by more conservative justices. For now, though, outside the Boston Planned Parenthood clinic the scene remains fairly constant. Even we were caught up in the buffer zone when we stopped to talk to protester Bill Cotter (ph) .
Do you feel very constrained by these yellow lines?
BILL COTTER: Yes.
TOTENBERG: And as I started to ask my next question with my feet squarely inside the yellow line, a security guard came out. Hi.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: How are you? You just have to be outside the line when you're doing this. Okay?
TOTENBERG: Oh, okay. All right.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: All right? Thank you.
TOTENBERG: Not that this is an experience unusual for any reporter in Washington. We get moved around all the time. Indeed, even lead plaintiff Eleanor McCullen often stands far outside the buffer zone. You know, Eleanor, I noticed something. There is this yellow line, but you're well beyond it. You're another 12, 15 feet beyond it standing here.
MCCULLEN: Well, that's true.
TOTENBERG: And why is that?
MCCULLEN: Well, I move around. I go where the Holy Spirit leads me.
TOTENBERG: Where the legal spirit leads the Supreme Court, we'll know by summer. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
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Women's sports are on commentator Frank Deford's mind, specifically the difference between, say, a female skier and a female basketball team.
FRANK DEFORD: In sport, besides just the losing, there are always disappointments - two from last week. First, Lindsay Vonn, sadly acknowledging that her injuries were too serious, announced that she would not be able to compete in the Olympics next month. Second, the owners of the Los Angeles Sparks, acknowledging that they were overwhelmed by debt, just gave up the franchise. Every employee was let go.
Since there're no apparent buyers, even for an L.A. showcase, the Sparks were just dumped back to the poor league, the Women's National Basketball Association.
Now, even if you aren't a sports fan, you've probably heard about the sad fate of Ms. Vonn. Even if you are a sports fan, you might well have not heard about the sad plight of the Sparks. The larger point here is how individual female sports continue to be the popular fare on that side of the gender line, while women's team sports simply never manage to attract much attention - let alone success.
This is, too, high season for the women. Serena Williams has begun her attempt to win her 18th Grand Slam title at the Australian Open. And then, notwithstanding Vonn's absence, women will be prominently displayed in the Olympics in sports like skiing and figure skating.
But, say, have you ever even heard of Breanna Stewart? She's the incredibly gifted sophomore basketball star at the University of Connecticut, which dominates its universe more than any other team in American athletics. If Breanna's UConn were a men's team, it would be daily lifted to the heavens in print, on radio and TV, in blogs and text and twitters.
If Breanna Stewart had become as fine a tennis player as she is at basketball, headlines would be blaring out of Australia now about the grand new challenge to Serena.
Ironically, despite the popular emphasis on individual sports, and at a time when so many girls in the United States now grow up, with pride, participating in sport, American women are lagging in that territory. In particular: Europeans dominate tennis, Asians golf. I can only conclude that, like our boys, more American girls are choosing to play team sports. Only, when school is over, there's no teams for the best of them.
Gee, I suspect that more Americans are familiar with the nostalgic baseball league from the 1940s depicted in the old movie, "A League of Their Own," than they are with any existing women's league. There's no crying in baseball. But there is crying for women's team sports.
The final irony is that I agree with what we keep hearing, especially about female politicians: That they're much more accomplished than men at working together at - well, at teamwork. It's just that nobody much wants to watch women athletes displaying that ability.
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MONTAGNE: Commentator Frank Deford part of our team, joins us each Wednesday.
You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
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Let's hear again from the Race Card Project, in which our colleague Michele Norris collects short stories about race and identity; stories that are only six words long yet capture so much depth, especially on the topic we're exploring this week: America's history of slavery, and the way we talk about that history. And people are talking about it since the release of the award-winning movie "12 Years a Slave."
Yesterday, we heard from a black man who was surprised by just how much he was burdened by discovering the details of his slave ancestors' lives. Today, we hear from a white woman whose ancestors were on the other side of the story.
KATE BYROADE: My name is Kate Byroade. I live in West Hartford, Conn., and my six words are: Slavery's legacy broke my family pride.
INSKEEP: Slavery's legacy broke my family pride - those are the six words from Kate Byroade, and our colleague Michele Norris is here to talk about the meaning behind them. Hi, Michele.
MICHELE NORRIS, BYLINE: Hey, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK. So, what's the backstory here?
NORRIS: Well, just a little bit about Kate Byroade. She's a librarian. She has two daughters. She now lives in New England, but her family history reaches back to the American South. And as we unpack her six words - slavery's legacy broke my family pride - we should really focus on that last word: pride.
INSKEEP: Why?
NORRIS: Well, for two reasons. First, Kate Byroade is proud of the fact that she has surrounded herself with all kinds of diversity. She lives in a diverse neighborhood. She attends a diverse church. Her kids go to diverse Girl Scout troops; that's really important to her. But there's a different kind of - I guess, more complicated pride that's based on family lore. She's always known that her family has owned slaves, in the South. Where the pride comes in is the fact that the family took some sort of comfort in the idea that the slaves that worked for them were treated better than most; that their slaves were treated well. This is a story that she heard over and over again, especially from her Southern grandmother.
BYROADE: She was matter-of-fact that the family had owned slaves in the past but emphasized that we did not come from plantation-type families, that our slaves had been trusted house servants. At first, this seemed OK to me because it was OK to her. But eventually, I understood that the domination of another person's free will was unacceptable. We are very shy in this culture about calling out the great wickedness of slavery, and we should not be. We must not be.
INSKEEP: Writing there an explanation of her six words. And this notion of the benevolent slave owner is a really common one, and you have someone here who is forcing herself to come to terms with the reality that it was, well, it was slavery.
NORRIS: Yeah. And it's been harder for her to come to terms with it, as she's gotten older. But even going back to her childhood, this is something that she struggled with - you know, when the things that she saw in textbooks, or the stories that she saw in TV and shows like the miniseries "Roots," didn't necessarily square with the genteel stories that she heard at her family dinner table.
NORRIS: And there's one particular incident that really left a psychological mark on her. It happened when she was just 10 years old. She was in school in Bloomfield, Conn. They were doing an assignment on immigrant ancestors, and she shared that story with us. We should listen.
BYROADE: And so we're there in class and actually, one of my best friends is a Mayflower descendant, but I am a Jamestown descendant. And I let drop that my family had owned slaves. Now, this school that I attended was probably about, at the time, 60 or 70 percent African-American in its population. And I did not think that I was boasting.
INSKEEP: Well, how did her fellow students respond to this disclosure, Michele?
NORRIS: Not well. And what really left the strongest impression on her was not necessarily what happened in the classroom, but what happened when she left the classroom. And she was on her way home from school; a group of black students from her school - and their older brothers and sisters from a nearby middle school - went looking for her.
BYROADE: And those children decided that I was - I don't know what they decided. But they decided they had to chase me, and they had to scream at me, and they had to yell at me. And they literally, did that.
NORRIS: Now, Steve, remember, she's just 10 years old when this is happening. She found safety in a stranger's house, someone she knew was home. She pounded on the door. And in the end, this left a mark on her. But instead of making slavery this subject that is taboo - something she never wanted to talk about - it actually deepened her interest in trying to understand this historical chasm in America and, you know, something that became even more difficult and even more complicated for her, the more she learned about her family's history.
INSKEEP: Well, what happened when some relations of hers - as we know from her submission to the Race Card Project - actually went looking for the details?
NORRIS: Well, as she expected, it really shook her up. A distant cousin discovered that when Kate Byroade's five-times great-grandmother arrived in the U.S. in the 1800s from Ireland, a black child - immediately upon her arrival - was purchased to serve as a handmaiden. And after that, when she discovered that this child had been purchased for her five-times great-grandmother, the history was then attached to a person.
INSKEEP: I can feel that as you're telling me this. It becomes a different story.
NORRIS: And I felt it when I talked to Kate Byroade. It wasn't just an abstraction. It was attached to a person - a child, a child who had a name. That child's name was Harriett.
BYROADE: She was a young child in the Indian territory, scooped up by outlaws, and used to cover a bet on a horse race. The outlaws lost, and she covered the bet to the tune of $275, and was eventually sold to an ancestor of mine. She was fortunate to become a member of the family. They set her free. They educated her, and she was able to marry respectably and was a valued member of the community of Fort Smith and Van Buren, Ark.
INSKEEP: Interesting use of the word fortunate, though, Michele, because she was kidnapped. She was snatched from her family.
NORRIS: And she was enslaved. And I asked Kate about that, and she admitted that that was an odd use of that term, but she was really referring to the fact that she was educated and lived better than most slaves, at the time.
INSKEEP: And by the way, this is another confirmation of the plot line of "12 Years a Slave," which is based on a true story of a free black man kidnapped into slavery.
NORRIS: As was this child.
INSKEEP: Now, I want to go back to the word we began with, Michele. You focused on the word pride. The six words were: Slavery's legacy broke my family pride. What does Kate Byroade do about that now?
NORRIS: Well, I'm going to defer to her. Pride is important to all of us, when we think back on our family history, but here's what she has to say about that.
BYROADE: I think you can feel pride in the legitimate accomplishments of your ancestors. But I don't think you can feel pride in the fact that they owned slaves. I don't think you can feel pride that the wealth and prestige was accomplished on the backs of people who were not free; who had no say, who were subject to your whim.
INSKEEP: Kate Byroade, sharing her story through the Race Card Project, as we talk this week about slavery and the discussions that flow from the film "12 Years a Slave." And we're going to continue tomorrow with Michele Norris as we talk to the screenwriter of "12 Years a Slave," John Ridley. Michele, looking forward to it.
NORRIS: I am, too. Thanks, Steve.
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Less than a month to go before the Winter Games, Russian officials are imposing what they say will be the tightest Olympic security in history. After terrorist attacks in the region, authorities are deploying surveillance equipment and tens of thousands of troops in Sochi, the host city on the Black Sea.
NPR's Corey Flintoff reports the location makes security challenging.
COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: Sochi is unique among the cities hosting the Winter Games, because it has the mild climate of a seaside resort, but it's less than an hour away from the snow-capped mountains of the North Caucasus. But the mountain region is also home to mostly Muslim ethnic groups that have a long history of conflict with Moscow that dates from the colonial battles of the Russian Empire to the Chechen Wars of the past two decades.
EKATERINA SOKIRIANSKAIA: Therefore, I - from the very beginning - found it very ambitious to decide to organize Olympics in such a close proximity to the most active insurgency crisis in Europe.
FLINTOFF: That's Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, the North Caucasus Project Director for the International Crisis Group. In fact, over the past few years, Islamist militants have staged almost daily attacks in various parts of the region, where the death toll among security forces, insurgents and civilians numbers in the thousands. The potential danger of holding the Olympics near a conflict zone was brought home last month when a pair of suicide bombings in the city of Volgograd left 34 people dead and dozens wounded.
Volgograd is on the edge of the North Caucasus, a little more than 400 miles from Sochi.
PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: President Vladimir Putin used his annual New Year's message to the nation to honor the dead and vow to pursue the terrorists to the death. The president has a lot of personal prestige riding on Russia's ability to bring off a spectacular event in the region, and do it safely.
Andrei Soldatov is a security expert and writer for Russia's secret services watchdog Agentura.ru. He was one of a pair of reporters who revealed the extent of the Russian government's electronic surveillance plans for Sochi, including technology that will be able to monitor every email, every social media message and every phone call made during the Olympics.
On a recent trip to Sochi, he also encountered the most low-technology security measure: Patrols of uniformed Cossacks who have the authority to stop visitors and check their identities.
ANDREI SOLDATOV: It seems to be the initiative of the local governor to impress the population. Because, of course, these people seem to be completely untrained to detect or identify terrorists.
FLINTOFF: And that, says Soldatov, is where the system falls down. No matter how many troops you deploy, he says, if they don't have training in counter-terrorism, experience in the community and, most importantly, good intelligence about the insurgents, attackers may be able to slip through.
Mark Galeotti is a professor of Global Affairs at New York University and an expert on crime and security issues in Russia. He points out that the anti-terrorism resources being concentrated in Sochi have to come from somewhere, from other cities that will be left more vulnerable.
MARK GALEOTTI: And combine that with the fact that if the rebels can't get to Sochi, then they will try for wherever they can get, because I think they realize that a bomb in Russia proper is much more newsworthy than a bomb in the North Caucasus.
FLINTOFF: The recent attacks in Volgograd and other cities close to the North Caucasus show that terrorists are ready and able to take their fight elsewhere in Russia. A big enough tragedy in one of Russia's heartland cities could drain the joy out of Putin's Olympics.
As Ekaterina Sokirianskaia points out, it doesn't take much to carry out an effective attack.
SOKIRIANSKAIA: Modern terrorism doesn't require much resources. You need a man or a woman who are ready to sacrifice their lives, and explosives that you can actually make at home.
FLINTOFF: And that, she says, makes it virtually impossible to protect every potential target during the Olympics.
Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Moscow.
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And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning. Today Congress takes another step toward what is known as regular order. That just means lawmakers pass ordinary bills that decide the annual spending levels of different federal agencies. The appropriations process is complex and sometimes ungainly, though it is considered far more sane than whatever lawmakers have done in recent years as that process broke down.
The House will vote on a measure that combines 12 annual spending bills. It spends more money than congressional Republicans wanted, but less than what President Obama had asked for. It's a compromise. It comes very late but it would keep the government open through October and avoid another shutdown. NPR's David Welna reports.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: It's more than 1,500 pages of mind-numbing numbers and instructions, and it's only been available to lawmakers since Monday night. House Speaker John Boehner acknowledges that voting today on an omnibus spending bill the size of a phone book is less than ideal.
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WELNA: Indeed, funding for the federal government that was due to expire today is being extended a few more days to move the omnibus through both the House and Senate. As he convened a Cabinet meeting yesterday at the White House, President Obama said he was very pleased with the bipartisan measure the two chambers have put forward.
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WELNA: Unlike last fall, this time it's been a near certainty that Congress would not let the government shut down over disagreements on funding levels. Kentucky's Hal Rogers chairs the House Appropriations Committee. He says his fellow Republicans have learned a lesson.
REP. HAL ROGERS: The shutdown educated, I think, particularly our younger members who was not here during the earlier shutdown, which I was, about how futile that kind of practice is.
WELNA: The $1.1 trillion omnibus boosts discretionary spending by $22 billion over last year's levels. Federal workers get a one percent wage hike, the first cost-of-living increase in four years. Head Start gets half-a-billion dollars more. A measure banning the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing carbon emission rules was left out. So were proposed cost-of-living cuts in military pensions for disabled veterans under the age of 65.
Funds are withheld for enforcing a scaling back of incandescent light bulbs. A ban is lifted on U.S. agencies financing the construction of coal-fired power plants abroad. Some of the more conservative measures may have swayed some Tea Party-aligned lawmakers who blocked other spending bills and now support the omnibus. Louisiana's Steve Scalise chairs the 170-member House Republican Study Committee.
REP. STEVE SCALISE: I think a lot of our members will be supporting it.
WELNA: Others, though, plan to vote against the package because it continues to fund the Affordable Care Act. Georgia Republican Phil Gingrey is one of them.
REP. PHIL GINGREY: In fact, I've made a pledge that I will be part of the repeal and replace Obamacare or I'll go home.
WELNA: Conservative groups including FreedomWorks, Heritage Action and the Club for Growth are all urging lawmakers to oppose the omnibus because it spends $42 billion more than the budget passed last year by House Republicans. But there's also opposition to the measure from liberals; they say it does too little to restore deep cuts in social services mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act. Raul Grijalva is a House Democrat from Arizona.
REP. RAUL GRIJALVA: I just think that by us continuing as Democrats to affirm that the Budget Control Act is a sane, and fiscally sane, and humanely sane piece of legislation is a mistake.
WELNA: But another Democrat, Maine's Chellie Pingree, says while everything in the omnibus may not be perfect, welcome to Washington.
REP. CHELLIE PINGREE: Most things that we have done have been so drastically imperfect that a pretty good solution is better than where we've been.
WELNA: Pingree expects she'll be voting today for the bill and it appears that majorities from both parties will be doing so as well. David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
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Diplomats from around the world are trying to raise $6 billion for Syria. In particular, the money is for Syrian refugees.
MONTAGNE: In a country that's really not so populous, millions of people have had to flee their homes, and many have had to flee the country. Startlingly few of those refugees have found shelter in the United States.
INSKEEP: We start with the diplomatic meeting in Kuwait to raise money. Secretary of State John Kerry is adding to the aid the United States has already offered, and he says he is hoping for ceasefire agreements in order to get help to those who are trapped.
NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: A former U.S. diplomat who worked on Syria for the Obama administration understands there are no magic solutions to the conflict in Syria and no limit to its complexity. But Fred Hof - now with the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East - says one issue should be at the top of the agenda.
FRED HOF: The entirety of the American diplomatic effort needs to be focused on what has become, easily, the most catastrophic humanitarian disaster of the 21st century.
KELEMEN: Hof says even that word catastrophe doesn't do justice to the conflict in Syria.
HOF: You're seeing genocidal effects being produced on the ground, this terrible daily bombing, strafing, shelling by the Assad regime of populated areas - densely populated areas - in the hope that they might catch a few rebel fighters. This is what is driving this humanitarian catastrophe, and the international community just hasn't come up with an answer to it yet.
KELEMEN: The U.N. stopped even counting the dead. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says U.N. human rights investigators don't have access to reliable statistics.
SECRETARY GENERAL BAN KI-MOON: We believe that well over 100,000 people have been killed, and hundreds of thousands people have been wounded.
KELEMEN: Activists now put the death toll at over 130,000. The war has also uprooted nine million people and counting, says Jan Egeland, a former U.N. aid coordinator who now runs the Norwegian Refugee Council.
JAN EGELAND: The humanitarian challenge that is posed to the world by Syria is much bigger than anyone seemed to be able to recognize. We haven't been in this kind of a situation since the Balkans and the Central African region was in flames.
KELEMEN: And the refugee crisis is putting enormous strains on Syria's neighbors.
EGELAND: Little Lebanon taking now a more than a million refugees. It's a country kneeling under the pressure. Jordan has taken more than half a million. They don't even have enough water resources for the existing poor population.
KELEMEN: While these are all issues being discussed here in Kuwait, Egeland says the world is responding too late, with too little.
EGELAND: Where are the big fundraising campaigns? Where is the outrage around the globe of what is happening with this hemorrhage of human lives inside Syria?
KELEMEN: The U.S. has been a major donor. But before coming to Kuwait, Secretary of State Kerry made clear the world can't just endlessly raise money to help more and more Syrians in need.
SECRETARY JOHN KERRY: It's one of the largest refugee, displaced person catastrophes on the face of this planet today, and it needs to stop. And we are not looking for a policy of simply increased assistance to refugees. We're looking for a policy that saves Syria and provides them an ability to go home and rebuild their lives. And that is our goal.
KELEMEN: The goal of a peace conference set to begin January 22nd in Switzerland. Kerry says those talks could last a while. In the meantime, he and his Russian counterpart, who have been pushing for this conference, hope to get Syria's warring factions to agree to humanitarian ceasefires, to at least get some aid to Syrians facing another cold winter and another year of war.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Kuwait City.
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Among those calling for the U.S. to take in more Syrian refugees is the International Rescue Committee.
SHARON WAXMAN: Enabling people to go home and rebuild their lives is always the first, second and third priority. But in many cases, there are Syrians - as there have been in other civil war situations - who will not be able to return home.
MONTAGNE: That's the group's vice president for public policy, Sharon Waxman. Her group says the U.S. could comfortably accept thousands more Syrians fleeing that civil war.
WAXMAN: The vast majority of assistance from the United States has been on the humanitarian resources side - more than $1.4 billion - which has been enormous and very significant in helping to relieve the suffering on the ground. The numbers are huge. You've heard them earlier, in the earlier piece. It is six-and-a-half million people displaced inside Syria, more than two million refugees that have fled the borders and are putting an enormous, enormous strain on countries across the region.
MONTAGNE: And yet other countries both in Europe and the U.S. are not really taking a sizable number of Syrian refugees. How many has the U.S. taken in so far?
WAXMAN: Less than 100. The United Nations refugee commissioner has recently called on the international community to begin a resettlement program. The number they're starting with is small. It's 30,000 people. We're calling on the United States to make a down payment, if you will, and start with resettling 12,000 of those this year, and then increasing the numbers in the out years.
MONTAGNE: Would you be at all concerned that letting in thousands of refugees from this particular civil war will also allow in bad actors?
WAXMAN: Well, it goes without saying that the United States has an obligation to protect the homeland and make sure that those people who are coming into the country don't pose a threat to the national security. You know, at the same time, there are a lot of procedures, rules and regulations in place that can enable us to screen out those bad actors and enable in the vast majority who really do need relief from persecution.
MONTAGNE: Yeah. Why has the U.S. been reluctant to accept Syrian refugees so far?
WAXMAN: We don't specifically know what the issue is. But in the past, there have been cases where - I mean, with an overly broad interpretation of the terrorism laws - where someone who may have given soup, for example, to someone in the opposition would be barred from entry. Should it be a terrorism-related concern, it would be ironic, since on the one hand, the United States government is providing support to some members of the armed opposition, but then on the other, might interpret the law in a way that would preclude their family members from coming to the United States. But we don't know that that's the case.
MONTAGNE: Clearly, this is a tragic situation of epic proportions, but what obligation does the U.S. to allow in Syrians?
WAXMAN: Well, the United States has always been the leader in refugee resettlement. Keep in mind there are more than 14 million refugees across the globe, and less than 1 percent are resettled. This year, for example, the president and Congress have agreed to resettle 70,000 refugees, and it's a question of American leadership and a deep, longstanding commitment to helping those who are feeling persecution.
MONTAGNE: Well, we do know, however, that the U.S. has not allowed in some people that one might say it does have an obligation to translators and those who work for the U.S. in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Very few of them have actually been able to make their way over to this country to be resettled. What do you say to that?
WAXMAN: Well, there is no doubt that Iraqis and Afghans who worked with and alongside the American military and American government do have a special place in this country. And there is an existing program to allow them to come into the United States, and large numbers of Iraqis actually have been settled. In the case of Syrians, those programs don't apply, but we do, obviously, have a longstanding commitment to helping those who are fleeing persecution, and Syrians fit squarely into that commitment.
MONTAGNE: Sharon Waxman is vice president for public policy and advocacy at the International Rescue Committee. Thank you very much for joining us.
WAXMAN: Thank you very much.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
Nicole and John Grant stopped by a Wisconsin bar. They watched the Green Bay Packers play the Chicago Bears. And Nicole Grant told her husband: If the Packers lose, you can shoot me with your stun gun. When the Packers lost, John Grant took her at her word. He's been fined $250 for disorderly conduct.
Taser Safety Tip 19: When your spouse says you can shoot her with a stun gun, ask yourself if she means it.
It's MORNING EDITION.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
More than half of the customers affected by last week's chemical leak in West Virginia now have access to safe tap water. About 300,000 people were told not to drink, wash or cook with water after the spill tainted the water supply. For days, the ban on tap water crippled the local economy.
And as officials continue to lift the ban zone by zone, small businesses are showing signs of life once again. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF POURING CRUSHED ICE)
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: Ice cold drinks are back on the menu at Adelphia Sports Bar and Grille in downtown Charleston.
DENO STANLEY: Well, you know, we had to, of course, flush all the water and do deep cleans and change all our filters and have our soda lines cleaned out.
WANG: Deno Stanley owns the restaurant, which like many businesses in the region, were closed for days after the ban on tap water.
STANLEY: You have to have good food and atmosphere and service. But, you know, without water, we're, you know, up the creek without a paddle.
WANG: So now you're floating again.
STANLEY: We are floating again. We're back up to about 80 percent capacity.
WANG: The missing 20 percent required a final health department inspection. But that didn't keep away regulars like third-grade teacher Laura Eid.
LAURA EID: I'm still a little nervous to wash my hands, so I'm still using hand sanitizer. I'm still using bottled water.
WANG: But you're not too nervous to go to a restaurant, though.
EID: No, not too nervous. But they are using paper plates and plastic cups. So it makes me happy.
(SOUNDBITE OF A CASH REGISTER)
WANG: Just a couple doors down, instructors at the Charleston School of Beauty Culture were happy to hear the cash register ringing again, after customers began returning for haircuts. But another sound has been even sweeter music to barber instructor Gene Nelson's ears.
(SOUNDBITE OF RUNNING WATER)
GENE NELSON: Because just about everything we do, we're dealing with water. Every person you touch, you're in contact with something, so they have to be able to wash their hands in between each client.
JORDAN SHEETS: Yeah, I have an interview at State Farm today.
NELSON: Oh, really?
SHEETS: Yeah.
WANG: Jordan Sheets took a seat in the barber chair, after desperately calling to find an open barbershop before his job interview.
SHEETS: I just had to get this length off so I could look presentable when I go in.
WANG: Looking presentable has been a challenge at home, where Sheets' family had been living days without safe tap water.
SHEETS: Had to drive to a truck stop - $13 a shower.
WANG: Sheets eventually found free showers at St. Francis Church in a small town nearby, St. Albans, where the water supply has been fine. And business these past few days has been even better.
(SOUNDBITE OF COINS)
WANG: The coin-operated washing and drying machines at St. Albans Cleaners have been running almost non-stop since the chemical spill.
A lot more quarters in those machines.
NANCY ROBINSON: A lot more quarters to gather, yes.
(LAUGHTER)
ROBINSON: A lot more 20s to change.
(LAUGHTER)
WANG: Nancy Robinson, who works at this Laundromat, says lines have formed out the door with customers from neighboring towns with tainted tap water.
ROBINSON: I'm not getting much time to do anything. I can't even get to my chiropractic appointments.
(LAUGHTER)
WANG: It's also been busy for Mike Messinger, owner of Dwight's Restaurant.
MIKE MESSINGER: I haven't been able to go outside and look around. I've stayed in my restaurant pretty much every waking moment.
MARY HENDRICKS: And I'll bring you some hot coffee right back, OK? You enjoy your meal.
WANG: Waitress Mary Hendricks has two words to describe business these past few days at the 24-hour restaurant...
HENDRICKS: Extremely crazy...
(LAUGHTER)
HENDRICKS: ...but blessed. I've been blessed at home with water, and blessed that my employment has water.
WANG: And blessed with a seemingly endless run of customers.
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News, Charleston, West Virginia.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. The National Security Agency faces pressure to reform. Congress is starting to consider what to do about an agency that still operates in great secrecy but has seen many of its operations exposed. In a moment we'll ask how much more we don't know. We start with lawmakers listening to a presidential commission pushing for change after the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
NPR's Carrie Johnson reports.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, kicked off the hearing with this question: Were the programs exposed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden really worth the backlash?
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: The most critical factor to decide whether to conduct any particular intelligence activity is an assessment of its value.
JOHNSON: For one such program, known in shorthand as 215 for its place in federal law, the president's review panel unanimously concluded that bulk collection of U.S. phone records did not break up any terrorism plots.
Here's former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell, a member of the panel.
MICHAEL MORELL: It is absolutely true that the 215 program has not played a significant role in disrupting any terrorist attacks to this point. That is a different statement than saying the program is not important.
JOHNSON: Morell said the program had helped analysts figure out terrorists were not operating inside the U.S., likening the collection of billions of phone records to writing a check each year for homeowner's insurance even if your house never burns down.
The review panel has urged the NSA to get out of the business of storing those records- instead, keeping them with telephone companies and service providers and getting a judge's OK before doing a search.
University of Chicago law professor and panel member Geoffrey Stone.
GEOFFREY STONE: The concern of the Fourth Amendment, the concern of our constitutional history, is that government can do far more harm if it abuses information in its possession than private entities can.
JOHNSON: And the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has identified episodes when the NSA gathered too much information and went beyond the bounds of the court's directives.
To Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee that's no surprise.
SEN. MIKE LEE: We've seen this movie before. We know how it ends. We know that eventually if that much information remains in the hands of government for that long, it may eventually be abused.
JOHNSON: Whether to allow the NSA to continue to collect U.S. phone records in bulk, and if not, who should store that data - those are some of the biggest decisions in front of President Obama.
Another recommendation of the review panel: to put an independent advocate before the secret surveillance court drew flak yesterday from an unexpected quarter: judges themselves.
Judge John Bates, former leader of the surveillance court, wrote lawmakers that a special advocate would be unnecessary and counterproductive in most cases. And if experts were needed, Bates said, that should be the call of the judges.
Panel member Cass Sunstein, a former White House adviser, respectfully disagreed.
CASS SUNSTEIN: The judge sometimes is not in the ideal position to know whether a particular view needs representation and that in our tradition standardly the judge doesn't decide whether one or another of you gets a lawyer.
JOHNSON: Now it's President Obama left to decide which of many opposing views will prevail and which of the review group's 46 recommendations he'll pursue by executive action or with the help of Congress.
Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And the president will announce plans for reform this Friday. The NSA says it's open to some reforms. On MORNING EDITION last week, NSA official Chris Inglis told us the agency is considering leaving telephone records in private hands.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHRIS INGLIS: The program would have to have sufficient agility. And if you had a plot that was unfolding at the speed that a human or perhaps individuals coordinating across time and space were effecting, you'd have to have some confidence you could move at that speed.
MONTAGNE: People closely listening to Inglis included Barton Gellman of The Washington Post. He's received documents from Edward Snowden. And Gellman says it will be hard to keep the phone records program functioning.
BARTON GELLMAN: They have to do an enormous amount of processing of that information in advance. And that means they can't leave it in three different places.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
In other words, they can't just leave it with a variety of phone companies and easily just go after it in the same way that they've been going after recently.
GELLMAN: Right. I think actually they can't do it the way they've been doing it at all, if it's left in the hands of three different phone companies. And I think they've been pointing that out to the president.
INSKEEP: The agency might prefer giving all records to some independent third party.
Barton Gellman was also listening when the NSA official told us he would welcome a public advocate before the secret court that oversees the agency.
GELLMAN: I think Chris Inglis had some very interesting things to say, both about the public advocate and even unbidden he volunteered the idea of a technology advisor for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
INSKEEP: Explain what that would be.
GELLMAN: Well, you have judges who are not computer scientists, who are not national security experts, being asked to decide the legal questions of an enormously complex set of facts. So complex, in fact, that in an earlier case in which one of those judges held that the NSA had been violating the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the NSA's response was that there was actually no one here who understood these programs well enough in their totality to represent what they were doing accurately to the court, because the court said it had been misled for a period of years.
INSKEEP: So this is a major concession then by the NSA were it to happen.
GELLMAN: It seemed so and the question is always in the details. I mean one of the most revealing things about oversight in this whole six months of stories has been what the chief judge of this Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said to my colleague Carol Leonnig at The Washington Post. He said we rely entirely on what the NSA tells us about what it's doing.
We have no independent fact-finding or investigative power. We don't go over to the NSA and ask questions and investigate. We wait for them to come to us and tell us what they're doing. So a technologist could advise the court on the meaning of what the NSA is saying. But if the court doesn't have investigative power, it puts a greater burden on other oversight methods.
INSKEEP: Other oversight methods, meaning Congress, for example.
GELLMAN: Meaning Congress, for example, which does had subpoena power and which also has very limited staffing that is both capable of understanding what's happening and cleared to know what's happening.
INSKEEP: So I want to play a little piece of this interview that we had with Chris Inglis, the retiring top civilian at the National Security Agency. He had already, at this point in our discussion, agreed that in hindsight he wished that he had disclosed more and so that led to another question in my mind. Here it is.
Is there a program within the NSA that you think if it were disclosed that there would be significant public debate about its correctness?
INGLIS: No, I don't think so. I essentially at the NSA have about 36,000 pages of requirements that I'm working on behalf of the executive branch. But those all can be traced back explicitly to an explicit authority, either from a court or from some executive branch authority, that says here's your authority to go get that.
INSKEEP: He says, I'm only doing as an agency what I'm told by other agencies, and no, I don't think there's anything else that would bother you. As someone who has studied a lot of the documents, Barton Gellman, do you think he's right?
GELLMAN: The answer he gave you would've applied exactly the same to the meta data program, to the collection of all American's call records. That's to say they were responding to intelligence requirement, meaning, you know, how do we find out X, Y or Z, and they were doing it under the authority of this closed system that said it was perfectly fine. And moreover they were comfortable with the idea that the American public would understand and agree if the program were disclosed.
So there could be any number of things they're doing. One that comes to mind, you asked Chris Inglis about the cancellation of a program in 2011 that was collecting all the records of everyone that all Americans were emailing and who they were emailing and who they were emailing. They said they're no longer collecting it under that authority, in that manner. It seems exceedingly unlikely to me that they are no longer collecting it at all.
INSKEEP: So you're instinct is, there's more information out there. There are more stories to come.
GELLMAN: I certainly have more stories that I think will raise interesting questions for public policy, and I think I won't say anymore about them right here and right now.
INSKEEP: Barton Gellman, who writes for The Washington Post and is also a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. Thanks very much.
GELLMAN: Thanks for having me.
INSKEEP: And more facts about the NSA are being reported this morning. The New York Times reports the agency implanted surveillance software in 100,000 computers around the world. You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Bonjour. I'm Renee Montagne. France's first lady is in the hospital, in shock over news that the president is having an affair with a much younger actress. At a press conference yesterday, Francois Hollande insisted his liaisons are his business.
And vive la difference, the French agree. Still, the White House might be wondering who exactly will be with Hollande as first lady when he comes to the U.S. next month. And the French president is not saying.
It's MORNING EDITION.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Over the years, Americans have grown used to getting anything they want when they want it on the Internet. But yesterday a federal appeals court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission cannot require Internet providers to offer unfettered access. It was Verizon that brought the case against the FCC. The ruling could have far-reaching implications for what's known as net neutrality. Here's NPR's Laura Sydell to help us out with what all this means. Welcome.
LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: Hello. Good morning.
MONTAGNE: First, do give us some background on the case, how it came about.
SYDELL: Back in 2010, the FCC passed rules to support so-called net neutrality. And this means that broadband providers must treat all traffic on the Internet exactly the same. So you can't discriminate between a Democratic website and a Republican website. And the rules got set up after the FCC tried to punish Comcast for secretly slowing some traffic on its networks.
Comcast got caught doing this when a guy who was sharing barber shop quartet songs noticed his network slowed down when he used the file sharing software Bit Torrent. The Associated Press confirmed his experience when it tried to upload the Bible with Bit Torrent, and the FCC took Comcast to court but lost. The court told the FCC that it didn't have rules in place to use against Comcast.
So the FCC came up with the open Internet rules. And that is where we got to this moment.
MONTAGNE: What was the basis on which Verizon challenged the rule?
SYDELL: Verizon argued that the FCC had no right to make those rules in the first place because the FCC didn't give itself the right. A few years back the commission decided that the Internet would not be regulated like a telephone line. Phone lines are heavily regulated. They're considered common carriers and therefore they're necessary for public communications.
The FCC decided it was going to be much lighter when it came to regulation on the Internet. It classified it differently. So Verizon essentially argued that since the FCC had classified it differently, it had no right to regulate the Internet so heavily and to tell them what to do. The FCC did try to reclassify Internet connections and what happened was the Republicans in Congress said we don't want you to reclassify it.
They got upset because they didn't want more regulation on the Internet.
MONTAGNE: OK then. So what does this new ruling by this federal appeals court mean for us consumers?
SYDELL: It means that theoretically your broadband provider can decide to slow or block particular websites. One of the arguments that the Internet service providers make is that Netflix and Google don't have to pay for fast access to your house, so that they might simply start charging companies if they want a faster line to the consumer, and that may bring up your prices.
And it could make it a lot more expensive for the next startup that might challenge Netflix or YouTube. They'd have to pay extra for a fast connection to you or strike a deal with Verizon. And I should add that Google and Netflix do pay to connect to the Internet. This is really about the last mile into your house, and the Internet service providers want to charge extra for that.
Netflix in particular is in the crosshairs here because more than 30 percent of Internet traffic at peak times comes from Netflix, according to studies. So Verizon might say, Netflix, you need to pay us more. Or maybe Verizon strikes a deal with Amazon and says your prime video service can get speedier delivery to the home and we're going to slow down Netflix.
MONTAGNE: And so what does this mean, Laura? Is the battle over?
SYDELL: Well, the FCC does have a few options here. It could appeal the decision. It could try and go back to the drawing board and come up with some new rules that fit with the decision, or it can try to reclassify broadband once again.
MONTAGNE: NPR's Laura Sydell. Thanks very much.
SYDELL: You're welcome.
MONTAGNE: This is NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
President Obama today heads to Raleigh, North Carolina to talk about the economy. He is expected to call upon Congress to try again to extend federal unemployment benefits. In Washington yesterday, Republicans in the Senate blocked a bill that would have restored the benefits that ended last month for 1.3 million Americans. But in North Carolina, a state law has prevented people there from getting the benefits since last July. North Carolina Public Radio's Leoneda Inge examines the impact of shortened help.
LEONEDA INGE, BYLINE: When Tammie Morris lost her job more than a year ago at a Chick-Fil-A in Durham, she and her husband Ortez Morris hit hard times. But at least they had Tammie's unemployment check to help them get by. Then last July 1, a new North Carolina law cut the maximum state unemployment benefits by roughly a third. As a result, the state no longer met the minimum federal standards for unemployment insurance.
That meant North Carolina residents could not get the extended federal benefits available in every other state. It was a body blow for many jobless people.
ORTEZ MORRIS: Very traumatic.
INGE: That's how Ortez Morris described the abrupt cut off. The 2013 law slashed state jobless benefits from 26 weeks to just 20 weeks - the shortest length of help in the nation. And the Morris's got none of the federal benefits that might have added months more of coverage. During the worst of the recession, some Americans were getting as much as 99 weeks of help from their combined state and federal benefits.
MORRIS: As soon as we needed unemployment, it got cut off. So that didn't feel proper, fair.
INGE: That made life a lot tougher for the Morris's. By August, they were staying with an aunt. Before long, the aunt wanted them to move along.
TAMMIE MORRIS: She left a note on the bed and told us we needed to find a place.
INGE: Now the couple lives at a homeless shelter where dinnertime allows them to join a line for beef or vegetarian casserole, salad, fruit and carrot cake for desert. They are grateful for the charity, but wish the state legislature would undo the new law.
Governor Pat McCrory says that won't happen.
GOVERNOR PAT MCCRORY: We had to take some - make some very, very difficult decisions.
INGE: He says the state's economic future is brighter now because the legislature has reduced its spending. And it's speeding up repayment of the $2.8 billion it owes the federal government, for borrowing unemployment dollars for laid off workers, during the worst of the recession. Governor McCrory explained his position recently to business leaders at an economic forum in Durham.
MCCRORY: We felt like our unemployment benefits were putting North Carolina in continued debt. And we needed to tear up the credit card and pay off that debt as quick as possible, so you in business could free up money and start hiring people again.
INGE: He can point to progress, at least in terms of the unemployment rate. In the past year, it has dropped from 9.4 percent to 7.4 percent. But critics are not impressed. They say when 70,000 people abruptly lost jobless benefits many simply fell out of the workforce.
JOHN QUINTERNO: Which means that our unemployment rate has come down sharply, but not necessarily for the right reason.
INGE: That's John Quinterno, an economic analyst in Chapel Hill. He says the state is worse off now because its labor force is shrinking.
QUINTERNO: And that's very - to me, very alarming.
INGE: Back in Washington, Democrats want to restore extended benefits and include a special provision that could allow North Carolina to start getting federal money again. But many Republicans oppose new spending without off-setting budget cuts.
Meanwhile, Ortez Morris is in a city-run worker training program. Tammie is looking for work. They both hope they won't be calling the shelter home come spring.
For NPR News, I'm Leoneda Inge in Durham, North Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Sure, millions of Americans have faced horrid winter temperatures in recent weeks, but think of the plight of India. In recent weeks, New Delhi has repeatedly faced temperatures of seven or eight degrees. OK, that's seven or eight degrees Celsius, still well above freezing. But in recent weeks it was colder in Northern India than it had been in decades. So it's a moment of relief as Indians gather around bonfires for their traditional end of winter celebration.
From New Delhi, NPR's Julie McCarthy sent us this postcard about the Punjabi festival known as Lohri.
JULIE MCCARTHY, BYLINE: Never mind that December 21st is actually the longest night of the year. By ancient custom, Lohri - which falls on the auspicious 13th of January - marks the winter solstice in large swathes of Northern India. In much of the south it's called Pongal.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MCCARTHY: Traditional music, food, and dance mark this moment when the sun is said to begin its ascendancy into the northern hemisphere, making the nights shorter and merry-maker Rita Shrivastava happy.
RITA SHRIVASTAVA: The severity of the winter, it goes now. Days will be longer, and the weather is going to change.
MCCARTHY: Rita's husband, retired Colonel R. Shrivastava, says Lohri also presages blue skies for farmers as the winter wheat of the Punjab, India's breadbasket, comes in
COLONEL R. SHRIVASTAVA: A farmer when sees his crop full bloomed and he's going get a lot of money out of that.
DESHRAJ LACHKANI: (Singing in foreign language)
MCCARTHY: Sufi singer Deshraj Lachkani was on hand to as hundreds gathered in the vast courtyard of the India Habitat Center in central Delhi. India's farewell to winter ushers in a New Year in the Hindu calendar. Revelers offer their Lohri blessing by tossing popcorn into a blazing bonfire.
(SOUNDBITE OF POPPING CORN AND MUSIC)
MCCARTHY: Anita Mulhotra instructs her two small boys on how to properly throw, correcting their baseball overhand pitch with the more respectful palms-up toss into the flames.
ANITA MULHOTRA: Fire god, it's a god. We are trying to pay the respects like this.
MCCARTHY: So is there a Hindu mythology to Lohri?
MULHOTRA: There was a village in Punjab and...
MCCARTHY: Anita explains that the Mughal emperor there coveted two beautiful Hindu sisters.
MULHOTRA: Their name was Sundari and Gundari. So...
MCCARTHY: A Sikh leader told their parents to find two grooms and he performed the weddings around a fire that night, sparing the girls the clutches of the emperor in the morning. The sardar, as the Sikh is known, is celebrated today.
MULHOTRA: Yes, so Hindu religion tries to say thank you to those, you know, all the sadars that made their daughters live a respectable life.
MCCARTHY: So Lohri is auspicious for newlyweds and newborns. One modern age guru calls it the transcendence from darkness to light. Thirty-two-year-old Kapil Saini says Lohri provides an excuse for families in rapidly changing India to unite.
KAPIL SAINI: So we are sitting together, eating meal, sharing thoughts, wishing each other a bright future, say thanking to God, this is what Lohri is.
MCCARTHY: Today's gloomy skies made it hard to imagine that winter's end may be near. Anita Mulhotra shrugs off the doubts and declares...
MULHOTRA: Life and hope.
MCCARTHY: Julie McCarthy, NPR News, New Delhi.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And time now for our music project, Heavy Rotation. Each month, NPR Music turns to public radio DJs and program directors to name their favorite new tune. And each month, we feature one of those picks here on MORNING EDITION.
JESSI WHITTEN, BYLINE: My name is Jessi Whitten. I'm the music director of OPEN AIR, from Colorado Public Radio.
MONTAGNE: Her pick is "Silver Timothy" by Damien Jurado.
WHITTEN: Damien Jurado is a Seattle-based musician. "Maraqopa" is his last record that came out, and it was beginning with this theme of a man who's leaving home, never to return, to find himself. And this is picking up where that left off.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SILVER TIMOTHY")
DAMIEN JURADO: (Singing) I was met on the road by a face I once knew. Shapeless was his frame, and his colors were few.
WHITTEN: Maybe the problem is that I saw "American Hustle" too recently. What I literally see is walking through a poolside party in the '70s, and everyone's beautiful and wearing sunglasses and just being as hedonistic as I imagine the '70s were. So, that's where this beginning takes me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SILVER TIMOTHY")
JURADO: (Singing) Go back down, don't touch the ground. Go back down, don't touch the ground. Go back down...
WHITTEN: All of the sudden, there is this psychedelic cyclone that's just pulling you towards madness.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SILVER TIMOTHY")
WHITTEN: It's like you're caught in the tornado, and you're about to meet little people in "The Wizard of Oz."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SILVER TIMOTHY")
JURADO: (Singing) I was met on the road by a face that was mine.
WHITTEN: He's been making music for about 20 years now, so throughout that time, people have known him as a number of different things, primarily as a folk musician. And now he's really moving out of his folk element here.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SILVER TIMOTHY")
MONTAGNE: That's Jessi Whitten, of Colorado Public Radio. Her pick for this month's Heavy Rotation: "Silver Timothy," by Damien Jurado. And you can find our complete list at NPR.org.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Like other animals, we humans grow when we're young and then stop growing once we mature. But this turns out not to be a universal rule of nature. Scientists have discovered that trees keep growing faster the older they get. NPR's Richard Harris reports on this unexpected twist of nature.
RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: Talk to any forester and you'll hear that trees seem to be a lot like people. They grow to a certain height, and then they stop getting taller. So it's easy to assume that their overall growth stops when trees reach that stage of maturity.
NATE STEPHENSON: A very common assumption has been their growth rate declines with increasing size.
HARRIS: Nate Stephenson, a forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, decided to challenge that common assumption. He rounded up dozens of colleagues from 16 countries and asked them to look back at the growth rate of nearly 700,000 trees that have been the subject of long-term studies. And according to results published in Nature magazine, the growth didn't slow down as these big trees got old and mighty.
STEPHENSON: What we found was the exact opposite, that tree growth rate increases continuously as trees get bigger and bigger.
HARRIS: Trees eventually stop getting taller, but they keep getting wider. And when scientists measured that extra girth, they discovered that these trees packed on more and more mass the older they got.
STEPHENSON: It's as if on your favorite sports team you find out that the star players are a bunch of 90-year-olds. They're the most active. They're the ones scoring the most points. That's an important thing to know.
HARRIS: Because in the world of trees, that means the oldest trees in the forest are doing the most to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and store it as carbon in their wood. Stephenson says that's another argument for preserving old-growth forests.
STEPHENSON: Not only do they hold a lot carbon, but they're adding carbon at a tremendous rate. And that's going to be really important to understand when we're trying to predict how forests will change in the future, in the face of a changing climate or other environmental changes.
HARRIS: Some ecologists have argued that young forests are more important than old forests for combating climate change. That's because the thousands of small trees that replace the few big ones collectively do pull more carbon dioxide out of the air than the mature forest does. But Stevenson says that doesn't give full credit to the importance of old, mature trees.
Previous studies have suggested that old trees grow faster than young ones, but this huge study really makes that point. And Nathan Phillips, at Boston University, says the study's results have implications that go beyond conservation strategies. The findings challenge an assumption that seemingly applied to all of biology.
NATHAN PHILLIPS: We didn't think that things could have unlimited growth potential at some level, at the organismal level. So there's been a long history of that kind of thinking.
HARRIS: But the new study shows that when it comes to growth in trees, well, the sky's the limit. And this leaves Phillips wondering whether trees might in fact have the potential to live forever. He tries to imagine what would happen to a tree if you could prevent it from being blown down or succumbing to drought or disease.
PHILLIPS: How long could it go? And I think that it could go for a long, long time - basically indefinitely.
HARRIS: He's seen 500-year-old Douglas fir trees that are still producing scads of pinecones, which means they're still reproducing. So when it comes to aging, trees have something very special going on. Richard Harris, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Florida may soon become the latest state to allow medical marijuana. Groups are gathering signatures to put a referendum on the fall ballot. And even before that, Florida's legislature may allow residents access to a particular type of marijuana. According to its advocates, this strain, called Charlotte's Web, offers new hope to children with severe seizure disorders. NPR's Greg Allen reports.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Paige Figi is a Colorado mom whose daughter Charlotte suffers from Dravet syndrome, a debilitating genetic disease that left her unable to walk, talk or eat. Figi says an oil extracted from a strain of marijuana has helped save her daughter's life.
PAIGE FIGI: Charlotte is doing great. She's two years into treatment. I would have brought her here, but she can't leave Colorado.
ALLEN: That's because the marijuana extract her daughter depends on can't be taken over state lines. Paige Figi was in Tallahassee recently, to tell her story to Florida legislators. They're considering a bill that would allow access to a type of marijuana now known as Charlotte's Web. It's a variety of marijuana with very little tetrahydrocannabinol - THC, the ingredient that produces the high. The strain has very high amounts of another compound: cannabidiol, or CBD.
A few years ago, Figi told legislators, her daughter was having 300 seizures a week. After trying every drug and therapy she and her husband could think of, Figi says they started Charlotte on a marijuana extract high in CBD. She takes just a few milligrams of the oil each day in her food. Figi says the results have been dramatic.
FIGI: She's 99 percent - almost 100 percent seizure-free. She has about one or two seizures per month now, from 1,200.
ALLEN: Figi told legislators the marijuana extract isn't a cure. Her daughter and others with Dravet have a genetic disease they'll have forever. Figi says her daughter will never drive a car, marry or live independently. But she says Charlotte, who used to have a feeding tube, now can eat and drink on her own. She has friends and a vastly improved quality of life. For families like hers, Figi says, Charlotte's Web and similar strains of marijuana represent a lifeline.
FIGI: It's brand-new. And it's very, very exciting for these parents, who have nothing left. These kids are going to - I'm sorry to be insensitive - they will pass from these syndromes. This will be how they die.
ALLEN: The Figi story has become well-known among parents of children with Dravet syndrome and other seizure disorders. There's now a waiting list for Charlotte's Web, and the grower in Colorado is working to ramp up production. In the meantime, families from Florida and other states have been moving there to get their kids started on the therapy.
CORY BROWNING: I've purchased a house in Breckenridge, Colo.
ALLEN: Cory Browning is a lawyer in north Florida whose daughter has Dravet syndrome and has suffered from as many as 200 seizures a day. Since medical marijuana is illegal in Florida, Browning told Rep. Matt Gaetz he's looking to Colorado.
BROWNING: I don't want to break the law. I have a law license to protect. If I have to, our only options may be to send my wife and daughter to Colorado.
STATE REP. MATT GAETZ: And so you would split your family?
BROWNING: Yes. We have no choice.
ALLEN: Some 21 states and the District of Columbia now have medical marijuana. In Florida, leaders in the State Legislature have consistently blocked efforts to bring a bill to the floor. But for Charlotte's Web and similar strains, even some staunch opponents of medical marijuana now are willing to make an exception. Rep. Charles Van Zant, a Baptist minister from central Florida, has long opposed anything that he believes expands substance abuse. But after hearing pleas from Paige Figi and other parents, he said he was moved.
STATE REP. CHARLES VAN ZANT: I don't think this is substance abuse. I think this is using the substance wisely, as God intended. I'm for it.
ALLEN: While parents and advocates are embracing this specialized form of marijuana as a new therapy for children with seizure disorders, many medical experts are more circumspect. Dr. Orrin Devinsky is a neurologist and head of New York University's Comprehensive Epilepsy Center.
ORRIN DEVINSKY: There are many more unknowns than knowns. And I think that the focus of the community - both lay and scientific, and governmental - should be on getting good information. That should be the real focus of what we need right now.
ALLEN: Devinsky's overseeing clinical trials - beginning soon - that will test the safety and efficacy of a CBD compound developed by a British drug company. To get FDA approval for the drug, Devinsky says researchers will have to go through blind tests, a process likely to take at least a couple of years. In the meantime, there are families in Florida - and around the country, and the world - who say their children can't wait for the tests. For these families, Dr. Devinsky thinks Charlotte's Web and similar marijuana strains may make sense.
DEVINSKY: If I had a child who had failed 15 medications and drug treatments, and there was nothing else to do and they were having many seizures a day that were terribly disabling, I think it would be a very reasonable thing to try a high-CBD cannabis product.
ALLEN: As enthusiasm for the new therapy spreads among parents of children with Dravet syndrome and similar disorders, ironically, Dr. Devinsky says, it may make it harder to conduct clinical trials. The challenge may be finding families who haven't already begun trying the Charlotte's Web extract.
Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now we have the story of people who are eating out by dining in. Numerous websites seek to connect diners with home cooking in someone else's house. Eat With or Side Tour or VoulezVous promise to connect you with a stranger who would happy to have you over for dinner.
Reporter Arun Venugopal, of member station WNYC, gave it a try.
ARUN VENUGOPAL, BYLINE: It's easy to think that this latest foodie trend sweeping New York and other cities is all about the food. Mmm, can't wait to get that home-cooked meal in Chinatown.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD CHATTER)
VENUGOPAL: But it's not.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I know baseball.
(LAUGHTER)
VENUGOPAL: The food is often just an excuse...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I know the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to L.A.
VENUGOPAL: ...for what can essentially be a really great party with a bunch of people you've never met.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: You say Jay Z, because in my funny-speaking language, I say: Oh, that's Jay Zed.
(LAUGHTER)
VENUGOPAL: This was a taco party I found through the Eat With website. I paid 40 bucks to go to the home of two fun-loving Latinas. They have a great apartment, filled with art, just across from the Brooklyn Museum. And as soon as their guests arrived they made it a point to shove rum drinks into their hands.
Katrin Bergmann came all the way from Frankfurt, Germany. She was part of a gaggle of German tourists that turned up, because she'd seen a segment on Eat With on German TV called "How to Survive in New York."
KATRIN BERGMANN: We thought we wanted to do something different from a normal tourist, tour. And we wanted to talk to real people who live here. And so we have real Brooklyn people around us, and that's...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: And Germans.
BERGMANN: And Germans, yes.
(LAUGHTER)
VENUGOPAL: The hosts, Glori Linares and Victoria Delgado, keep shuttling between the dining room and kitchen, frying up empanadillas stuffed with Oaxaca cheese. They're both vivacious, easy-going, perfectly suited to the job of hosting a bunch of strangers and dealing with unforeseen circumstances, like an episode last summer.
GLORI LINARES: And all of a sudden, we hear a thump on the floor.
(LAUGHTER)
VENUGOPAL: She passed out?
VICTORIA DELGADO: She did pass out, and we freaked out a little bit, not that much.
LINARES: After that, she was, like, really, like, she was fine.
DELGADO: She just fainted.
LINARES: She just fainted.
VENUGOPAL: Because it was a hot day, and the lady went a little heavy on the rum. But I actually went for two dinners, and one was nothing like the other.
RASANATH DASA: If ambition is tied into authenticity, there's nothing more powerful than that.
VENUGOPAL: Here, the setting was the East Village, in Manhattan. And the host, a Wall-Street-banker-turned-Hindu monk.
DASA: The problem is when it gets rooted in narcissism. Then it takes on a very different form.
VENUGOPAL: We sat in Rasanath Dasa's apartment, discussing authenticity and the pure life, capitalism and self-denial, all the while sipping water and having what might be some of the best soup I have had. If this all sounds a little strange, a little surreal it was, and completely mesmerizing.
Vipin Goyal co-founded Side Tour, the site where you can sign up Rasanath Dasa's dinner. He said the company takes pains to find people who are more than just good cooks.
VIPIN GOYAL: It was people who we thought would be really remarkable for other people to get to know.
VENUGOPAL: The idea seems to be succeeding. Side Tour says some of its hosts make anywhere from 10 to $50,000 a year. And in the fall, the company was bought by Groupon. Meanwhile, Eat With is adding dining experiences in dozens of countries. Not that anyone's expecting home dining to replace restaurants, at least not in New York. After all, there are only so many New Yorkers who can cook, and are willing to play host in their tiny apartments. But that doesn't make the experience any less fun.
BERGMANN: Cheers.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLINKING GLASSES)
VENUGOPAL: For NPR News, I'm Arun Venugopal, in New York.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's go from Oscars to gold medals. The Winter Olympics are approaching and the U.S.A. is looking to be a contender in bobsled. It took the gold in the last Winter Olympics in the four-man competition, and the U.S. is hoping to get the edge in next month's games in Sochi, Russia with a little help from technology. NPR's Robert Smith reports.
ROBERT SMITH, BYLINE: When I meet Steve Holcomb, bobsled driver, he doesn't talk about his Olympic gold medal. He talks about the one that got away. Four years ago, Vancouver, his two-man bobsled team started the run with a great push.
STEVE HOLCOMB: I was actually winning the race in Vancouver and I made a driving mistake, and we went from first place to sixth place in two turns.
SMITH: Holcomb blames himself. In bobsledding, any tiny mistake in the driving can cost you the fraction of a second that you need to win. But the problem in the two-man team was bigger than just one run. The U.S. team hadn't won a two-man bobsled gold medal since FDR was president. And after the last Olympics, they took a look at the sled itself. It was older than some of the athletes at the games.
HOLCOMB: The sled I had been using up until that point was actually about 19 years old. It had just been, you know, we built it every year and modified it to meet the rules. And it was one of those sleds that was fast.
SMITH: But the European teams had new sleds that were redesigned constantly, sleds built by race car designers. The Italians had the help of Ferrari; a Japanese Formula One team was working with that country's athletes. And so the United States went looking for an American race car partner.
MICHAEL SCULLY: My name is Michael Scully and I'm a creative director at BMW DesignWorks.
SMITH: BMW, a German company, but, as Scully stresses, he works in California in the North American division. Go USA. Scully knew race cars and, as it turns out, also the challenges of high speed winter sports. He was a snowboard racer in his youth. So when Scully sat down in his first bobsled, he thought he knew what speed was.
SCULLY: It was very quickly clear to me that I was not in any way prepared.
SMITH: Riding a bobsled into one of those sharp corners is kind of like having your head slammed up against the wall by a really big guy.
SCULLY: It's this very almost chaotic experience.
SMITH: Scully was convinced that there were things he could do to make the sled more like a quiet precision race car. Steve Holcomb, the driver, remembers their first meeting and Scully just bursting with ideas.
SCULLY: We can raise that up, we can make this more narrow, we could close out there we go, ahh, that's all illegal, unfortunately.
SMITH: Ah, the rules. In order to make bobsledding fair, the sport has strict standards for the sled. The weight has to be the same, the runners on the bottom carved from the same metal. The trick would be to find the wiggle room in the rules. For instance, the BMW designers moved the center of gravity. They wouldn't tell me whether it was forward or back. They adapted the steering for Steve Holcomb's style, and they made the sled more aerodynamic, smaller.
HOLCOMB: It's quite snug.
SMITH: So snug that the new sled came as a bit of a surprise for the bobsled guys with their football player-sized bodies.
HOLCOMB: It is challenging to get in. Trust me. When you're at a full sprint and you have to jump over a three foot wall, basically, of the sled and you have to get in, it's not easy.
SMITH: But as they tested the new sled, the numbers looked good. It was faster than the old one. Now, this does not guarantee a gold medal for Team USA. After all, the designers from Ferrari know the same principles of aerodynamics as the folks at BMW. But there is a psychological factor at play here. When Team USA shows up with their brand-new sled, they keep it covered, hidden from view.
SCULLY: You want people to think that you've thought of something that they haven't yet and then that drives them crazy. 'Cause they're like, why didn't I think of that?
SMITH: Adding to the mystique, the new sled has put up some remarkably fast times this season.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPORTS BROADCAST)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Unintelligible) 55.63. That was a winning run.
SMITH: This is footage from Universal Sports.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPORTS BROADCAST)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Never in history of bobsledding has the USA won a two-man championship gold medal.
SMITH: But they're doing it this season. Is it the sled? Is it the driver? Part of the Olympic edge is to keep your opponents guessing. Robert Smith, NPR News, New York.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits, attacking income inequality, they are all at the top or near the top of President Obama's domestic agenda. And all fall under the purview of one cabinet member, Labor Secretary Thomas Perez. Perez has been on the job since last summer.
NPR's Brian Naylor has this profile.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: If not exactly a kid in a candy store, Tom Perez was having fun this week at the Detroit Auto Show. He sat in a Corvette, climbed into a new pickup, and gamely posed for pictures next to a $140,000 Dodge Viper.
TOM PEREZ: Any federal employee who's driving a Dodge Viper either has a really good spouse, you know, a really good inheritance, or needs to be investigated by the inspector general.
NAYLOR: Perez was one of a parade of Obama administration officials to stop by the auto show this week, celebrating an industry that has staged a remarkable comeback in recent years, thanks in part to help from the administration and taxpayers. As Perez told a local TV interviewer...
PEREZ: Oh, the main note I'm taking is that manufacturing is alive and well in America and here in Detroit, and that the auto industry is absolutely roaring back.
NAYLOR: The health of manufacturing in the U.S. is an issue close to Perez's heart. He's the son of Dominican immigrants, and grew up in Buffalo, another industrial city that's seen better days. Lately he's become a high-profile pitchman for the president's economic message. He's fond of describing the Department of Labor as a kind of online dating agency, matching workers with jobs.
PEREZ: We're kind of like the Match.com for employers and workers, and sometimes in order to make that match work we need to help somebody upscale and get those critical skills to enter that Allied Health profession or the advanced manufacturing.
NAYLOR: At his next stop, Focus: HOPE, a Detroit job training and community center, he chats with Jamal Edwards, a senior at Wayne State University, who in addition to pursuing a degree in engineering is also learning how to make auto parts.
JAMAL EDWARDS: I've been on the machine (unintelligible) about a year now.
NAYLOR: Are you pretty comfortable with it?
EDWARDS: Yes, I am. I'm pretty comfortable.
NAYLOR: Is it like driving a car?
EDWARDS: No. It's not like driving at all.
NAYLOR: Perez is the former labor secretary from Maryland, but his most recent job was with the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was assistant attorney general for civil rights. He says there are a lot of parallels between the two posts. He cites the March on Washington that took place 50 years ago last August.
PEREZ: That march was a march for jobs and a march for justice. When Dr. King was bailed out of jail in Birmingham, it was Walter Reuther and the UAW who bailed him out. And the interconnection between labor rights and civil rights is very real.
NAYLOR: Perez's final stop in Detroit is at the home of Shinola, once a shoe polish firm that now manufactures high end watches and bicycles. It gives Perez a chance to take one of the bikes for a spin around the company's office.
PEREZ: You know, this is inspiring me now to - this is inspiring me to ride my bike back to work now. Even though...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: That's perfect.
PEREZ: Yeah. You know, it's really light.
NAYLOR: Shinola is a feel-good story. Its watch assemblers include a former pizza deliveryman and a woman who worked her way up from janitor. Perez says it's the American spirit at work. He says his department has to do more to help businesses like Shinola connect with potential employees.
PEREZ: We have 2,500 American job centers out there, and one of the things we're doing is more aggressively marketing that fact. Too many businesses don't know that we exist. Too many people in need don't know we exist. That's why I spend so much time with large and small businesses alike educating them about who we are and what we do.
NAYLOR: Perez's big push now is for an increase in the minimum wage. It's part of what he seeks to accomplish in the next three years, giving people ladders of opportunity, as he puts it, like the one he had, to climb into the heart of the middle class. Brian Naylor, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
There's another comeback happening in Detroit. Some carmakers are making significant investments in a fuel that is not new at all - diesel. The newest diesel engines are far cleaner than their predecessors, and they get many more miles per gallon. The question is, what's holding customers back from switching gas pumps?
NPR's Sonari Glinton reports from the floor of the North American International Auto Show, in Detroit.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: When you look around the auto show, there's a lot of energy. There's a lot of money being spent again, and there's one topic that keeps coming up - fuel economy. Scott Yackley is with General Motors.
SCOTT YACKLEY: Yeah. As you can see around the auto show, it's a major driver. Everywhere you go, there's fuel-economy numbers. Even on the sports - ultra-luxury sports cars, they're talking about fuel economy. So fuel economy overall is very important.
GLINTON: Now, Yackley should know. For the past seven years or so, he's been living and breathing fuel economy. He's one of the engineers who engineered an engine for GM's all-new midsize trucks. It's diesel. And if the auto show is report card day for engineers and designers, you can hear Yackley puff up with pride when he describes his recent work.
YACKLEY: It's got a capability beyond the other two gasoline engines - with respect to towing, torque, payload - and it's really fun to drive. So you get all those additional benefits; it's fun to drive; and above all, this diesel is expected to be the most fuel-efficient truck in the industry.
GLINTON: GM is not the only carmaker launching diesel trucks. Chrysler announced it's putting diesel into its Ram truck. And while the American car companies are rolling out diesel engines slowly, Volkswagen is expanding its portfolio in the U.S. with second- and third-generation diesel.
OLIVER SCHMIDT: Diesel is our technology for fuel efficiency.
GLINTON: Oliver Schmidt is head of engineering and environment with the Volkswagen Group of America. He says diesel is still getting a bad rep from a terrible try 30 years ago. He says people still ask if they're loud or smelly.
SCHMIDT: And they ask if they are smoky because they've been on this school bus when they were kids. But with current emission regulations, this is gone. All the stinky, smelly stuff - that is gone. The diesel is as clean as the gasoline car today. And with future emission regulations that are coming up, they are getting even cleaner.
GLINTON: Schmidt says Volkswagen is selling a lot of diesels. And they're selling them in the middle of the country, where drivers are doing a lot of highway miles. Diesel engines get much better mileage on the highway.
But what accounts for the slow adoption - or re-adoption? Margaret Wooldridge is a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan.
MARGARET WOOLRIDGE: I mean diesel - small diesel engines for passenger vehicles are agile; they meet emissions regulations. But the fear is that people just won't buy them.
GLINTON: There is some worry about refueling a diesel. Diesel is not nearly as ubiquitous as gas; there are about a quarter as many stations. However, they tend to be grouped on highways and interstates. And in real-world driving, diesel owners report getting as much as 50 miles per gallon. But a diesel doesn't come with a - you know, a little green leaf or emblem saying hybrid, so drivers don't get the street cred they might get with say, a Prius. Again, Margaret Wooldridge.
WOOLRIDGE: I think primarily, that's cultural, and that's the U.S. bias against diesels. So all those automakers sell diesel engines - diesel passenger cars in Europe, for example - at very high production amounts, production volumes.
GLINTON: Wooldridge says in order to get to the new fuel-efficiency standards, American car companies will have to get over that bias because they can't leave out any technology - even an old one, like diesel.
Sonari Glinton, NPR News, Detroit.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning.
The warring parties in Syria are one week away from a peace conference. Rebels have been fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Rebels have also been fighting rebels. Syria's political opposition is fractured over attending the peace conference at all, raising the prospect that Assad may come out on top.
NPR's Deborah Amos is following the run-up to these peace talks. She's on the line from Beirut. Hi, Deborah.
DEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: And people have assumed that developments on the battlefield, of course, will influence the peace talks. If we looked at a map of Syria marking what territory the opposition holds, how's it look different than a few months ago?
AMOS: You know, this has been a stalemate for some time now, which is why there is a movement for a diplomatic solution. Nobody is winning on the ground. There has been an interesting development in terms of rebels fighting rebels. What you had is a revolt that began more than a week ago, when you have homegrown Syrian rebels turn on ISIS, and that is an al-Qaida affiliated group with foreign fighters. But lately, ISIS has regrouped. They've taken back territory, the provincial capital of Raqqa, and some of the border crossings with Turkey.
What's important to note here, Steve, is that these homegrown rebels have unified against al-Qaida, and al-Qaida has lost territory. I talked to an activist earlier today, and he said we are going to beat them. ISIS is well-organized, well-armed, he said, but we outnumber them 10 to 1.
INSKEEP: Well, if the rebels are fighting each other, do they have any energy left to fight the government of Bashar al-Assad?
AMOS: The regime has taken some advantage of this fight within the rebel ranks, and has taken back a few villages outside of Aleppo, the most populous city in the country. But we are still at a stalemate.
INSKEEP: OK. So how, if it at all, does that stalemate influence the talks once they finally begin?
AMOS: You know, the rebels on the ground call the shots inside Syria. It's not the political opposition outside. And that's why there are low expectations for Geneva. The political opposition can't deliver on any agreements. And at the moment, most of the rebels fighting want to continue that fight - and, in fact, so does the regime. There is still alarming violence.
We've had a little break. Just a few days ago, after a meeting in Paris, we heard Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterparts talk about confidence-building measures, some maybe local ceasefires between the regime and the rebels, some kind of deal on humanitarian aid. Now, as the more moderate rebels unify in the North, and as civilians demand more movement on humanitarian aid - there have been starvation cases in Syria, there may be room for some of these kind of deals.
INSKEEP: OK. So you're saying that neither side is really acting like it's ready to stop fighting, in a grand sense, but there may be some opportunities for some smaller agreements.
AMOS: Indeed. And if this conference opens, it will open with very low expectations, because most of the diplomatic firepower has been spent on just getting everybody there. These talks are supposed to produce a transitional government by mutual consent of the opposition and the regime. That, at this point, is a very tall order. The Syrian opposition is a shaky coalition. They're divided over attending the conference. What they're afraid of is being drawn into a long process that keeps Assad in power.
The Syrian regime comes to the table in a much stronger position. They're backed by Russia and Iran. Both those countries have contributed arms and advisers to the fight against the opposition. Both the Russians and the U.S. back this diplomatic track, and they do have some objectives, and they are: to end the violence in Syria, preserve the unity of the Syrian state - so you don't have chaos - and eliminate radical Islamist groups. But there's no clear plan on how you do that, and that will be a long process.
INSKEEP: One final question, very briefly, Deborah Amos: You said that the rebels fighting on the ground are somewhat different than the opposition in suits who will attend the peace conference. Do the guys at the peace conference even have the authority to make peace if it were available?
AMOS: That is a tough call. The rebels control the ground. Most of them do not agree with a political opposition going to Geneva, and they've been very strident in saying that. And that puts enormous pressure on the political opposition. They have to deliver in Geneva, otherwise, they lose all credibility.
INSKEEP: NPR's Deborah Amos is in Beirut. Deborah, thanks, as always.
AMOS: Thank you.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Mexico has been fighting a war on drug cartels for years, and it also has become a war with more than two sides. Thousands of federal police and army troops are pouring into the state of Michoacan, on the Pacific Coast. For years, that state has been home to gangs running drugs, and also forcing farmers to pay protection money just to take their crops to market. In response, people in Michoacan formed militias to fight back. And until recently, the government seemed to encourage them. Now, Mexico is trying to disarm those militias. NPR's Carrie Kahn is in the state capital, Morelia, and joined us. Good morning.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Good morning, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Give us a picture of what's going on there right now.
KAHN: It is still a very tense situation. There's a large military and federal police presence right now. The federal police continue to come into the area. The federal police came into two major towns in this western region of Michoacan and disbanded the local police. The local police have long been accused of being in collusion with the drug cartels here and the organized crime gangs. Earlier in the week, there was a clash between the federal police and these armed civilian militias. They're trying to disarm them. And there was a clash, and the federal police actually shot and killed two civilians in these towns. Yesterday, they said they arrested two cartel members, but the militias say that's not good enough.
MONTAGNE: Well, that's the thing, Carrie. For years, the government has struggled against these drug gangs. It seems - from the outside, at least - rather understandable that civilians would band together to fight them. But is that really what's happening, here? Are these desperate people, or are these vigilantes?
KAHN: Well, they are farmers. They're local residents. They say that they are sick of these criminal gangs. They've been running extortion, kidnapping rings for years. But it's been almost a year that these self-defense groups began popping up. And it's because this part of Michoacan is really rich in lime growers, avocados. It's a big export sector to the U.S. It also has a large migrant population to the United States. So, many cities in the United States know who the Michoacanos are, the people from here. But there's also concerns that maybe they are backed by rival gangs.
You know, you see these guys, and some of them are armed with nothing more with machetes and hunting rifles. But then you see other groups that have large assault weapons, matching shirts, nice cars that they're - trucks that they're driving in coordination. So there is question about where they're getting their money. And it's the drug cartel that is here - it's called the Knights Templar - they dominate the meth traffic here in Michoacan, which now has one of the highest murder rates in the country, about 100 a month. And this is in a state of about four million residents.
MONTAGNE: But why did the government move in now, when it seemed for months and months and months to approve of these self-defense militias?
KAHN: That's a really good question, and it's a hard one to understand now. But it seems like the militias were growing, and they were also spreading. And they were surrounding one of the Knights Templar strongholds, which was a large town called Apatzingan, which has about 100,000 residents. And it looked like maybe they were poised for a major battle there. And, Renee, this coincided with a plane crash by one of the leaders of the militias. He was involved in a plane crash - survived. But then the federal police took him to Mexico City to a private hospital, and was there protecting him. And it sort of brought to light the federal government's approval of them. And it sort of came to a head all at the same time.
MONTAGNE: And so, where to from here?
KAHN: It's really difficult to say. It's been, as you said, a troubled area for many years. President Calderon started his war against drug traffickers here in December of 2006. The feds can't leave, but they really can't stay forever, too. So it's a difficult situation here in Michoacan.
MONTAGNE: That's NPR's Carrie Kahn, speaking to us from the state of Michoacan, in Mexico. Thanks very much.
KAHN: You're welcome.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
A Rhode Island company called Nestor sells traffic enforcement systems. The company may well be a decent investment, but this week a blogger revealed its stock was soaring far beyond expectations. Nestor is traded under the stock market abbreviation NEST, and investors confused Nestor with a tech company called Nest, which is being sold to Google for billions. Mistaken stock purchases increased Nestor's value by 1,900 percent.
It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
Let's hear now about what really seems to work for older people looking to sharpen their cognitive skills and hoping not to lose them too soon.
NPR's Ina Jaffe has more on what a large-scale study found.
INA JAFFE, BYLINE: It's common sense that older adults have a better quality of life if they keep their minds active. That's one reason for the popularity of, say, crossword puzzles. Jonathan King, head of the Cognitive Aging Program at the National Institute on Aging, says crosswords are fine, so far as they go.
JONATHAN KING: The thing you best do when you do crossword puzzles is you get better at doing crossword puzzles.
JAFFE: On the other hand, the study that King co-authored provided more than 2,000 people - mostly in their 70s - with training in cognitive skills that could apply to much of everyday life. One group took memory training. One group was trained in reasoning, and another in quickly processing visual data. The control group, as usual, got nothing. There were just 10 training sessions, and King says researchers figured the impacts would dissipate over time.
KING: But when we kept on retesting, first at one year, two years and up, even up to five years, we actually saw preservation of the training. It was therefore striking to us that when we now tested again at 10 years people really still were improved compared to the controls.
JAFFE: In everything but memory skills. King says that with study subjects now in their 80s, there may be physiological issues, like changes in the brain that memory training just can't overcome. And as time went by, all of the people who received training showed some declines
KING: They declined, but they declined less than if you had received no training.
JAFFE: Brain training has become a hot commodity. Millions of people have logged onto computer-based products designed to give users a mental workout. One of them, Lumosity, is an NPR underwriter. King says he's got nothing against the commercial sites.
KING: Except that in most of these cases, we really don't know how well they work. The question is how much emphasis you should put on spending money and time, as opposed to other things you might be doing, as well.
JAFFE: Like exercising, that's one thing that science has proved does have a positive effect on cognitive ability, so older adults can help themselves out by turning off the computer and taking nice, long and frequent walks.
Ina Jaffe, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Emergency medical technicians - EMTs - are trained to save your life, and aim to get you to a hospital as quickly as possible when needed. One thing they are usually not asked to do is to find ways to save money.
NPR's Zoe Chace explores one experiment in New York City that is trying to cut emergency care costs, and cut return trips to the E.R.
ZOE CHACE, BYLINE: I'm in an ambulance, and we're on our way to the emergency room.
PETER DERMODY: How long have you been feeling like this, Michael?
MICHAEL: Like, two days.
DERMODY: For two days? Is there anything that hurts?
CHACE: Michael's diabetic, hasn't eaten in two days; sweaty, pale. Closest emergency room on a Friday afternoon, it is packed.
UNIDENTIFIED HOSPITAL WORKER #1: Excuse me. Excuse me. No. No. No. No.
UNIDENTIFIED HOSPITAL WORKER #2: You can't go in that way.
CHACE: Peter Dermody, the EMT - he can't even get his patient through the double doors. There are so many stretchers and police officers and firefighters and paramedics and doctors. He grabs the first nurse he sees, trying to get his patient to the front of the line.
DERMODY: He's been feeling sick for two days now.
UNIDENTIFIED NURSE: All right, OK. I'm not taking a report on you.
DERMODY: Oh, I'm sorry. I thought...
UNIDENTIFIED NURSE: I'm just trying to get a stretcher.
DERMODY: I'm sorry. I thought you...
UNIDENTIFIED NURSE: But you're in line for triage.
CHACE: This whole thing happening around me is very expensive: the ambulance ride, minimum $350; median emergency room stay, varies a lot, but is regularly over $1,000. But the way this system is set up, the EMT has few choices about this expensive decision because of who picks up the bill.
For instance, if someone calls 911, Medicare will only pay for the ambulance and the treatment if the patient takes that ambulance to the emergency room. So that sets up this incentive for the way emergency service works. There is really only one destination, because...
DR. KEVIN MUNJAL: You only get paid if you bring that patient to the emergency department.
CHACE: This is Dr. Kevin Munjal. He's in charge of EMS at Mount Sinai, a big hospital in New York. And he's totally obsessed with this perverse incentive that drives up the cost of health care.
MUNJAL: The way we practice is so often affected by the incentives that are created in the system. And the incentives are often about what gets reimbursed, and what doesn't get reimbursed.
CHACE: The incentives are the same for the hospital Dr. Munjal works at. Still, he is trying to change this system. He can't stop people from getting sick, from calling 911. But he thinks that maybe he can do something about people who use ambulances over and over again - the frequent fliers.
Dr. Munjal says that 22 percent of the patients released from his ER come back within 30 days. I heard about this phenomenon from David Konig, the guy who runs the ambulance company. He says he sees it all the time.
DAVID KONIG: I've done plenty of calls where I walk in at 3 o'clock in the morning 'cause someone's fallen, and they literally still have the hospital wristband on their wrist from eight hours before, when they got dropped off.
CHACE: Dr. Munjal's thinks maybe these guys - the EMTs - maybe if they do their jobs a little differently, this is a place where he could start to fix the problem.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOORS SLAMMING SHUT)
CHACE: Back in the ambulance, this time the EMTs are doing something different. They're bringing a patient home from the hospital, who'd been sick with pneumonia.
UNIDENTIFIED EMT: She has a nebulizer. You check her pressure...
JOSENIA REESE: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED EMT: And she's also got a glucometer for the diabetes.
REESE: OK.
CHACE: This is the kind of patient who could easily end up back in the emergency room. She's elderly, she's weak; she could trip and fall, and come right back. So part of the new protocol designed by Dr. Munjal is for EMTs - like Josenia Reese - to talk with the patient in the ambulance, find out if their home is as safe as it can be.
REESE: So as far as like in your house, you have nightlights and stuff? OK. What about the bathroom, does it have like, the grab bars and the heat adjuster?
UNIDENTIFIED PATIENT: Yes. That's there, too.
REESE: OK.
CHACE: And once the EMTs arrive in someone's home, they're being asked to check the apartments for wires and rugs that someone could trip over.
LISANDRO ROSARIO: We got up there, and there's rugs everywhere. I mean, there's rugs on top of rugs. Everything was blocking the way - like, we had to move furniture to get into the room.
CHACE: Lisandro Rosario basically redecorated this elderly woman's house. You have to lose the rugs, he told her.
ROSARIO: She was a little hesitant, at first. She was like, no, my apartment's been like this for years, I've never fallen. And I'm like well, yeah, I'm trying to prevent that from happening.
CHACE: It's a different way of looking at emergency care, but one that the EMTs seem ready for. Dave Konig, the guy who runs the ambulance company, he used to be an EMT himself.
KONIG: I mean traditionally, we - as the emergency medical services - have been focused on the acute: something happens, get you to the hospital; definitive care and so on. So now, we're moving away from that and more towards sort of preventive care - preventive maintenance.
CHACE: Back at Mount Sinai, Dr. Munjal is tracking this experiment, to see if any of this advice has an effect on the number of people who end up back in the emergency room. Eventually, he hopes EMTs and ambulances can make more decisions - bring the patient to the most efficient place, like their primary care doctor or the dialysis center - rather than de facto, one of the most expensive ones.
Zoe Chace, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Apple has agreed to compensate consumers who bought more than they realized from the company. The company will also fix a problem that led to some unauthorized spending.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The problem they have to fix here requires some explanation. Owners of iPhones and iPads know that Apple has an app store. Press a button and you can shop for applications - those specialized programs to use in your device; playing games, recording videos, whatever. You were supposed to enter a password, to prove that you really want to make the purchase.
MONTAGNE: But apparently, some kids were exploiting a vulnerability in the security system. Your kid asked to download some game for $1.99.
INSKEEP: You - the conscientious and seemingly attentive parent say, OK, and enter the password.
MONTAGNE: But for 15 minutes after you give that approval, the system allows additional purchases without entering the password again. Kids took advantage of that 15 minutes, to buy hundreds or even thousands of dollars' worth of extra stuff. They made so many purchases that Apple has now agreed to pay back $32 million.
INSKEEP: The Federal Trade Commission says Apple must also change its billing methods. So, from now on, your kid will have to peer over your shoulder and memorize your password.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: You’re listening to MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
NPR's business news begins with a GM comeback.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: General Motors announced this week that for the first time in nearly six years, it will begin to pay cash dividends to its shareholders. GM stopped paying out dividends back in June of 2008, as it struggled to save money through the recession, bankruptcy and a government bailout.
This week, the automaker - which is the largest in the U.S. - approved a quarterly dividend of 30 cents per share on its common stock. The first payment is set for the end of March.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Big banks' control of commodities, like aluminum and oil, is drawing more scrutiny. The Federal Reserve is considering restricting banks' ability to trade and warehouse physical commodities. And as NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports, Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee believe the Fed isn't moving fast enough.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Under normal circumstances, the Fed bars bank-holding companies from trading or owning commodities. The idea is, a bank might be able to hoard a commodity to lower the supply and force up the price. But when Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley became holding companies during the financial crisis, they were permitted to grandfather in their existing commodity trading operations.
And that is raising concerns - especially among Democrats - that this could lead to problems for both consumers and companies that rely on those commodities. Here, Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley.
SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: Would you say this is a good policy to allow these two activities to take place, where a firm with enormous assets can control the supply and demand of a product while at the same time, trading on the product?
NOGUCHI: Norman Bay, director of enforcement at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, says there is a potential cost to that kind of set-up.
NORMAN BAY: Anytime there's fraud or manipulation, there is an impact on the end user. And invariably, that cost is borne by consumers.
NOGUCHI: Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown raised another issue. In light of disasters like the Exxon Valdez or BP oil spills, what's the risk to the safety and soundness of the financial system if big banks are on the hook to clean up such disasters?
SEN. SHERROD BROWN: You know, if it's owned by an oil company - it's an oil tanker - and there's a terrible problem, that's tragic for everybody involved. But it doesn't have the potential damage to our economy. These do.
NOGUCHI: The Fed is soliciting public comment on new restrictions through March 15th. But some banks are already selling off their commodities units ahead of any new rules.
Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And our last word in business is: Surveillance - not from the NSA, but from a store near you.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Retailers have long tracked activity in stores, with video cameras. Now, they have an option to track you. Security tech company 3VR has unveiled an in-store video camera that allegedly uses facial recognition to gauge your age, gender and mood.
INSKEEP: Retailers could use real-time information to customize digital signs - just as you are passing.
MONTAGNE: They might even warn a nearby sales associate of your facial expression as you head toward the counter.
INSKEEP: Maybe you're looking cranky, or maybe ready for an impulse buy.
MONTAGNE: No word, though, on how the software analyzes the guy in sunglasses, or a kid sticking out her tongue. And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
INSKEEP: And I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep, good morning.
Once again in this New Year we're asking if we could finally see a year when the U.S. economy takes off. The recovery is years old now. But as millions know firsthand, we have yet to see that explosion in hiring or growth that would signal good times are back.
Economists are optimistic about the coming year, as they have been about some pasts ones. And to explore that optimism, we call on David Wessel. He's a regular guest on this program. He is now director of the Hutchins Center at the Brookings Institution and continues to be a contributor to The Wall Street Journal. David, welcome back.
DAVID WESSEL: Good morning.
INSKEEP: So what's the case for optimism?
WESSEL: Well, last year ended on a very strong note. The U.S. economy grew at a 4.1 percent annual rate in the third quarter - that's pretty good. And it looks like it grew significantly better than three percent in the fourth quarter, so that's encouraging. It suggests some momentum going into 2014 and that's got the forecasters - the private ones, the International Monetary Fund - marking up their projections for 2014.
Indeed, just yesterday the IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, took a cautiously upbeat stance when she spoke at the National Press Club here in Washington.
CHRISTINE LAGARDE: Growth in the United States is certainly picking up, driven essentially by private demand. And that recovery that we have observed in 2013, that unfortunately was dragged by the fiscal consolidation of 2013, will be helped by the loosening of the fiscal corset as a result of the recent budget deal.
WESSEL: And she said that the world economy is doing better though she warned it's not yet healthy.
LAGARDE: Overall, as I said, the direction is positive. But global growth is still too low, too fragile and too uneven.
INSKEEP: OK, so she's not going crazy with optimism here, but she talked about private demand going up, I guess that means people wanting to buy more stuff. And the loosening of the fiscal corset, what is that?
WESSEL: That's wonderful, isn't it?
INSKEEP: Yeah.
WESSEL: Well, what we see is, as she had pointed out - and as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has pointed out - that in 2013 the federal government actually hurt the economy. The tax increases and particularly the spending cuts of the so-called sequester held the economy back. But the budget deal, which is just passing Congress now, has eased those spending constraints. And there's more certainty about what tax and spending policy will be for the rest of the year. So in 2014, Washington will be less of a minus for the economy than it was last year.
INSKEEP: And when we talk about private demand going up, does that mean that people are, what, feeling more confident, more willing to spend money? They need to spend money, they can borrow more. What's happening there?
WESSEL: Exactly. So households and businesses and banks are in much better financial shape than they were a few years ago. Corporations have a lot of cash. When they get ready to invest and hire, they can do it. Consumers have reduced their debts. And for those people who are fortunate enough to own a house or own stocks, they're much better off. House prices are up nearly 14 percent over the past year, stock prices up 25 percent. And at least some of those people are spending.
Auto sales are back to where they were before the recession. And the average car on the road now is more than 11 years old, so the auto industry is pretty optimistic that people will have to replace them.
INSKEEP: Oh, because they're just getting worn out. You've got to get new products. But with that said, David Wessel, still hard to get a job if you're looking for one and the latest unemployment report did not look so good at all - only 74,000 jobs added.
WESSEL: Right, that certainly didn't help the case for optimism at all. And it's a reminder, as Christine Lagarde said, that things are better but they're not good. Unemployment is still at a historically high 6.7 percent. And an unusually(ph) high fraction of those without jobs have been without work for more than six months, many for more than a year.
But so many other indicators are encouraging that the December jobs report right now looks kind of like a fluke.
INSKEEP: OK, what could go wrong?
WESSEL: Well, there's always the possibility of some blowup in the Middle East or another turn for the worse in the euro crisis - the countries that share the euro currency. At home there are a couple of big risks. One is that the Fed will move too quickly to withdraw the monetary adrenaline that's been pumped into the economy. And another is that economists will just - I mean that employers will just be so slow to add jobs, and importantly, to raise wages that the spending power of the middle-class will just be crimped.
INSKEEP: OK, David, thanks very much.
WESSEL: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: That's David Wessel of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, and also of The Wall Street Journal.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Hollywood is up early this morning for the Oscar nominations and 2013 offered a host of movies now vying for recognition from Academy voters.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "DALLAS BUYERS CLUB")
MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: (as Ron) I got this DDC in France supposed to keep the healthy cells you've got from getting the HIV. I gotta get some of this.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (as character) None of those drugs have been approved by the FDA.
MCCONAUGHEY: (as Ron) Screw the FDA. I'm going to be DOA.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "AMERICAN HUSTLE")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (as character) You're going to do this because you got no choice. You work for me.
CHRISTIAN BALE: (as Irving) You keep changing the rules and I'm getting a little power drunk, Richard.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Oh, you want to tell me? Wanna wake him up?
AMY ADAMS: (as Sydney) Oh, no. I said we shouldn't do any of, Irving. You know I said that. So now I support Richie. He's got vision. Do it heavy or don't do it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "NEBRASKA")
WILL FORTE: (as David) I can't let you go.
BRUCE DERN: (as Woody) It's none of your business.
FORTE: (as David) Yes, it is. I'm you son.
DERN: (as Woody) Then why don't you take me?
FORTE: (as David) I can't just drop everything and drive to Lincoln, Nebraska.
DERN: (as Woody) Oh. What else you got going on?
MONTAGNE: Those were scenes from three Oscar hopefuls. From the beginning, "Dallas Buyers Club," "American Hustle" and "Nebraska." To talk about some of the likely nominees, Kim Masters of the Hollywood Reporter joined us from NPR West. Good morning.
KIM MASTERS: Good morning to you.
MONTAGNE: So let's begin with the Best Picture. What do you think will make the cut?
MASTERS: Well, as you may know, Renee, it could be somewhere between five and ten films, so let's go with the sure things. "12 Years A Slave" definitely will be among the most nominated films. "Gravity," the film with Sandy Bullock and George Clooney, definitely a bunch of nominations. And "American Hustle" based on the Abscam scandal, which some people might remember.
Other than that, we're looking at probably "Captain Phillips," "The Wolf of Wall Street," "Nebraska," "Dallas Buyers Club," but we're getting into an area where we're not sure how many, so whether films like "Philomena" or "Her" from Spike Jones or "Saving Mr. Banks," all of these movies could slip in and a few more.
MONTAGNE: All right. So then let's move on to Best Actress. I gather there's something of an Oscar sure thing in this category.
MASTERS: Yeah, I would say if there's a sure thing in any category, Cate Blanchett for her performance in "Blue Jasmine" for months has been dominant. So the question is, who gets in and who gets out. Does Judy Dench make it for "Philomena," Sandra Bullock for "Gravity," Amy Adams for "American Hustle," Emma Thompson for "Saving Mr. Banks"? That might leave out Meryl Streep from "August: Osage County."
So as you can see, there are a lot of worthy competitors, but Cate Blanchett really has an edge.
MONTAGNE: And I think Best Actor is a bit more competitive.
MASTERS: Yes. We have Matthew McConaughey from "Dallas Buyers Club" looking very strong; Chiwetel Ejiofor from "12 Years A Slave"; Bruce Dern, "Nebraska"; Tom Hanks, "Captain Phillips"; Leonardo DiCaprio, "Wolf of Wall Street," and that doesn't even include Robert Redford from "All is Lost," who at one point a lot of people thought was a frontrunner.
So again, there are several other competitors I haven't even mentioned, a tough category.
MONTAGNE: And looking back and thinking about all of these movies from 2013, I'm just curious, Kim, what is your takeaway from the year in films?
MASTERS: This is just such a strong year. We have to hope it's not a one-off. There's been a lot of complaining about these big comic book movies and sequels that cost a fortune and seem kind of repetitive. And for people who like movies, this is a year and the first one I can remember in a long time when there's such an abundance of choices. So that's the good news of 2013.
MONTAGNE: Kim, thanks very much.
MASTERS: Thank you, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Kim Masters hosts The Business on member station KCRW.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. Australia's National Science Agency hopes to shed light on colony collapse disorder, where honeybees mysteriously disappear from their hives. In the biggest study of its kind, researchers attached teeny tiny electronic sensors to 5,000 honeybees. And how to glue on those microchips without getting stung? They refrigerated them briefly to put the bees to sleep. And those bees who were especially hairy got a shave before they got their sensors. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. We're talking about slavery on MORNING EDITION this week. Though it was abolished a century and a half ago, the details of slavery become excruciatingly present when people explore their family histories. We've heard two of those stories thanks to the Race Card Project as NPR's Michele Norris. Let's talk now about a movie that's prompted more conversation.
INSKEEP: Michele and I talked with John Ridley, a screenwriter and occasional commentator for this program. The Oscar-nominated "12 Years a Slave" was his creation. He was working from the memoir of a real person, Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped and sold into slavery. The movie shows the sheer brutality of the slave system, but Ridley was also compelled by the man who endured it.
JOHN RIDLEY: The thing that struck me was about Solomon's character as an individual, a man who used every part of himself to survive - his wits, his guile, his physicality - but never gave into bitterness. Never gave up his faith in other people, in a system that completely let him down. And I wanted more than anything - I have two boys and I just said if I were trying to show my two sons what I thought the character of a man was, of an American man, of a man of color, that's what Solomon was when I read this book.
And my message was just about character.
INSKEEP: Can I ask John Ridley about the inclusion of a scene in this film, and it's advanced in the film so I won't describe it too precisely, but it's probably the most brutal of the various beatings that are administered in this film. And in this scene, a slave owner is about to whip someone and then hands the whip over to a slave, Solomon Northup, says you do it.
RIDLEY: Yeah.
INSKEEP: Why did you include that scene in that way?
RIDLEY: I included it for two reasons. One, and most importantly, and with almost everything that you'll see in the film, it was that way in the memoir. It was exceptionally important to me to hew as closely as possible to what was happening in the book. And I think also what is very important is that it speaks to the mindset of the slave owner as well, played by Michael Fassbender.
It would have been very easy, again, going to a 2013 mindset, to simply say, well, these individuals are all purely evil and blacks across the board were just purely saints and that was it. And that scene in particular really spoke to the multifaceted nature of that environment and what it did to individuals across the board.
MICHELE NORRIS, BYLINE: I'm assuming that this was a difficult task for you, that you really wrestled with this story.
RIDLEY: I would say this was in every regard the most challenging thing that I've ever been faced with. And I don't think I really knew that when I read the book. I did not know what I was getting myself into. Until I saw the film, I didn't have a moment where it hit me the way I think it hits everyone else. You know, I'd seen it previously but the first time I'd seen it with people, that's when I really felt the magnitude of everything that story was and what everyone had put into the film.
NORRIS: Take me to that moment. What was that like for you?
RIDLEY: It was overwhelming for many reasons. One, it was at the Toronto Film Festival and that is just a whirlwind in and of itself. And I had no expectation on how an audience would perceive it. And the emotional connectivity of that audience, where people begin to move as an organism and they begin to feel as an organism, and to get to that moment - I'll just call it the soap scene with Master Epps and not being able to carry out this whipping and forcing Solomon to do it and the reaction of the audience, and I myself, I couldn't watch.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "12 YEARS A SLAVE")
MICHAEL FASSBENDER: (as Epps) You admit it.
LUPITA NYONG'O: (as Patsey) Yes. Freely. And you know why? I got this from Mistress Shaw. Mistress Epps won't even grant me no soap to clean with. I stink so much I make myself gag.
RIDLEY: I'd seen it before.
NORRIS: And you couldn't watch.
RIDLEY: I truly covered my eyes, looked away. My wife is crying, people behind me are crying. And more than that, when you sit with an audience and you get caught up in their reactions, it was too much. It really was.
INSKEEP: We've heard in recent days of folks who have found out a very personal, close connection to this issue of slavery, and it's changed their view of the world.
NORRIS: Well, I certainly find that people - in the weeks since I've seen it, I've had so many people approach me who suddenly want to talk about slavery.
RIDLEY: I certainly - I absolutely believe that this film has reached a point that it has a cultural density, and it's been going on for months now. And I appreciate that deeply. I appreciate it for my own involvement and certainly for what Solomon left behind. And we have to remember, when Solomon wrote his memoir, at that time it was a bestseller. It became a lynchpin in the abolitionists' cause. He toured. He spoke. And the story fell into obscurity.
And we're having these conversations now and what people are walking away from this film and this story with, is that - and by the way, I put myself at the head of this - at the head of this list, at how we really didn't have any concept of what slavery was all about. So I'm not surprised that many people would walk away from this film feeling like they need, now, to have a true conversation about these kinds of things.
I'm just sort of shocked that it's taken us this long to really try to excavate what slavery was all about.
INSKEEP: I think there's something that's underlined in this movie that maybe a lot of people don't realize, which is the intimacy of it. I'm thinking of a particular scene, the entire scene is a slave owner, Epps, and the slave, Solomon Northup. And the slave owner is talking with the slave and their faces are three inches from each other. And the slave owner has got his arm around Northup and, in fact, a lantern in his hand which is lighting the scene.
And they have this entire conversation inches from each other. And you realize it's something different than segregation. It's something that people did in exceedingly close contact to the evil that they were perpetrating or living through.
RIDLEY: It was certainly an up close brutality. I mean this was not something waged at a distance. And the fact of the matter is when you have plantation owners or overseers or individuals who have to be next to each other, to force individuals to do things, the way they live. Or other individuals feeling like, Look, you're a property - I can do with you what I want, I don't need to maintain a distance out of fear. I can get right up next to you because I control the situation.
NORRIS: It is difficult to look back at a difficult history. Somewhat easier, if I can even use that word, if you have overcome horrible circumstances; if you've climbed up the rough side of the mountain and you - there's something ennobling in some way about surviving. And yet, were you trying in the film to make sure that people would think about, not just Solomon Northup but also the people who owned him?
RIDLEY: I wanted people to consider all aspects of these circumstances. But I think what cannot get lost in this is where we've come as a country, and I think there has to be a sense of pride that we have come this far. There's got to be pride for the individuals whose families survived all of this. I think there's got to be pride for those individuals who look at, if my family was like this, I am not.
I mean just anecdotally for my own family, my father was out here in California at one of the schools where our kids go, and they were just having a grandparents' day. And a woman from Virginia came up to my dad - they were wearing name tags, their last day was Ridley. And she said to him: You know, your name is Ridley. My dad said yes and goes: Oh, you know, I used to have family in Virginia named Ridley.
And my dad just said, very casually, because my dad is that kind of guy. He said: Oh, well, you know what? Your family, they probably owned our family. They may have, I have family from Virginia. And the woman was not shocked. She was not taken aback. She goes: Oh, you know what? That's very possible. They started researching together, firing letters back and forth, looking to find out if that was true.
I think it's very important for people to not go into it going: Oh, if my family did that 160 years ago, that's me. You know, as opposed to, you know, what don't we find out what happened. Why do we find out how we got to a point now where our kids or our grandkids are in the same school, enjoying the same privileges, that we are citizens in the same country and can actually talk about this - as opposed to being afraid or horrified about what happened.
What happened, happened. We can't change that. But we can change who we are in this moment. That's how you move on from this.
INSKEEP: John Ridley, thanks very much for the time.
RIDLEY: Thank you. Thank you both for having me. I deeply appreciate it. Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It was one of the most stunning disasters of the last decade. The day after Christmas 2004, the Asian Tsunami killed nearly a quarter of a million people. Most of them, more than 175,000, died in the Indonesia's Aceh Province.
In the two years following that utter devastation, reporter Michael Sullivan spent time with several people, tracking, for MORNING EDITION, their recovery from the disaster. And he returned again, a few weeks ago.
MICHAEL SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Did you feel the earthquake this morning, my interpreter asked when we met. No, I said. I missed it. It was about 4:30 this morning, Firda said.
FIRDA: Every time there's an earthquake I get scared. It's like trauma for me. So every earthquake happen again, even if it's not too hard, it still makes me scared.
SULLIVAN: I'd either slept through it or don't remember waking. The smell of thousands of rotting corpses, that one I remember. Firda and I had come to Peukan Bada looking for familiar faces. To a place I described nine years ago as chewed up, spit out, gone.
For about a half a mile in either direction, there are only concrete foundations where houses once stood, and bits and pieces of people's lives, violently torn from them last Sunday morning. A red child's bike, a toy truck, schoolbooks. Survivors poke through the wreckage, kerchiefs over their faces to ward off the stench.
Samiruddin and his wife Rohani were among the first I met back then. The family stayed at her mother's house, farther inland, until their house could be rebuilt with help from a German NGO. It took almost two years. But when they finally moved in, they were happy.
SAMIRUDDIN: (Foreign language spoken)
SULLIVAN: Our old house was a little bigger, but this one is stronger Samiruddin said. And the walls are much thicker than the old house.
In 2006, Samiruddin's trucking business was doing well, too. Everybody was busy back then. There was lots of work rebuilding.
Fast forward seven years. The NGOS involved in the recovery effort are long gone. And so is Samiruddin's trucking business. It dried up when the foreign aid workers left and then Samiruddin got sick.
ROHANI: (Foreign language spoken)
SULLIVAN: Stomach problems and hypertension, his wife Rohani says, that often leave her husband unable to sit up at night on his own. The family now ekes out a living running a small grocery on the main highway. They sleep - two adults, three children - in a room above the store. Then each morning, she comes back here, to her rebuilt home to cook and wash and clean. And it's exhausting.
ROHANI: (Foreign language spoken)
(LAUGHTER)
SULLIVAN: Yes, she says, I'm tired all the time. But I can't cook at the shop because the water there is dirty, so I have to come here to make meals and get the kids ready for school. I'd rather be living here, she says, but I have to take care of my husband. And he has to stay at the shop at night so people don't break in.
I ask why their oldest boy - Yusran, now 18 - can't stay at the shop so the rest of the family can be together here and make things easier for her. She doesn't answer. The boy does. He says he doesn't want to.
YUSRAN: I'm not happy here.
(LAUGHTER)
SULLIVAN: And suddenly it's clear: the sweet 10-year-old I remember is now an 18-year-old, unhelpful bully. Rohani is embarrassed. And I'm embarrassed for her. Not what I was hoping for. So I go looking for another family I'd know then, hoping for a different outcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHICKENS)
SULLIVAN: And I get one. At the home of 40-year-old Mursulin, who lives just a few hundred yards and a whole world away. There's a big yard, lots of trees, a hen house, even a slide for the kids. Tucked into the lot on the right is the small shack Mursulin built just after the tsunami. And the simple but strong two bedroom house an American NGO built for him two years later. He's even added two more bedrooms to accommodate his new and expanding family.
Mursulin lost his first wife and son during the tsunami. Now he's remarried with three new children. And life, he says, is good.
MURSULIN: (Foreign language spoken)
SULLIVAN: After the tsunami, he says, it took a while to feel normal. It was hard to get up in the morning and I didn't want to do anything, he says. Now, he says, I know I have to earn to take care of my family. And so he does.
MURSULIN: (Foreign language spoken)
SULLIVAN: He's been working as a subcontractor for a local construction company, he says. And while we talk, I'm struck by how often he smiles. All the while, his arm draped around his oldest. Mursulin almost never smiled when I first met him.
MURSULIN: (Foreign language spoken)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Foreign language spoken)
(LAUGHTER)
MURSULIN: (Foreign language spoken)
SULLIVAN: We laugh when I remind him of his dark humor after the tsunami. Back then, he told me: Yes, the tsunami took everything, but now at least I've got a great view of the mountains. Not anymore. His neighbors who survived have almost all come back rebuilt. And they've planted new trees, too. And Mursulin's view of the mountains has been spoiled. And that's a good thing, he says, I'm happy about that. And I'm happy for him.
For NPR news, I'm Michael Sullivan.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Last week on this program, we heard of the dying wish of a man who served as a U.S. Marine. Hal Faulkner had hoped to receive his honorable discharge from the Marines six decades after he was kicked out of the service for being gay. He got his wish. And now we must report that 11 days after receiving his wish, Mr. Faulkner has died after a battle with cancer.
Here's NPR's Quil Lawrence.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Hal Faulkner joined the Marines in 1953 and served in the Philippines. But in 1956 someone told his command he was gay and that was enough to get him an undesirable discharge. Since the Pentagon repealed the ban on gay troops, it's possible to get a discharge for homosexuality corrected. But the process can take months. And Faulkner had already lived longer than his doctors predicted.
His lawyer Anne Brooksher-Yen pushed the military to expedite the case, but it didn't look good.
ANNE BROOKSHER-YEN: I did have a conversation with him where I told him, you know, that we might not be able to get this done before he died.
LAWRENCE: Because it was Faulkner's dying wish, the Marine Corps somehow settled his case in just two weeks. A group of friends and family - and three active duty troops - gathered to present him with his upgraded honorable discharge just after New Years.
Officially, Faulkner said, he was a Marine again.
HAL FAULKNER: And I didn't think that maybe I would last through all the battles that we've had, but a Marine is always a Marine.
LAWRENCE: In the years before "don't ask, don't tell," more than 100,000 men and women were kicked out of the service, with bad discharges, for being gay. A patchwork of organizations is helping those vets correct their records - so they can get access to VA health care, the GI bill, and home loans.
Hal Faulkner wasn't after any of that. He just wanted his country to acknowledge - even 60 years late - that he served honorably. He will get one benefit. When his niece told him he was eligible for a military funeral, he was overcome - all he could do was nod yes. He passed away on Tuesday.
Quil Lawrence, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Oscar nominations are in. They were announced this morning in Beverly Hills. And "American Hustle" and "Gravity" are the early front-runners. Each of them got 10 Academy Award nominations, including best picture. "12 Years a Slave" was close behind with nine nominations. For more, we're joined now by Linda Holmes, who writes and edits NPR's entertainment and pop culture blog Monkey See. Good morning.
LINDA HOLMES, BYLINE: Good morning to you.
MONTAGNE: All right. So as I said, "American Hustle," "Gravity" and "12 Years a Slave" big box office hits as well as critically acclaimed, all of them. Any sense on which might come out ahead?
HOLMES: Well, you know, "Gravity" is the biggest earner by far, but at the same time it's the only best picture nominee out of these nine that didn't have its screenplay nominated. So it may have a few things for it to overcome. "American Hustle" pulled off a fairly rare feat, which is it hit all four of the acting categories, lead and supporting actor and actress, which interestingly enough, the director, David O. Russell, his film last year, "Silver Linings Playbook," did the same thing. So that might, you know, push in favor of "American Hustle" a little bit. It's hard to say at this point. I think there are several good contenders. "12 Years a Slave" is my favorite of the ones that I have seen, but...
MONTAGNE: Also an American history film, the sort that does win Oscars in many years.
HOLMES: Sometimes, yes. And then in the last couple of years, they've been tilting a little bit toward more crowd-pleasing, "Argo" and things like that, thing that are a little easier on people. It sort of depends on the year.
MONTAGNE: All right. Well, let's take a look at best actor and actress.
HOLMES: Yeah. You know, the best actor's nominees are some of your big awards - the actresses, Streep and Judi Dench, things like that. On the actor side, they are a little well-established as awards winners, even if they are big stars. People like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey and especially Chiwetel Ejiofor, who conveyed this big splash in "12 Years a Slave"; none of those guys are as accustomed to walking up and winning tons of awards as some of the women on the acting side.
MONTAGNE: Although one of the big front-runners in these awards is Cate Blanchett. She's is up for best actress.
HOLMES: Absolutely. It wouldn't be a big shock to anyone.
MONTAGNE: Best director, best screenplay, what are we seeing there?
HOLMES: Well, you know, best director - the best director nominees are drawn from among the best picture nominees. I think a lot of people think that Martin Scorsese is always a decent pick for best director, but you could get Steve McQueen for "12 Years a Slave." But it can be a tough race to call. I think in the screenplay category, "12 Years a Slave" is a very good possibility in adapted screenplay. I think that in original screenplay, I actually think "Her" by Spike Jonze would be my pick of the ones I've seen for original screenplay. Decent possibility that will happen.
MONTAGNE: Well, again, there's lots of movies out there. Are there any of the what you might call sleeper movies that might surprise us on Oscar night?
HOLMES: Well, the little ones in the nominees are "Philomena" and "Nebraska." And then my favorite nomination is Barkhad Abdi from "Captain Phillips," played a Somali pirate.
MONTAGNE: As a sleeper possible supporting actor.
HOLMES: Supporting actor, wonderful performance.
MONTAGNE: Linda, thanks.
HOLMES: Thank you.
MONTAGNE: Linda Holmes writes and edits NPR's entertainment and pop culture blog, Monkey See.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The most recent studies show that American kids still have a problem with obesity. In fact, the closest thing we have to good news is that kids are not gaining weight as rapidly as they were some years ago.
Some experts say fast food and a lack of exercise drive childhood obesity in the United States, and now researchers at Cornell University may have identified a surprising new factor. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam is here to tell us about it. Hi, Shankar.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK. What's the problem?
VEDANTAM: I can say it in one word, Steve: plastics. In this case, plastic debit cards might be making our kids fat.
INSKEEP: What do you mean by that?
VEDANTAM: Well, many school cafeterias allow kids to pay for their lunch by swiping a debit card. You know, your parents load up $50 on the card and the kids swipe it in the cafeteria.
INSKEEP: Sure.
VEDANTAM: I spoke with Brian Wansink. He's a behavioral economist at Cornell, so he studies how human behavior affects economic choices. He's found that compared to kids who use cash in cafeterias, kids who use debit cards seem to make more unhealthy eating choices. Here he is.
BRIAN WANSINK: Kids are much, much, much more likely to take desserts, and are much less likely to take fruits and vegetables. In contrast to that, in schools where kids are paying cash, kids not only buy a lot more fruit, but they also buy a lot less dessert.
INSKEEP: Wow. OK. A lot of questions there, one of them why. But first, how is it that he knows this?
VEDANTAM: Well, along with a colleague, David Just, Wansink has just finished an analysis where he monitored more than 2,300 students at 287 schools across the country, kids in grades one through 12. And what they found was that three times as many kids buy vegetables when they were paying cash, rather than using debit cards, and kids paying cash also ate a lot less. They consumed 10 percent fewer calories.
INSKEEP: I want to try to figure this out because I think people instinctively understand you might spend more money with a debit card or a credit card. That's one reason a lot of people don't like to use them very much. You feel that maybe you're going to be more careful with your money if money is going through your hands. But you're not necessarily talking about kids spending more or less; you're talking about them choosing different foods depending on how they paid. Why would that be?
VEDANTAM: Well, I think you've actually hit the nail on the head, Steve. Using cash and credit cards are the same in terms of economics, but psychologically they're actually very different things. When you're using a debit card or a credit card, the consequences, the financial consequences of your purchase, are far off in the future.
And Wansink thinks the same thing might be happening with your experience of the things that you buy, which is your attitude becomes, what I put in my mouth doesn't really matter because the consequences of that are also far off in the future.
INSKEEP: OK. If schools are concerned about childhood obesity, what should they do about this?
VEDANTAM: Well, Wansink thinks the smart thing to do is to actually work with the bias instead of trying to fight it. Once we understand how the bias works, why not make it work for you? So his idea is what if schools said you can buy fruits and vegetables using the debit card, but if you want to buy desserts and candy, you actually have to pay cash.
INSKEEP: Hmm.
VEDANTAM: And he's also conducted another experiment along these lines. He's found that making it a tiny bit harder for kids to get cookies in a cafeteria makes a big difference to whether they actually pick out the cookies. Here he is again.
WANSINK: When we put cookies behind the line, behind the lunch line, so that kids have to ask the cafeteria workers to pass it to them, cookie sales dropped dramatically. In some cases as much as 50 percent, simply because a kid has to wait for 10 seconds to say can you please hand me a cookie.
VEDANTAM: So I think the bottom line here, Steve, is that it's hard to get through to kids when you, you know, you have to worry about coronary heart disease in 40 years. For a 17-year-old, that just is so remote.
INSKEEP: Mm-hmm.
VEDANTAM: It's much more effective to say, hey, look, all your friends are already sitting down and eating. They're already talking. Maybe they're talking about you. Wouldn't you rather be sitting down with them instead of spending 10 boring seconds waiting for a cookie?
INSKEEP: Well, Shankar, I've got a debit card here. Let's go get something to eat.
VEDANTAM: Absolutely, Steve.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
NPR's science correspondent Shankar Vedantam. You can follow him on Twitter @hiddenbrain. You can follow this program @morningedition and @nprinskeep.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's hard to listen to pop music today and not hear the sound of the drum machine. It began as little more than a glorified metronome, but it's since worked its way into home basement studios as well as state-of-the-art recording facilities. A new book chronicles the history and influence of the drum machine in all its wood and plastic-paneled glory. Oliver Wang has the story.
OLIVER WANG, BYLINE: About 10 years ago, a disgruntled pianist in Los Angeles named John Wood began a popular bumper sticker campaign with the slogan: Drum Machines Have No Soul. Not everyone was convinced, including producer Eric Sadler.
ERIC SADLER: Drum machines don't run themselves; it's the people who put into the drum machines that give the drum machines soul to me. I've definitely given some drum machines some soul.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE")
PUBLIC ENEMY: (rapping) ...put it up on the board. Another rapper shot down from the mouth that roared...
WANG: Sadler was part of the Bomb Squad, the production team behind the hip-hop group Public Enemy which used drum machines - among many other devices - to help shift the sound of pop music in the late 1980s.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE")
ENEMY: (rapping) I'm public enemy number one. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. Yeah, that's right...
WANG: Here's the thing: the earliest drum machines were never intended to be studio recording devices. Take Wurlitzer's 1959 Sideman, one of the first commercially available drum machines. It used vacuum tubes to create its percussive sound. It was marketed to organ players who perhaps didn't want to pay a drummer to join their lounge act. Joe Mansfield demonstrates the Sideman.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUMMING)
WANG: Mansfield is the author of "Beat Box: A Drum Machine Obsession."
JOE MANSFIELD: It's about two-feet and some change tall. It's maybe a foot and a half wide, and it looks like something that would belong in, like, an old, wood-paneled library to me. At first look, you wouldn't think it would be a drum machine - which I didn't when I found it.
WANG: The instruments were still largely novelties throughout the '60s and '70s but musicians slowly began to play around with them says Dante Carfagna. He's the producer behind the recent CD compilation "Personal Space" which examines early pop experiments with drum machines and other electronics.
DANTE CARFAGNA: I think a lot of these cases, perhaps the artist didn't have a band, so they tried to recreate that band with the electronics around them: a drum machine, a synthesizer, maybe a guitar. So I think it might be a function of loneliness in a very strange way.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL ABOUT MONEY")
SLY STONE: Hey, I gotta out of here and get some money, man.
WANG: Then in 1971, Sly Stone recorded "A Riot's Going On," one of the first hit albums to prominently feature a drum machine. He used the Maestro Rhythm King and Joe Mansfield grew up marveling at how Stone deployed its tinny beats.
CARFAGNA: That record used the Maestro Rhythm King, in a way in a studio, that I'm sure it wasn't meant to be used, and it was amazing.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FAMILY AFFAIR")
STONE: (singing) The family affair. It's a family affair. It's a family affair. It's a family affair. Oh, yeah, a family affair. A family affair. It's a family affair.
WANG: By the early 1980s, major pop acts latched onto drum machines in a big way but many just used the machines' built-in rhythms. Mansfield points to Hall and Oates' 1981 hit, "I Can't Go For That."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I CAN'T GO FOR THAT")
MANSFIELD: Yeah, that's pretty much pre-programmed in there. They just souled(ph) out the kick and snare and high-hat a little bit, but that's it.
HALL AND OATES: (singing) Easy, ready, willing, overtime. Where does it stop? Where do you dare mean to draw the line?
WANG: Around the same time such hip-hop pioneers as Grandmaster Flash began to make beat boxes a prominent part of rap music production.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FLASH IS ON THE BEAT")
GRANDMASTER FLASH: (rapping) One, two, one, two, three, and listen to this. Just listen to this. Just listen to this. Just listen to this. For all you MCs in a crew, this is what we want y'all to do...
WANG: The Bomb Squad's Eric Sadler says that by the mid 1980s, newer beat boxes were sampling actual drums, creating a harder, punchier sound that hip-hop producers grabbed onto. One of the most popular was the Oberheim DMX.
SADLER: All the rhythm machines before was, kind of, little tight sounds, and they didn't have that sort of sound that sounded like a real kick drum or a bass drum and that sort of thing. And with the DMX, it was like, wow, you know, this sounds more like real drums to me.
(SOUNDBITE OF OBERHEIM DRUM MACHINE)
WANG: However, when it comes to punch, no drum machine has been more popular than Roland's TR-808, debuted in 1980.
(SOUNDBITE OF TR-808 DRUM MACHINE)
WANG: For collector Joe Mansfield and other musicians, the 808 stands out for a signature kick drum with a low end boom you can feel in your bones.
MANSFIELD: Just imagine the 808 bass drum pounding the speakers in a club, it's definitely something that would get people's attention.
(SOUNDBITE OF TR-808 DRUM MACHINE)
WANG: Today, most producers simply recreate the sounds of an 808 using software rather than fussing with hardware that few thought would survive 30 years of use. But Dante Carfagna suggests there's still a market out there for the original machines and their unique sonic personalities.
CARFAGNA: Those sounds do have a certain character now which echo a different era.
(SOUNDBITE OF CASIO DRUM MACHINE)
WANG: As for Joe Mansfield, his "Beat Box" book only includes a fraction of his collection, a collection that keeps growing.
MANSFIELD: On eBay Germany today, I purchased a machine called Elgam Match-12. It's a machine I've been looking for, for a little bit. And I happened to find it on the German eBay site.
WANG: And so the beat box goes on. For NPR News. I'm Oliver Wang.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUM MACHINE)
MONTAGNE: You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And it is Friday morning, which is when we hear from StoryCorps, the project that travels the country giving everyday people the chance to tell their stories. This reflection comes from Alabama, 1964, which is when Clayton Sherrod, who was 19 at the time, became the executive chef in an all-white country club in Birmingham. Sherrod, who is African-American, worked there throughout his teenage years.
He was the club's first black chef. At StoryCorps, he remembered how he ended up running his first kitchen.
CLAYTON SHERROD: My father had a heart attack. I was, like, 13 years old. And my mother said, you can't go back to school. You're going to have to find a job. So I went to the country club. And I always wanted to go up to the kitchen and wash dishes because it was really fascinating to see those guys cooking, so I made up my mind that I was going to be a chef.
All my friends told me I was crazy. But I saw something that no one else could see, and that is me walking around with that big tall hat on. So I counted how many positions it was from washing dishes to the executive chef, and I had my chart pinned to the wall in our little outdoor bathroom there, and I would mark every time I got a promotion. And then I would turn the light off, and I would dance.
And I would sing "Johnny Be Good" and I changed it to "Clayton Be Good, You Are So Good." And, you know, I didn't mind all the hard work. Actually, I loved it. I worked the whole weekend without going home, and I worked myself up to sous-chef. And there was this guy named Frank Kahee (ph) who was executive chef.
He told me one day, he said, I know what you're trying to do. You think you're going to be the chef here, he said, but I'm going to be here for life. He said, you might as well just keep working under me or go somewhere else. So what I did, I was sneaky. You know, in the back of trade magazines, there's articles in there looking for chefs all over the country.
I wrote one of the best-looking resumes and signed Frank Kahee's name on it and sent it to all of these headhunters all over the country and he actually thought he was famous. He said everybody knew about him, but he didn't know that was me that did it. And the general manager got tired of it.
He said, Frank, every time you come to me for raises and people want you here and people want you there. He said, right now at this very moment, I consider you dead. Frank, he turned white as a sheet and he said, well, what are you going to do? He said, well, Clayton, can you take care of it until we find another chef? I said I'll be more than happy to.
That's all I needed. I never even looked back.
(SOUNDBITE FROM SONG "JOHNNY BE GOOD")
INSKEEP: Clayton Sherrod at StoryCorps in Birmingham, Alabama. He was the chef at that country club for 13 years. His interview will be archived, along with all StoryCorps recordings, at the Library of Congress. And as always, you can get the StoryCorps podcast at NPR.org.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
The minimum wage is shaping up to be a hot political issue this year. President Obama says he wants to raise it. So we're going to take time today to look back at how the U.S. got a minimum wage in the first place.
Here's David Kestenbaum, with our Planet Money team.
DAVID KESTENBAUM, BYLINE: For much of American history, there was no minimum wage. And to understand the obstacles it faced, consider this story. In 1895, the state of New York decided it wanted to improve working conditions in what, at the time, could be a deadly profession: baking bread.
ERIC RAUCHWAY: Bakeries are, in fact, extremely dangerous places to work.
KESTENBAUM: Eric Rauchway, a historian at UC Davis.
RAUCHWAY: Flour is such a fine particulate. If it gets to hang in the air, it can actually catch fire, and the whole room can go up in sort of a sheet of flame.
KESTENBAUM: New York passes a law called the Bake Shop Act. It doesn't set a minimum wage, but it limits working hours and requires that bakeries be kept clean. Pretty quickly, the law is ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The logic is that people have a right to enter into any contracts they want.
RAUCHWAY: This is an interference with the right of individuals to enter into a contract. And that is part of our basic freedom, and the government has no right to abridge that.
KESTENBAUM: At this point, there is basically no way the Supreme Court is going allow anything like a minimum wage. The first time anyone decides to really give it a try is during the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt is president. He wants to put more money in people's pockets. Here's FDR.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: The proposition is simply this: If all employers will act together to shorten hours and to raise wages, we can put people back to work.
KESTENBAUM: FDR wants businesses to do this voluntarily. Remember, the Supreme Court does not like this kind of thing. And Roosevelt's administration comes up with a clever idea. It creates the blue eagle. It's a picture of a blue eagle. FDR says go along with my plan, and you can hang it in your store to show your patriotism. It was a good-looking eagle. Jason Taylor is an economist at Central Michigan University.
JASON TAYLOR: He looks very powerful, spreading his wings.
KESTENBAUM: Not the kind of eagle you want to cross.
TAYLOR: Yeah, no. And it said below it: We do our part. And the idea was that if you're complying with President Roosevelt's plan, you know, you're doing your part.
KESTENBAUM: And if you were not displaying a blue eagle, you were...
TAYLOR: ...you were not doing your part, and Roosevelt said that you should be boycotted.
KESTENBAUM: It was called the National Industrial Recovery Act. Congress passed it in 1933, and a lot of businesses signed up.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: The JCPenney Company, employing 21,000 people, has, through its president, wired the administration, pledging prompt 100 percent cooperation.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: The Gillette Razor Company stands squarely behind the president. We have adopted his voluntary code, and we urge all other employers to do likewise.
KESTENBAUM: Why were businesses so happy to pay higher wages? There was more than patriotism at work here. Businesses were also going to be allowed to form cartels and set prices. At the time, the country was suffering from deflation, and prices and wages were plunging. Not surprisingly, the blue eagle was no match for nine men in robes. Yes, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down the law. The Supreme Court is not going away, but it turns out, neither is FDR. Again, historian Eric Rauchway.
RAUCHWAY: So, in 1936, Roosevelt is reelected by the biggest landslide in modern history.
KESTENBAUM: It's unbelievable. I look at the numbers, and it's - I'm so used to very close elections. That was 523-8 in the Electoral College.
RAUCHWAY: It's the biggest landslide since Monroe ran unopposed. It's huge.
KESTENBAUM: FDR takes on the Supreme Court. This is that famous moment where he tries to pack the court, tries to pass a law that would let him appoint additional justices. That fails, but one justice basically switches sides. In 1937, the court upholds the right of Washington state to have a minimum wage. And the next year, FDR pushes the Fair Labor Standards Act through Congress, which contains a kind of minimal minimum wage.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
ROOSEVELT: After many requests on my part, the Congress passed a Fair Labor Standards Act, what we call the Wages and Hours Bill. That act, applying to products and interstate commerce, ends child labor, sets a floor below wages and a ceiling over the hours of labor.
KESTENBAUM: Eric Rauchway, the historian, says this was more a political victory than an intellectual one, and the nation is divided over it today. David Kestenbaum, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This is Morning Edition from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. A California driver beat an unusual traffic charge yesterday, by employing a high-tech defense. She had been ticketed for driving with Google Glass, the eyeglasses that carry a tiny computer you can use for things like checking email. A police officer pulled her over for speeding and noticed she was wearing the special glasses.
INSKEEP: California forbids drivers from turning on video screens in the front of the car while driving, except for things like navigation. But the driver, among thousands of people chosen to test this product, argued that her glasses were not turned on. And the San Diego traffic court ruled that police had not proven otherwise.
MONTAGNE: Also yesterday, Google's research branch, Google X, unveiled and even smaller computer. This time it is on a contact lens. The soft lens contains a tiny flexible computer that monitors the glucose levels in tears. NPR's Steve Henn reports that if it works it could save diabetes patients thousands of pin pricks and blood tests.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: Dr. John Buse is a professor of Medicine at North Carolina and chairs the National Diabetes Education program for the National Institute of Health. Although he just found out about Google's smart contact lens project a week ago, he's pretty excited about it.
DR. JOHN BUSE: I think the Google X device could be a huge game changer.
HENN: He says for years, diabetes researchers and practitioners have been looking less invasive ways to monitor blood glucose levels. Taylor Degroff was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes as a little kid.
JENNIFER SCHNEIDER: Taylor was two years old.
HENN: That's Taylor's Mom, Jennifer Schneider. How many finger sticks do you think Taylor has had in the course of her life?
SCHNEIDER: Um...
HENN: Taylor's body makes no insulin on its own.
SCHNEIDER: I'm going to try to do the math. We check 10 times a day, on average.
HENN: Ten times a day, 365 days a year, for 11 years - that's more than 40,000 finger pricks. And one of the reasons her parents test so much is that a mistake - too much insulin - not enough sugar - can be fatal.
SCHNEIDER: It's hard. Every night we worry.
HENN: The family recently got a continuous glucose monitor that Taylor now wears on her thigh. It involves needles and a wire under Taylor's skin. It's expensive, but it monitors her blood sugar levels around the clock and will trigger an alarm when levels get too low. Jennifer Schnieder says it's made a big difference in their lives. What Google announced yesterday is that it's taken similar technology, miniaturized it, and put it inside a soft contact lens.
BRIAN OTIS: You know, at this point we have functional prototypes.
HENN: That's Brian Otis, the smart contact lens project manager at Google X. Can I try one on?
OTIS: We have devices that are ready to wear - unfortunately, you are not enrolled in one of our studies, but I wish you could.
HENN: And then, just to rub it in, Otis opens a contact lens case.
You are taking it out.
OTIS: I want to show you one of our prototypes.
HENN: It looks and feels like a normal contact lens - almost.
OTIS: There we go. A few things that you will notice...
HENN: There two gold lines - actually the antenna - rimming what would be the iris of the wearer. But to see computer inside this contact lens, you really need a microscope. So Otis brings one out.
OTIS: All of these components are thinner than a human hair. The square in the middle is the integrated circuit that contains tens of thousands of transistors.
HENN: That looks just like a single flake of glitter to the naked eye.
OTIS: And that connects directly to the glucose sensor next door.
HENN: Picture slim circuits that look like thin interlocking fingers.
OTIS: There is a pin hole in the contact lens that allows the tears to approach the sensor.
HENN: Now, no one knows if measuring glucose levels in tears will really work as a proxy for blood glucose levels in diabetics. There are years of research and tests ahead. And a smart contact lens aimed at helping diabetics may never make it to market - but nonetheless simply shrinking the electronics involved in this thing is remarkable. To do it, the team at Google X created integrated circuit - a full-fledged a computer chip capable of complex calculations and then built that onto a flexible piece of plastic that is the size single flake of glitter. Otis places one on my fingertip.
OTIS: Can you feel it?
HENN: No, I can't feel it at all. What would you say, three ridges in my fingerprint?
OTIS: Yeah, that's about right.
HENN: It's possible to imagine almost infinite uses for sensors and chips this small but Brian Otis says for now his team at Google X is focused on a single one - someday giving diabetics a less painful way to manage their disease. Steve Henn, NPR News, Silicon Valley.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning. This month marks the 50th anniversary of the surgeon general's report that linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer, a landmark report and the catalyst for a massive national anti-smoking campaign.
It's started a decades-long conversation about smoking, as a matter of public health and as a matter of personal choice. That conversation continues. Today, the surgeon general released a new report on smoking, the 32nd time the office has spoken out over the years.
NPR's Richard Knox says the report identifies new risks to smoking, and breaks new ground on e-cigarettes.
RICHARD KNOX, BYLINE: Acting Surgeon General Boris Lushniak is the latest in a long line of surgeons general who've tried to pound the last nails in the coffin of America's smoking habit. There's no reason to think his 900-page report will do the trick. But it's not for lack of trying.
THOMAS FRIEDEN: Smoking really is even worse than we knew.
KNOX: That's Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He ticks off an impressive list of disorders the report now finds are caused by smoking.
FRIEDEN: Diabetes, birth defects and stroke in people who are exposed to second-hand smoke.
KNOX: Also: Liver cancer, colorectal cancer, age-related macular degeneration, ectopic pregnancy, rheumatoid arthritis, erectile dysfunction and more. Frieden says smoking not only causes more diseases, it's more lethal than it used to be.
FRIEDEN: Even though the Americans who smoke are smoking fewer cigarettes, the risk of dying from smoking among smokers is increasing.
KNOX: Maybe because companies have re-engineered cigarettes in recent decades, changing the way people inhale and increasing the toxic components of smoke. Whatever the reason, the report conveys a new sense of urgency.
FRIEDEN: If we don't act now, 5.6 million of our children will be killed by tobacco.
KNOX: Many of the proposed actions are familiar: raise cigarette taxes, do more public education, increase the legal age for buying cigarettes. But there's one new wrinkle. Behavioral psychologist David Abrams says this report makes a distinction between the harmfulness of burning tobacco and less-harmful ways of delivering the nicotine that keeps people addicted.
DAVID ABRAMS: That is new because it implies that less-harmful forms of getting one's nicotine - especially if one cannot quit smoking cigarettes - may be acceptable.
KNOX: That includes e-cigarettes - electronic, cigarette-like devices that don't burn tobacco. They release nicotine in a vapor that doesn't contain the toxic chemicals that cause most of the harm.
Abrams helped write the new report's last chapter on the changing landscape of tobacco control. He's with Legacy for Health, an anti-tobacco group set up as part of past legal settlements against the industry. He thinks e-cigarettes could help wean millions away from cigarettes.
ABRAMS: For the first time in a century, we have an appealing, alternative way to give addicted current smokers a satisfying way to give up their combusted products.
KNOX: Abrams calls this a harm-reduction strategy rather than a total abstinence approach. It's sort of like condoms or clean-needle exchanges to prevent AIDS. And it might be equally controversial.
Dr. Frieden, the CDC director, is a skeptic.
FRIEDEN: It might be possible that things like e-cigarettes, in the future, will have a positive role. As they're being rolled out now, I have grave concerns that they're doing more harm than good.
KNOX: Among other things, Frieden worries e-cigarettes will addict many adolescents and young adults to nicotine, and then they'll take up conventional cigarettes with all their dangers.
FRIEDEN: We know that nearly 2 million American kids have now used e-cigarettes. That's a problem.
KNOX: Frieden says strict regulation is needed to prevent companies from marketing e-cigarettes to young people.
FRIEDEN: Including things like bubble-gum and cotton-candy flavors; marketing over the Internet, where kids can get them; free samples; and the kind of advertising that re-glamorizes the act of smoking.
KNOX: Advocates are waiting for word from the Obama administration on whether the Food and Drug Administration has the ability to regulate e-cigarettes under the Tobacco Control Act of 2009.
Richard Knox, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Next, we'll hear from a man who was driven from his country, and who returned only to be driven away again. The country is South Sudan, formerly a part of Sudan. It became independent in 2011, part of the resolution to a decades-old conflict.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
South Sudan's new status encouraged one refugee from that conflict to come home. He was helping his country, until a conflict broke out within South Sudan between tribal factions led by the president and his former vice president. Our colleague David Greene spoke with a man who was forced to relive horrors of the past.
DAVID GREENE, BYLINE: His name is Daniel Majok Gai. He's one of the Lost Boys. Those were children separated from their families during Sudan's civil war. Daniel still has nightmares of the day in 1987 when a militia from the north attacked his village.
DANIEL MAJOK GAI: My father, who was out there in the field, tried to look for our cattle. They came and attacked the home. I ran in a different direction that I was not even know. So, from them, I never return home.
GREENE: He ran alone. And like so many of the Lost Boys, he kept running. It was a nomadic existence for more than a decade. Daniel moved on foot for hundreds of miles, spending time in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. Fourteen years after first fleeing, Daniel was at a camp in Kenya with nearly 60,000 other refugees. He kept paying attention to this bulletin board. If his name showed up, it would mean he was leaving to be resettled.
GAI: There was a bulletin board that take only 90 name. And when you see your name, you're knowing that you are flying to Nairobi, and Nairobi to wherever you are taken. A friend a mine came and said, hey, Daniel, you are leaving on the second of September. I said, you're kidding. Say, for sure. I came, and it was Daniel Majok Gai there on the board. I look at it closely, and it says you are going to Denver, Colorado.
GREENE: And Denver became Daniel's new home. He became an American citizen, and he went to college. Eventually, he was reunited with most of his family, who it turned out had also survived. In 2011, Daniel decided to move back to his homeland, and he's been working for a nonprofit there, helping to build schools. He got married, and was living in the South Sudanese city of Bor with his wife, their infant son, and also Daniel's elderly father. Then, last month, violence caught up with Daniel again. Shooting erupted in Bor. Daniel rounded up his family, and they headed for the swampy forest.
GAI: The moment we find ourselves in the forest, there was nothing for us to eat. The children were crying. The mothers were speechless, and there was nowhere that these people can survive. So, I told a cousin of mine - two of them - I said, we have to get back to town.
GREENE: You left your father, your mother and your son, and you went back to town to try and get some food and other things.
GAI: Yes. I came back to town. And thank God, we made it to my home compound. And we entered in, took out five bags of wheat flour, one sack of beans and sugar, and we ran again to the forest.
GREENE: And tell me what the next days were like as you're with your family and all these other people on the run.
GAI: Most of jungle area, there were, like, a flooding. And that area we went to was also under flooding. So, we had to cross water to where there's small hills, where we can sleep there. No mosquito nets, no blankets, nothing like that, you know. And so it was terrible. Most of people and children became sick. But after nine days, that's when the government came and took control of the city. I came back to see myself, and it was just unbelievable. You see dead bodies on the roads, and dogs are eating on the carcasses.
GREENE: Well, Daniel, your son was one of the people who got sick. How ill did he get?
GAI: That last day, he could not close his eye, and he could not - when he closed them, he cannot open. He was having diarrhea, vomiting and coughing. And so I told my wife and my father, even though the dead bodies are lying on the streets, we have to go back to town, and this is where we'll get help. And we came back to town, and there was not any medical facility available. There were all broken in, and they were looted. So, I call my brother and say: What should I do? My son is dying in my hand. Said, OK, what you should do, come to the airport. Maybe you might be lucky.
GREENE: And the family did get lucky. After a few days, they were able to get on a flight to Kenya, and Daniel's sick baby made it to a hospital in Nairobi. That's where we caught up with Daniel. He spoke about how his son's health has finally been improving.
GAI: I could see life on him, you know, open his eye, and try to smile, because he's outgoing boy. So, finally, after five days, he was released from hospital. So he's now doing well.
GREENE: That's just - that great news, that he's doing well.
GAI: Yeah.
INSKEEP: Can I ask you, Daniel, I mean, watching your young son go through this and escape violence and, you know, you escaping violence yourself, I just - I imagine this brings back the nightmares of your own boyhood.
GAI: Tremendously, yeah, it does. And when I saw myself and a son and a wife running, again, to the bushes that I ran to when I was only nine years old, it break my heart. I was helpless. I ask myself: Where can I find these two leaders and just look at them in their eyes and ask them, what are you doing? Because I know there are people who are still hiding under the bushes now. And by this time, the food that they were able to carry with them, it's out. So, they are likely dying. If you are killing innocents, you are displacing them, and you claim that you want to be a leader, who do you want to be a leader? Who do you want to lead?
GREENE: Are you still optimistic for the future of South Sudan, despite everything you've been through?
GAI: I will say I'm 90 percent optimistic about the future of South Sudan. I hope that someone or somewhere from the peace-loving countries, leaders will jump in and call these two leaders to the table and bring peace in.
GREENE: Well, Daniel, we are thinking about you and your son and your whole family. We just really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us.
GAI: Well, thank you very much for thinking of me. And also, you need think also for the South Sudanese children, innocent, that don't know what is going on, why are they being hunted, why are they being killed. The reason that I'm doing this radio now, it's for people to listen to my voice and know exactly this is my personal experience, a second war experience in my own life. And I don't want my son to be in this crisis again.
GREENE: That's Daniel Majok Gai, speaking to us from Nairobi. He tells us he plans to return to South Sudan and resume his work building and managing schools as soon as he can.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne hoping you're not thinking of calling your newest creation in the kitchen a Cronut with a C, because that has already been taken. The trademark was officially registered this week to describe the cross between a croissant and a donut that's lured New Yorkers into long lines for months now.
The trademark does not affect pastry chefs selling Dossants, Crodoughs, Cronut, Croillers and Craynuts. All of which, by the way, really exist.
It's MORNING EDITION.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn announced last night that he is giving up his Senate seat early at the end of this congressional session. His departure won't affect the balance of the Senate. But something that might affect the House - this week, several Democrats there said they won't be running again, which could add to an already uphill battle the party is facing in its effort to win back control of the House.
For more on what the departures from the Democratic side might mean, we turn to NPR political editor Charlie Mahtesian. Good morning.
CHARLES MAHTESIAN, BYLINE: Hi, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Start with who's retiring, and any big surprises there.
MAHTESIAN: Well, this week alone, we've seen three retirements, all of them Democrats. There's Bill Owens, of upstate New York. There's George Miller, of the San Francisco area in California; and Jim Moran, of Northern Virginia. And that makes for a total of 16 House retirements so far.
And there's no real bombshell retirement this week, but I would say the Bill Owens retirement was a pretty big surprise because he hasn't actually been in Congress for that long. Miller and Moran have been in office for a couple of decades, but Owens has only served two terms. And it's a really hard road to get to Congress. So to see a member of Congress leave so soon, it's a little bit of a surprise.
MONTAGNE: Well, is there a common thread in these last several Congress people who are retiring?
MAHTESIAN: Well, there's no single explanation, but you can certainly see some broad themes that you can identify from the round of retirements over the past couple of weeks. And first is that serving in Congress at this time is just an incredibly frustrating experience for many lawmakers, and it's especially unpleasant for the centrists or moderates.
Then you have another theme, which is that some members see a rough election year ahead, and they don't relish the prospect of dragging their families through all that and then putting themselves through the ringer when the job is less satisfying than it's ever been.
And then there is, I think, for a few members - although none of them would ever really admit this - retirement is really just a reflection of their assessment that their party is not going to return to the majority anytime soon. And so they figure this is probably a pretty good time to pull the plug rather than to wait it out as a part of a relatively powerless minority for a couple more years.
MONTAGNE: Well, how does, then, this affect the Democratic Party's chances and the Republican Party's chances in November?
MAHTESIAN: Well, both parties are going to have some prime opportunities to pick up seats as a result of these 16 retirements because it's typically easier to win an open seat than knock off an incumbent in these competitive districts. So when you add it all up, the retirements haven't so far dramatically altered the election landscape.
But some of the Democrats who are retiring are leaving seats that are very conservative, and they're all but certain to elect a Republican in November. And what that means is that the Democrats, who need to win 17 seats to win back the majority - that means they're probably going to have a slightly steeper climb.
MONTAGNE: You've just then touched upon something that has been much talked about - this generational shift in Congress in recent years, where there's been a great loss of moderates. How do you think these retirements are going to change the makeup of the House?
MAHTESIAN: Well, some of the folks who are retiring have served for several decades, so there's going to be a loss of institutional knowledge and also the loss of members who can remember a time when the House was actually a little more functional than it is today. But I think your point about moderates is a really important one because that's one of the most important consequences here from the retirements.
The ideological center of the House of Representatives continues to deteriorate; which means the House seems likely to continue to harden ideologically, and it's going to remain deeply polarized. One way to look at it is that the members who are in the center, they function as the grease of the legislative machine. And without that grease, the gears and lever stop working.
MONTAGNE: With news of this week's announcement by three more Democratic House members that they're retiring, NPR's Charlie Mahtesian. Thank you very much.
MAHTESIAN: Thank you, Renee.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep, good morning.
Let's listen to some of a discussion of a question the United States will face for as long as it's a leading nation. It's the question of when to use American military force. The man who advises the president on that question is General Martin Dempsey. He's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And this week, he spoke with officers and civilians studying at the National Defense University in Washington.
General Dempsey told the students he worries that Americans, including often national leaders, do not fully comprehend what he calls the military instrument and its limitations.
NPR's Tom Bowman was in the audience.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: The general strolled onstage in the cavernous, modern hall. The crowd: a select group, mostly military officers, a sea of uniforms in blue, gray and green.
GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY: Some of you I know got here through the keen competition of the Air Force assignment system, others through the blind luck of the Navy's assignment system.
(LAUGHTER)
BOWMAN: Dempsey worked the crowd. He's a West Point graduate who went on to study Irish poetry. He's known for his quick wit. But he also had a serious message: Americans don't know what you do.
DEMPSEY: We face a deficit larger than our budget. And that is a deficit of understanding between those of us who serve in uniform and our fellow citizens.
BOWMAN: That disconnect is most glaring when comes to this: What can the U.S. military achieve in places like or Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria.
DEMPSEY: And that's why, in the time remaining to me, I'm going to increase my commitment to have a conversation with our national leaders and the American people, about the purpose of the military not only in times of war, but in peacetime as well.
BOWMAN: After the speech, we met with General Dempsey. He swapped his formal uniform jacket for a plain black one. No ribbons or braids, just four stars on each shoulder. A cup of coffee was placed next to him and picked up on his theme.
DEMPSEY: One of the things that makes our profession valuable to the nation is that we do have these conversations about what is the proper role of a military leader, what's the proper role of the military instrument of power - in and among all the other instruments of national power. I think we have to have that conversation.
BOWMAN: But right now, when there's trouble in Syria or Iraq, the conversation turns quickly to that military instrument. Dempsey knows what the military can and cannot do. He was a division commander in Baghdad back in 2003. U.S. leaders expected a quick war. That year, Dempsey spoke about a growing insurgency.
DEMPSEY: You know, this is not the kind of conflict where we're going to know it's over because somebody walks out of a building with a white flag.
BOWMAN: The country descended into hellish sectarian fighting. Dempsey spent four years in Iraq, the last two training Iraqi forces. Dempsey lost many soldiers in the fight. And to this day, as a reminder, he carries photos of them.
DEMPSEY: At any given time, I'll have three and I have another 130 or so on my desk.
BOWMAN: Now as the top officer in American military, Dempsey faces pressure over and over to use military force again in places like Syria. More than 130,000 people have died there in the fighting between government forces and rebel groups. Dempsey, along with all the president's top national security advisors, pushed for arming the rebels back in 2012. The White House rejected the idea. Still, Dempsey was skeptical about using the American military. He outlined several options from air strikes to no-fly zones and explained their shortcomings.
Last summer, Senator John McCain lashed out at General Dempsey for not supporting a tougher approach in Syria.
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: Which do you think is a greater cost? The action we're taking now, which is - has had no effect on the battlefield equation or doing nothing?
DEMPSEY: Senator, I am in favor of building a moderate opposition and supporting it. The question of whether to support it with direct kinetic strikes is a decision for our elected officials, not for the senior military leader of the nation.
MCCAIN: This goes back to my concern about your role as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
DEMPSEY: I understand.
BOWMAN: McCain's argument, if the U.S. had acted more forcefully two years ago, the Assad government would be weaker now. Moderate rebels would be gaining ground. Instead, Syria's regime is stronger and al-Qaida is pushing out the moderate rebels. Next week, diplomats meet to try to negotiate a political settlement. If those talks fail, General Dempsey says he'll once again face questions about what the American military can do to help the rebels.
DEMPSEY: Well, at some point, I would then be asked for a menu of possibilities. And that menu will be broad and include both direct action but most importantly, in my view, things we could do to empower them.
BOWMAN: But your favorite option out of that would be to maybe train, arm the rebels and let them do the job?
DEMPSEY: Yeah, I don't know if I'd call it favorite, actually. What I would say is I think that the most effective - the one that would produce an outcome that would be sustainable over time - would be one that we empower that moderate group, assuming we can still find them, in that mixture.
BOWMAN: Training and arming the rebels - the same idea Dempsey backed two years ago: keep the U.S. military role limited, and help the Syrian people resolve the crisis. That could be where the Syria fight is headed.
Right now, though, the fight is headed across borders.
DEMPSEY: I've talked for some time about the fact that the conflict in the region stretches from Beirut to Damascus to Baghdad. And...
BOWMAN: So this is clearly a regional conflict right now, isn't it?
DEMPSEY: It is a regional conflict.
BOWMAN: And it's spilling back over to Iraq.
This month, al-Qaida fighters and their tribal supporters took control of Fallujah, a place where so many Americans died a decade ago.
Now veterans are on TV, NPR talking about Fallujah. Why did we lose friends? Why did we sacrifice? You were there when Fallujah fell. What runs through your mind when you see the black flag of al-Qaida in Fallujah?
DEMPSEY: Well, you know, the same thing that runs through any veteran's mind that has served there, which, you know, which is disappointment. But by the way, not disappointment in what we've done, disappointment in what Iraq has done to - failed to take advantage of the opportunity that we gave them. Look, the young men and women who went to Iraq won their fight. They did exactly what we asked them to do.
BOWMAN: And some of them didn't come home. Later, back at the Pentagon, General Dempsey will reach into the box on his desk with the words Make It Matter carved on its lid. He'll place in his pocket photos of the soldiers he lost in Iraq.
Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
The late Tom Clancy was hero of American espionage writing, and the hero of his spy novels was Jack Ryan. On the big screen, Ryan has been played by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck.
Now, there's a new Ryan in town. Los Angeles Times and MORNING EDITION film critic Kenneth Turan has our review.
KENNETH TURAN, BYLINE: "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" is serviceable, but not compelling, something that could pass for the real thing if you're not looking too hard.
This Jack Ryan film stars Chris Pine as the durable CIA analyst. It's an origin story, as well as a reboot. We see Ryan meet Cathy, the love of his life, played by Keira Kneightly. And we see how he's recruited into the CIA by Commander William Harper, played by a steely Kevin Costner.
Ryan's cover job is with a big Wall Street bank. He discovers that the Russian bank his firm is doing business with is hiding enormous amounts of money. Harper wants him to go to Moscow and audit everyone's books, a situation that makes fiance Cathy nervous enough to show up in the Russian capital, as well.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT")
KEIRA KNEIGHTLY: (As Cathy Muller) You lied to me for three years, and you were good at it. I think you actually enjoyed it.
CHRIS PINE: (As Jack Ryan) Cathy - can we have a minute, please?
KEVIN COSTNER: (As Commander William Harper) No, you can't.
(As Commander William Harper) No, you can't.
KNEIGHTLY: (As Cathy Muller) I would like to talk to Jack alone, please.
COSTNER: (As Commander William Harper) This is geopolitics. It's not couples therapy.
TURAN: It will come as no surprise that those Russians do, in fact, have something up their sleeve. The key culprit is a dour, fanatical plutocrat named Viktor, a juicy part that director Kenneth Branagh has kept for himself. Viktor may have more secrets than St. Basil's Cathedral has onion domes, but our man Ryan is not afraid to stand up to him.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT")
KENNETH BRANAGH: (As Viktor Cherevin) You Americans like to think of yourselves as direct. But I wonder if perhaps you are just rude.
PINE: (As Jack Ryan) You Russians think of yourselves as poets, but perhaps you're just touchy.
TURAN: Once the formerly desk-bound Ryan goes operational in a big way, the verbal sparring in "Shadow Recruit" gives way to lots of brisk action. Still, there is no shaking the feeling that this group is a kind of an espionage film B team, capable of mild diversion, but nothing more.
MONTAGNE: Kenneth Turan reviews movies for MORNING EDITION and The Los Angeles Times. And you are listening to MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
NPR's business news begins with a slam dunk for Bitcoins.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: Pro basketball's Sacramento Kings will now accept Bitcoins, the electronic currency, as payment for just about everything, from court-side seats, to a DeMarcus Cousins jersey. The Kings are the first major professional sports team to accept the virtual currency.
As of yesterday, Bitcoins could be used to purchase merchandise sold in the team shop at the Sleep Train Arena. Fans will be able to make online purchases, including game tickets, with Bitcoins by March 1st.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Many in the region of Catalonia in Spain are pushing to secede from the country, partly for cultural and partly for economic reasons. Naturally, the government of Spain opposes that. But yesterday, the regional parliament pressed the bid for independence a step further.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Lauren Frayer reports.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Catalan lawmakers in Barcelona have overwhelmingly endorsed a motion demanding that Spain give them the power to hold a referendum on independence. Catalan President Artur Mas praised democracy - in English -on his way out of the regional parliament.
PRESIDENT ARTUR MAS: As a democrat and as a Catalan, I am very happy.
FRAYER: He plans to hold that referendum in November, asking the Catalan people two questions: Do you think that Catalonia should be a state? And if so, do you want that state to be independent?
Another option is for Catalonia to re-negotiate its fiscal pact with Madrid. Polls show Catalans are roughly divided. Catalonia has its own language. The region is also wealthier than the rest of Spain, and Catalans resent paying taxes to Madrid.
As for the central government, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has made himself clear.
PRIME MINISTER MARIANO RAJOY: (Spanish spoken)
FRAYER: This referendum won't happen, he told reporters last month. It's unconstitutional, and it will not happen.
For now, Madrid says it won't renegotiate Catalonia's status. But it's unclear how it could prevent Catalans from holding a vote if they want to.
For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer, in Madrid.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This next story began as pretty much your standard contract dispute. The Weather Channel wanted more money for its programming, and DirectTV wanted to pay less.
So, at 12:01 Tuesday morning, the satellite service dropped the Weather Channel and replaced it with a smaller producer of weather programming, which raises the question: How much do TV viewers really want or need weather information when they can get it from other sources?
NPR's Mandalit del Barco reports.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: During negotiations, Weather Channel's star meteorologist, Jim Cantore, made a direct appeal to viewers.
(SOUNDBITE OF WEATHER CHANNEL BROADCAST)
JIM CANTORE: Only The Weather Channel is committed to telling you the entire story, to make sure you're informed and safe before, during and after the worst of it. DirecTV thinks that their subscribers can do without this life-saving information, and has dropped the Weather Channel. Don't let DirecTV control the weather.
DEL BARCO: The independent channel, based in Atlanta, had asked DirecTV to pay a penny more for each subscriber, arguing it acts as a public service or a utility. But DirecTV disagreed, says spokesman Robert Mercer.
ROBERT MERCER: The Weather Channel has embarked on this elaborate, dramatic sky-is- falling campaign, but they're not the only ones who can report the weather.
DEL BARCO: DirecTV has now replaced The Weather channel with Weather Nation, a back-to-basics channel with local temperatures and forecasts.
(SOUNDBITE OF WEATHER NATION BROADCAST)
UNIDENTIFIED BROADCASTER #1: Check out some of these wind gusts: 60 to 70 miles an hour.
DEL BARCO: The Twittersphere exploded, with fans and representatives from both companies tweeting furiously.
The Weather Channel has blasted its replacement as a, quote, "cheap startup that does weather forecasting on a three-hour tape loop." Here's distribution president Jennifer Dangar.
JENNIFER DANGAR: They would not pay the penny, and they would rather put something sub-par up. And their customers are not going to have access to the best, most accurate information.
DEL BARCO: Thirty-two years ago, the Weather Channel made its debut on cable TV. And that was thrilling for an entire generation of self-professed weather geeks like Mark Sudduth. At the time, he was 11 years old.
MIKE SUDDUTH: My parents referred to me as obsessed. I mean, I would - when the tropical update would come on at 10 minutes before the hour, get out to my way, because I'm going to make sure I caught that tropical update. You know, and then even the local forecast, the locals on the eights, it catered to those who were into the weather like nothing else.
DEL BARCO: Sudduth says he was hooked: watching meteorologists and storm chasers track hurricanes and tornadoes and blizzards from the studios. It was even more exciting when they reported from the field.
SUDDUTH: It was great, because it was weather 24 hours a day.
DEL BARCO: Watching guys like Jim Cantore and John Hope explain severe weather patterns even inspired Sudduth to start his own successful website, HurricaneTrack.com. Then, he says, something changed.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEL BARCO: When there wasn't severe weather, the channel began playing movies and reality shows about things like ice fishing.
(SOUNDBITE OF WEATHER CHANNEL BROADCAST)
UNIDENTIFIED BROADCASTER #2: Oh, yeah. There's a dandy. Look at that jumbo. That's a Devil's Lake jumbo, right there.
DEL BARCO: And a new show called "Freaks of Nature."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FREAKS OF NATURE')
UNIDENTIFIED BROADCASTER #3: Steven's going to do a 90-foot dive into this 15-foot deep pool.
DEL BARCO: Sudduth says he and others were turned off.
SUDDUTH: Weather is not entertainment. It's very serious. And I think them drifting away from that may have hurt them.
DEL BARCO: DirecTV spokesman Mercer says some of its customers made similar complaints.
MERCER: They enjoy watching weather news without having to wade through a sea of reality TV shows.
DEL BARCO: He points out there are so many more sources of weather news and information now, on Internet websites and smartphone apps. Another network, AccuWeather, announced it will soon go live, 24/7, on cable.
And The Weather Channel still has a strong presence online, and remains available to many cable subscribers. But on DirecTV, it's gone with the wind.
Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And our last word in business is...
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTBALL GAME BROADCAST)
PEYTON MANNING: Omaha!
MONTAGNE: Yes, Omaha. It's more than just the biggest city in Nebraska. It's also a signal that Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning barked out repeatedly last Sunday during a playoff game against the San Diego Chargers.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTBALL GAME BROADCAST)
MANNING: Omaha!
UNIDENTIFIED BROADCASTER: Denver.
MANNING: Omaha! Omaha!
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Well what, exactly, does Omaha mean? Well, since it is signaling something about the play that's about to start, and since Manning may well be using that signal again, he's a little elusive.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
MANNING: It's a run play, but it could be a pass play...
(LAUGHTER)
MANNING: ...or a play action pass, depending on the wind, which way we're going, and the jerseys that we're wearing.
(LAUGHTER)
INSKEEP: That makes it clear. This Sunday, Omaha will mean cold, hard cash. Several Omaha-based companies have put their money on Omaha during this weekend's conference championship game.
MONTAGNE: Every time Manning shouts Omaha this weekend, the businesses will donate $500 to Peyton Manning's foundation for at-risk children.
INSKEEP: Think of it like a drinking game, except nobody gets hurt. Let's start now. It's MORNING EDITION, from Omaha News. I'm Steve Omaha.
MONTAGNE: And I'm Renee Montomaha.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning. President Obama today is set to announce the changes he would like to make in the way the National Security Agency keeps track of Americans and foreigners. He will speak at the Justice Department, six months after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden prompted a fierce debate in this country and abroad by exposing previously secret NSA surveillance programs.
Many groups will be intently listening to this speech and different groups of people with different interests will be listening for different things. NPR's Tom Gjelten has been covering this story for months. He's in our studios. Tom, good morning.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK. So the president himself has said that something needs to change here, right?
GJELTEN: He did, Steve. And he hand-picked a group of security and privacy experts to review the NSA activities, to recommend changes. We've now got those recommendations. And because the president picked the group himself, their recommendations carry a lot of weight. But that's not all he has to consider. As you say, there are many groups with stakes in this debate. Obviously the national security establishment, but also the civil libertarians, privacy advocates, business interests, the courts, Congress.
INSKEEP: And many more, many more. So you've been talking with officials here this morning. What is the president likely to say he wants to change?
GJELTEN: Well, the big issue, Steve, is the NSA's collection of our telephone records. Every call Americans make, what number they dial, how long the call lasts. Not the contents of the call, but still, that telephone metadata, as it's called, says a lot about us. So this is controversial. The NSA wants a database it can search for possible terrorist communications but the president's own review group said that program has not been all that helpful. The issue is what to do about it, and the latest we're hearing from our sources is that the president is likely to say those records should not be held by the government but rather be kept outside the government. The NSA could still get access to the database and search it, but only with a judicial finding.
INSKEEP: And we don't know exactly how this would work in the president's proposal, but let's make sure people understand the possibilities. The information would be held outside the government. What might that mean?
GJELTEN: Well, it could mean the telephone companies will hold it, it could mean a third group, some kind of special non-governmental group could hold it. We don't know yet that the president is actually going to be specific about what should happen.
INSKEEP: Okay, this is a subject that is of great concern to Americans because they're not supposed to be spied on by the National Security Agency without a court order and people felt that they were being or there was a potential for that. What about foreigners?
GJELTEN: Well, foreigners have a lot fewer protections than Americans do. And one of the things that we're going to be looking for is whether some of those privacy protections for foreigners, including for foreign leaders, get improved.
INSKEEP: Now, there's some other issues to deal with here because we were talking about the different interest groups that you mentioned, Tom Gjelten. You have reported for us this week on technology companies who have their own stake here and their own set of interests and their own questions.
GJELTEN: They're worried, Steve, that the NSA has been breaking their encryption, finding vulnerabilities in their technology and software for the purposes of surveillance and cyberwarfare even. The tech companies would like to see those activities scaled back. Another thing they'd like to see is for the NSA to be more transparent about what it demands of the tech companies, and the tech companies feel that if customers knew how rarely the NSA goes to them, they might feel reassured. Those are some of the things the techs are looking for.
INSKEEP: The companies are saying, look, we actually don't give them troves of information.
GJELTEN: Not that much.
INSKEEP: Okay, are there concerns beyond Edward Snowdon's disclosures that the president is likely to address here?
GJELTEN: Well, see, this would be an opportunity to reform the oversight of NSA surveillance, perhaps by installing a public defense lawyer in the court to represent privacy interests against whatever the NSA is arguing. That's something that we should be listening for. Another thing: Since he's going to be speaking at the Justice Department, the president might have something to say about the FBI and what national security powers it should have.
INSKEEP: Okay, Tom, thanks very much.
GJELTEN: You bet.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Tom Gjelten, speaking with us on this morning when we're expecting a speech by President Obama at the Justice Department, talking about the changes in the National Security Agency that he would like to see.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And even before Edward Snowden and his leaks made NSA surveillance the subject of dinner table conversations all over American, President Obama said he wanted a debate about the right balance between security and civil liberties. The Snowden revelations made sure that Mr. Obama got one. NPR's Mara Liasson reports on how the political calculus is working at the White House.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: The president's new senior advisor, John Podesta, describes what Mr. Obama wants Americans to understand.
JOHN PODESTA: That he has put in place two things. One is a set of reviews and oversight that the debate that he called for, which would be open, that will include Congress of the United States to ensure that the American people can feel like the right balance has been struck has been done with great discipline.
LIASSON: Turning to Congress is not a punt, the White House argues, because next year Congress has to decide whether or not to renew the law that authorizes the surveillance programs. The president knows he can't satisfy everyone. The ACLU, the tech companies, European allies and the intelligence community all have different concerns.
Late last year, Mr. Obama told reporters what he thought had to happen.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: What is absolutely clear to me is that given the public debate that's taken place and the disclosures that have taken place over the last several months, that this is only going to work if the American people have confidence and trust.
LIASSON: And that means making some changes in the programs he inherited.
OBAMA: We need this intelligence. We can't unilaterally disarm. There are ways we can do it potentially, that gives people greater assurance that there are checks and balances, that there's sufficient oversight, sufficient transparency.
LIASSON: Transparency enough to safeguard against potential abuse, like unwarranted NSA snooping into people's private lives, but also not so transparent that terrorists avoid scrutiny. Peter Feaver, a former Bush and Clinton White House national security staffer, says public opinion won't be much help to the president.
PETER FEAVER: We know that what the public thinks when it feels secure is different from what the public thinks when it feels insecure. So in the immediate aftermath of attacks, the public accepts infringements, not just accepts, demands steps be taken that it feels would be unwarranted at other periods when it feels more secure.
LIASSON: And over the last year or so there's been a noticeable erosion in public support for these surveillance programs. Carroll Doherty is with Pew Research Center.
CARROLL DOHERTY: We've been tracking a question that, you know, pits civil liberties versus protecting against terrorism since 9/11 and we've consistently had majority saying, no, protect the country. And now for the first time you see pluralities at least saying, no, it's more important to not restrict civil liberties.
LIASSON: It's still not a top issue for most voters, but there is a small group that cares intensely about surveillance, and it's not the same red/blue spit you see on almost every other issue in American politics. It cross cuts parties internally, uniting the civil liberties left and the libertarian right, Rand Paul Republicans with the ACLU. Carroll Doherty.
DOHERTY: This is a unusual political alignment. It's conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats who have a lot in common on this issue and they're the ones who are most worried about civil liberties. You know, at a time of polarized politics, you do see this common ground between liberals and conservatives. Both parties are divided almost 50/50 on that civil liberties versus terrorism question.
LIASSON: Because Democrats are divided, the president can afford to anger some of his base, but he does have to worry about young people, a vital constituency and one of those most concerned about surveillance. To them, said one White House official, Mr. Obama now looks like every other president. Peter Feaver says the politics of surveillance are so volatile, it's not easy to find the sweet spot.
FEAVER: The sweet spot shifts. That doesn't mean that you should give the public exactly what it wants when it's feeling most afraid, any more than you should give the public exactly what it wants when it's feeling most complacent. This is really a test for political leadership. What the political leader does is see the bigger picture and explain that bigger picture to a distracted public. That's the challenge for President Obama. And hopefully, that's the challenge he'll meet in this speech.
LIASSON: We'll find out later today whether the president met that challenge. Mara Liasson, NPR News, the White House.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
World powers will be gathering in Switzerland next week to look for ways to end Syria's brutal civil war. At this late date, though, representatives of the Syrian opposition are still deciding if they will come. For months now, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been cajoling opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to come to the Geneva conference, but the U.S. would allow Iran only a limited role on the sidelines, although Iran is a major player in the Syrian conflict.
To discuss the implications of this, we brought into our studio Barbara Slavin, an Iran-watcher at the Atlantic Council. Welcome.
BARBARA SLAVIN: Thank you very much.
MONTAGNE: Remind us, first, of the role that Iran plays in the Syrian conflict. How and why does Iran support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad?
SLAVIN: Well, it's been a 40 year relationship, actually. Syria has been Iran's only real ally in the Arab world, so it's something that goes back to the time of the revolution, the Iran-Iraq war when the Syrians took the Iranian's side because they were angry at the Iraqis for other reasons. But it's been a very durable relationship, very useful for both sides.
The Iranians supply all sorts of military goods, and lately they're actually providing oil and money, intelligence operatives, and they've encouraged Hezbollah, which is the Lebanese group very close to Iran, to come in and actually fight on behalf of the Syrian regime. Some say that Hezbollah has actually saved the Syrian regime last summer so it's a really close relationship and has been for a very long time.
MONTAGNE: And in this case on Iran's side is Russia, which is cohosting the Geneva peace talks with the United States. Now, the Russians want the Iranians at the table. Secretary of State Kerry has conceded recently that Iran probably has to be involved, but on the sidelines. What is the latest on Iran's status at these talks?
SLAVIN: Well, it's very complicated. I think the United States recognizes that without Iran there, this isn't going to be a peace conference. It's going to be about something else. The Syrians want it to be about so-called counter-terrorism. The U.S. and the UN probably are going to focus more on humanitarian access, to try to get some more food and medicine into Syrians who are displaced in the country and who are in a terrible state.
But it's not going to be a peace conference without Iran there because of its important role supporting the Syrian regime.
MONTAGNE: You know, one thing, why don't the Obama administration want Iran at the table, given that it has recently engaged with Iran to forge a nuclear deal?
SLAVIN: Well, you know, the nuclear deal is just the sort of tip of the iceberg for the United States and Iran. It's very important. In fact, it's absolutely necessary that this go forward for the relationship to develop. But when it comes to Syria, you have a lot of other equities there. The Saudis, of course, are opposed to having Iran involved.
MONTAGNE: 'Cause they are traditional Shiite power, Sunni power rivals.
SLAVIN: It's Sunni versus Shia, it's Arab versus Persian, you name it. But in this case, the United States has been insisting that the Iranians accept the principals of the first Geneva agreement, which was, I think, in 2012, and agree to have a transitional government replace Assad. This Iranians have refused to do. They're not going to accept any preconditions to come to the table. And frankly, given the situation now, where the Assad regime is actually doing better than it has in a while, this conference is not going to be about a political transition, no matter what the United States says.
MONTAGNE: Right. And that is a very key point, the question of President Assad stepping down or not. Do you see any indication that Iran might be willing to abandon President Assad, to accept some sort of coalition government in Damascus?
SLAVIN: I think the Iranians would be perfectly willing to jettison Assad and they've said so, but they want to know what the alternative is, and as they rightly point out, you have a very confused situation now with a completely fractured opposition and the rise of all these jihadi groups who are militantly anti-Shia. So the Iranians aren't going to throw Assad under a bus unless they know that someone who replaces him will protect their equities in Syria, which means their intelligence contacts, their conduit to Hezbollah, that Syria will remain a friend of Iran after Assad.
MONTAGNE: Barbara Slavin is author of the book "Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S. and the Twisted Path to Confrontation." Thanks very much for joining us.
SLAVIN: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. This next story would be hard to believe except the source for it claims he has security video. Joe Lynn owns the Shambles bar in Chicago. He tells a local website a man tried to break in at 6:43 a.m. The burglar was technically adept - he disabled a lock. But the video shows he could not open the door.
He just kept pulling and pulling. He finally gave up pulling and just had to walk away, apparently never having noticed the sign that said: Push. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Colombia is a country famous for its exports. It's well known that those exports traditionally include flowers and also, unfortunately, cocaine. You may not realize Colombia is also the world's fourth-largest coal exporter, thanks in part to the Drummond Coal Co. The Alabama-based mining firm produces about 25 million tons of coal annually in the South American country.
Drummond is also under fire for polluting beaches and dumping coal in the ocean. Now, the Colombian government has ordered a complete halt to Drummond's port operation, as John Otis reports.
JOHN OTIS, BYLINE: The government order, which took effect Monday, prohibits Drummond from loading coal at its Caribbean port near the resort city of Santa Marta. Drummond exports 80,000 tons per day. But it is a dirty operation. Cranes load coal onto open-air barges for delivery to ships. This process kicks up coal dust that fouls the air, water and beaches. Julio Vera is a private energy consultant in Bogota, the Colombian capital.
JULIO VERA: The color of the beaches have changed. The sand in Santa Marta was very white. At this moment the beach in Santa Marta is not white. It is grey or black in some parts.
OTIS: Under a Colombian law that took effect January 1st, coal must now be loaded directly onto ships by way of enclosed conveyer belts, a much cleaner system. These renovations at Drummond's port are nearly finished. But of Colombia's four main coal exporters, Drummond is the only one that failed to meet the deadline.
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PRESIDENT JUAN MANUEL SANTOS: (Spanish spoken)
OTIS: Shortly before his government ordered the shutdown, President Juan Manuel Santos said: Drummond is flouting the law by maintaining a coal export system that is polluting the bay of Santa Marta. This isn't the first time Drummond has been accused of misdeeds in Colombia. The company has been involved in court battles over its alleged ties to Colombian death squads that killed labor activists.
Drummond has denied any wrongdoing. To prevent a barge from sinking in rough seas last January, Drummond dumped 1,900 tons of coal into ocean then said nothing until pictures of the incident were posted on the Internet. The company was fined $3.5 million and ordered to clean up nearby beaches. The Colombian government will lose about $6 million in taxes and royalties for every day Drummond's port is shut down.
SENATOR JORGE ROBLEDO: (Spanish spoken)
OTIS: Colombian Senator Jorge Robledo wants the government to sue Drummond for this lost income. He said the company knew at least seven years in advance that it would have to modernize its port. The Drummond scandal reflects the hurdles in President Santos's quest to scale-up mining. As security improves in a country plagued by drug traffickers and guerrillas, new areas have opened up for gold, silver, nickel, and coal extraction.
But it can leave a huge footprint. In some Colombian villages located near mining sites, people suffer from mercury poisoning and black lung disease. What's more, Colombia's record at enforcing environmental laws is spotty - which encourages mining companies to violate them, says Julio Fierro, a Colombian geologist at the National University in Bogota.
JULIO FIERRO: (speaks Spanish)
OTIS: That's the problem with mining in countries with weak government institutions, Fierro says. Mining always becomes a source of social and environmental conflict. Drummond did not respond to NPR's requests for comment. In a communiqué, the company said that its port renovations should be completed in March when it expects to resume exporting Colombian coal. For NPR News, I'm John Otis in Bogota, Colombia.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: This is NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And this is Special Coverage on MORNING EDITION from NPR News of the President Obama's speech at the Department of Justice. He's speaking about changing the NSA and how it collects intelligence. He so far has given a history of intelligence collection and the importance of signals intelligence. Let's rejoin him for a few moments right now.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And yet, in our rush to respond to a very real and novel set of threats, the risks of government over-reach - the possibility that we lose some of our core liberties in pursuit of security - also became more pronounced. We saw in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 our government engaged in enhanced interrogation techniques that contradicted our values. As a senator, I was critical of several practices such as warrantless wire-taps. And all to often new authorities were instituted without adequate public debate.
Direct combination of action by the courts, increased congressional oversight and adjustments by the previous administration, some of the worst accesses that emerged after 9/11, were curbed by the time I took office. But a variety of factors have continued to complicated America's efforts to both defend our nation and uphold our civil liberties. First, the same technological advances that all U.S. intelligence agencies to pin-point an Al-Qaeda cell in Yemen or an email between two terrorists in the Sehel also mean that many routine communications around the world are within our reach. And at a time when more and more of our lives are digital, that prospect is disquieting for all of us.
Second, the combination of increased digital information and powerful super-computers offers intelligence agencies the possibility of sifting through massive amounts of bulk data to identify patterns or pursue leads that may thwart impending threats. It's a powerful tool. But the government collection and storage of such bulk data also creates a potential for abuse. Third, the legal safe-guards that restrict surveillance against U.S. persons without a warrant do not apply to foreign persons overseas. This is not unique to America. Few, if any, spy agencies around the world constrain their activities beyond their own borders. And the whole point of intelligence is to obtain information that is not publically available.
But America's capabilities are unique. And the power of new technologies means that there are fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do. That places a special obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do. And finally, intelligence agencies cannot function without secrecy.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
That's President Obama speaking today at the Justice Department, standing before a row of American flags. A number of distinguished intelligence officials and members of congress are in the audience. As the president discusses, in rather lengthy speech, what he sees the history of intelligence gathering in the United States as - particularly signals intelligence, the importance of it. Defending the importance, as we've heard in the last several minutes, and the president - we have the text of the speech now.
In the next few minutes, we'll be talking about how he plans to change the National Security Agency particularly the Metadata Program. That's the program that has gathered telephone call information from all Americans. And we have a few minutes before our next break here. So we're going to discuss what we're learning from this speech with a couple of our correspondents who've been covering this story. NPR's Tamara Keith and NPR's Tom Gjelten. And, Tom, let's start with you. You're looking at what the president is saying here. You've been talking with officials all morning. What is actually going to change about the National Security Agency?
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: Steve, the headline here is that this Metadata Program that we've been so focused on, where the government collects the telephone records of all Americans, that is not going to end but it's going to change. It's going to go through a process of transition and the most important change. Well, there are two big changes. One, the government will not be holding that data anymore. Where it's going to go, who's going to hold it? - Has not yet been determined.
INSKEEP: Is it going to be private phone companies? Some third party?
GJELTEN: There's going to be a period of transition. And the second change is that every time, every single time the NSA, an NSA analyst, wants to search that database the NSA is going to have to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and get that request approved. Those are two very important changes.
INSKEEP: And one thing to note here. He says in this speech, I am therefore ordering a transition. The transition you talked about. Tamara Keith I gather where he says ordering this must mean that he feels he has the authority to do that. He won't need to ask Congress for much to do this part?
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Well, he's ordering a transition, however, Congress would be needed to actually make the change. So what he's doing is he's calling on the attorney general and the intelligence community over the next 60 days to conduct a pretty detailed review, consider where this data could be kept. And meet with Congress and sort of develop a plan that then would have to be implemented by Congress, but the things that are happening right now that they'd have to go through the FISA Court. The changes that he's called for, those things can happen immediately through executive action. However, the big ticket stuff will require Congress.
MONTAGNE: Well, one thing that has come up in all of this is a suggestion that he create some job called a private advocate. That is one person who makes decisions about who, you know, makes decisions about what's being done with this information. It doesn't look like he is going to do that in this speech.
KEITH: What is now being discussed is a panel of advocates. So these would be civil liberties and privacy advocates. It's not exactly clear to me what form that would take but that they would be consulted sometimes. They would be part of the review process sometimes.
INSKEEP: We're talking about people before this Secret Court that reviews warrants to spy on Americans, right? So...
GJELTEN: Yes. And the arrangement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a matter of legislation. So this is specifically, you start tampering with the way the FISA court works - that specifically requires Congressional action. And once you bring Congress in it sort of becomes unpredictable. I mean, they may choose to do less, they may choose to do more.
INSKEEP: And there may not be a defense lawyer, so to speak, for every single warrant. Is that what you're saying Tamara?
KEITH: They were saying that it would be only in novel instances, so not in every single case.
INSKEEP: OK. So we're learning more throughout the morning and we'll continue reporting this throughout the morning and throughout the day here on NPR News. But President Obama, as we've been hearing, is speaking at the Justice Department and saying, among other things, I am, quote, "ordering a transition that will end the bulk Metadata Program as it currently exists." And, from what we understand, this means that the National Security Agency will still be able to get access to phone records. It's just unclear who's going to keep those records and how the access will be provided. We'll bring you more as we learn in on NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Let's talk more about changes to the National Security Agency that President Obama is announcing as we speak at the Justice Department. And we're joined in our studio by Tamara Keith and Tom Gjelten. And let's just begin.
Tom, you told us earlier today that technology companies wanted greater transparency. They want the public to know more about what the NSA is doing. What is the president proposing today?
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: He's proposed three changes that will improve, will increase the transparency of what the NSA is doing. First of all, he's asking for more of the court opinions concerning this program; the oversight opinions, to be declassified. Most of those now only secret. He wants them - more of them to be declassified.
Second, so-called national security letters, which are types of subpoenas that the FBI can issue to get information. Right now, when those letters are issued, nobody can talk about them - forever. And he is saying that those should be disclosable.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Maybe not right away, but eventually.
GJELTEN: Not, but not indefinitely, should not indefinitely be kept secret. At some point, those should be made public.
And the third thing, and this is the really important one. When the NSA makes requests to technology companies, he, the president, wants the NSA to be more open to speak more publicly about when it makes those requests, how many of them, and so forth. That's something that has been very important to the tech companies.
INSKEEP: And why? Because they think that this is better for them for it to be known, the companies?
GJELTEN: They're thinking that customers will see that this does not happen all that often.
MONTAGNE: You know, Tamara, I'm wondering, most limitations of the NSA have been about spying on Americans. But the president is also talking about spying on foreigners. In fact, he says in his speech something along the lines of: If I want to talk to our allies and our leaders, we'll pick the phone and talk to them.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Yes. And that is specifically addressing the concern that the NSA had been gathering telephone data on leaders like Angela Merkel; close allies of the United States. What the president is saying and what his advisors are saying is that they are already spying on dozens fewer foreign leaders. But they are not being specific about exactly who that is.
Another part of this is that they're also extending certain protections that are currently afford to Americans; privacy protections. To foreign nationals, as well. And so there would be a higher threshold for gathering some of this telephone metadata and some of the data would not be allowed to be kept as long.
INSKEEP: This is a major change, isn't it, Tamara, because historically all of the protections, or nearly all of them have been about protecting American citizens from being spied on by their own government without a court intervening in some way.
KEITH: But the international uproar over this has been pretty significant, and it was important for the president to try to allay some of the concerns.
INSKEEP: Tom Gjelten, let me just ask you; we've heard a lot about what the president is announcing in lengthy speech. What is the president not saying?
GJELTEN: One big issue, Steve, that he did not address - he is not addressing at all - and that is what the NSA has been doing to undermine the technology companies' encryption of data. Those are the tools that those companies use to keep that data private. There's been concern that the NSA has been breaking that encryption. This has been something that a lot of people have talked about. As far as we can tell, he's not going anywhere near that. So we have to assume that he must have concluded that that decryption effort by the NSA is something that will continue because we don't see any evidence otherwise.
INSKEEP: OK. Tom, thanks very much. That's NPR's Tom Gjelten. He covers intelligence and other issues. Thank you.
GJELTEN: You bet.
INSKEEP: And NPR's Tamara Keith, one of our new White House correspondents. Good to have you along, Tamara.
KEITH: Thank you.
INSKEEP: And again, President Obama today saying that the telephone records program run by the NSA will not continue, quote, "in its current form," although it appears it will continue in some form that has yet to be announced. We'll continue to have news and analysis as we learn it on MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep with Renee Montagne. We've been listening this morning and we're about to listen a little more to President Obama, who is saying that he is ordering changes, a transition at the National Security Agency, not ending a controversial program that gathers the phone records of Americans. But ending it as we know it and making changes that are yet unspecified. The President talked about his planned changes just a moment ago and let's listen to some of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I believe critics are right to point out that without proper safeguards this type of program could be used to yield more information about our private lives. And open the door to more intrusive bulk collection programs in the future. They're also right to point out that all thought the telephone bulk collection program was subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and has been reauthorized repeatedly by Congress, it has never been subject to vigorous public debate. For all these reasons I believe we need a new approach. I am therefore ordering a transition that will end the Section 215 bulk metadata program as it currently exists.
And establish a mechanism that preserves the capabilities we need, without the government holding this bulk metadata. This will not be simple, the review group recommended that our current approach be replaced by one in which the providers or a third party retain the bulk records. With government accessing information as needed.
Both of these options pose difficult problems, relying solely on the records of multiple providers for example could require companies to alter their procedures in ways that raise new privacy concerns. On the other hand Any third-party maintaining a single consolidated database, would be carrying out what's essentially a government function but with more expense, more legal ambiguity. Potentially less accountability, all of which would have doubtful impact on increasing public confidence that their privacy is being protected. During the review process some suggested that we may also be able to preserve the capabilities we need through a combination of existing authorities, better information sharing and recent technological advances but more work needs to be done to determine exactly how this system might work.
Because of the challenges involved, I've ordered that the transition away from the existing program will proceed in two steps. Effective immediately we will only pursue phone calls that are two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization, instead of the current three. And I have directed the Attorney General to work with Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, so during this transition period the database can be queried only after a judicial finding or in the case of a true emergency.
INSKEEP: That's President Obama speaking a little bit earlier today at the United States Department of Justice. Standing at a lectern before some American flags while Senators and Intelligence Officials listened. Very complicated announcement being made here today. Talking about the way that he intends to change - not end - but change or begin changing a controversial surveillance program that gathers American phone records and also deals with a number of other issues of concern at the National Security Agency. Let's just try to translate what we've just heard, that chunk of the speech we've just heard. NPR's Tom Gjelten is here along with NPR's Tamara Keith and we're going to just talk this through phrase by phrase. First the active phrase there, Tom Gjelten, there for ordering a transition. What's he doing?
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: What he's doing Steve is he knows he doesn't like the program as it currently exists but he's not exactly sure how to replace it. So, we're in a kind of limbo period here. Where we know that the program of collecting telephone records on all American's phone calls is going to end, as it currently exists, but what it's going to be replaced by we don't know yet. He says he want to consult Congress, he wants to consult outsiders. That data will still exist, that data will still be collected but where it's going to be held is no yet determined.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Well, he did. He spoke of a possible third party consolidating this singular database in somewhere else other than the NSA, maybe the telecommunication companies - wasn't clear at all. What could it be?
GJELTEN: Yes, but he also made an argument about why it might not be a good idea to have the telephone companies hold it. So, he's clearly undecided about this. When they talk about a third-party, we heard earlier today from a senior administration official, this is an entity that does not currently exist.
INSKEEP: I want to ask about something else in here. He said something about data from the existing program will proceed in two steps instead of three. Would you just explain what on earth he's taking about there, Tom Gjelten?
GJELTEN: Very quickly. They see a phone number that they regard as suspicious and they want to check into who made that phone call. They find out who that person called and then in the second step they will...
INSKEEP: Call - the numbers they find.
GJELTEN: ... all the numbers.
INSKEEP: Cal the numbers.
GJELTEN: Exactly. Whoever was called, who that person called. So, these are called hops. They're only going to go two hops, previously they've gone three hops. And you did the math a few days ago how quickly that that can expand into a real large number of queries. They're now going from three hops down to just two hops.
INSKEEP: OK. So, less surveillance. I want to ask Tamara Keith about something here. Because the president says, Tamara Keith, I believe the critics are right to point out a number of concerns, but then he went on to say that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is the court that is supposed to rule and issue a warrant before the NSA spies on Americans. But this court even though it's been reauthorized by Congress it, quote, has never been subject to vigorous public debate, I guess that debate would have to be led by congress? Is Congress ready for the debate.
KEITH: I think Congress is possibly ready for that debate but congress is not of one mind about it. Congress - many members of Congress disagree with each other and there are unusual alliances on these issues. And there's also the matter that much of this is classified and they can't actually talk about what they know. And so, that makes the discussion somewhat more challenging as well.
INSKEEP: OK, Tamara thanks very much.
KEITH: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: That's White House Correspondent Tamara Keith, she's also covered Congress for years. NPR's Tom Gjelten covers intelligence matters. Tom, thanks to you for coming in as well.
GJELTEN: Of course.
INSKEEP: And we'll continue covering this again. President Obama has announced today that he's ordering a transition, as he calls it, at the National Security Agency. A program to collect phone records of millions of Americans will end as we know it but appears to be ready to continue in some other form that's yet to be determined. We'll try to learn more as we can. It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
Singer and songwriter David Dondero has been touring the world and putting out records for nearly two decades. Critics and other musicians praise him, and he's been on a handful of record labels. But he's still far from a household name and now, he's doing everything on his own. Iowa Public Radio's Clay Masters has his story.
CLAY MASTERS, BYLINE: On a cold Sunday night in the college town of Ames, Iowa, a couple dozen people gather at DG's Tap House. David Dondero just pulled into town, driving an early 1990s Toyota Corolla.
DAVID DONDERO: It came with a 160,000 and now, it's gone - yeah, I put 10,000 on. Now, it' s got 170,000. It's a pretty good car. It just, it has an issue with the starter and the battery cable terminals. I got to mess with that crap tomorrow.
MASTERS: Often, he'll book a tour from his cellphone between cities.
DONDERO: Reno; and Monroe, Utah; and Pueblo, Colo.; and Denver and Omaha; then here. So it's good to be back in the Midwest.
MASTERS: In Ames, he plays a career-spanning set including some from a new record.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THIS GUITAR")
MASTERS: Dondero is a transient. He's lived all over the country, from Alaska to Texas. When he's not touring, he finds work, most recently as a carpenter in California. But it never lasts. Music always finds its way back into his life.
DONDERO: Yeah, so it's weird. It's a juggling act of holding employment and losing employment and trying to make it all happen. But this guitar was kind of like a reflection of that, you know. Like, this damn guitar, here I am again back down to nothing.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THIS GUITAR")
MASTERS: Dondero has been playing solo for most of his career. Singer and songwriter Jolie Holland remembers meeting him in the late 1990s outside a show in British Columbia. He was selling records out of the trunk of his car. She has them all.
JOLIE HOLLAND: Dave's first record was incredibly brilliant and then the last record that he put out is incredibly brilliant.
MASTERS: Holland recently recorded a cover of Dondero's "The Real Tina Turner."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE REAL TINA TURNER")
MASTERS: Holland has taken a different path from Dondero. She's signed to a respected label with a roster that includes Tom Waits and Mavis Staples. She has a manager and booking agents who do their jobs.
HOLLAND: That allows me to do my job, which is to write music and keep a band together and do everything else that I have to do to in order to lead the band and write the songs and keep myself alive in this environment where it's just so incredibly difficult to pay the rent.
MASTERS: That is if you choose to settle down and pay the rent.
DONDERO: I was with labels with managers that are always talking about the next level and trying to be in the big time. And I'm happy enough being able to float my own boat and roll around and play in small clubs to people that want to hear it. And doing it this way has taken away all that kind of pressure of trying to get to the next level, whatever that is.
MASTERS: Dondero may not want any of that. But David Bazan, who made a name for himself fronting the band Pedro the Lion, has a wife and kids.
DAVID BAZAN: I mean, there's no net for Dave, of any kind, except for his own constitution.
MASTERS: Bazan says he admires his friend. He first met him when they toured Europe in 2008. Bazan says he watched him every night.
BAZAN: Whoever's in the room, even if they don't know about him prior, are just kind of captivated and it energizes him. And I could see it over and over again; him being plagued with self-doubt, you know, when he's not on the stage, when he's kind of going about his day. And then he gets up on stage and it's a reminder to him, like, oh yeah, I'm kind of made for this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'VE SEEN THE LOVE")
MASTERS: You could see it at the sparsely attended Iowa show and you can hear it on his records.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'VE SEEN THE LOVE")
MASTERS: Dondero seems happy doing things the way he does.
DONDERO: If you do it my way, you're, like, even in songs you can go some different direction every day. You don't have to get stuck in the same words or the same pattern. You can change it up every time if you want. You don't ever have to do the same thing twice if you don't want to.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIVING AND THE DEAD")
MASTERS: For now, David Dondero is on the road on another tour with no end in sight, taking it a show at a time, looking for a place to settle down until he gets restless. For NPR News, I'm Clay Masters.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIVING AND THE DEAD")
NEARY: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. BJ Leiderman wrote our theme music. I'm Lynn Neary.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
A lot of writers can be fairly easily stereotyped. They write stories about dysfunctional families, star-crossed lovers, endearing losers. They write historical fiction, literary fiction, crime novels. But Jay Cantor's body of work defies categorization. His fiction has been inspired by the revolutionary life of Che Guevara as well as the comic strip world of Krazy Kat. In his latest work, "Forgiving the Angel," Cantor fictionalizes the lives of people who were friends and lovers of Franz Kafka. Jay Cantor joins us now. Good to have you with us.
JAY CANTOR: Wonderful to be here.
NEARY: Franz Kafka is not an easy writer for a lot of people. I mean, it's hard for a lot of people to grasp exactly what he's about. So, what drew you to him specifically as a writer?
CANTOR: I first read Kafka when I was young, and it felt to me very direct. It felt to me - although they were about a person turning into a cockroach, or an artist whose art is to starve himself while people watch - it felt to me like the stories were the autobiography of his emotions. And I guess I felt some kinship with that.
NEARY: How much did you actually know about his life and the people who he loved before you began working on this novel? Did you know much about him?
CANTOR: Nope. But I was always taken by the fact that Kafka had a very close friend and admirer, Max Brod, and he knew that Max loved him more than anyone in the world, and loved his work. And he told Brod that after he died, after Kafka died, he wanted Brod to burn all his work. And on the one hand, he loved Kafka, and wanted to do what Kafka wanted, and on the other hand, Kafka had to have known that would tear the man's heart from his chest. So, I began to brood on Brod...
(LAUGHTER)
CANTOR: ...yeah, sorry - and that led me to reading about Kafka and about Brod and the people around them and the effect that Kafka had had on them. And the book really is not so much about Kafka the writer - or his writing, anyway - but about his effect on people.
NEARY: Yeah. And in the Max Brod story, the way you tell that story, it's as if Max Brod has entered into a Kafkaesque kind of world because he was faced with that decision. And, I think, you seem to imply that Kafka might had done that on purpose.
CANTOR: Yeah. Well, that was - finally, exactly right. What Brod feels, and what I felt, was he turned Brod's life into a story where Brod was a character in a story by Franz Kafka, which, given Brod's love for Kafka, would have been the greatest gift possible - and the worst thing to do to a person. And he wants Kafka to have intended that. It's the only way that Brod can die in peace, is to take it as a lesson and figure out what the lesson might have been. And I guess an old Jew's chief desire is to figure out a way to die in peace.
NEARY: You know, I used the word Kafkaesque, and before we go any further, I think that...
CANTOR: Not a clue.
NEARY: ...you should define...
CANTOR: Not a clue.
NEARY: Oh, come on.
CANTOR: Nope, no, can't. It's passed into the language. Anytime anybody has a quandary, like they go to Dunkin' Donuts and should I have the jelly filled or the glazed, it's Kafkaesque, and it's not. So, I don't know the answer anymore. I think it's a contradiction that if you live that contradiction out, it will put you in a very profound relationship to life, though not a happy one. Bearing the burden of a tragic question.
NEARY: You know, I was about to say, I was about to say there's a great deal of tragedy in these stories. And I think the person who sort of emerges most strongly from the pages is the great love his life, Dora. And, you know, she only spent a few years with him but it seems like she never got over her association with Franz Kafka. And it's almost like it haunts her for the rest of her life.
CANTOR: She's an extreme case of that. Many of the people who knew him found that to be the most memorable encounter of their life, and that it gave them a painful but precious inheritance of tremendous honesty and inability to accept lies in himself or from others. And that was certainly very true for her.
NEARY: Well, Dora's story and the final story in the book, which is about another lover, his love Milena, both of those stories take us deep into the prison camps of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. And this is where, of course, the stories become very tragic. And also those worlds, again, and this time in the very profound sense, not in the humorous sense we've been talking about, but those worlds become very Kafkaesque also. These people are trapped under conditions over which they had no control and in some cases don't even know why they're there, really, or understand why they're there.
CANTOR: They understand the world has given for why they're there, and they know that it's no reason at all. So, they understand and don't understand.
NEARY: This was not a world that Franz Kafka ever experienced himself, but these people who were associated with him, you put them in those worlds.
CANTOR: Me and history puts them in those worlds. They really were in those camps.
NEARY: And what did they have to do with Franz Kafka? How does the writing of Franz Kafka in any way inform your understanding of those worlds or what those characters went through in those camps, both in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany?
CANTOR: I think Kafka's relationship to the insoluble difficulties of existence is - I'm going to borrow a phrase of Samuel Beckett's - is: I can't go on, I'll go on. It's some part of describing the experience of the camps. And I hope that the book conveys, at least for Milena, that her experience of Kafka and Kafka's work helped her to understand and sustained her when she was in the camps. Until she died. She died in Ravensbruck.
NEARY: And I wanted to ask you about the subtitle of the book, because the book is called "Forgiving the Angel." The subtitle is "Four Stories for Franz Kafka," not inspired by or about, but for Franz Kafka. Why for?
CANTOR: Gratitude. I'm very grateful for his stories and his life. I felt the articulation of things that I had felt and never seen so wonderfully expressed in Kafka, and I was grateful for it.
NEARY: Jay Cantor. His new book is "Forgiving the Angel: Four Stories for Franz Kafka." Thanks so much. It was good talking with you.
CANTOR: Thank you.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
The nominations for the Oscars were announced this week, and while many of the big contenders, like "12 Years a Slave" and "The Wolf of Wall Street," weren't a surprise, there were some controversies in different categories. Top among the film-world controversies was India's pick for the best foreign language film. Here's a bit of music from the film India picked, a drama about a truck driver in the western Indian state Gujarat called "The Good Road."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
NEARY: "The Good Road" did not make the list of nominations and some in the Indian film world think there was a better choice. They expected that India would choose a movie widely acclaimed on the festival circuit called "The Lunchbox," which opens in this country in late February. Here's what that film sounds like.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE LUNCHBOX")
NEARY: To help us understand what all this means about film and culture in India, we've brought in Aseem Chhabra, a film critic based in New York. Good to have you with us, Mr. Chhabra.
ASEEM CHHABRA: Thank you.
NEARY: Let's begin with the process for selecting the foreign film. As I understand it, each country is allowed to make one submission for the Oscars and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences picks five of those as the nominees. Is that right? Has it got the process right?
CHHABRA: That's right, yeah.
NEARY: OK. Who makes that decision in India?
CHHABRA: In India, there's an organization called the Film Federation of India, which is - well, the film industry itself has made up this party. But it functions in very mysterious ways. They often don't announce who the members of the jury are, although this year the names are leaked out. But it's independent of the Indian government.
NEARY: And this committee chose "The Good Road" as India's submission. So, tell us a little bit about that film and why they might have chosen it.
CHHABRA: Well, it's very hard to say why they chose it, because "The Good Road," it really did not play at all in India. It had a very, very limited release. The premise of "The Good Road" is very interesting. There are about three parallel stories going on. There's a story with a truck driver. There's a story about the little child who gets separated from his parents. And then there's a child prostitution ring. So, it could have worked out very well. It's just that one of the things the director did was that he worked with a lot of amateur actors and it has a very uneven form of acting. And some actors are convincing and some are not.
My issue with "The Good Road" was that it was trying to be an art house film, and I think it didn't succeed really. But clearly, there was a lot of expectation that the film "Lunchbox" should have been India's pick only because it had already done very well in the festival circuit. And, I mean, it's hard to say but the Academy could have been more favorable towards that film.
NEARY: Perhaps the acting wasn't as good, but I have to say in "The Lunchbox," just the opening of the film, which shows how that lunchbox gets from the woman's house to the office, was absolutely mesmerizing for me.
(LAUGHTER)
CHHABRA: It's a big business and it's a very successful business in Mumbai. And, you know, it's foolproof, they never go wrong. And hence there's a charm in the story that there's one small mistake made where the lunchbox gets delivered to a wrong person.
NEARY: What did you like about it so much? I know you were disappointed that it wasn't the pick.
CHHABRA: Well, I thought "The Lunchbox," it's a beautiful, sweet and terribly sad story about two individuals in Mumbai - a woman who is unhappy in her marriage and, you know, she cooks lunch every day. There's a whole, this business of lunchboxes being picked up from homes and then being delivered in the offices. It's a perfect foolproof system where there's never a mistake. And hence this story get very charming because the lunchbox that she sends to her husband gets delivered to a wrong man, who also is a sad, lonely widower. And this mistake is realized in the start. It's a very sort of a Jacovian(ph) kind of a conversation with each other where they start to send each other little notes. And a romance blooms between two people who actually never met. It's a very quiet film. It's a very Indian story, but it's also a story, which clearly would resonate really well in the West.
NEARY: "The Good Road" was made not in Hindi, which is the language of the Bollywood film industry, but in a regional language. Is that significant? I mean, did that indicate some kind of cultural shift going on in terms of film in India?
CHHABRA: I wouldn't agree with that. I mean, yes, it was made in Gujarati. So, that's a regional language, and there's a very strong regional film industry across India. I don't think that's the reason why "The Good Road" was picked. I think it had more to do with, I would say, it's internal politics. But you know the thing is that kind of stuff happens across the board in other countries also. There have been cases of Pedro Almodovar's films not being sent as Spain's official entry. In Sweden, for instance, a lot of filmmakers used to be very envious of Ingmar Bergman's success in the West. So, if one filmmaker or one film starts to do very well, others start to feel left out.
NEARY: The actor who stars in this movie would be well-known to Western audiences because he was in "Slumdog Millionaire." He was in "Life of Pi." Again, this movie did very well at Western film festivals. And I wondered if the committee almost deliberately stayed away from the film "The Lunchbox" because of that, because it already had a following in the West and it wanted to put the spotlight on a sort of smaller, lesser-known Indian film.
CHHABRA: Well, that may be so, but the thing is that the race for the foreign language film gets so competitive. Films that have a lot more buzz at film festivals before clearly start to attract the attention of the Academy. So, therefore, if India had picked a film that was already in the conversations - there were bloggers who were writing about it, Hollywood Reporter and Indiewire - a lot of bloggers saw it in Toronto and they said this should be India's official entry, because they understand how to the process works with the Academy. So, you know, it's unfortunate because India's the largest film-producing country in the world and so far only three Indian films have been picked for nominations, but India's never won the Oscar in the best foreign language category.
NEARY: Film critic Aseem Chhabra. Thanks so much for being with us.
CHHABRA: Thank you very much.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
It started as newspaper serial in the 1970s and grew into a beloved series of books that stand as a chronicle of life in the city of San Francisco, beginning in the decade after the summer of love. The series began before anyone had ever heard of AIDS and will end in the era of marriage equality. Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" is coming to a close with the publication of the last book in the series. "The Days of Anna Madrigal" is the story of the transgender landlady who presided over a cast of characters, both gay and straight, living in her apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane. Many of the members of the family Anna created for herself show up in this last chapter of the series. It ends not in the streets of San Francisco but in the Nevada desert. Armistead Maupin joins us to talk about this book and his remarkable series. Welcome to the program.
ARMISTEAD MAUPIN: Thank you, Lynn.
NEARY: So, take us back when this all began. What were you setting out to do when you started this newspaper serial?
MAUPIN: I did one for the Pacific Sun, a little weekly in Marin County that really grew out of the fact that I was trying to write a nonfiction story about the heterosexual cruising scene at the local Safeway. There was actually a ritual on Wednesday nights where people went down in an effort to pick people up. And it struck a nerve with a lot of people in the city, especially single women. And editors of the Pacific Sun asked me if I would continue writing a serial, and I did. And then we went from there.
NEARY: This was a series of stories about what life was like in the city of San Francisco, both heterosexual and gay, which at that time people weren't writing so much about gay life, right?
MAUPIN: Not at all. In fact, it was practically taboo. I had to constantly wrangle with my editors when they realized what I was doing. They actually kept a chart in the front office that said heterosexual and homosexual to make sure that the homosexual characters didn't outnumber the straight folks and thereby upset the natural order of civilization.
(LAUGHTER)
NEARY: Did you think of yourself as being sort of subversive at that time?
MAUPIN: Oh yes, very much so. I'd just come out. I was part of this wonderful wave of liberation that was happening in the city that was both, you know, joyful and political at the same time. Your private life was part of the politics.
NEARY: You were still writing, of course, in the '80s, and that was the time when the gay community was grappling with AIDS. And, of course, that became part of the whole story.
MAUPIN: Yes. I lost a very dear friend to Pneumocystis pneumonia in 1982; he was one of the first people diagnosed with it. And I decided at that point that I could not continue to write what was essentially a comedic work without working this terrible new reality into it. And so that's what I did. I killed of one of the major and most beloved gay characters. When the story began, there was something amiss at 28 Barbary Lane, but I didn't quite reveal what it was for a long time. And the impact, when it ran in the newspaper, in the Chronicle, was a lot of complaints from gay people who said I was spoiling their light morning entertainment by, you know, injecting my own political agenda here. But pretty soon it was everybody's agenda.
NEARY: But there continued to be a lot of humor in your stories.
MAUPIN: Yes. I mean, the people I know who had to deal with AIDS found it very, very useful. I remember being kind of crushed in the early days because the great writer Edmund White issued a decree in which he said humor has no place in this epidemic. Well, man, that was the wrong way to go, because everybody needs that to save their lives in the worst moments. We don't ban humor, ever. It's one of our greatest defenses.
NEARY: There's a lot of love and a lot of love for life in your characters. Why all the way through this was it so important to show that, and in particular to show that as being part of what it means to be gay?
MAUPIN: Those characters and the way they react to things are just me. And almost everybody at 28 Barbary Lane is in one way or another drawn from my own soul. I lean on the cynical side for Mona; and Michael is the wounded romantic; and Maryann the little - seems to be naive but she comes from somewhere else and she's very much on the ball and knows what's going on. And I just tried to, you know, use my own experience. I'm glad that it let people lighten up about everything, including gay people about their own blessing, which is the way I look at my homosexuality.
NEARY: That's interesting. How did you get to the point where you looked at your homosexuality as a blessing? And did you always see it that way or did you have to sort of come to that in some way?
MAUPIN: Oh, no, I didn't always see it that way. Like a lot of gay kids, I grew up terrified of what I knew myself to be, because I saw this homophobic world around me. If the word homosexual was on a page in print somewhere, it would leap out at me. I felt haunted by it, because I couldn't talk to anybody about it, and because it was both a crime and a mental illness when I was a child. Really, San Francisco was the enormous help; to come to a place where even the straight people were more matter-of-fact about my sexuality than I was. I came out to this woman friend of mine who was about 30 and had a couple of small kids and made this big speech to her. And she sort of said - well, she did say in another form: big deal. And I realized that sexuality in general was a beautiful thing. I understood my straight friends. I understood the men I knew in Vietnam who pined for their wives late at night. You know, I understood what love was for the first time and it transformed me.
NEARY: You know, as identified as you are with the gay world, with being gay, you don't like to be identified, I've heard, as a gay writer though.
MAUPIN: Well, I've stopped that battle.
(LAUGHTER)
NEARY: OK.
MAUPIN: I'm proud of having been part of this revolution. It's the thing I'm most proud of, really. What I objected to about gay writer was the pigeonholing in it. And I've always felt that my success, and indeed my contribution, has been to speak to the world at large, to write for everybody and tell my stories.
NEARY: Armistead Maupin. His new book, "The Days of Anna Madrigal," is the last book in the "Tales of the City" series. Well, thanks very much. It was fun talking with you.
MAUPIN: I liked it too, Lynn. Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
NEARY: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Lynn Neary.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
The U.S. Olympic snowboarding team will be finalized over the course of this weekend. Two young snowboarders have been hunting for a spot on that team: 17-year-old Arielle Gold and 20-year-old Taylor Gold - they're brother and sister. NPR's Sam Sanders takes a look at their run for Sochi.
PATTY GOLD: Come on, Taylor. Come on, Taylor.
SAM SANDERS, BYLINE: Patty Gold may be the loudest spectator at the bottom of the half-pipe. She and her husband, Ken, are at the Copper Mountain Grand Prix, about two hours west of Denver. This is one of five qualifying events for the U.S. snowboarding team, and a spot in the Winter Olympics. The Golds' two children, Arielle and Taylor, are both competing in the snowboard half-pipe.
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SANDERS: Patty Gold says she's usually very nervous on competition days, but she had a bit of help this evening.
PATTY GOLD: Well, I had a glass of wine before I came up here, so that helped.
SANDERS: Father Ken Gold is a pacer. He refuses to actually watch near his wife when their children compete; he moves too much.
KEN GOLD: Get it. Come on. Get it. Get it. Come on.
SANDERS: Arielle and Taylor spin, flip and trick their way down the half-pipe. At the end of the night, Taylor wins first in men's; Arielle, second for the women. One step closer, for each of them, to Sochi.
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SANDERS: The day after their big win at Copper Mountain, they were trying to figure out what to do with the prize money they've been raking in recently. It's customary in the snowboarding world for winners to share a bit of their take buying drinks for all their friends and fellow snowboarders. But Arielle and Taylor are both under 21. They can't legally drink, so a nice dinner will have to do.
TAYLOR GOLD: You can - wait...
ARIELLE GOLD: Should I invite Haley?
(LAUGHTER)
SANDERS: Sitting around watching the Broncos game in sweatpants and thick socks, Taylor, Arielle and friends at the house try to figure out who should make the invite list. Their parents look on. Arielle bounces back and forth between an online calculus final and Googling restaurant phone numbers. Taylor and his friends are watching some Key and Peele comedy videos on YouTube. If they're under any pressure, it doesn't show, maybe because snowboarding been a constant for them for so long.
TAYLOR GOLD: I started when I was 7, and she started when she was 7.
SANDERS: Taylor remembers the exact moment he knew he wanted to be a snowboarder.
TAYLOR GOLD: I watched the Olympics in 2002. And I saw, you know, the men sweep the podium that year. And I was, like, oh, my God, that looks so fun. So, that year I asked my parents if I could take some snowboarding lessons and kind of just, like, snowballed from there. Yeah, no pun intended.
(LAUGHTER)
SANDERS: Arielle on the other hand, took a bit longer.
ARIELLE GOLD: For me, I'd say things didn't really start to get serious until probably, like, two years ago. That's when I kind of started to realize that I could make something out of this and I guess potentially go to the Olympics.
SANDERS: Arielle got really good, really fast, and last season, she ended up doing much better than Taylor. That just made him work harder.
TAYLOR GOLD: I just wanted to get to that same level, you know. I was really excited for her, but, I mean, super jealous.
(LAUGHTER)
SANDERS: Imagine being the parents of these two. Having one child athlete is hard enough. Having two, in the same sport, with a shot at the Olympics at the same time makes parenting them a career. Father Ken Gold videotapes every single one of their practices. The family moved across Colorado to Breckenridge from Steamboat Springs for five months every year just to be closer to competitions. And Arielle and Taylor chase winter all around the world.
KEN GOLD: They have a brief hiatus in the spring. Then they go to Mammoth, California, where there's still snow in May. And they go to Mount Hood for a month in mid-summer, and then they go to New Zealand for a month in end of the summer where it's winter in the other hemisphere. So, they're on snow, you know, 10, sometimes more months a year.
SANDERS: The family schedule might change soon. There's talk of Taylor going off to college, something he's put off for a few years to compete. And Arielle will soon be 18 and done with high school. Parents Patty and Ken say their family was never just about one sport anyway.
KEN GOLD: We've never made them do it. They do it because they love it and they're passionate about it. I love being the parent of great athletes. But I even more value being the parent of great people.
SANDERS: As for life after snowboarding? Ken and Patty say they could see themselves splitting their time between Colorado and a much warmer climate, doing more kiteboarding, one sport you don't do in cold weather. Sam Sanders, NPR News.
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If you have teenagers in your house, you may find this hard to believe, but texting - at least the kind you do through your cellphone provider - is on the decline. This news comes from the British consulting firm Deloitte, which reported that the number of texts sent in Britain last year decreased by seven billion. Of course, that doesn't mean we are retreating to snail mail or even email. And don't think for a minute that anyone is abandoning texting language - those lovely acronyms like OMG and LOL. No, of course not. And here to tell us what is replacing good old-fashioned texting is David Gerzof Richard, a professor of digital media and marketing at Emerson College in Boston. Good to have you with us, David.
DAVID GERZOF RICHARD: Always good to be with you.
NEARY: Now, according to Deloitte's technology predictions report, there were 160 billion instant messages sent in the U.K. last year, and that's compared to only 145 billion texts. Now, that is still an awful lot of texts, but can you explain why there has been such a drop? I mean, is it more expensive to text?
RICHARD: It depends on what network you're on, and what country you're in. The cellphone products, the service products that companies offer sometimes include text messaging and sometimes they don't. And if they don't, then they charge for it. So, what people have been doing in cases where they are being billed for the texts that they're sending, they're moving over to apps, apps on smartphones.
NEARY: OK. So, apps like what? Like Facebook and Snapchat? Is that what we're talking about?
RICHARD: So, Snapchat, Facebook would be two of them. Some of the most popular ones are an app called WhatsApp or a Chinese program called WeChat. And between Apple's iMessage, WhatsApp and WeChat, they're sending 50 billion messages globally each day.
NEARY: OK. And what's better for people? Why is it better for people to use those apps?
RICHARD: Well, there's a couple of reasons. One is it's free. You're using the data portion of your cellphone plan, so it doesn't cost you anything to send a text over there. And there's a lot more sort of multimedia richness that can be built in. You can have these chats with all kinds of friends from all over the place based on a user ID, not a cellphone number. And there's all kinds of interesting things that can be added into this.
NEARY: So, they really are still texting, just using a different means, right?
RICHARD: Yeah. So, the texting language is still being used. It's just instead of going over the traditional cellphone networks through the texting app that's built into your phone when you get it from the store, you're using an app you're downloading through, say, the Apple App Store and using that to be able to connect with your friends.
NEARY: David Gerzof Richard is a professor of digital media and marketing at Emerson College. Thanks for being with us, Professor Richard.
RICHARD: Always good to be with you.
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President Obama thinks more poor kids who are good students should be enrolled in the country's best colleges and universities. Too often, he says, kids from lower income families don't even apply to the best school, where they might have a good chance of getting financial aid. This week, he gathered the heads of 100 colleges and universities to a meeting at the White House to discuss how to change this situation for the better.
I hope he is successful. But I have spent a lot time over the last couple years helping my own child navigate the college application process, and I can't say I'm hopeful. It's a process that can make a smart person feel stupid and a relatively comfortable person feel poor. For me, the first shock came at the beginning of my daughter's junior year, when I Googled a couple of schools I thought she might be interested in. They were small, private colleges with good reputations. I knew college would be expensive. I just hadn't realized how expensive. The combined cost of tuition and room and board at these schools is between $55,000 and $60,000 a year. I was horrified to learn that this was pretty much the norm for private colleges and universities.
Out-of-state tuition at public universities is better, but not always that much better. When I began talking about this, I was often told don't worry, you won't have to pay the full ticket. The schools will give your daughter money. They will, I asked. Yes. Once your kid gets in they tell you how much you get. Oh, I thought. So, it's like buying an airplane ticket. One person pays $800 for the same flight that someone else gets for $150 and everyone in the middle pays $300. And obviously those who know how to play the game best will get it at the lowest cost.
I don't know about you, but I really hate that. Besides, I kept thinking, if my kid goes to a school that costs $60,000, someone is going to have to give her an awful lot of money. We're close to the end of the process now. We came up with a decent list of schools, mostly public universities. And just like everyone said, we'll make a final decision after we hear from all the schools and find out just how much they really are going to charge. And just in case, we've got a really great safety valve - a Canadian university. And trust me, my Canadian husband never stops telling me what a good education she'll get, and how much cheaper it will be, if she decides to go there.
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To Mexico now where there's tense calm in the western state of Michoacan. It's been the site of fighting between civilian militias and drug traffickers with federal forces trying to regain control. At the moment, businesses are slowly reopening. The Militias who took up arms have put down their weapons and children are supposed to go back to school on Monday. NPR's Carrie Kahn reports.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: About 20 men stand guard at the main intersection on the road into the Michoacan town of Nueva Italia. Some are young, some are old. A few have T-shirts on identifying them as the civilian militia or self-defense patrols as they call themselves. There are no arms in sight except one young man carries a pistol strapped to his belt.
And all say they've had run-ins with the Knights Templar. That's the drug cartel that rules this region known for it's limes, avocados and tempestuous residents with the reputation for rebellion.
JOEL GUTIERREZ: (Foreign language spoken)
KAHN: Nineteen-year-old Joel Gutierrez says residents here are sick of the cartel's kidnapping, murdering and stealing from everyone.
That's why we took up arms, he says. The local and state police did nothing to protect us. And he should know. Gutierrez says last summer he was at a neighbor's house when he heard Knights Templar cartel members screech up their dirt road in several cars.
GUTIERREZ: (Foreign language spoken)
NEARY: He took off running. He says the gang took his parents, his grandparents and three cousins.
KAHN: They haven't been heard from since. Another man at the checkpoint says he was held with his two brothers until his family paid a ransom, and nearly everyone talks about having to pay quotas or taxes or being forced to sell their crops to the drug cartel at below market prices.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Foreign language spoken)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (Foreign language spoken)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Foreign language spoken)
KAHN: The militiamen have been patrolling their towns and inspecting cars at checkpoints like this one for nearly a year. All that time, federal police did little to stop them and at times seemed to encourage the movement. However, that tacit approval appeared to end last weekend. That's when the number of the militia's mushroomed and surrounded Apatzingan, a town of 100,000 people and the Knights Templar's stronghold.
A major battle between the militias and the cartel seemed imminent. The federal government sent in thousands of police and troops to disarm the civilian patrols. A deadly confrontation ensued. Federal soldiers fired into a crowd of civilian militia supporters, killing two. Militia leader, Estanislao Beltran says the government should have gone after the real criminals, the Knights Templar and not those trying to defend themselves.
ESTANISLAO BELTRAN: (Foreign language spoken)
KAHN: He says we are sick and tired of cartels here in Michoacan and vehemently denies rumors that he takes funds from a rival group. The cartels have been terrorizing us for more than a decade. He says, why would we side with any of them? In fact, the Knights Templar is just the latest group to control the meth and marijuana trade here. A break-off of the previous Familia Michoacan cartel, the Knights Templar are known for their quasi-religious preachings and ruthless violence which quickly expanded beyond drug trafficking and into extortion and kidnapping. Beltran says for now his militia is willing to store their weapons.
BELTRAN: (Foreign language spoken)
KAHN: We would like to give the federal police the chance to show us they can control this problem but, he says, short of arresting the cartel leaders and their lieutenants, his group will not retreat. Since the killing of the two civilians, the federal forces have backed away from their plan to disarm the militias. The escalating violence in Michoacan has become the biggest security problem for President Enrique Pena Nieto who's tried to downplay the drug wars since coming into office 13 months ago. This week, the government appointed a trusted Pena Nieto ally to coordinate security and development in Michoacan.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: (Foreign language spoken)
KAHN: But for now, dozens of checkpoints manned by the civilian's militia remain in the region. Heavily armed federal police watch nearby in pickup trucks. The militia no longer carries their riffles or assault weapons on plain sight, but they say their arms are close by if the Knights Templar come back.
GUTIERREZ: (Foreign language spoken)
KAHN: For Joel Gutierrez, whose whole family was killed, he says he's in the fight for the long run. He says we have to stop the Knights Templar for the kids that still live here. Hopefully, we can bring back the peace and stop the injustice, he says. If not, this insanity will never end. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Michoacan.
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President Lyndon Johnson went to Eastern Kentucky in 1964 to promote his war on poverty, but when he did, he opened a wound that remains very raw today. People in the region say they're tired of always being depicted as poor. When NPR's Pam Fessler went to Appalachia went to report on how the war on poverty is going, she was warned that people would be reluctant to talk. Instead, she got an earful. Here's her reporter's notebook.
PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: Lee Mueller has lived in Martin County, Kentucky for much of his life, and he covered President Johnson's visit there as a young reporter. He says every few years since, more reporters have arrived.
LEE MUELLER: We became kind of the poster child for the war on poverty, and any time somebody wanted to do a story about poor people, we were the first stop.
FESSLER: And that's meant some very unwelcome attention over the years. News reports of kids struggling to survive among jobless, drug-addicted adults, trailer homes surrounded by trash. So, now here I was, another in a long line of unwelcome journalists. Michelle Harless, a high school guidance counselor, had one request when I interviewed her.
MICHELLE HARLESS: I just ask when you portray us, please don't portray us as ignorant hill folk, I guess, because we are educated. We're poor, but we're educated, and everyone's pretty proud. It's not a desolate place where no hope can be found.
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FESSLER: And indeed the county's got a lot going for it: well-paved roads, cheerful schools, beautiful mountains, albeit some have been strip mined. And yes, there are trailers surrounded by trash, but also tidy suburban homes. Even so, more than a third of the residents here are poor. But poverty's also in the eye of the beholder. For some here it's just the way life is. Like Normie Slone, who's 79 years old. She spends her days caring for her two severely disabled adult children - 58-year-old Sissy, who lies on a recliner in the family's cramped living room, chewing on a rubber toy, and Bobby, who sits in a wheelchair nearby.
NORMIE SLONE: He's 55, yeah.
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SLONE: He has to sit in that chair all the time. He can't get up and do nothing.
FESSLER: She says he can't get up and do anything on his own. Like lots of poor people, Normie Slone has strung together her own safety net with some help from the government, the rest from charities, family and friends. She says at least life is better than it used to be.
SLONE: We're not starving. We're not starving to death.
FESSLER: Many people here say told me they're rich in things that aren't included in any official measure of poverty. Things like family and faith. So, they're understandably a bit disturbed by how they're often seen from the outside.
OWEN WRIGHT: We're probably one of the last few groups that it's still politically correct to make fun of. It's still OK to tell, you know, hillbilly, redneck jokes, or whatever.
FESSLER: Owen Wright is with the Christian Appalachian Project. It's one of the nonprofits that helps Normie Slone.
WRIGHT: And I think, you know, it can affect the self-esteem of the people that live here in Appalachia, 'cause once that's been drilled into them for so long, it's easy for them to start believing that themselves.
FESSLER: And he says it only holds them back more. Lee Mueller, the journalist, says it wasn't always like that, especially before President Johnson came with the national media in tow.
MUELLER: We knew the region was poor, but there wasn't a stigma to it to us.
FESSLER: In part, he says, because there weren't any rich people around to show them otherwise. So, people didn't think of themselves as poor?
MUELLER: Uh-uh. And we were surprised when we went someplace and found out that other people thought we were.
FESSLER: But that was a long time ago. Today, the stigma is very real and for some people, almost as bad as the poverty itself. Pam Fessler, NPR News.
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This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Lynn Neary in for Scott Simon. Intelligence officials, civil liberties advocates, technology executives and foreign leaders - all of them had something at stake yesterday when President Obama laid out his ideas for reforming the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. Those previously secret programs were revealed last summer by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The president sought to balance security and privacy concerns in his speech. NPR's Tom Gjelten has been looking into whether he satisfied his different audiences.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: With his speech at the Justice Department, the president laid out an approach to intelligence gathering he hoped would appeal to everyone. Mr. Obama stressed the importance of surveillance to the nation's security and he said he had seen no indication the mass collection of Americans' telephone records, for example, broke any laws or abused civil liberties. But, he said, there is a potential for that happening.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I believe critics are right to point out that without proper safeguards this type of program could be used to yield more information about our private lives and open the door to more intrusive bulk collection programs in the future.
GJELTEN: The NSA's bulk collection of U.S. telephone records - the numbers called and the duration of the calls but not the content - is the single-most controversial NSA surveillance program. Mr. Obama said he was ordering the end of that program as it currently exists with the data being held by the government. Instead, the records would be held somewhere else, but where he wasn't sure. The president pointed out that the review group he appointed said the data should be held either by the commercial providers of telephone service or by some third party. But Mr. Obama doesn't like either of those ideas.
OBAMA: Relying solely on the records of multiple providers, for example, could require companies to alter their procedures in ways that raise new privacy concerns. On the other hand, any third party maintaining a single consolidated database would be carrying out what's essentially a government function but with more expense, more legal ambiguity, potentially less accountability.
GJELTEN: The president did say NSA analysts shouldn't search the telephone records no matter where they're kept without a court's permission. NSA critics weren't entirely satisfied. The American Civil Liberties Union found positive features in the president's speech, but after reading it a half-dozen times, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said he still didn't see the answer to a simple question.
ANTHONY ROMERO: Will or will not the U.S. government have at fingertip the data of my mother's phone calls? They shouldn't possess that data.
GJELTEN: Another group with keen interest in the NSA debate is the technology industry. Tech leaders say their businesses have been hurt by the news that NSA worked through and sometimes against tech companies to conduct surveillance. Many were hoping to hear the president say all that would end.
ALEX STAMOS: I would say most people in the tech industry are probably disappointed from the speech.
GJELTEN: Alex Stamos, cofounder of iSEC, a technology security firm, says he was hoping to hear the president to promise the NSA would stop undermining company efforts to protect their customers' data.
STAMOS: The other thing I would have hoped to hear is that the U.S. government would no longer infiltrate the networks of American technology companies. And he didn't say anything about that either.
GJELTEN: Finally, one more constituency the president needed to address yesterday: foreigners. The disclosure of NSA monitoring their communications, even the personal phone calls of foreign leaders, has damaged U.S. standing abroad. People in other countries don't have the same privacy protections U.S. persons have. The president tried to reassure them.
OBAMA: Our efforts will only be effective if ordinary citizens in other countries has confidence that the United States respects their privacy too. And the leaders of our close friends and allies deserve to know that if I want to know what they think about an issue, I'll pick up the phone and call them rather than turning to surveillance.
GJELTEN: Administration officials say the president and his advisers worked on this speech right down to the last minute. The ambiguity around some of his proposals suggests it's not yet entirely clear what the administration really will do about NSA surveillance going forward. Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Washington.
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The president's efforts to smooth over frayed relations with allies was somewhat successful. In Germany, reports surfaced last year that the NSA had monitored the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. A senior lawmaker in her party called Obama's speech, quote, "an important contribution toward restoring the trust we've lost in our close friend and ally." Her spokesperson said they would look at it carefully. In Brazil, where documents show that the NSA monitored the phone calls of President Dilma Rousseff, one Brazilian politician said the spying on friends and allies should never have happened. Here in the U.S., many of President Obama's proposed changes to the NSA's surveillance programs will require congressional approval, and there is bipartisan agreement that some reform is needed. But as NPR's Ailsa Chang reports, the members are divided over how far those reforms should go.
AILSA CHANG, BYLINE: There are some on Capitol Hill who think no one should be messing with the surveillance programs at all because the bits of information they vacuum up form mosaics of data that could save lives. Republican Peter King of New York, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN on Friday he was glad to see President Obama leave the programs pretty much intact.
REPRESENTATIVE PETER KING: I don't think any changes were called for, any so-called reforms. But the fact is the ones the president made today are really minimal.
CHANG: Minimal to King, but substantial to others. One of the president's reforms that was especially significant to Democrat Martin Heinrich, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the call to move bulk telephone data out of the hands of government.
SENATOR MARTIN HEINRICH: When you put it in the hands of the government, you create a whole new level of risk. And certainly a risk of it being misused for political purposes.
CHANG: The White House is asking Congress to ultimately approve the assignment of a new custodian of the records, and Heinrich says he thinks it ought to be the phone companies.
HEINRICH: Well, the reality is those telecom companies already hold that data. They take that very seriously because there's an economic incentive for them to do that.
CHANG: Heinrich also applauded the president for requiring prior court approval before the government can access any data, though he's pushing for the White House to go further and make sure the government gets a warrant before reading any communications. Heinrich is one of several lawmakers who think the government shouldn't be involved in this kind of metadata at all. Here's Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky on CNN.
SENATOR RAND PAUL: I don't want them collecting the information. It's not about who holds it. I don't want them collecting every American's information.
CHANG: Paul says the president is trying to have it both ways. He says Obama may have expressed concerns about privacy in Friday's speech but the White House still left the door wide open for the government to gather volumes of personal information.
PAUL: Well, what I think I heard is that if you like your privacy you can keep it, but in the meantime we're going to keep collecting your phone records, your emails, your text messages and likely your credit card information.
CHANG: Paul has an ally from far across the political spectrum. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an Independent who usually votes with the Democrats, told CNN he thinks the collection of telephone data is destructive to American ideals.
SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS: And I think all of this stuff has a very significant chilling impact on the willingness of the American people to be thinking about issues, to be writing about issues, to be talking about issues. That is my feel.
CHANG: Still, some critics of the program were simply grateful the White House is even asking Congress to help figure out the path forward. Republican Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota says it's a nice change of pace around these parts.
SENATOR JOHN HOEVEN: One of the things you're seeing with the administration is they have not engaged Congress enough. And also the solution is going to have to be bipartisan. I think that's the only way we're going to get broad-based public support for what we're doing.
CHANG: In the meantime, there's already pending legislation in both chambers that would simply end any bulk collection of phone data immediately. Ailsa Chang, NPR News, the Capitol.
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This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Lynn Neary. When a chemical spill leaked into West Virginia's Elk River last week, people were warned not to cook with or even wash their clothes in the water. It was only safe for flushing toilets. Yesterday afternoon, West Virginia authorities announced that thousands more customers could resume using tap water, though pregnant women were urged to stick with bottled water. And underlining the extent of the damage, the company that's been blamed for the chemical spill filed for bankruptcy yesterday. Americans have come to expect that the water flowing through their pipes is safe, but our next guest tells us clean tap water is a fairly recent development. Jim Salzman is the author of the book "Drinking Water: A History" and a professor of environmental law at Duke University. I asked him when it became standard for American tap water to be considered clean.
JIM SALZMAN: Well, what's interesting is that to a certain extent it's always been considered clean and drinkable. What's changed is our notions of what's safe. So, for example, if you and I could go back in a time capsule to, say, London about 160 years ago, there was a well that was there in the middle of London called Soho Pump, and it had some of the best drinking water in the whole city. Well, right next to it was a pit that was used basically for dumping carcasses, soiled nappies and everything. I couldn't pay you enough to drink that water yet at the time it was prized water.
NEARY: So, when exactly did federal regulation of drinking water begin in this country?
SALZMAN: Well, it turns out it's the 100th anniversary of the first public health service standards for drinking water. And the concern at the time was the federal government was not willing to tell states and towns, municipalities you have to treat your water. So, what they did was they required interstate common carriers, essentially trains, buses, ships, to have water that met these standards, which essentially meant chlorinated water. But the fact is the trains and the buses went through so many towns and cities that this was real impetus for those cities to actually add chlorination to their own drinking water supplies.
NEARY: So, up to a certain point, people thought their water was safe and clean but it really wasn't. And then once people began to understand that though, did they become more demanding about their water? Is that what happened?
SALZMAN: Well, it's a really interesting transition. So, 1908, the very first city in the U.S., Jersey City, decides to chlorinate its drinking water. And chlorine is what really changes things dramatically. And what's interesting, from today's perspective, is that chlorination actually knocked the bottom out of the bottled water market.
NEARY: What do you mean it knocked the - 'cause I always think of the bottled water market as being quite new.
SALZMAN: Well, it's ironic. There was a big bottled water market in the U.S. late 19th, early 20th century. It was basically seen as healthier, better for you. And this newfangled chlorination essentially made water really safe to drink for the first time, in some respects, ever. And as a result, tap water became a newfangled thing, which is very ironic, considering the reputation today of bottled water versus tap water.
NEARY: Yeah. Why did bottled water become popular again?
SALZMAN: So, it was popular to a certain extent throughout the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s. Bottled water in the sort of single serve and liter size that we think of really was a niche market in restaurants until the late 1970s. And Perrier really for the very first time put a lot of money into their marketing budget and they got very lucky with their timing, 'cause it coincided with the fitness craze. I mean, think about it. Jane Fonda and aerobics. And what happens to really push it long is that Nestle ends up getting in the act with Perrier; Coke launches Dasani; Pepsi launches Aquafina. And now all of the sudden what you have is mass distribution channels. Today - get this - per second on average, 1,500 bottles of water are being opened nationwide.
NEARY: Is there any such thing as truly pure water from any source, bottled or tap?
SALZMAN: Well, it's called distilled water, sure. It ends up actually not tasting very good. It's funny actually - for Aquafina and Dasani and actually the major bottled water brands, that's actually tap water that is passed through very fine filters. It's called reverse osmosis. And then the water actually is too clean to taste good. So, in the industry they call it pixie dust - they put some minerals actually back into the water to improve the taste.
NEARY: So, clean water tastes bad.
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SALZMAN: Well, I mean, what's clean water, right? I mean, the water that we have out of our tap is clean. The water that we have out of bottled water is clean, right? The question is do you want water that has no contaminants in it all, which would be distilled, or water that's safe to drink? And the fact is we could certainly treat water if we wanted to, to the point where there's nothing in it, but we wouldn't be willing to pay the cost.
NEARY: So, what happened in West Virginia certainly doesn't instill confidence necessarily in a municipal water system I would think.
SALZMAN: The fact that this happens so infrequently actually I think is a testament to the quality of our drinking water. I mean, it's quite remarkable. I could go anywhere in the U.S. and have some tap water and not really give a second thought about its quality. I can't do that in most parts of the world. You know, there's no question you're right. We have to remain vigilant. There are always sources of contamination that water providers have to be worried about - natural sources, microbes, pathogens, bacteria and such. And then there are obviously these accidents. One of the reasons this chemical got into the system so quickly is that no one expected it to be in the water. And so the treatment system wasn't set up to deal with it.
NEARY: Yeah. And now they're telling pregnant women you may still not want to drink this water, although other people can. And that, I think, makes people feel like, well, what do you mean?
SALZMAN: Think about this, though. I mean, there are over 60,000 chemicals in commerce in the United States and only a fraction of those have had really significant toxicity testing. And so the chemical that's spilled here is something that's used to, you know, to treat coal. It's not something you'd expect to find in your drinking water. And that's not a justification for why we don't have the data, because we should have it. It ended up in our drinking water. But the scale of the problem I think is important to keep in mind as well.
NEARY: Jim Salzman is the author of "Drinking Water: A History." Thanks so much for being with us.
SALZMAN: Thanks.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
Ron Unz has both liberals and conservatives scratching their heads. He earned his credentials as a far-right Republican with his successful campaign to end bilingual education in California in 1998. He cemented that reputation as the publisher of the American Conservative magazine. Now, the Silicon Valley multimillionaire is sponsoring a ballot initiative to raise the state minimum wage to $12 - up from eight, a proposal that you'd really expect to hear from the other end of the political spectrum. We reached out to Ron Unz to discuss his minimum wage campaign, and I asked him to explain why he was pushing for a pay hike.
RON UNZ: Well, I think there are very strong liberal and conservative reasons for raising the minimum wage. Right now, $250 billion a year in social welfare spending goes to workers who can't survive on their paychecks. What we're talking about is a massive system of hidden government subsidies for these low-wage employers where they can shift the costs of the workforce over to the taxpayer. I think businesses should stand on their own two feet and have to pay their workers instead of forcing the taxpayers to make up the difference.
NEARY: Now, do you think that people who, let's say, they have two kids, maybe they're living in a city like Los Angeles, do you think that they won't still need some government help?
UNZ: Well, certainly in some cases in expensive cities still need some help but much less help. On a minimum wage of $12 an hour, a couple - two full-time minimum wage workers - would earn $50,000 a year. That certainly doesn't make you affluent, it doesn't make you rich, but you can get by reasonably well on $50,000 a year.
NEARY: And you don't think jobs will leave the state?
UNZ: Some jobs, but probably a lot fewer than most people think. There have actually been a lot of recent studies in the last five or 10 years that have turned around the economic sentiment on this issue. In most cases, in nearly all cases, the jobs we're talking about for these workers are in the low-wage service sector. They're non-tradable. They're not subject to foreign competition. They can't be outsourced. Those jobs are exactly the sort of jobs where the employers would simply pass along the extra costs to the consumer. They'd raise prices and keep their workers at a much higher paycheck. Furthermore, the price rises we're talking about are very much smaller than most people would realize. Wal-Mart is America's largest low-wage employer. Three hundred thousand Wal-Mart workers average about $9 an hour. All Wal-Mart would have to do to cover a $12 minimum wage is raise their prices by 1.1 percent one time. The average Wal-Mart shopper would pay only an extra $12.50 per year. People wouldn't even notice the price hike.
NEARY: Well, if the goal is to lift low-wage workers above the poverty level, is $12 an hour really enough?
UNZ: The figures I've seen are that probably for every extra $3 or 4 they earn in their paycheck, they'll lose probably about a dollar worth of government assistance. In this case, a $12 minimum wage, if it were nationwide, would boost the incomes of 40 percent of all the wage earners in the United States. The average rise for a full-time worker would be $5,000 a year, which is a life-changing amount of money. If their wages went up by $5,000 but they lost, say, $1,000 or $1,500 worth of government benefits, they'd still be far better off. And also they'd be keeping the money themselves, the money they earned. And I think most workers would rather earn their living rather than get it in government handouts or welfare programs.
NEARY: Ron Unz is chairman of the Higher Wages Alliance. Thanks so much for joining us.
UNZ: Great to be here.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Lynn Neary. Way back in 1985 when I was hosting WEEKEND ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, I found myself interviewing Robert Redford about a new film festival sponsored by the Sundance Institute. Redford was enthusiastic about his film festival, showcasing independent film. He described it as far from Hollywood.
ROBERT REDFORD: It's free from the meter ticking of money and people in suits walking around looking at watches.
NEARY: I told Redford that some people had accused him of naivety when he started the festival, but he was optimistic.
REDFORD: I think a little idealism is not wrong. And we'll just see what happens. If it works, it works.
NEARY: It's probably safe to say it worked. But there are a few more people in suits walking around that ski resort these days. They've got checkbooks with them too. The Sundance Film Festival is celebrating its 30th year this week. To hear more about the history of the festival, we called Eric Kohn, the chief film critic for Indiewire. He's attending the festival in Park City, Utah this year, and when he told us when Sundance started, there really was no such thing as indie film culture.
ERIC KOHN: What Sundance did, at least for the United States, was mobilize an independent film community and eventually create a marketplace. So it now is an alternative, sort of way of making movies outside of Hollywood that's still a viable both to have a career and to remain, in various different ways, creatively autonomous.
NEARY: So, has it changed from its beginnings? I mean, has it changed from a place where lesser known actors and directors could come and sort of experiment on independent films to one where sort of big budget actors are now starring in lower budget movies but with a different kind of feel to it?
KOHN: I think the cliché of Sundance is that it's sold out. It's the most popular, well-known festival in America, maybe in the world, and so it's an easy target. And it's very easy to single out, especially the films here that do have bigger names to say that, you know, look, it's not really independent when you have famous people.
The reality is some of those movies are actually quite good and some famous people want to be involved in movies that aren't sort of bound to Hollywood in that very restrictive way. So, that's one part of the answer to your question.
The other thing to keep in mind is that this was not a marketplace that existed 30 years ago, now that there are more ways to make independent films and there's a viable marketplace for them. There's all kinds of independent films being made but it's a much bigger program for that. There's nearly 100 world premieres here. I look at sections at this festival that don't have any famous people in them, and that's really where I see independent films thriving. It just doesn't grab headlines in the same way.
NEARY: Do you know was there sort of a moment over the last 30 years when Sundance went from being a kind of little-known venue for little-known films to being what it is today? When it made that transition, was there one film that made it, was there a moment?
KOHN: When Steven Soderbergh's feature film - his first feature film - "Sex, Lies and Videotape" premiered here. It was this breakout success story that ended up actually doing some good commercial business. So, within the next couple of years, you had filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino with "Reservoir Dogs" and Richard Linklater with "Slackers" show up here out of nowhere and then all of the sudden have these major careers because people were coming out and discovering them and putting down money to help them sort of find their way.
NEARY: Had anybody heard of Soderbergh, for instance, before that film at Sundance?
KOHN: Absolutely not. He was, you know, a 26-year-old film school graduate just sort of interested in making movies the way he wanted to make them. So, it really did put the festival on the map and at this point is sort of legendary. And I think a lot of filmmakers now look to Sundance as this high-water mark of how you can get discovered. And the reality is it does happen. Every year that I come to this festival, I always find somebody who I'd never heard of before, never would have had a reason to hear of before, and they do something that shows that clearly they have a vision and this willingness to work outside of any kind of conventions for what you would expect a movie to be. And, you know, the truth is if it's a good movie, there is a way to make it commercial. And that's what keeps people coming back here on the industry side to discover people, to see things you've never seen before and realize that the world wants to see that too.
NEARY: Eric Kohn is the chief film critic for Indiewire. Eric, thanks so much for being with us.
KOHN: Pleasure. Thank you.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Lynn Neary. Scott Simon is away. In Afghanistan, the Taliban staged a suicide attack on a Kabul restaurant that's a favorite among foreigners in the city. The attack appears to be the deadliest violence against Western civilians in Kabul since 2001. So far, it's been confirmed that 13 foreigners, including three Americans, were among the 21 killed.
The dead include three U.N. personnel, the International Monetary Fund country director, and the owner of the popular restaurant. NPR's Sean Carberry reports.
SEAN CARBERRY, BYLINE: It was about 7:30 on Friday night when a suicide bomber approached the entrance to the Lebanese Taverna here in Kabul. He detonated his vest, killing several security guards and at least one civilian who was sitting outside in a car. According to officials after the initial blasts, two gunmen worked their way into the restaurant and began indiscriminately shooting the customers.
FUAD: (Foreign language spoken)
CARBERRY: That's Fuad, who gave only one name. He was working in the restaurant at the time of the attack.
FUAD: (Through translator) We managed to escape upstairs and saw that the staff were following us.
CARBERRY: The owner of the restaurant, Kamal Hamade, told the guests to flea upstairs too. Hamade reportedly grabbed a gun and went back downstairs to fight the attackers, but he was gunned down along with more than a dozen others inside the restaurant.
(SOUNDBITE OF CRYING)
CARBERRY: Outside one of the city morgues, relatives of one of the Afghan victims wailed inconsolably, unable to grasp how this could happen in an upscale neighborhood of Kabul where there's a significant security presence. The Taliban issued a statement saying the attack was retribution for an alleged U.S. airstrike earlier in the week that killed civilians.
The militants say they were targeting a restaurant, quote, "frequented by high-ranking foreigners where they used to dine with booze and liquor in the plenty." The international community here is largely in shock over the loss of friends and colleagues. A number of international workers say their organizations have implemented strict security protocols for the time being.
Some are in complete lockdown, other's banned from going to restaurants until they can determine if this was an isolated incident, or a sign that Taliban are now targeting innocent civilians in the city. Sean Carberry, NPR News, Kabul.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
On June 5th last year, the world was introduced to Edward Snowden and in detailed newspaper articles to the way the NSA conducts surveillance on the phone and Internet records of Americans and foreign citizens. Now months later, President Obama gave his most sweeping response yet to those revelations. In a speech yesterday at the Justice Department, he largely defended the NSA's telephone data gathering strategies, but he also acknowledged the need to protect civil liberties, announcing changes to how he wants that telephone metadata stored and accessed.
Cindy Cohn is the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, and she joins us now from San Francisco. Welcome to the program, Cindy.
CINDY COHN: Thank you.
NEARY: Now, it seems that the President wanted to accomplish two things in his speech. First, he wanted to defend the program as it was conceived, but he also wanted to, I think, give some assurance to those who have been calling for privacy protections. Do you think he succeeded on those two fronts?
COHN: I think he did try. It's as marked change in tone from where he started in June. I think he's still got a long way to go before he restores the trust of the American people. I think that the NSA has so clearly outstripped its boundaries in so many different directions that there's a lot to do to try to reign it back into the organization that I think most Americans could support.
NEARY: The President did say that he wants eventually to move the storage of the bulk data out of government hands. Now, is that a satisfactory solution?
COHN: Well, it's good that he wants to end the program as it is currently, but no, you know, the government shouldn't be able to outsource mass surveillance anymore than it should be able to handle it in-house. What we need to do is we need to end mass surveillance and require the NSA to have some level of suspicion before it gets to even have custody of our communications and communications records.
The gather-it-all-up-first and then sort-out-second, whether there's anybody who's done anything bad in their strategy is the thing that we really have to stop if we're going to restore trust in the NSA.
NEARY: You know, the President said that he has no indication that intelligence agencies are abusing surveillance power. It doesn't sound like you would agree with that.
COHN: What the President's saying is, well, nobody intentionally abused it. I don't think that the American people, you know, I think that we don't want abuse, not that we don't want intentional abuse, and you know, we learned this term called love int - love intelligence - which was the NSA analyst spying on their exes. We know that they misdialed and somehow managed to spy on all of Washington, D.C. rather than Egypt. You know, even if it's not intentional, I don't think it's fair to say that the program is always worked perfectly.
NEARY: You know, it's very clear, as we said at the beginning, that there's two very compelling interests that the President is trying to balance here, and you know, one of the things he said in his speech is that even privacy advocates, you know, such as yourself, want protection from another 9/11. So how do you find that very delicate balance?
COHN: The reports are consistently that the agencies had all the information that they needed. It wasn't that they needed more information; it's that they didn't do a very good job sharing the information in the way that would be most useful to stop the attack. That's what the president's review committee said, that's what Richard Clarke says, it's what people across the spectrum have said. So of course we want to be safe from another terrorist attack, but that doesn't mean that every technique that the NSA wants to do actually gets us there.
NEARY: Cindy Cohn is the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She joined us from San Francisco. Thanks so much for being with us, Cindy.
COHN: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Lynn Neary. This week, it came out that Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan quietly signed into law one of the most repressive anti-gay measures in the world. The law punishes violators with up to 14 years in prison. The development got us thinking about just how difficult it is to be homosexual in so many different parts of the world. To hear more about this, we've reached Jonathan Cooper, the chief executive of the U.K.-based gay rights organization Human Dignity Trust. Thanks for joining us.
JONATHAN COOPER: It's a pleasure to be here.
NEARY: Let's start with this law in Nigeria. As I understand it, one of the things that it makes illegal is for gay organizations to hold meetings at all. So, can you explain a little bit more about that.
COOPER: Yeah. The law in Nigeria basically does two things. It criminalizes gay marriage or same-sex marriages and it also criminalizes association rights of gay and lesbian people. And so therefore it is at a criminal offense now to set up a gay or lesbian organization in Nigeria. And it is also now a criminal offense to attempt to marry somebody of the same sex in Nigeria.
NEARY: Yeah. And pretty much as soon as this was signed into law, people were beginning to be arrested, I think the day after. I mean, how is this going to affect the whole gay rights movement or gay rights community in Nigeria?
COOPER: Well, we're hearing reports of dozens of people being arrested. There's even some suggestion that those people who are arrested are subject to all kinds of inhuman, degrading treatment in order to try to persuade those people to give details of other gay men. It's principally gay men that are being kind of rounded up at the moment. And the reality is if there's any suggestion that you may be gay, you are very, very vulnerable now in Nigeria. And we do need to put this whole issue into context. Most of sub-Saharan Africa that were under British colonial rule have laws that criminalize homosexuality. And we need to kind of understand the history of this. And the reality is it's a curious consequence of British colonial rule, that the British left a legacy of these laws that criminalize gay sex. It was an obsession of the British in the 19th century to criminalize gay sex. You have this extraordinary statistic that out of 53 commonwealth countries that there are, 42 of those countries criminalize homosexuality. And that just gives you a sense of the extent to which this is a British colonial legacy.
NEARY: Let me ask you about Russia, 'cause there's been a lot of international protests leading up to the Olympics, which are being held there in just a few weeks. Because of Russia's laws against homosexuality, how do things stand right now, and are these international protests having any effect?
COOPER: Well, the Olympics are taking place and the sponsorship is still in place and those sponsors are the great companies that we all rely on day in and day out. So, are the protests making a big impact? I'm not sure. I think the Russian authorities and Putin have settled in behind this particularly odious law. If there's an attempt to somehow promote or pretend that homosexuality is as valid a relationship as heterosexuality, or the heterosexual family, then you are committing and administrative offense. But the reality is you can cause an administrative offense but it is also in all intents and purposes a criminal offense. I mean, there is the ultimate sanction if you refuse to pay your fine or imprisonment. And so, you know, Russia is a serious problem.
NEARY: What about countries where progress is being made. I understand in Latin America, for instance, there are a number of countries that have laws protecting gay rights. And in Asia, Vietnam may become the first Asian country to legalize gay marriage.
COOPER: Yeah. I mean, we should be celebrating movements towards full equality. And we're seeing that in South America and in Central America and as you point out in pockets of Asia. But then you get other parts of Asia - Singapore, for example, where there was a recent challenge to the criminal laws there, and the Singapore upheld the legality of those criminal laws. And there are examples of prosecutions in Singapore.
NEARY: Jonathan Cooper is with the gay rights group Human Dignity Trust. He joined us from the BBC in London. Thanks so much for joining us, Jonathan.
COOPER: It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
The North American International Auto Show opens to the public today. That's the fancy name for the Detroit car show. NPR's Sonari Glinton has been getting a sneak preview in the Motor City, hanging out with engineers and auto execs. And he's with us now. Good to talk with you, Sonari.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: It's good to be here, Lynn.
NEARY: Now, you've spent, I think, four days at the car show. What are the standouts?
GLINTON: Well, I'd say there were two stars. So, one was a truck; the other was a company. The Truck is the Ford F-150. It's the best-selling vehicle in America for 30 years running. And it got a radical redesign. They made the body partially out of aluminum. And that means it's going to be a lot lighter and a lot more fuel efficient. And fuel efficiency is a really big deal at this car show. The second is General Motors. They won truck of the year for the Silverado and car of the year with the Corvette. But I'd say kind of the real star at GM is their brand new CEO, Mary Barra.
NEARY: Well, let's talk about those two things separately. Let's start with Mary Barra. First of all, did she have any news?
GLINTON: She didn't really say that much. She didn't make much time for any chats individually with reporters. So, that sort of created this surreal atmosphere at the auto show. It was like Angelina Jolie showed up. And every time she was someplace, the press, you know, swarmed her like paparazzi. And to give you an example. Vice President Biden visited the floor on Thursday and he met with all the heads of all the companies. And when he got to GM, the press was far more interested in Mary Barra than they were with the vice president.
NEARY: Tell, what is the fascination with her?
GLINTON: Well, the one obvious thing is that she's a female CEO in a really traditionally male world. And the auto industry is still sort of going through these changes and it's having trouble recruiting top talent - recruiting women, recruiting young people who are really interested in design. You know, why go to Detroit when you can go to Silicon Valley? So, she's kind of the emblem of that problem that it took so long for a CEO to be a woman, and that's a story that people want to hear about her rise through the auto industry.
NEARY: So, let's go back to that truck that caught your eye, the Ford F-150. What makes that truck so important?
GLINTON: Well, you know, fuel economy is really important at this auto show because the auto industry has to, you know, meet these really tough fuel efficiency standards - 55 miles a gallon. And we're getting there slowly. And you can do it two ways. You can change the engine and the kinds of fuels and the way it's run or you can change the body of the vehicle. And what Ford did with the F-150 is that they are taking about 700 pounds out of this vehicle. And this is such a big-selling car that making it even a little more fuel efficient will have a tremendous effect on the fuel efficiency of the fleet. And the technology, if it works, we're going to see it trickle into cars that everyone is driving.
NEARY: That's NPR business reporter Sonari Glinton. And he joined us from the studios of Michigan Radio. Thanks for being with us, Sonari.
GLINTON: It's great to be here.
NEARY: This is NPR News.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Lynn Neary. Time now for sports.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
NEARY: And then there were four. Tomorrow is the Sunday before the Sunday before the Super Bowl. And that means New England takes on Denver and San Francisco goes up against Seattle to see who's headed to the big game. NPR's Tom Goldman, who's caught in the middle of that San Fran-Seattle crossfire, joins us on the line from Portland. Good morning, Tom.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: I'm ducking here. Hiya, Lynn.
NEARY: Now, I have to say, from all my wisdom and knowledge about football, that the match-ups this weekend...
GOLDMAN: Which is a lot.
NEARY: ...yeah, it's a lot - aren't much of a surprise, are they?
GOLDMAN: You know, they're not. And that's a surprise in itself. This season was as topsy-turvy as any. A team could look unbeatable one week and extremely beatable the next. But here we are with the four teams that were absolutely expected to be here. Sports Illustrated is a fine magazine but often dead wrong on predictions, like many sports experts are. But in September's NFL preseason issue, SI picked Seattle versus San Francisco for the NFC championship; New England versus Denver for the AFC. They nailed it. It's disappointing to people who like upsets and upstarts, but for those who like good games with great teams, tomorrow will be a treat.
NEARY: All right. Let's start with what's considered the big one. This is the Broncos versus the Patriots, or should we say Manning versus Brady?
GOLDMAN: Why not? Everyone else is saying it. I heard one commentator liken a Brady-Manning match-up to when Muhammad Ali would fight Joe Frazier and America would stop and watch. A little hyperbole there, if for no other reason that Tom Brady and Peyton Manning won't get close to laying gloves on each other the entire afternoon until the post-game handshake when Manning usually looks bummed out. He's lost to Brady and the Patriots 10 of the 14 times they've played. Who will win this 15th match-up? The erudite people of football outsiders says Denver's defense, because of some prominent injuries, is vulnerable to the pass, meaning Tom Brady could be in for a big day, even though New England's running game has been dominant of late. And despite Manning's record-smashing year of passing, look for Denver to try to run the ball a fair amount. It should be a close game. Those soothsayers from SI said New England 30, Denver 27 in that preseason issue. Sounds about right - unless it's not.
(LAUGHTER)
NEARY: But that's not the only big quarterback match-up this weekend, right?
GOLDMAN: Right, right. That's right. Colin Kaepernick of the 49ers against Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks. And, Lynn, those guys could be Brady-Manning in 10 years, although they are very different from the old guys, in that Kaepernick and Wilson are very mobile and can be as dangerous running the ball as they are passing. But, Lynn, enough quarterback talk already, OK? It's important to remember football, more than any team game, is a team game. All the parts have to be working together for good things to happen. Brady and Manning are mere mortals if they're not protected by guys we don't talk about, like, say, offensive lineman Marcus Cannon of the Pats and Denver's Orlando Franklin.
NEARY: Well, speaking of those other players, the Seahawks are going to be missing an important one tomorrow - Percy Harvin.
GOLDMAN: Yeah, that's right. A great wide receiver. He's out recovering from a concussion. He got blasted in the head last weekend by a New Orleans defensive back who was fined $21,000 for a helmet-to-helmet hit. Harvin was obviously woozy after that. He went into locker room, reportedly was check out for a concussion, came back into the game and then apparently hit his head on the turf and that was diagnosed as a concussion.
Now, there were concerns about whether he should have been back in the game after that first hit. A huge no-no in today's concussion-aware NFL to send a player back in if he's got symptoms. But the doctors reportedly gave him the go-ahead. During this postseason, you did have a player for Green Bay knowingly go back in the game after suffering a possible concussion, and he hadn't been cleared by doctors.
NEARY: Well, the concussion issue on display not only on the field but also there's some news from the courtroom in the NFL concussion lawsuit, right?
GOLDMAN: That's right. The big settlement between the NFL and thousands of retired players hit a snag when the judge rejected it because she didn't see how the money in the deal would cover all the potential plaintiffs who were claiming football caused their brain damage. It could be resolved by the judge getting more documentation showing the numbers are good, or the settlement could blow up. Along with the on-field issues we just mentioned, it shows how this concussion issue is a big old battleship that's very hard to turn around, despite the best PR efforts by the league that it's getting on top of the issue.
NEARY: NPR's Tom Goldman. Thanks so much.
GOLDMAN: You're welcome, Lynn.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
Under a deal mediating by a federal bankruptcy judge, a group of local and national foundations this week pledged $330 million to help Detroit's pension fund and protect the city's valuable art collection. With Detroit in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings, city officials had been casting an eye on the Detroit Institute of Art's collection of city-owned art valued at between $400 million and 800 million. The foundation's offer will not provide all the money needed to fund the bankrupt pension fund, but, combined with possible state aid and individual donations, it is hoped enough money can be raised to prevent the need to auction off the artwork. One of the first individual donors to step up was philanthropist Paul Schapp, and he joins us now from member station WDET in Detroit. Welcome to the program, Mr. Schapp.
PAUL SCHAPP: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be with you.
NEARY: I understand that you were instrumental in helping to get this whole deal going because you were one of the first people to really offer to donate money - $5 million in fact. What were you hoping to accomplish by doing that?
SCHAPP: Well, there was an article in the Detroit Free Press on December 5th that outlined the plan of Judge Rosen to try and find $500 million that would serve two purposes. One, to prevent the sale of the treasures of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and at the same time help minimize the pain to the Detroit pensioners. But I was struck by what a hard sell that was going to be, unless individuals, family foundations and others would step up and show that there is sort of grassroots support.
NEARY: You understand how all this works much better than most of us do. So, why would that have been such a hard sell without that kind of show of commitment, as you said, from the grassroots level?
SCHAPP: Well, this is unusual to ask major foundations to participate in this way. That's not their normal charter for helping various causes. And because of that I thought it was going to be important, and I believe it was, that individuals step up and make commitments.
NEARY: Three hundred thirty million dollars that has been pledged so far - it's not enough though to take care of the whole pension debt. And I understand that the governor is now proposing that the state should match these donations. Will that take care of the whole debt?
SCHAPP: Well, it might come close to what's needed at least to save the Detroit Institute of Arts treasures. The judge is looking to have the DIA become an independent, nonprofit organization that owns the art and the donations will go to the DIA but flow through them to the pension funds.
NEARY: So, in other words, this would then protect the art museum in the future from ever being under this kind of threat of having these art works auctioned off because of city debt or anything like that?
SCHAPP: Absolutely. That is one of the goals.
NEARY: And also, it seems to me, this then solves the hidden problem here which is how do you weigh such ethereal needs as the beauty of works of art being saved versus the very real needs of people who depend on those pensions.
SCHAPP: Oh, absolutely. Their pain is real but the idea that you would sell treasures to then pay the pensions just was something that would be do demoralizing to this community that we had to step in and hoped that others would do so as well.
NEARY: How are people feeling now? I mean, has it helped with the morale in Detroit that this movement is occurring?
SCHAPP: Oh, I believe so. I think the news about the governor was what we'd all been hoping for. This is a real sign of a community coming together to solve really difficult problems.
NEARY: And this doesn't take care all of Detroit's bankruptcy problems, does it?
SCHAPP: No, it certainly doesn't. But, as the judge points out, it would get out of the way two of the most difficult issues and then maybe some of the other things can be dealt with.
NEARY: Philanthropist Paul Schapp. Thanks so much for joining us today, Mr. Schapp.
SCHAPP: You're quite welcome.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Stephen Dunn is one of the country's most beloved poets. His writing feels less like reading poetry than reading wise words from a trusted friend, the friend who is really good at turning a thoughtful phrase. Dunn won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 and hasn't let up since. His newest book of poems is called "Lines of Defense," and it is his 17th. I spoke with Stephen Dunn recently about his book, and I asked him how he has used poetry in his own life.
STEPHEN DUNN: What good literature has always done is given me a language for the occasion. A lot of times not, of course. But I think the poems that matter to me are the ones that speak to that which cannot easily be said. We're on the verge of understanding but we finally get the words from the poem or the story or the novel or whatever.
MARTIN: That is made clear in a couple of poems that you've included in this collection about we navigate dying and loss. The narrator is talking about the pending death of his brother.
DUNN: Yes.
MARTIN: May I ask you - is this you? Are you narrating this poem?
DUNN: Yes.
MARTIN: This was a loss you had.
DUNN: Yeah.
MARTIN: One called "The Little Details." I'll read a bit. It says: (Reading) My brother is talking about his icemaker because a man can't talk about his lymphoma and chemo every minute of the day. Can you describe what kind of relief, details, the minutiae of life can bring?
DUNN: Well, we live with the little things much more than the large things. For me, the latter part of that poem - middle to the latter part - is what's important.
MARTIN: Go ahead and read, if you...
DUNN: OK. (Reading) What's a life without its little details - trips to the market, a good parking spot. He has to hang up, has a bet on the Jets-Patriots game, which is about to start. He's sure the Jets will cover the spread. I make the opposite bet, our old fun. Later, I put on my Maria Callas CD, full of words I don't understand, but do. If your brother has cancer, how lucky to find someone to sing you beyond what you've permitted yourself to feel. Last time he visited he shrugged, smiled, threw up his hands, as if to say he was implicated in the big comedy now. Then we played a card game called Push and drank fine scotch and turned on the TV.
MARTIN: Such ordinary things.
DUNN: Absolutely ordinary things, and then the extraordinary things like Maria Callas singing mixed with that give us permission to feel something that we weren't allowed to feel, we didn't allow ourselves to feel.
MARTIN: And the other poem about your brother, it's called "A Cold Mist." It's a different tone, this poem, slightly angrier. Is that the right word?
DUNN: I think it was this poem that I resisted writing for a long while because I was thinking about what his wife would think, what his children would think.
MARTIN: It's about the memorial service.
DUNN: Yeah, and before that. It's, you know, there's no appropriate way to feel about death, but you find yourself feeling something that is antisocial a little bit, just inappropriate. I imagine that those are the things that if people confess to, they find out that that's telling the truth for others, as well. And people have spoken to me about this poem in that way; that it was a kind of solace for them, because they were feeling things that wouldn't hold up to scrutiny very well.
MARTIN: I'm afraid we're making this book sound a little heavy.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: There are light moments that I want to talk about. Another poem, "Pedagogical."
DUNN: OK.
MARTIN: You almost tell a joke. It's a short poem.
DUNN: Yes.
MARTIN: And that's kind of a biography of your work. You've written in a college paper about Stalin and you've described his acts as inhuman - is the word you use. And the kicker is that the response from your professor is a follows: Stephen, when it comes to think like that; human will do just fine. You describe it also as the beginning of your intellectual life, that moment.
DUNN: Yeah, I think...
MARTIN: How so?
DUNN: ...I think so. I knew what he had written was true right away, and it struck me as a great criticism of my calling it inhuman. And to think that things that are inhuman are profoundly human was the beginning of the thinking for me that I hadn't allowed myself before, didn't even know about.
MARTIN: While we're on the subject of your college experience, I have to note - and this feels like a bit of a departure from other poets - you had a very serious college basketball career...
DUNN: I did.
MARTIN: ...at Hofstra.
DUNN: Yeah.
MARTIN: How did you go from basketball to poetry? Or did the two always coexist for you?
DUNN: No, no. The poetry followed much later, but I was always a serious reader. I was not particularly a good student, and I was a pretty good basketball player. I've written an essay called "Basketball Poetry," in which I try not to push the metaphor too far. But one of the points that I make in the essay is the similarity between poetry and basketball is a chance to be better than yourself, to transcend yourself, if you're hot that day. And that happens in writing in our best moments, where we find ourselves saying what we didn't know we knew or couldn't have said in any other circumstance. Those are the moments in poetry I live for now. I can't play basketball anymore.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: But do those days come more readily to you now, days when you say, yeah, I'm on fire?
DUNN: Maybe a little more readily, in that I rarely start poems these days with a clear sense of what I'm doing. I think in the past few years, I've been writing hoping that every line is a line of discovery rather than something experiential that I'm just saying. I think one of the great dangers of people who write experiential poems - which I have written many - is that you might just say what happened to you as if it were important. You wouldn't be exercising any degrees of selection that you need to exercise if you're going to write a good poem.
MARTIN: Stephen Dunn. His new collection is called "Lines of Defense." Thank you so much for talking with us, Mr. Dunn.
DUNN: You're welcome.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Ten years ago, Rinaldo Willy was reading about how to make synthetic diamonds from ashes when he realized any kind of ashes might work, even those of a human. Today, his company turns people into diamonds, or rather they take cremation ashes and compress them at very high heat, turning them into these precious gems. Rinaldo Willy joins us from Switzerland, where his company, Algordanza Memorial Diamonds, is based. Welcome to the show, Mr. Willy.
RINALDO WILLY: Thank you.
MARTIN: Can you break it down for us? How does this work?
WILLY: Well, the process is in two parts. The chemical part is to gain the carbon out of the cremation ashes. And the physical part is to imitate nature by using a machine, which is able to build up a lot of pressure and heat. The more time you give this process, the bigger the rough diamond starts to grow.
MARTIN: And I understand that the diamonds you're making don't all come out the same color.
WILLY: Yeah. We were also surprised at the beginning when every diamond got blue. And we figured out by analysis that it's the element boron who gives the diamond the bluish diamond. But one time the diamonds turned white and we were a bit irritated, not secure if we had done any mistake or if we got any impurity during the process. So, we repeat it and it turned again white. And after we have got information that this person died of cancer and was treated very aggressive with chemo...
MARTIN: Um-hum. Chemotherapy.
WILLY: ...and the chemistry was telling us, well, chemo has an influence on the amount of boron. So, we assumed that was the reason why the diamonds got white. But what we have is every diamond from each person, it's slightly different. So, it's always a unique diamond.
MARTIN: So, what do people do with these diamonds?
WILLY: What we know from Europe, the very favorite is to produce jewelry out of it. We know from Asia culture that they prefer a lot of pendants. So, it's always depending from culture.
MARTIN: Have you reached out or have you communicated at all from families who have received these diamonds?
WILLY: The most reaction, astonishing, is happiness. I don't know why. But say if the diamond is blue and the deceased had also blue eyes, I hear almost every time the diamond had the same color of the eyes. And they were happy that a family member comes back home.
MARTIN: Rinaldo Willy is the founder and CEO of Algordanza, a company that makes diamonds out of human remains. He joined us from Switzerland. Mr. Willy, thanks so much for talking with us.
WILLY: Was my pleasure.
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MARTIN: This is NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Erika Hayasaki is a journalist. And, like a lot of reporters, she has covered stories of great tragedy and loss. In fact, she was one of the reporters who covered the mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007, in which 32 people were murdered. All of that made death feel more present in her life.
Later, when she was covering stories in New Jersey, she came across an article in the campus newspaper. It was about a class on death at Kean University and it was a hit on campus.
ERICA HAYASAKI: Students were really lining up to take this class and they don't even want to miss the class. So it was interesting to find out how popular a class on death could actually be on a college campus with young people.
MARTIN: Norma Bowe is a former nurse who teaches that class. Erika Hayasaki took her course and has written a new book about it called "The Death Class." I recently spoke with both women. Erika Hayasaki started off by describing Norma Bowe's unusual field trips.
HAYASAKI: She takes her students to morgues and cemeteries. She does lectures in the cemetery on the biology of dying. She takes them into maximum security prisons, crematories. I mean, it was constantly exciting and, you know, there were so many places that we could go.
MARTIN: Norma, what holes did you see in our collective education, our understanding of death and dying that you would think something like this would be necessary?
NORMA BOWE: You know, I think in our culture we spend a lot of time avoiding death. We don't talk about it. If someone we love dies, we, if we're lucky, get maybe a three-day hiatus from work and from school and we're just supposed to move on. And I think that's a real disservice because I think unless you're able to properly grieve, you know, you can get pretty physically sick from carrying around that kind of a burden. On our very urban campus, for instance, we have a lot of students that have had friends that were murdered or they know someone personally who committed suicide or died in an accident. And, you know, I wanted to give a place where students could feel safe exploring, you know, the ways that grief could hold us back, that we can stay stuck, ultimately to kind of encourage people to live their lives because we don't know when we're going to take our last breath.
MARTIN: So, what are these classes like?
BOWE: Well, it's a really amazing process. We start off the class. They come in and they're sitting in a lecture-style room with the rows of seats, as you can imagine. And the first thing I do is pull everyone into a circle and we form a bereavement group. And there's something very powerful about being in that circle and having to look people in the eyes.
MARTIN: Erica, you were sitting in those classes. Did it feel like therapy?
HAYASAKI: It didn't feel like necessarily therapy but there were students who came and openly were grieving. And I think Norma knew how to handle each student in the different issues that they come to the class with. And I think that's important if you're going to have a death class. She also had the medical background, so you learn about the biology of dying, psychology, the theories and the history of it, which I think really helps to talk about such a complex, difficult subject.
MARTIN: In the book, you profile several of the students who've taken Norma's class. Can you tell us a little bit about Caitlin and Jonathan?
HAYASAKI: Sure. I met Caitlin and Jonathan through Norma while I was following the class. And Caitlin was one of Norma's students who at the time that I met her was dealing with a lot of death anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. And she was in love with a young man named Jonathan, who - Jonathan actually when he was a young boy saw his mother murdered in front of him by his father. And so he came with his own struggles. And the two of them got to know the professor over the course of the next couple of years very closely. And I was fortunate enough to be around during a lot of that to see how she had such an impact on these two students in particular and helping them both - Jonathan, for one, find his voice - and Caitlin to conquer some of her fears that something is going to go wrong.
MARTIN: And lastly, Norma, I wonder what do you hope people take away from this book?
BOWE: I really hope that this book will bring a conversation to the table if people could talk more about their fears of death, about anticipatory grief, about how they're feeling and how they're doing after someone they love has died. You know, I'm hoping that more people will look each other in the eye and really ask the question how are you doing and get a real truthful answer.
MARTIN: Erica Hayasaki and Norma Bowe. Erica's new book is called "The Death Class: A True Story about Life." Thanks to both of you.
BOWE: Thank you.
HAYASAKI: Thank you.
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MARTIN: You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The new album from punk band Against Me! is titled "Transgender Dysphoria Blues" - and that is not just a metaphor. It's the first album the band has released since lead singer Laura Jane Grace went public with her transition from man to woman. Now, instead of hinting at feelings of gender dysphoria in her lyrics, they're all right there, front and center:
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MARTIN: The band, Against Me!, has been around for more than 15 years, and built significant success on the back of those growling, assertive vocals, formerly attributed to Tom Gabel, now Laura Jane Grace. She and band mate James Bowman join me now from ETV Radio, our member station in Columbia, South Carolina. Laura and James, welcome to the program.
LAURA JANE GRACE: Thank you so much for having us.
JAMES BOWMAN: Yes, thank you.
MARTIN: Laura, I'd like to start with you. This has been a long time coming. What does it mean for you to be able to do your first album as a woman?
GRACE: It's freeing. It's liberating.
MARTIN: What about your persona? Because a lot of being the front person of a band, it's about you, this personality and what you project. That has changed.
GRACE: But that's where the disconnect was happening for me in a lot of way and where I was feeling a good majority of the dysphoria was being on stage. And being featured in magazines where, you know, rock and roll or punk rock, it's a boy's club in a lot of ways. And you're out there with your photo side by side with these other people that you're supposed to measure up to and didn't. I didn't feel that way. I wasn't one of those dudes or whatever I like. So, it was really felt more and more pressure to be someone I wasn't. and so to be able to be true to myself and authentic when I'm on stage, you know, I don't have to think. I can just be and exist.
MARTIN: So, James, what was it like for you and the rest of the band when Laura first sat down and kind of came clean about where she was and what she wanted and her transition?
BOWMAN: I remember I wasn't surprised or shocked, really. And I guess maybe I was just expecting it somehow, I don't know. But I remember the drive back. We were at the studio that we had in St. Augustine at the time. And I remember driving back and the car ride was really quiet. And I was just thinking. And it was actually just all the moments of, like, little snippets of lyrics and stuff like flashing back. And I was like, ah. It all kind of makes sense now.
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MARTIN: And what has been the reaction from your fans, James? How's the tour going so far?
BOWMAN: Yeah, everything's been great. Everyone's really supportive and crowd interaction and reaction has been really supportive and really overwhelming. It's been really great.
MARTIN: Were you surprised by that at all, Laura? Were you kind of girding yourself for a different response?
GRACE: I really didn't know what to expect, but the support I've received from people has been definitely overwhelming and humbling.
MARTIN: And these feelings that you were in the wrong body, this started a long time ago when you were very young, right?
GRACE: I vividly remember - I was probably about 4 years old and lived in Texas at the time - and there was a Madonna concert being broadcast on TV. And I just remember feeling self-recognition, you know, of, like, that's me and that's what I that's what I want to do. And, at the same time, realizing that there was a misalignment between, like, recognizing yourself in someone and realizing, like, but I'm a little boy. And there were just many moments like that, you know, throughout growing up. But immediately, when you have those feelings, you feel shame.
MARTIN: So, this goes on for years, you kind of pushing down these feelings and setting them aside. Ultimately, you met the woman who would become your wife, Heather, and you had a daughter. How has your transition affected your family life?
GRACE: Well, it's something that's in transition, too. It's scary. You know, I'm not going to lie, like, it's really frightening feeling like that there's so much uncertainty, and that you've made a decision, even though it wasn't really a decision, because it was something that was based on, like, either I'm going to kill myself or I need to address this. And I know that it's something that is going to potentially, like, destroy everything in my life in a lot of ways, and, like, that is going to cause a lot of uncertainty for things that I don't want to change.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: James, did you have any hesitations when Laura came to you and said, OK, I have an idea for our next album, it's going to be all about me and what's going on in my life?
(LAUGHTER)
BOWMAN: Egomaniac. No, not at all. I think, you know, there's a good story behind the record that is really important for people to hear.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Has any of this changed the way you make music as a band at all?
GRACE: No.
(LAUGHTER)
GRACE: No. Not at all. You know, and that's something that I think is hard to stress to people too is that there's like, you know, there was the initial moment where, like, I came out to everyone in the band or whatever. But then it was like the next day there was, like, business as usual.
BOWMAN: Yeah. The only thing that changed, honestly, was pronouns. You know, that's it.
MARTIN: And performing is better for you then now?
GRACE: Of course, yeah. I mean, it's what it was when it started out as far as being a joyful experience and what I live for.
MARTIN: Laura Jane Grace and James Bowman from the Against Me! The band's new album is called "Transgender Dysphoria Blues." It is out Tuesday. And for a few more days, you can hear it at our website, npr.org. Laura and James, thanks so much for talking with us.
GRACE: Thank you so much for having us.
BOWMAN: Thank you.
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MARTIN: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. Last week, the oldest crossword puzzle creator turned 100 years old. No, not Will Shortz, but it is time for the puzzle.
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MARTIN: Will Shortz is, of course, the puzzle editor of the New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle-master. He joins me now. Hey, Will.
WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Hey, Rachel.
MARTIN: So, I understand you actually attended the birthday party of Bernice Gordon, her 100th. How was it?
SHORTZ: Well, it was great. She's been making crosswords for the New York Times since at least 1953, and she had a birthday party a week ago, which I went to. I was the only puzzle person there. She had lots of family and friends. It was a good time.
MARTIN: Very cool.
SHORTZ: It was just great to be there with her.
MARTIN: Well, I imagine it's a small group of you elite puzzle creators, so it was very cool that you got to go. And with that, what was last week's challenge, Will?
SHORTZ: Yes. I said name a familiar form of exercise in two words. Switch the order of the two words then say them out loud. And the result phonetically will name something to wear. What is it? Well, that exercise system is Tae Bo. Do you know that, Rachel?
MARTIN: Of course. I used to do some mean Tae Bo in my day.
SHORTZ: All right. And switch the two halves and you get bow tie.
MARTIN: All right. So, we got just over 600 correct answers this week and our randomly selected winner is Christine Welch of Keizer, Oregon. She joins us on the line now. Hey, Christine. Congratulations.
CHRISTINE WELCH: Well, thank you, Rachel.
MARTIN: Have you done a lot of Tae Bo in your past?
WELCH: No, none at all.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: But did it come pretty quickly or did you have to mull this one over a little bit?
WELCH: Yeah, I mulled it over a little bit, though about it the first day, you know, off and on. And it just came to me.
MARTIN: Sometimes it does that, yeah. And you are from Keizer, Oregon. I've got family in Portland and Eugene, but I've never been to Keizer. Where is it?
WELCH: It's on the northern edge of Salem.
MARTIN: I understand you're currently retired, but you used to teach high school?
WELCH: Yes.
MARTIN: What'd you teach?
WELCH: I taught mathematics.
MARTIN: I mean, I think there's some pretty strong parallels between math skills and puzzling skills, right?
WELCH: I think so. Doing a hard math problem is like solving a puzzle and it's fun.
MARTIN: All right. Well, let's put those skills to the test. You ready to do this?
WELCH: I think so.
MARTIN: OK, Will. We're ready.
SHORTZ: All right, Christine and Rachel. I'm going to give you three words starting with the letter B. You give me a word that can go before each of mine to complete a compound word or a familiar two-word phrase. For example, if I said brew, body and base, you would say home, as in homebrew, homebody and home base.
MARTIN: OK. You've got it, Christine?
WELCH: Yes.
MARTIN: OK. Let's give it a go.
SHORTZ: Number one: we'll start with three-letter answers. And your first trio is berg B-E-R-G, bucket and breaker.
WELCH: Ice.
SHORTZ: Iceberg, ice bucket and icebreaker, right. Brow, ball and bank.
WELCH: Eye.
SHORTZ: Eyebrow, eyeball and eye bank is right. Bed, breeze and biscuit.
WELCH: Sea.
SHORTZ: Sea, including the horse Seabiscuit. OK. The next group is four-letter answers, and your first one is board B-O-A-R-D, bird and blower.
WELCH: Snow.
SHORTZ: Snow blower, snowbird and snowboard, right. Bubble, box and bar. And bubble might be something you see in your sink.
WELCH: Soap.
SHORTZ: Soap bubble, right. Now, five-letter answers. And your first one is bottle, balloon and buffalo.
WELCH: Water.
SHORTZ: Excellent. Bean B-E-A-N, beret and...
WELCH: Green.
SHORTZ: Didn't need the third one.
MARTIN: Oh. Didn't even need the third.
(LAUGHTER)
SHORTZ: Is right - green. Bulb - OK. Can you get it from just bulb?
MARTIN: Light.
SHORTZ: Light bulb, yes, light beer and light brigade. OK. This time I'm not going to give you any words.
(LAUGHTER)
SHORTZ: OK. Here you go: it's beet B-E-E-T, baby and bowl.
WELCH: Sugar.
SHORTZ: Sugar bowl, right. Now, six letters: bagger, beetle B-E-E-T-L-E and bomb. It was a term used after the Civil War, first used after the Civil War.
WELCH: Oh, carpet.
SHORTZ: Carpetbagger, carpet beetle and carpet bomb, right? And here's your last one. It's eight letters. And your words are blade, bag and bone. And I'll give you a hint: it's part of your body.
WELCH: Shoulder.
SHORTZ: Shoulder blade, shoulder bag and shoulder bone. Nice job.
MARTIN: Christine, that was great.
WELCH: Well, thank you.
MARTIN: That was very well done. And for playing the puzzle today, you get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin, puzzle books and games. You can read all about it at website, npr.org/puzzle.
And before we let you go, the hard question. What is your public radio station, Christine?
WELCH: KOPB in Portland, Oregon.
MARTIN: Christine Welch of Keizer, Oregon, thanks so much for playing the puzzle, Christine.
WELCH: Thank you, Rachel. And thank you, Will.
MARTIN: OK, Will. What's up for next week?
SHORTZ: Yeah, the challenge comes Ed Pegg, Jr. who runs the website MathPuzzle.com. Name a famous person whose first and last names together contain four double letters - all four of these being different letters of the alphabet. Who is it? For example, Buddy Holly's name has two double letters, D and L. What famous person has four double letters, all of them different?
MARTIN: When you've got the answer, go to our website, npr.org/puzzle and click on that Submit Your Answer link - just one entry per person, please. And our deadline for entries is Thursday, January 23rd at 3 p.m. Eastern Time.
Don't forget to include a phone number where we can reach you at about that time, because if you're the winner we'll give you a call. And you will get to play on the air with the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle-master, Mr. Will Shortz.
Thanks so much, Will.
SHORTZ: Thanks, Rachel.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Illegal immigrants coming from Mexico used to cross into the U.S. through California. As the government put up fences and stepped up surveillance, immigrants found it easier to cross into Arizona. With that migration route now too difficult, the new entry point is Texas. This has left the Border Patrol and local authorities straining to deal with a surge of immigrants, not all of whom survive that journey. NPR's Ted Robbins reports from the American side of the Rio Grande River.
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TED ROBBINS, BYLINE: We begin in Reynosa, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas at Casa del Migrante, a Catholic-run shelter. It's a relatively safe place in what can be a dangerous city for migrants like Mario Torres. The soft-spoken 25-year-old has already traveled 1,500 miles from his home in Honduras. He paid fees to guides and bribes to bandits. Better than staying home, he says.
MARIO TORRES: (Foreign language spoken)
ROBBINS: I couldn't find work. I came with my wife, we came together the two of us, he says. The criminals they killed one of her brothers. We had to come because they were threatening us. Torres was a truck driver, his wife was a high school teacher. He says they had no choice but to escape the poverty and violence in Honduras, the country with the highest murder rate in the world. His wife is already in the U.S., with relatives in South Carolina. They paid smugglers a premium price for her to cross safely $13,000.
TORRES: (Foreign language spoken)
ROBBINS: I have a cousin in the United States, he says. She loaned us the money. And now she's working - my wife started working and paying it back little by little. Now, he's biding his time until he can cross. He'll need to pay a guide to ford the Rio Grande on a power boat, an oar boat, anything that floats.
DANNY TIRADO: A water jug or an inner tube or a bunch of dried logs tied together - whatever way that they can float across.
ROBBINS: Border Patrol Agent Danny Tirado drives me along the U.S. side of the river. It's a very different landscape than the Arizona desert, which has gotten most of the attention over the last decade. There, steel walls and mountain ranges separate the seemingly endless desert between the two countries. Here, the wide Rio Grande is the main barrier, though it twists and turns so much in places, border agents can't see around the next bend. The air is humid, the vegetation thick.
TIRADO: It's a lot of dense brush so, yeah, it is, it does make it easy for people to hide in that area.
ROBBINS: The Border Patrol has been beefing up its presence here. Over the last decade it's doubled the number of agents in the Rio Grande sector to roughly 3,000.
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ROBBINS: They even have a checkpoint 65 miles north of the border. It's in Brooks County, Texas, on the main road out of McAllen. Every vehicle stops here. It's been an effective way to catch drug smugglers. Few migrants try. Instead, human smugglers stop before the checkpoint and tell their clients to walk around it, right onto Linda Vickers ranch land.
LINDA VICKERS: I don't feel safe anymore out here. As you see, you know, I carry a pistol with me and cell phone when I go outside. It just shouldn't be like that.
ROBBINS: The Border Patrol checkpoint is Linda Vickers's nearest neighbor, about four miles away. The ranch is in grassland dotted with mesquite trees and scrub brush. We sit on the front porch of her large stucco ranch house surrounded by her dogs, and they stand at alert whenever they sense something.
VICKERS: I guarantee you they smell somebody.
ROBBINS: Linda Vickers says she sees groups of ten, 20, even 50 people every day.
VICKERS: It's the trespassing. It's like if you had a nice yard in a nice place and people were littering and tearing your fences and defecating and, you know, on your property, and you're finding all this, you'd be a little upset too.
ROBBINS: It's easy to see why people cross here. If they make it to the next pickup point, they've pretty much made it to anywhere in the U.S. But it's not a quick walk around the checkpoint, as smugglers tell the migrants. People can be out in the heat or the cold for days before they're picked-up again. Brooks County Chief Deputy Sheriff Benny Martinez sees the bodies of those who don't make it. Eighty-seven people died last year crossing Brooks County. And he calls that good news.
BENNY MARTINEZ: I call it good news absolutely compared to last year's 129. We're way down.
ROBBINS: He says deaths were down only because the weather was relatively mild. Brooks County has fewer than 10,000 residents. Martinez and his four deputies used to deal with relatively small matters - traffic, drunkenness, the occasional burglary or fight. These days, illegal immigration takes up more than 85 percent of the sheriff's workload and half the county budget.
MARTINEZ: It's been overwhelming. It's been frustrating. Frustrating, in the sense that you're trying to do what's right and you can't 'cause you don't have the resources to do it.
ROBBINS: Brooks County doesn't even have a medical examiner for the bodies. It relies on a neighboring county and on Texas State University to do autopsies and DNA tests so the dead can be connected with their families. Benny Martinez says he'd like to see the federal government pass a guest worker program so people can come legally. In the meantime, Brooks County is asking the government to reimburse its costs.
MARTINEZ: It has to come from Washington. I don't see Brooks County taking the whole burden of all this. It just doesn't make sense.
ROBBINS: It fits the government's strategy, though. Increase border security in one place so people cross in another place until it becomes too dangerous or too expensive. But they keep coming. Ted Robbins, NPR News.
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MARTIN: You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia now have medical marijuana programs. New York State is one of the only in the Northeast that does not. The state's governor, Andrew Cuomo, have opposed it until this year.
NPR's Margot Adler reports that he has now reversed his position, with a program that will be very different from those in other states.
MARGOT ADLER, BYLINE: New York would have the most restrictive policy in the country. It would be a research program under strict federal guidelines. Attempts to create a medical marijuana law have failed to get through the New York State Senate for years.
So now, Governor Cuomo is bypassing the legislature. He is taking an executive action in support of medical marijuana by revising a 1980 law, allowing marijuana for research. Here he is in his State of the State last week.
GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO: We will establish a program allowing up to 20 hospitals to prescribe medical marijuana and we will monitor the program to evaluate the effectiveness and the feasibility of a medical marijuana system.
ADLER: Governor Cuomo knows his constituents. Some polls show 80 percent of New Yorkers support medical marijuana - Democrats and Republicans. Doctors are divided. Some say medical use of marijuana is untested.
Republican State Senator Dean Skelos, the majority leader, has opposed medical marijuana in the past. His office told NPR he is not commenting until more details emerge.
STATE SENATOR DEAN SKELOS: Shouldn't New York have the best medical marijuana program in the country?
CROWD: Yes.
ADLER: But advocates who want access to it have been writing letters, talking to the media, and they staged a rally in Albany a few days ago. Kate Hinz brought her daughter who suffers from a rare form of epilepsy called Dravet's syndrome. Some have found that a strain of marijuana - without THC, the ingredient that gets you high, effective in lessoning what can be multiple seizures every day.
KATE HINZ: I pray that you are never forced to witness your child seizing hour after hour, for sometimes days or weeks, that you never have to watch them turn blue and gasp for air.
ADLER: Critics say the governor's plan won't treat conditions like Dravet's syndrome. They argue that under the 1980 New York law, you can only use marijuana grown at a research farm run by the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the University of Mississippi. Or you can get marijuana seized by Law enforcement.
Gabriel Sayegh of the Drug Policy Alliance says this is a problem because in places like Maine and Colorado...
GABRIEL SAYEGH: They're growing, you know, over 100 different strains of marijuana for patients so they can find the right kind of medicine for their needs. So there's a big question here. Where is the marijuana is going to come from? What will the protocols be?
ADLER: Other critics say the real problem is that marijuana is still a Schedule 1 illegal drug under federal law. Why should hospitals be willing to participate? Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, chair of the New York State Assembly's Health Committee, told public radio station WNYC...
STATE ASSEMBLYMAN RICHARD GOTTFRIED: The Justice Department has said they're not going to prosecute people who are acting under a strong state medical marijuana law. But that is a very different question from whether the FDA and the Medicare system and others will work with a hospital that is essentially violating federal law.
ADLER: Dr. Nirav Shah is the New York State Commissioner of Health and he has answers to all the questions and critics. He says, they will use the federal farm in Mississippi, and when asked if they will grow enough marijuana, he said volume is not the issue since this is a research protocol. In other words, it would start slow. As for when the program could start...
DR. NIRAV SHAH: We should have it up and running within a year.
ADLER: Hospitals will participate, he says, because they won't be violating federal law.
SHAH: We're going to stay strictly within federal guidance, and that way not imperil any federal funds for any institutions that might participate.
ADLER: And while the several hospitals, I called said it was premature to respond. Shah says he's already heard from more than a dozen institutions.
SHAH: I had unsolicited phone calls from many hospital's CEOs saying we want to know more of what it is, but sign us up. And most recently, our conversations with the hospital associations in New York State suggest that there is interest.
ADLER: Of course, research protocols and clinical trials often take years. It's not clear what medical conditions will be covered under the law and when. So parents like Kate Hinz may find New York's new program too restrictive and too slow.
Margot Adler, NPR News, New York.
JESSE HEIMAN: I'm not a heartthrob. You know, I'm kind of just your average-day nerd-geek type of person. But I can relate to a lot of people, so I think that's why they put me in a lot of things.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
That is the voice of Jesse Heiman; by his own account, one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood. Although it's not his year for an Oscar nomination, yet anyway. Heiman has appeared as an extra in more than 100 films and television shows, including "The Social Network," the "Spiderman" series and "Knocked Up." But his big break came last year when he starred in a racy Super Bowl commercial for GoDaddy.com.
Heiman says he moved to Hollywood in the early 2000s with those proverbial big dreams of becoming a star. Hollywood extra, Jesse Heiman is our Sunday Conversation.
HEIMAN: I had the dreams of being like Michael J. Fox in "Back to the Future," or "Indiana Jones." I really wanted to work with Steven Spielberg. Like, I thought like he would be my key to everything. And within like a few months of being in Los Angeles, I was an extra on the film "Catch Me If You Can," being directed by Steven Spielberg.
MARTIN: Ah, no way.
HEIMAN: And Steven Spielberg himself actually came up and gave me some direction and that was very cool.
MARTIN: What did he say to you?
HEIMAN: He told me put my face further into a book, which...
(LAUGHTER)
HEIMAN: ...kind meant I think he wanted me even more...
MARTIN: Less of you.
HEIMAN: He wanted less of me in the shot but people still found me and that's great, you know. And from there on, I feel like my career just took off.
MARTIN: What is that actually like being an extra, Jesse? There you are on the set of a really big movie - starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Steven Spielberg is the director. I imagine that's intimidating.
HEIMAN: You know, it sounds funny to average-day people, it's just another job, you know. It just happens your every day job is working with amazing actors and directors, and different crews and different sets. And for every leading actor and actress, there's a hundred to thousands of extras behind them, you know, in every scene. We're more part of the film than the main actors sometimes.
MARTIN: But is it hard ever? I mean, do you have temper this urge to just, you know, scream out a line that comes to you to show director that, you know, I'm more than an extra?
HEIMAN: There are times when you feel like you could do a better job than the actor who has the lines, 'cause sometimes it'll take them like 13 to 15 takes to get one scene down, you know. And you're like, this is the first scene. We have like, eight more scenes to film today, let's get going. You know? But you have to keep professional on set. If you speak up, you know, you could get yourself fired and not brought back.
MARTIN: But that's hard. Aren't you actually supposed to be doing the opposite in order to get discovered, to get your big break? You have to stand out.
HEIMAN: Yes, you're supposed to. And for me, it was just luck they kept putting me in different shots and different films and shows, and in the center of the shot. Directors seem to tell me, you know, you have a great look, you should keep doing this. And so, their confidence in me and their wanting to use me that was all the confidence I needed to keep at what I was doing, and to keep going onto wherever it took me.
MARTIN: So let's talk about that big commercial, famous commercial - almost infamous, may I say. This was a really big role for you. This was a commercial you did for GoDaddy that aired during the 2012 Super Bowl. Let's listen to a clip of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF A COMMERCIAL)
MARTIN: So you play Walter...
HEIMAN: Yes.
MARTIN: ...in this commercial. And you and supermodel Bar Refaeli proceed to kiss in a very up close and personal manner...
HEIMAN: In your fantasy.
MARTIN: ...of the commercial.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: So this was a big break for you, right?
HEIMAN: It was a tremendous break for me. It was amazing. It was, you know, I was at a point where I didn't know what was next in my career. Then this happened and then now my whole career exploded into stardom. I went for a normal casting for this, like an audition and there was someone that kissed all the guys that came in that day. I was lucky enough to be the first one in. I think that was the key...
(LAUGHTER)
HEIMAN: ...'cause she remembered me better than she remembered all the others' kissing, and said I was the best kisser. So...
MARTIN: Pretty good accolade.
HEIMAN: And then Bar Refaeli said that herself when I went on the "Today" show, they had her on too, and she said in front of like millions of people, that I was a really, really good kisser.
MARTIN: Keep that in your back pocket and just play that card whenever you need to.
(LAUGHTER)
HEIMAN: I do. I do.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: So we have to mention though there was backlash to this ad.
HEIMAN: Of course.
MARTIN: A lot of people thought it was hard to watch. Did you ever think, you know, when you were auditioning for this, when you got a sense of what it was going to be, that maybe it wasn't the best idea?
HEIMAN: No, you know, I don't really have any regrets going into any auditions or commercials or work. You know, it's - people are saying: Why is she kissing him or why is he kissing her? You know, I just like to be the guy that's like the geek that got the girl that year. You know, or I like to think everybody has a chance if you just have the confidence and the go-for-it.
MARTIN: So you've been on the set with a lot of famous actors.
HEIMAN: Yes.
MARTIN: We mentioned Leonardo DiCaprio, but Will Farrell, Vince Vaughn, Mindy Kaling, a lot of great comic actors.
HEIMAN: Yup.
MARTIN: Are you ever able to interact with them at all? Or do you just hope to soak up what they're doing and learn just by watching them?
HEIMAN: Oh, yes. When I worked on "Old School" with Will Farrell and Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughn, I got to know them very well. And they were very nice to me on set. They'd give me advice and they told exactly what I needed to know, in order to have a long career. And that's obviously worked out for me, you know. And sometimes I'll see them on rounds in town and they'll say, hey, how are you doing. They'll remember me. That's great.
MARTIN: So I imagine that was a high point. You've had others. Has there been a low point, where you thought I'm packing it in, I'm going back home?
HEIMAN: Well, you know, there's a lot of struggling in this town. There's a lot of times when there's - the shows are on hiatus or summertime, or there's been years where work has not as been as great as it has been the last couple of years for me. And it can get tedious or it can get boring at some times. But this town works in crazy ways sometimes and your next big day could be tomorrow. So you just got to keep your head up and keep going.
MARTIN: Jesse Heiman, he talked to us me from our studios in Culver City, California. Jesse, thank you so much.
HEIMAN: Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Time now for another episode of archrival series, Wingin' It. This week, we introduce you to an 87-something-year-old British sailor who has racked up approximately 300,000 nautical miles; sometimes with no crew, just him and his 42-foot yacht, Fiona.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: For more than 50 years, Eric Forsyth has failed the world, from the Arctic to the Azores, and South America to South Africa. We managed to anchor Eric to a seat in one of our studios a few months ago. At the time, he was getting ready to set sail on an epic trip to Antarctica - for the third time.
ERIC FORSYTH: I'm actually happier on the boat than on land.
MARTIN: Are you?
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Is that true, do you think?
FORSYTH: I think the physical and mental demands on the boat are what keeps me what young.
MARTIN: So this isn't your first trip to Antarctica by boat.
FORSYTH: No, it's my third trip to Antarctica. But...
MARTIN: What is it about Antarctica that fascinates you so?
FORSYTH: I guess it's an addiction.
(LAUGHTER)
FORSYTH: I lived on my boat with my wife many, many years ago in the '60s, and I saw enough tropical beaches for my whole life. And now I like to go places that are more difficult to get to. And the people you meet there are generally more interesting than average.
MARTIN: Are you alone on these trips or do you have crew with you?
(LAUGHTER)
FORSYTH: Let me put it this way, I tried to get crew but they don't always show up or they get off early.
(LAUGHTER)
FORSYTH: For example, on this last trip, one crew just didn't show up despite numerous e-mails. And in order to stick to our timetable, I just had to push on by myself and actually cross the Atlantic to Brazil by myself.
MARTIN: Are there particular dangers with this destination, with the route you planned out in Antarctica?
FORSYTH: Yes. The biggest danger is the ice. The ice is different every year and you don't really know what you're going to run into until you get there. When I get to Falkland Islands I'll check with the fisheries people there, they always know what's going on and I'll see if it looks really feasible.
This particular trip has taken a year in planning and it's rather unusual. I'm going to sail down to Antarctica and sail around the continent heading west. Most sailboats, when they get down to those latitudes, head east and I've done that trip myself. But if you go far enough south, the winds becoming easterly, and then that means that going west is it a downwind sail. The trouble is the ice may be in the way, and so it's sort of a balancing act to keep the ice under control and still keep a fair wind.
MARTIN: This may be a silly question, but for someone who is never been to that part of the world, how cold is it?
FORSYTH: The water temperature is precisely 32, so everything on the boat sinks to 32. The cabin air temperature is usually between 38 and 40.
MARTIN: What does that mean in terms of just living on a boat?
(LAUGHTER)
FORSYTH: Well, you dress up warmer. You never take your clothes off.
(LAUGHTER)
FORSYTH: You certainly don't have showers or anything like that. And then you live like people used to live in past centuries.
MARTIN: I suppose there isn't such a thing as a typical day. But if there were, could you describe what that looks like?
FORSYTH: We do two hour watches and that means that you have to keep an eye on the way the sails are drawing. You know, you've got to keep the boat moving. Also, look out for, as I say, the ice. There's one occasion on this when we went through an ice field, it lasted three days with big icebergs just popping up all the time. So you sort of dodge around.
And then I like to have a very strict meal schedule so that people can sleep and know when they can get fed. You generally make your own breakfast, but we have morning tea. Lunch is usually soup and sandwich. And then there's happy hour, which is a crucial part of the day. I always carry enough rum to make sure everybody gets a slug...
(LAUGHTER)
(LAUGHTER)
FORSYTH: And then you sleep when you can.
MARTIN: Well, Godspeed. Eric Forsyth, adventurer, sailor fearless man, thanks so much for talking with us.
FORSYTH: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: We spoke with Eric before he set out on that trip a few months ago. When we contacted him last week, he was in South Africa. He said his boat had been clobbered by the bad weather. Those icy conditions he mentioned in the interview have made his epic journey to Antarctica impossible. Eric is now waiting for his yacht to be repaired. His next adventure: South Africa to the Caribbean.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. U.S. lawmakers, privacy advocates and foreign governments are still analyzing the implications of President Obama's speech Friday, in which he laid out a series of reforms aimed at changing the way the National Security Agency collects information. It was the president's most outspoken and comprehensive response to the controversial NSA spying programs leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden. To talk about the changes President Obama has suggested and the challenges of implementing those reforms, we've brought in Joel Brenner. He's the former inspector general for the NSA. He joins us in our studio here in Washington. Thanks so much for coming in.
JOEL BRENNER: I'm happy to be with you again, Rachel.
MARTIN: Let's talk about a few of these proposed reforms. First off, the idea that the government is no longer going to be able to hold this so-called metadata. Can you just remind us again what compromises this data? What does it mean?
BRENNER: Yeah, metadata is the electronic equivalent of the writing on the outside of an envelope when you put it in the mailbox. Ultimately, it'll have a postmark on it, which used to tell you more than they tell you now but it says about the origin of this and, to some degree, what path it took. And that's the kind of stuff that comes in bits and bytes and ones and zeroes on a communication that you or I might make in an email, for example.
MARTIN: And the question is where will it be housed if the government isn't going to hold it and the president doesn't like the idea of letting the telecommunications firms hold it, which I what his review panel had actually recommended, then where does it go?
BRENNER: For the time being, it's going to stay where it's been, with the government. What he's done is ask for recommendations by late March on alternatives. I'm not sure there are good alternatives. You could force the telecoms to keep it. You could let it stay where it is. You could put it into a newly created third-party government-controlled reservoir. But what's the difference if you did that? Or you could put it in some kind of a newly created private corporation, but I'm not sure what difference that would make either. I don't think it would keep anybody safer or contribute to privacy. And it would create legal difficulties about what the responsibilities of that private company would be 'cause it's not the government. So, I'm kind of skeptical that there's a meaningful alternative to what's happening now.
MARTIN: But if you keep it with the government, the problem doesn't go away, or the concerns that the president articulated in his speech don't go away.
BRENNER: No, they don't. The model for intelligence has been up till now- for signals intelligence, electronic stuff - that you have very strict rules about what you can collect and then once you get it you can look at it in any way you want. What we're doing now, because of the possibilities of what big data can tell you, we are collecting it - pretty much all of it - not the telephone calls, not the emails, but the metadata, and then having strict rules about when it can be looked at. This turns the traditional model upside down. But NSA hasn't wanted this world. This is simply the world in which it, like a private company or Google or anybody else, operates nowadays. I mean, NSA can't keep the country safer than the country wants to be kept. And we cannot, I hope, put ourselves in the position where we're going to say we're going to take zero risk with terrorism or crime. Because as country that says we're going to take no risks with security defines itself as a police state.
MARTIN: Final change I want to talk about with you; the president says the NSA can't spy on America's friends anymore, at least those heads of governments, unless there's a really good compelling reason that it pertains to a national security threat. Is that a substantive change or more of a political move to assuage concerns of U.S. allies?
BRENNER: You know, intelligence agencies make a living by stealing secrets, and they do it by breaking the laws of other countries. This is the nature of the business. There's no point sugarcoating it. And people do it to us. We're not living in Mr. Roger's neighborhood here. But as the world, both economically and socially, becomes more globalized and as we become really close, politically and socially, to other countries, they're going to expect us to obey their laws and vice versa. That's the position we're in right now. We're negotiating our way through a new world in which collection on the leaders of close allies is just not going to be worth the trouble. It's just counterproductive. There's not a question of manners. It's not a question of ethics. This is a question of political reality.
MARTIN: Finally, big picture question. What's the bigger lesson? Is there one?
BRENNER: Well, I think one of the lessons is I think we're in a world where our personal business and governmental lives are transparent to an astonishing degree. The president's quite right when he said the world's changed with dizzying speed, and that understanding that very little can be kept secret anymore, and that that which can be kept secret won't stay secret for very long is a critical adjustment that the government has not really fully absorbed.
MARTIN: Joel Brenner. He's the former inspector general of the NSA. He talked to us in our studios here in Washington. Mr. Brenner, thanks so much.
BRENNER: Pleasure to be here, as always.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Last year, revelations that the U.S. had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone soured relations between the two allies. In Europe, President Obama's recommendations to reign in the NSA when it comes to listening to foreign leaders was met with a lukewarm reaction. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports that Germans are especially skeptical that the changes will mean an end to American eavesdropping.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: The spokesman for Angela Merkel says her government welcomed Mr. Obama's efforts to reign in surveillance, but added that German law must be followed on German soil. He was alluding to the allegations the U.S. violated German laws with its phone and email monitoring. In an interview dubbed in German and broadcast by the ZDF television network last night, President Obama tried reassuring Germans that the U.S. will respect their privacy.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We will, for the first time...
NELSON: He said America will take into account the rights of citizens, regardless of their nationality, and use very clear criteria when engaging in bulk collection of data.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken)
OBAMA: ...establish a relationship of friendship...
NELSON: The president also spoke of his friendship with Chancellor Merkel and said U.S. monitoring of her phone would not happen again.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken)
OBAMA: ...to harm that relationship.
NELSON: But German politicians say Mr. Obama's assurances aren't enough.
NIELS ANNEN: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: It's not OK when allies spy on each other, says Niels Annen of the Social Democrats, who are Chancellor Merkel's main coalition partner. He told the ZDF network, we need a binding agreement because while the U.S. president is working toward trust, control is better. Germany's justice minister told the Sunday edition of the Bild newspaper that trust between his country and the U.S. won't be restored until there is a legally binding arrangement between the countries to protect Germans' privacy. Politicians here are pressuring Chancellor Merkel to convey that demand when she meets with Mr. Obama in Washington in the coming months. The Germans want tough data privacy measures included in any free trade pact signed between Europe and the United States. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Berlin.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Back in the U.S., while there were complaints that some of the recommendations were vague, reactions have been nonetheless swift, especially in Congress. Joining us to talk about the political fallout at home is NPR's political correspondent Mara Liasson. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: So, the president's NSA proposals, how are they going over on Capitol Hill?
LIASSON: Well, the reaction was mixed, as you would expect because this is such a divisive issue and not just left and right. The civil libertarian left and the libertarian right is united on this. So, you heard Democrats, like Tom Udall of New Mexico and Ron Wyden of Oregon call this a major milestone, but they want to go much further and put more restraints on the programs. Then you heard other Democrats, like the Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein and the House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican, saying they're concerned about the president's proposals to put more restrictions on the scrutinizing of people's metadata and calls. And they are worried about that. So, you can see it's a very mixed reaction because this is a divisive issue.
MARTIN: But Congress is the body that has to green light these reforms ultimately, right?
LIASSON: They do. And if they don't, by June of 2015, the Patriot Act expires, and of course that's what some of the opponents of this collection want to happen, that the whole law goes away. But that is the deadline hanging over Congress and they have a lot to do before then. They have to decide exactly what some of these reforms will look like. The president left the work to them. For instance, exactly where this data will be stored, if not by the government. So, they have a lot of details to figure out.
MARTIN: Let's get to the political realities. As you say, the criticism came from the left and the right. But did the president do enough to ease concerns from Democrats, from those in his own party?
LIASSON: Well, he's never going to ease the concerns of the ACLU and some parts of his base. But, yes, I think he did go far enough to quiet the concerns of people who thought these programs were going forward unrestrained and unreformed.
MARTIN: So, as the leader of his party, the president is also looking towards the fall, laying the groundwork for the midterm elections. Do we expect some bold new policy initiatives, Mara, or just a do-no-harm approach?
LIASSON: Well, first of all, the president's trying to limit the damage the Democrats will suffer in 2014. Historically, the president's party loses seats in the second term midterm. To help them, he has to get his own approval ratings up. He has to make sure Obamacare is implemented correctly. But, yes, he has come up with a policy agenda of big issues that do unite his party: raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment insurance, and focusing on issues like income inequality and a lack of upward mobility. Those are the things that he's going to be talking about. They will unite his party. And I think Democrats are happy with that. The question is how much of it can he get passed through Congress.
MARTIN: So, not enough for Democrats to just kind of look to the Republicans, as all the headlines suggest, all the fracturing that's happened in the wake of the government shutdown. That's not enough. They can just bank on that?
LIASSON: Oh, bank that the Republicans are having a bad year? No. The irony is that the Republicans, while their national brand is in a lot of trouble and they're looking at a daunting challenge in a presidential election in 2016, for 2014, for the midterms, Republicans are in very good shape. They did take a big hit after the government shutdown but much of that damage was wiped out by the damage the Democrats inflicted upon themselves with the rollout of Obamacare. But for 2014, the Republicans are in good shape. They're defending fewer seats in the Senate. The map in the House, the way congressional districts are drawn, protects Republicans House incumbents. So, yes, it's not enough to Democrats to bank on Republicans' troubles.
MARTIN: NPR's Mara Liasson. Thanks, Mara.
LIASSON: Thank you.
MARTIN: And you're listening to NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. In a close vote, Syria's political opposition agreed to attend peace talks this week in Switzerland. The U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hailed the decision as courageous. The vote clears the way for the first face-to-face negotiations in a war that has devastated Syria and destabilized the region. NPR's Deborah Amos has been following the latest developments from Beirut. Good morning, Deb.
DEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So, this vote came after a lot of heated debate, I understand. And at the last minute, Western and Arab backers of Syria's opposition brought enormous pressure to bear. So, who does this delegation represent?
AMOS: There was enormous wrangling and it passed by less than a majority. Some of the opposition coalition boycotted the meeting. Others resigned. So, it could be portrayed as a majority. But the coalition had little choice. They would have lost the support of their Western backers if they didn't go. Now, the opposition is weary of these negotiations 'cause they worry it's going to be this long drawn-out process that keeps President Bashar al-Assad in power. So, the coalition has to get something worth having in these talks or they lose what little relevance they have. Now, Western diplomats say it's essential that the armed groups go to Geneva. These are the people actually fighting the regime on the ground and be part of the delegation. The opposition put out a statement yesterday that three rebel groups have said yes to the talks.
MARTIN: So, is that a surprise? I mean, as you mentioned, the rebels are the most powerful group in the opposition. They're the ones on the ground doing the fighting.
AMOS: It is. Some of the moderate groups have said yes, including the Free Syrian Army. This morning, other key rebels denied those reports. There have been meetings with rebels in the Turkish capital, Ankara. Parallel meetings with this opposition vote. One Western diplomat told me that this is a new development. What you saw was the Turks, Saudi Arabia and Qatar - these are the Gulf States that are arming the rebels - working to convince rebels to join the negotiations with both carrots and sticks. The stick was the Turks said we will close the border if you don't go. The carrot was you can be within the delegation. They're considering the offer. Their problem, to the rebels, is they are in a huge fight with an al-Qaida-affiliated group on the border. They can't afford to split their ranks. They are all united to fight al-Qaida. And this is a distraction, the negotiations in Geneva.
MARTIN: But as I understand this, Deb, previously, the opposition as a whole said they would not attend the talks unless it was agreed that Assad would not be part of any transitional government. So, was that resolved?
AMOS: No. They had to let that go. Now, this conference is to form a transitional government. But the regime comes to the talks in a very strong position, both militarily and politically. They have strong backing from the Russians - that's one of the cohosts of the meeting - they have backing from the Iranians that have helped them, have military clout inside Syria. And just today, the regime allowed a convoy of aid into a Palestinian camp in Damascus that's been besieged for months. This is a place where some 40 people died due to lack of food and medicine. So, the regime is offering cease-fires in rebel-held areas. The idea, say analysts here, is we can solve problems that we created and to say we don't need international monitors or pressure and you need us to make this thing work. Now, the U.S. and other allies of the opposition are going to Geneva to make a transitional government but Damascus has said we are not giving up any power. So, the idea that there can be some progress in these talks in Switzerland, not so much.
MARTIN: NPR's Deb Amos reporting from Beirut. Thanks so much, Deb.
AMOS: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
International inspectors have arrived in Iran as part of the negotiated nuclear deal that goes into effect tomorrow. They're monitoring Iran's compliance with an interim agreement designed to try to prevent the country from developing a nuclear weapon. We reached out to Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute. She's also the coauthor of the book "Containing and Deterring a Nuclear Iran." I began by asking her whether she believes this deal contains or deters.
DANIELLE PLETKA: I don't think it does enough. It's certainly a step. The question is really whether it's an adequate step, not just for the United States and for the region, but also in exchange for what the Iranians are receiving.
MARTIN: So, what specifically is the United States surrendering that is too much?
PLETKA: I think that probably the biggest loss here is that the sanctions are now going to start rolling back, maybe not in America but certainly in parts of Europe and lots of Asia and Russia. And I think it's the beginning of the end of an effective sanctions regime.
MARTIN: But while this is an interim deal, this is still an ongoing negotiation. And it's widely believed that the sanctions over the years are what brought Iran to the negotiating table at this point. Is it not appropriate then for all sides to make concessions?
PLETKA: Absolutely. I think that if you're going put sanctions on then obviously the carrot that goes with the stick is that you have to be willing to lift the sanctions. And the administration insists that they have done very little to lift sanctions, that in fact the steps backwards are miniscule in comparison to what the Iranians wanted. I would counter that unfortunately what the Iranians have given is also miniscule. What the Iranians have done is they have bought themselves a lot of time in which they can freely work on a variety of aspects of their nuclear weapons program without fear of international censure.
MARTIN: Six months though, that's not...
PLETKA: No.
MARTIN: ...that's not a long time.
PLETKA: First of all, there's a relatively vaguely worded provision that allows the six months to be extended. Maybe a year - if you're being lawyerly, probably ad infinitum.
MARTIN: So, in your opinion can there be a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear challenge?
PLETKA: There's a better deal to be had. There was always a better deal to be had.
MARTIN: What specifically would that have entailed?
PLETKA: I think that there are things that are missing from this that are really important. The administration has made a very big concession, probably what, for the Iranians, was one of the most important things, which was that the Iranians insisted that they have a, quote, "right," unquote, to enrichment. The Obama administration insists that they do not have that right. Unfortunately, what this agreement does it envisions not only an interim but also a final status agreement which allows the Iranians to enrich uranium.
MARTIN: Which they say will be for civilian purposes.
PLETKA: Of course. And they've always said that and yet they have not managed to persuade even the Chinese, certainly not the International Atomic Energy Agency, and not the rest of us either.
MARTIN: If the U.S. cannot work out a diplomatic solution, if this interim deal falters, is military action inevitable?
PLETKA: You know, if you would have asked me that last year, I probably would have said yes and in previous years I might have even suggested that American military action is inevitable. I now think that American military action is almost inconceivable. And that leaves the Israelis, many of us who have expected that the Israelis would act on one of their red lines. And, you know, successive prime ministers have given more and more time to international negotiations. So, do I believe military action is inevitable? No. I don't think that anyone who is aware of the history of this could suggest that it's inevitable by any party.
MARTIN: Danielle Pletka. She is the coauthor of the book "Containing and Deterring a Nuclear Iran." She's also with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Thanks so much for talking with us.
PLETKA: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We all know talking on the phone or texting while driving is dangerous. More than 41 states have laws that make it illegal to text while driving. Most have laws that forbid new drivers from using their cell phones at all. But that doesn't stop drivers of all ages from talking and typing away. In December, reporter Alisa Roth rode along with a New York state trooper to see how the ban is working there. Here's an encore broadcast of her story.
ALISA ROTH, BYLINE: I'm on the highway north of New York City with Clayton Howell, who's a New York State trooper.
CLAYTON HOWELL: Because it was in her right hand, and because I didn't actually physically see the phone, I'm going to give her a break.
ROTH: We're looking for drivers who are texting or using hand-held phones. And the state police has been using unmarked SUVs like this one to try to catch drivers.
HOWELL: You can see down into the car. You know, it's a bird's eye view as opposed to being at the same level.
ROTH: People know it's dangerous to use phones while they drive and they know it's illegal, and they still do it anyway. Scott Adams is an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and he and a colleague looked what happens when states pass texting and driving laws.
SCOTT ADAMS: What we saw was that there was an initial decline in accidents once texting bans were passed. But after a few months, there was no effect.
ROTH: In other words, people stop texting and driving for a little while and then they start doing it again pretty quickly. Adams thinks part of it is that it doesn't really matter much if you get caught. In some states, the police can't even pull you over unless you're doing something else wrong, like not using your turn signal. Or the penalties are just too low. Arthur Goodwin studies distracted driving at the Highway Safety Research Center at the University of North Carolina. He says drunk driving is a good comparison.
ARTHUR GOODWIN: Decades ago, drunk driving was essentially ignored by the public.
ROTH: And then states started imposing harsher penalties and they made it clear that people who did it would get caught. And now there's this real stigma.
GOODWIN: At some point, society may frown on people who use cell phones while driving just the way we do with drinking and drivers.
ROTH: Back on the highway in New York, Howell, the state trooper, is chasing down those distracted drivers.
HOWELL: See her? Now, she's actually coming into my lane, no directional, engaged in her phone call.
(SOUNDBITE OF SIREN)
HOWELL: Good afternoon, Trooper Howell, New York State police. I stopped you for operating a motor vehicle while using your cell phone. May I see your license and registration, please?
ROTH: The driver is a young woman and she says she'd been talking to her mother. But she was caught talking and driving. And now she has to pay.
HOWELL: I'm going to issue you a citation for operating a motor vehicle while using your mobile phone, OK?
ROTH: The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that at any given time, more than 650,000 people are using their cell phones while they drive. This one just got caught. For NPR News, I'm Alisa Roth in New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ROTH: This is NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Chilean soap actress Paulina Sanchez is another performer who understands that success can take a long time. Ms. Sanchez has worked on stage and appeared in soap operas in Chile since the 1980s. This year, she stars in the title role of her very first feature film. It's called "Gloria," directed by Sebastian Lelio. The director keeps the camera close on Sanchez as she portrays this hardworking divorced mother of two in her late 50's, who's trying to navigate her life, a life full of unmet expectations.
The movie opens in a nightclub where Gloria gets up the courage to reintroduce herself to an old friend as if to signal it is time for something new.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "GLORIA")
PAULINA GARCIA: (Foreign language spoken)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA: (Foreign language spoken)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA: (Foreign language spoken)
MARTIN: "Gloria" opens in U.S. theaters this week. I spoke with Ms. Sanchez from her home in Santiago. And she explained why her character is looking for change.
GARCIA: She is not totally happy. But she is not depressed, as she knows life can be brighter, so she's looking for something. She has the idea that it may be love, as everybody thinks that is what is missing.
MARTIN: She does eventually meet someone. She meets a recently divorced man named Rodolfo and they immediately begin this love affair. We should say there are some pretty sexy scenes in this movie.
GARCIA: Yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: You one particular have several nude scenes. What was it like filming them? Were you at all hesitant to do those scenes?
GARCIA: Well, there are always tough scenes but we work with Sebastian in trust. I talked to very clear from the very beginning. Look, I'm not Kate Blanchett. I'm a Chilean actress who has three children and I am what you see. And he told me, look, I know how you look and that is exactly what I want. And we have fun.
MARTIN: So, Gloria is trying to figure out who she is in this new stage of her life. As you say, her kids are all grown and they are literally and metaphorically moving away from her. We're led to believe she doesn't exactly love her career , it's just a job for her. And then she gets burned by this guy, Rodolfo. It doesn't work out with him. What does she learn from that affair, from that romance?
GARCIA: I think it's very simple to say that she learned that you cannot get involved with stupid guys.
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA: Yeah. And then maybe you can also say that there are a lot of stupid guys so you have to take care. That's very simple to say. But I understood that she was making a big decision about happiness. Whatever happens with Rodolfo, I'm going to choose this path because it's what I want to do. And that is the biggest idea of Gloria's way of thinking. She's choosing life even though life is asking for a price.
MARTIN: There is a lovely scene at the end where we witness Gloria's rebirth, essentially. She's at a friend's wedding and this song that becomes her anthem of sorts comes on. Everyone is dancing and she has this amazing dance scene. Can you describe how that was filmed, because you have some great moves, Paulina, in that scene?
GARCIA: We began the scene at 1 o'clock, morning, and we finished at 5:30, morning.
MARTIN: Oh, my.
GARCIA: I was dancing for four hours.
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA: And it was raining. There was a lot of water coming into the place that we were shooting. Everybody was wet and we were reduced to use just a little place - they only place where it was dry and also it was my last scene. So it was a certain moment for me and sometimes the frames of that moment come into me like something that I lived so deeply.
MARTIN: Why is that? Why did it leave such a strong impression on you?
GARCIA: Probably because it was like I went to Gloria's country and then I came back. And when I came back I was feeling strange and I miss her. It was a very special film, you know. And it's not common to be in every frame, so I was in every, every scene in every, every frame. And so, as I was all the time there - 11 hours a day during five weeks, you know, you became friends, you became something very special.
MARTIN: Paulina Garcia, she stars in the Chilean film "Gloria." Thank you so much for talking with us, Paulina. It's been a pleasure.
GARCIA: Thank you very much - a pleasure, too.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GLORIA")
MARTIN: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
Several Afghan officials have been suspended following an attack on the popular restaurant in Kabul, Afghanistan which left 21 people dead. It was the deadliest violence against foreign civilians since the war began. The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was in retaliation for recent a airstrike that killed a number of Afghan civilians in a village north of the capital. The violence is the latest indication that the situation in Afghanistan is far from stable.
As the U.S. prepares to draw down forces after more than 12 years of war, a lot of the political unrest in Afghanistan is rooted in the opium industry. The U.S. alone has funneled billions of dollars into the country to fight the narcotics trade. But now, the man in charge of overseeing how U.S. dollars are spent in Afghanistan says there's very little to show for that investment.
John Sopko is the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and he said exactly that to a Senate panel this past week. He joined us in our studios to talk about his findings. And I started off by asking him about the state of the drug trade.
JOHN SOPKO: They're growing more poppy now and introducing more opium than ever before.
MARTIN: How in the world is that possible? I mean, when you think of all the aid that has been put into that country specifically to address that particular issue - billions of dollars from the U.S. alone, let alone all the international partners who've been focusing on this.
SOPKO: Well, the big problem we have found is we really don't have a strategy and it's no longer a priority, and it hasn't been a priority for the U.S. or for Western governments for a number of years. And if it's not a priority and you don't have a strategy - a real strategy on how to do it - you're going to have failure, and that's what we've seen. Right now, our strategy is nothing other than a bunch of wish lists that we hope the Afghans can do something, but they're not able to.
MARTIN: But wasn't there a strategy before? I mean, early on, after the U.S. overthrew the Taliban, Afghanistan was full of civilian advisers from America and Europe who were there to help Afghan farmers figure out what else to grow.
SOPKO: Well, we've changed the strategy over time. And we've emphasized, like you said, crop substitution. We actually did interdiction. But we tend to do it for a month, a year or whatever, and then we go and do something else. We had a very successful program in Helmand, with the Helmand Food Zone. But that was part of the surge. Once the surge ended, once then we stopped the program, now Helmand is producing more opium then it was before.
MARTIN: This is the last year, as of yet, that U.S. combat troops are going to be on the ground. International assistance has been dramatically reduced. The number of civilians who are working on aid projects, like poppy eradication, have left the country. Does some of the impetus for change need to happen within Afghanistan itself?
SOPKO: Well, obviously this is not going to work unless the Afghans have a will to pursue this. That's what I'm really concerned about, is because we will have less mobility. So we look at reconstruction and our concern is, now more than ever, reconstruction and any gains we made in reconstruction are in peril.
Because the narco traffickers don't care about women's rights, they don't care about better health care, they don't care about better education for the Afghans. They don't care about rule law. They actually opposed the rule of law. And what is happening is this is a bigger threat now than ever.
MARTIN: At what point do you cut your losses and say, there is no way that we can fix this problem to a level where it makes sense to continue funneling U.S. taxpayer dollars in this direction?
SOPKO: Well, let me back up and answer that question. It's a difficult one. Remember, I don't do policy. We just look at the process and look at the programs. I can say the money that has been used so far, if the goal was to reduce cultivation, we failed. If the goal was to reduce opium production, we failed. If the goal was to reduce the amount of money going to the insurgency, we failed. If the goal was to break that narco trafficking nexus and the corrupting influence, we have failed. I can tell you that.
All you have to do is look at the data. All you have to do is look at the statements made even by the DOD itself in the latest report to Congress about the failures.
MARTIN: What makes you so sure if we have seemingly wasted $10 billion already, that we would have the capacity to use future monies differently and more wisely?
SOPKO: That is the question I asked in Afghanistan. And no one in the embassy, no one at our military ISAF headquarters could explain to me how we were going to do a better job, or how we were doing a good job right now on counter narcotics.
MARTIN: Have you met with people at USAID? Have you gotten honest conversations about what is failed?
SOPKO: Well, we don't always get honest conversations. Very few people, particularly at some of the higher levels want to talk about failure. I was not overly impressed with the explanations given to me by anyone at our embassy, or anybody at ISAF. As a matter of fact, when I interviewed the country team leader for AID, he couldn't even explain the counter narcotics program to me. So this indicates to me is this isn't a priority, and that's very disturbing because this is a national security issue.
Early on, we determined that we had to cut that nexus between the narco traffickers, and they're providing now 30 percent of the revenue to the Taliban and the other terrorist groups. Narcotics is, we haven't broken that.
MARTIN: John Sopko is the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. He joined us in our studios here in Washington. Thanks so much.
Thanks so much for coming in.
SOPKO: You're welcome.
MARTIN: We reached out to the U.S. State Department for their response about Mr. Sopko's remarks. Larry Sampler, at USAID, said that the staff in Kabul is working very hard and at great personal risk. He went on to say, quote, "We all need to acknowledge it is a complicated problem with only long-term solutions."
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
To Syria now, where the political opposition in that country has agreed to attend peace talks in Switzerland next week. It's hoped that the many sides in this war can at least agree on a cease-fire in order to get aid to civilians who have fled the fighting. More than two million people have sought refuge in neighboring countries, including Iraq and Turkey. Many have taken shelter in temporary camps which provides little protection from the harsh winter. The United Nations says the war has created the worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide.
Mahmud Angrini is a Syrian doctor who fled to Southern Turkey's Hatay Province. He now works with an aid organization that helps care for those living in refugee camps. I spoke with him earlier and I asked Dr. Angrini what his life was like before the war.
DR. MAHMUD ANGRINI: Three years ago, I was a physician. I had a lab. It's a private laboratory in the city of Aleppo. And I was studying Ph.D. in the University of Aleppo. So I was happy and everything was going great.
MARTIN: And you were living in Aleppo. This was the site of some of the worst fighting of the war. I wonder, Mahmud, was there one particular incident - something that happened to you or your family - that made you think no more, I'm leaving?
ANGRINI: Rachel, I lost everything. I lost my house. My house was simply bombed. I lost my private laboratory. I lost my belongings. I turned into internally displaced person.
MARTIN: You are now work for an NGO doing aid work. What specifically are you working on? What do you do for that organization?
ANGRINI: We try to help people. We try to help the people who decided to stay inside Syria. So we provide some hospitals, some primary health care at the clinic. We try to support them with medicines. Even the organization try to help the camps with some services like water, sanitation and health promotion.
MARTIN: You're talking about camps inside the Syrian border. Can you give us a sense of what life is like in those camps right now? What are the conditions?
ANGRINI: Rachel, it's a very, very difficult situation, actually. They need clean water. They need clothes. They need blankets. They need everything. They need food. Try to imagine, this is winter in Syria and it's really a hard winter. Try to imagine those kids who are walking without sometimes without even shoes.
MARTIN: If the war ended tomorrow, would you return to Syria? And what about the many refugees that you've tried to help that you work with, would they go back? Would they want to go home?
ANGRINI: If the war ended without a real solution, no one can even dare to come back again inside Syria. I am sure that millions of Syrians will not dare to return to again home if Bashar Assad stays in the authority.
MARTIN: Dr. Muhmud Angrini is a Syrian refugee who now lives in Southern Turkey. Thank you so much for speaking to us.
ANGRINI: Thank you, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to turn our attention now to piracy. There have been a string of pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia over the past few years. One was the basis of an Oscar-nominated film starring Tom Hanks.
But now, an organization that monitors crime at sea says piracy has suddenly dropped. According to the International Maritime Bureau, there were 264 incidents around the globe recorded last year, which is a 40 percent decrease from its peak in 2011. The decline has to do with several factors. The organization says there are more armed guards on vessels and more international naval forces patrolling the waters off of Somalia, which accounted for most of the attacks. A stronger central government in Somalia has also cracked down on pirates.
But piracy remains lucrative and popular in other parts of the world. So if you are on the high seas, where should you avoid sailing your yacht? Indonesia and Nigeria.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: You are listening to NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. And it is time for sports.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: And on a Sunday in January, you know what's on everyone's minds: NFL playoffs. San Francisco and Seattle face off today for the NFC title. My West Coast loyalties are divided. I am in a conundrum. NPR's Mike Pesca joins us now. Hey, Mike.
MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Hello. How are you?
MARTIN: I'm flummoxed. But enough about me.
PESCA: Vexed, irked, peeved?
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: So, yeah, whatever, Pats-Broncos. But let's start with the San Francisco-Seattle game. Two teams from the NFC West, which used to be the worst division in the league, and a couple of years ago no one would have predicted this, right, that two teams from that division...
PESCA: I would have. I could have. It was - but, yeah - as recently as, as recently as 2010, the winner of that division that year was the Seahawks, and they were 7-9. So, a losing team won a division and there was all this stuff written about, you know, will the NFC West ever be good again? And the answer is yeah. And the answer is in just a few years. And the answer is you get a good quarterback like Colin Kaepernick of the 49ers or like Russell Wilson of the Seahawks, and also they have pretty good infrastructure. And you can win. In fact, the NFC West this year also had a team - Arizona Cardinals - didn't make the playoffs. They had 10 wins. The worst team in that division, the Rams, were 7-9 but mostly because they had to play six games against the teams I've already mentioned. They're an above-average team. It's the only division with above-average teams.
MARTIN: So, what does that mean? These teams can get better overnight?
PESCA: Yeah. And even though we say that, I don't think the NFL has really digested that lesson. Look at the coaches, the so-called coaching carousel. When people talk about the jobs that are open, everyone saying, oh, Detroit, that's the good job, that's the good job, because they have a good quarterback in place. And people are saying you'd never want to take the Cleveland Browns' job - they don't really have a quarterback, as if it's impossible to get a quarterback. You know, Wilson and Kaepernick were drafted in the third and second rounds. Any team in the league can have them. The other thing is it's not just a - yes, quarterbacks start off good but without excellent coaching already in place, Kaepernick maybe wouldn't have been recognized to be so good or given the scheme to allow him to succeed. So, I really think that change is so much more available to NFL teams than we think it is, especially if you look at the way we talk about what the good jobs and bad jobs are with coaching.
MARTIN: OK. Analysis, schmalysis. Who's going to win?
PESCA: Paralysis. OK. I don't know if I'm going to tell you who's going to win but I will just share my thoughts.
MARTIN: OK.
PESCA: In sports, in football, there are a billion things that could affect a game, but we usually concentrate - it's a mental habit - we anchor on one or two. And in this game, I feel we, as the sport-loving public, have anchored on the fact that Seattle is just so good at home - and they are good at home - and they yell so much it sets off earthquake meters, although maybe you want to get a better earthquake meter; it's a bunch of fans yelling.
(LAUGHTER)
PESCA: Right. So, but I would just say this. In their last four regular season games, Seattle lost at home. In their last four regular season games, Seattle lost to the San Francisco 49ers. So, this idea that the San Francisco 49ers can't beat Seattle in Seattle, I think it's a far-fetched idea. It possibly will be closer than - actually, everyone's saying it's close - but I would just say home field advantage is an advantage but it's not what a lawyer might call dispositive. Yes, that's the word.
MARTIN: Dispositive, yeah. Good word, good word.
PESCA: It's not the end-all be-all.
MARTIN: Yeah. OK. Curveball - you got one?
PESCA: I do. I've been looking at NBA rebounding statistics. There is this new technology called sports view. So, it used to be that the statistics were written down noted in a book by a guy who watched carefully. But now they're recorded by cameras. So, not only do you watch that, a, some guy got a rebound - how did he get the rebound? What'd he do to get the rebound? They're not tracking contested and uncontested rebounds. In other words, the rebounds you have to fight for and the rebounds that come to you.
MARTIN: That you try or - yeah.
PESCA: Exactly. And I find it interesting. I looked at the guys who are, you know, six rebounds above or more. Kevin Garnett only has about 28 percent of his rebounds are contested. Most of the ones are just because he's in good position. And then you look at other guys, like Ryan Anderson, Enes Kanter and Nikola Pekovic. They have over 50 percent of their rebounds are contested. I think that says something about effort and where these rebounds are coming from.
MARTIN: Yes, it does. NPR's Mike Pesca. Thanks so much, Mike.
PESCA: Thanks for agreeing with me.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne.
Today in Your Health, we'll hear about help for a colicky baby. We'll go first though to the gym. For a lot of us, the gym can be intimidating. For overweight people it can be downright scary. Enter: Downsize Fitness, a gym that caters to people with 50 pounds or more to lose.
Lauren Silverman, of member station KERA, explores the idea behind gyms.
LAUREN SILVERMAN, BYLINE: Kendall Schrantz used to be a chronic gym quitter. Now she makes a two-hour commute three times a week, to get to one very special gym.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Good job. Keep moving.
KENDALL SCHRANTZ: It's worth every single penny I paid for gas. It's worth the time I spend on the road, the miles - totally worth it.
SILVERMAN: Schrantz, who's 24, has struggled with her weight since second grade. She used to take her lunch money straight to the school vending machine for Cool Ranch Doritos and Skittles. She never felt comfortable in regular gyms.
SCHRANTZ: The looks you get from other people. My thought on that is, why are you looking at me when I got off of the couch, I got off of my bed and I'm actually doing something about it.
(SOUNDBITE OF CRYING)
SCHRANTZ: Sorry.
SILVERMAN: Schrantz breaks down and members come over to comfort her. They know what she's going through. That shared experience is at the core of Downsize Fitness. To join one of the four gyms across the country, you have to have a BMI of 35. Thirty is considered obese.
CEO Kishan Shaw says regular gyms aren't equipped to deal with people struggling with obesity.
KISHAN SHAW: Most people with more than 50 pounds of weight to lose will say, I need to lose weight before I go to a gym. So for me, I was 400 pounds and I lost 75 pounds before I went to a gym because I was too intimidated by dealing with gyms and going there and having those stares and everything.
SILVERMAN: Shah carries a photo with him from when he weighed 400 pounds and had a waist measuring more than five feet around. Today, he's half that weight and he, like other Downsize members, isn't your stereotypical gym rat.
SHAW: It's not about looks. It's about being able to get up off the floor, being able to keep up with your kids, fitting into an airplane seat, you know, really being able to be around for your grandkids.
SILVERMAN: So instead of aiming for six-pack abs, trainers emphasize functional fitness in small classes. Today, members side shuffle across the floor, pumping their arms before moving on to lunges.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Nice. You two up here, are you remembering to breathe? Form is more important than speed here.
SILVERMAN: At Downsize, it's not only the exercises that are modified, it's the equipment too. The stationary bikes, ellipticals, treadmills, all are specially designed for heavier people. The windows are tinted for extra privacy. There are classes on nutrition and striking before and after photos up on the wall. But can banning skinny people really help members drop pounds?
AUSTIN BALDWIN: Yes, but it's more complicated than that.
SILVERMAN: Austin Baldwin is an assistant professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He researches what motivates people to exercise. And he points to a 2012 study that looked at what he calls physique anxiety among overweight people.
BALDWIN: So for those who have high levels of physique anxiety, they preferred to be around others who were also overweight and obese. Whereas people with low levels of this physique anxiety actually preferred the opposite, right? They preferred to be around people who were more fit.
SILVERMAN: The study should that most people who are overweight feel more comfortable working out with people who are also overweight. And there's another feature Baldwin says may help gyms like Downsize. They're not weight-loss farms. Once you've dropped 50 pounds, you're not kicked out. In fact, the majority of trainers are former members who've graduated. That means you build community.
BALDWIN: So you're setting up a support network which we know to be important in changing behaviors, both in terms of tangible things and providing information, important skills and so on, as well as emotional support.
SILVERMAN: Of course, not everyone likes the idea of overweight gyms.
GOLDA PORETSKY: I would not go to a place called Downsize Fitness.
SILVERMAN: Golda Poretsky a plus-sized Holistic Health Coach in New York. She says any gym that boasts total pounds lost - 5,000 so far at Downsizes across the country - is selling a familiar message: Fat is bad.
PORETSKY: For me, it's more of the same. You know, it's just, oh, we can hide out while we lose weight and become societally acceptable. Like, that doesn't appeal to me in the least.
SILVERMAN: For her, the goal isn't to lose weight, it's to be healthy at whatever size you are. But for the people who are determined to shed pounds, Downsize is another option. There are now two in Illinois, two in Texas and remote classes online.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: You can do it. You're almost there. Come on.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND CLAPPING)
LAURA SILVERMAN, BYLINE: In the Fort Worth gym, 24-year-old Kendall Schrantz is determined to lose fifty pounds. She's already seeing results - a few inches off her waist - and she's discovered a new passion.
SCHRANTZ: I love running. It's so fun.
SILVERMAN: And that's the goal for these gyms - making fitness gratifying instead of degrading.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Good job group, Ruth. Get some water and we'll stretch it out.
For NPR News, I'm Lauren Silverman in Dallas.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Republican Party leaders say their No. 1 campaign issue for the midterm elections is thwarting Obamacare. At the same time, a growing number of Republican states are now saying yes to a major provision of the law: expanding Medicaid, the health care program for the poor. The Supreme Court made the expansion optional, and most Republican-led states said no, even with the federal government covering the majority of costs. But now, some are those same states are forging compromises with the White House to accept the federal money. Eric Whitney has the story of how Michigan decided to expand, starting with one of the biggest hospitals in Detroit.
ERIC WHITNEY, BYLINE: Scenes like this one play out hundreds of times a day all across the country.
(SOUNDBITE OF E.R. CONVERSATIONS)
UNIDENTIFIED HEALTH CARE WORKER: The airway is intact. Lung sounds...
WHITNEY: A team of doctors and nurses is assessing a patient just rushed into an emergency room.
UNIDENTIFIED HEALTH CARE WORKER: Do I have an initial blood pressure here yet?
WHITNEY: Because this emergency room is in Detroit, there's about a 1 in 3 chance that the patient being swarmed over is uninsured. That's a much higher rate than the rest of Michigan. That means hospitals like this one - Henry Ford Hospital - end up providing a lot of health care for free. Hospital CEO Nancy Schlichting says even as Detroit has lost nearly a quarter of its population in the last decade, the amount of free or uncompensated care her hospital provides has skyrocketed.
NANCY SCHLICHTING: About seven, eight years ago, we were at about $100 million a year. We're now at $240 million a year in uncompensated care.
WHITNEY: So when the Affordable Care Act offered Michigan the chance to give Medicaid benefits to some 400,000 more residents, Schlichting knew that would mean a lot more people she was already treating would now have a way to pay their hospital bills. She lobbied hard for the state to say yes.
SCHLICHTING: We were very active in advocacy. We got all of our employees engaged. We had over 5,000 emails that went to state legislators, as they were debating the Medicaid expansion for the state of Michigan. So, you know, we almost shamed people into it. You know, how can you turn your back on the people of this state who have lost jobs?
WHITNEY: But Republicans saw themselves as turning their backs on Obamacare, not the people of Michigan. State Rep. Al Pscholka was one of them.
STATE REP. AL PSCHOLKA: Yeah, here you are.
WHITNEY: Pscholka's district is on the southeast shore of Lake Michigan, and includes the historic town of Benton Harbor.
PSCHOLKA: Lake Michigan in December - still a nice view, come on. And you've got ice. (Laughter)
WHITNEY: It's a solidly Republican district. Pscholka says Obamacare doesn't have a lot of fans here.
PSCHOLKA: When people say Medicaid expansion, I think to a lot of us, that meant bigger government. And it meant expanding a program that doesn't work very well.
WHITNEY: Pscholka is a Republican Party leader in the Michigan House. He was asked to look at ways to reform Medicaid. But then, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder came out in favor of Medicaid expansion last year. Snyder argued that if the state didn't expand, the millions of dollars in Affordable Care Act taxes and fees Michigan would be paying would just go to other states, and not come back home in the form of new payments to hospitals and doctors. Pscholka says when he took a hard look at Medicaid, he didn't find the broken, bloated government program he was expecting.
PSCHOLKA: When I understood how it worked, and what we had done in Michigan in the late '90s that was actually pretty smart - we've privatized a lot of that already, which I think a lot of folks didn't understand.
WHITNEY: Medicaid is a government-funded program, but Michigan long ago started contracting with private-sector HMOs to administer it. Pscholka says that makes it easier for conservatives to stomach. And he helped draft legislation to accept Medicaid expansion dollars, but with some conditions. That doesn't mean every Republican in the state is convinced that putting more people on Medicaid is the right way to go. The bill to expand it only passed by one vote in the state Senate.
PSCHOLKA: This is not an easy thing to explain. It's not an easy thing to get up at my county GOP meeting, and look at friends of mine who've been friends of mine for 20 years - who are now shooting darts at me with their eyes, and can't believe that I was even involved in this; not only that I voted for it, but that I was somehow involved in crafting this legislation.
WHITNEY: Pscholka's change of heart on Medicaid earned him a primary challenge from a Tea Party candidate. But she's a long shot to beat him, and those favoring expansion have some strong allies beyond Michigan's popular governor. Hospitals, doctors and the state's small-business association all rallied behind the idea. Cynthia Kay owns a video production company in Grand Rapids with eight employees. She hopes putting more people on Medicaid will help keep the price of her company's health insurance plan down in the future.
CYNTHIA KAY: We're paying for the cost of health care, anyway. Uncompensated cost of care is driving my premiums up every single year. So whether I think I'm paying for it or not, I'm paying for all the people who are using the emergency room as their primary care physician.
WHITNEY: Advocates for the poor are thrilled so many uninsured Michigan residents will now be able to get Medicaid, but worry about some significant details that have yet to be finalized.
JAN HUDSON: I think it's going to be complicated.
WHITNEY: Jan Hudson is an analyst at the Michigan League for Public Policy, which advocates for low-income people. Among the compromises the White House made to win Republican support in Michigan are requirements for some Medicaid recipients to pay for at least part of their care.
HUDSON: Cost-sharing is always a concern for low-income people. The research says that that can be a barrier to people receiving the care that they need.
WHITNEY: The White House is OK'ing cost-sharing in other states, like Iowa and Arkansas. Iowa recipients will pay extra if they overuse emergency rooms, and Michigan will charge them more if they don't stick with wellness plans designed to keep them healthy. Groups that favor Medicaid expansion nationwide point to those kinds of tweaks as evidence that the White House is willing to compromise, and hope that will entice the 23 states that are still resisting expansion to take another look, and work out special arrangements of their own.
For NPR News, I'm Eric Whitney.
MONTAGNE: Eric's and Sammy's stories are part of a partnership between NPR and Kaiser Health News.
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Let's turn now to a disturbing problem for a lot of new parents - colicky babies. Babies suffering from colic cry incessantly, and it's a piercing cry; and parents can find themselves helpless to soothe the infant.
Now, research suggests that probiotics can help reduce colic in babies, and maybe even help prevent it. NPR's Rob Stein takes a look.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: When Melissa Shenewa and her husband imagined their first weeks with their new baby, they pictured hours of cuddling. Instead, they're enduring hours of this.
(SOUNDBITE OF BABY CRYING)
STEIN: Their 6-week-old son, Aladdin, is a colicky baby. He cries for hours, and nothing seems to help. Melissa Shenewa is often in tears.
MELISSA SHENEWA: (Crying) And being a parent when your child is screaming in pain for hours on end and there's nothing you can do, you feel helpless. You feel like you're not a good parent.
STEIN: The Shenewas are far from alone. Colic affects between 8 and 15 percent of babies. And Marc Rhoades, of the University of Texas in Houston, says it can be devastating.
MARC RHOADS: It's been linked to parental depression, and even thoughts of infanticide. So it's a huge problem.
STEIN: It's unclear what causes colic. But evidence, mostly from Europe, suggests there might be something that could help: probiotics. Several studies have found that probiotics can reduce how much colicky babies cry. And a new study published last week found a probiotic seems to prevent colic in the first place. Flavia Indrio, of the University of Bari in Italy, led that study.
DR. FLAVIA INDRIO: We do find that the baby who took the probiotic since the first week of life, they develop less number of colic and constipation in the first month of life. So they improve - at least, the symptoms.
STEIN: Giving babies friendly bacteria could help their digestive systems develop the right way. Robert Shulman is a pediatrician at the Baylor College of Medicine.
DR. ROBERT SHULMAN: There's a number of effects that we know probiotics can have; for example, affecting the immune system, affecting the barrier function of the intestine, affecting the other bacteria that live in the intestine. Now, we don't really know in babies for sure with colic, how these probiotics are actually working.
STEIN: Shulman and others caution that much more research is needed before anyone really knows for sure that they can help - and which probiotics really work, if they do. And while they seem safe, it's too soon to know for sure that there aren't any long-term risks.
SHULMAN: We don't really know what it means to change the bacteria in these young infants; how that might affect their immune function down the road, and so forth.
STEIN: So Marc Rhoads - at the University of Texas - is doing a new study, testing a probiotic on colicky babies like Aladdin Shenewa. He wants to confirm the European research in this country. Melissa Shenewa signed up her baby.
SHENEWA: So we're just waiting on that to kick in and hopefully - hopefully - it works.
STEIN: There are many probiotics already being sold in drugstores and supermarkets. And even some skeptics say they'd probably try one if they had a colicky baby.
Rob Stein, NPR News.
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In a robbery, what a robber can put to most use is cash. Though with debit cards, credit cards and e-commerce, people are carrying less of it. But there's one segment of society that still deals largely in cash, and that's undocumented immigrants. Gang members know that, and they know their victims are unlikely to report a crime.
NPR's Laura Sullivan begins her report in a police car.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLICED DISPATCHER)
LAURA SULLIVAN, BYLINE: It's Friday evening in Langley Park, Maryland. Officer Juan Damian drives his police car past fast food restaurants, discount stores and Hispanic groceries. This is a gateway community, a portal, where thousands of immigrants start when they first come to the states - sometimes legally, often not.
OFFICER JUAN DAMIAN: Well, the majority of the people up here are Hispanics. There's more men than women and, you know, a lot of them are undocumented.
SULLIVAN: Damian suspects at least two-thirds of this community is undocumented. And that has made it a magnet for robberies over the years.
DAMIAN: He comes to an area like this here and get out of the car, see people walking down the street, ask them for their money and rob them for whatever they have, get in the car and leave, because they don't call the police.
SULLIVAN: Damian says gangs know undocumented day workers are lucrative targets. Their pockets are often stuffed with a day or even a week's worth of wages.
On this evening, the sidewalks are filled with men walking slowly, carrying coolers and lunch bags, wearing construction boots and dust-covered jeans. Some have orange vests in their hands and hats covered in paint.
Officer Damian says some of them will carry a thousand dollars or more pockets - a month or two of work - because they are afraid to leave it where they live. Many undocumented workers live in apartments with a dozen or so others.
The street term for these men is walking ATMs. Damian watches them out the car window.
DAMIAN: The people that you see it's funny, just, well, I say it appears a special area. It's very different. Different kind of crowd.
SULLIVAN: Damian is not concerned with their immigration status. He's concerned with stopping sometimes deadly assaults and robberies. He says he will never ask a victim whether or not he or she is here legally. But it's been hard to build that trust.
So he and community leaders have come up with other ideas. They've beefed up patrols, trained other officers to understand it is possible for a man wearing dirt-covered pants to carry hundreds of dollars in cash. And they've been turning to local banks.
GEORGE ESCOBAR: You know, we've been working to enroll people and to open bank accounts for different individuals.
DAMIAN: George Escobar is the director of health and human services for Casa De Maryland, a local advocacy group. Casa de Maryland has been holding seminars for immigrants. He invites all the local banks.
ESCOBAR: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Capitol One, BNC. I mean basically, you name it, any institution that's serving the community. Banks have been happy to partner with us because they have a big and then easy base for them to do a lot of bank account enrollment.
SULLIVAN: Because this community is a portal, new people are always coming, so Escobar says they constantly schedule new seminars. On some nights, banks will enroll hundreds of new customers.
ESCOBAR: The demand is overwhelming. All of our clinics, the bankers are completely busy and can barely deal with the demand of people that are coming to enroll with them.
SULLIVAN: It's actually not illegal for undocumented immigrants to open a bank account. Lots of foreigners bank with U.S. financial institutions. Immigrants need their passport or I.D. and a U.S. taxpayer identification number, which you can get regardless of your status.
The bank account efforts mixed with community policing seem to be working. Numbers are hard to come by for a crime victims are afraid to report. But known robberies, at least, have been cut in half in the past five years in this one area. And police say the number of arrests are up too, meaning immigrants have come forward to describe their attackers.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD CHATTER)
SULLIVAN: Dora Escobar, who's not related to George, came to the United States several decades ago from El Salvador and now owns nine popular check cashing businesses. People mill about inside buying phone cards and talking. She says she worries about her customers at night and hopes they open bank accounts.
DORA ESCOBAR: (Foreign language spoken)
SULLIVAN: Yeah, it's worrisome she says, but with an I.D., they can open their own accounts.
Escobar says she's appreciative of the recent police efforts to protect the people in the community, but most undocumented workers still do not trust the police.
ESCOBAR: (Foreign language spoken)
SULLIVAN: It's working she says, but there's more work to be done.
Community leaders hope if they can get the cash out of people's pockets, it will keep the entire community safe, whether they are here legally or not.
Laura Sullivan, NPR News.
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One of those killed in the attack on that restaurant was its owner, Kamel Hamade. He was a Lebanese entrepreneur whose desire to open a restaurant landed him in Kabul six years ago. La Taverna became an oasis to aid workers, diplomats, journalists, all looking for a pleasant and safe evening out in a big city with very few options.
In fact, our own Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson dined there often in the years she was based in Kabul. She's in Berlin now, but at the news of Kamel's death, she joined an outpouring of sadness and affection for Kamel Hamade. The flowers, now piled high at the restaurant in Kabul, speak of a man who cared deeply for his patrons and his their safety.
Just to enter the restaurant involved a gauntlet - armed guards, steel doors and metal detectors.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: I mean there was even a password that the guards would have to use with each other before they would open the internal door to let you in. And, in fact, I was told by a colleague today that he had an oil barrel, a drum filled with oil that apparently he was planning to spill over if somebody ran in so that they would slip, they wouldn't be able to sort of get into the restaurant.
The idea was that these sort of layered approaches would make it more difficult for anybody to get into, except on Friday night, with the distraction and the damage caused by the suicide bomber outside, that sort of paved the way or somehow opened a path for the two gunmen to get inside.
MONTAGNE: And then this attack, Soraya, it's important to say 21 people died. It was not all foreigners. There was a young couple, newlyweds, Afghans, who were in there eating that night, and also staff.
NELSON: Yeah. I mean he really enjoyed being in Afghanistan, not just to cater to foreigners, but because he had the opportunity to work with Afghans. He really enjoyed training them. He taught them to make all these delicacies that he was so fond of and, you know, provided employment opportunities, which were very, very much sought after.
MONTAGNE: You took me there the first time that I went to La Taverna and I went other times without you, but with you, Soraya, it was especially warm, because when that door finally opened into the restaurant, there he was, Kamel. He was waiting to greet all visitors and he would really light up when he saw you.
NELSON: Well, it really felt almost like going home or something. I mean, you really needed that, being in Kabul. I mean it's a very intense environment. You're constantly on deadline. You're constantly vigilant because of the dangers. He also was very good at packing on the pounds for me because he kept sending over free goodies and his chocolate cake, which normally I'm not a big cake fan, but boy, that was something else.
It's definitely the best cake I ever had. So I would just really enjoy going there. I mean, it was always an experience.
MONTAGNE: Yeah, and it was also one of the few places where Westerners could, say, have a sip of wine.
NELSON: Well, yeah. I mean in the beginning there were still bottles. Unfortunately, once the government started to crack down on restaurants that were serving alcohol - because technically alcohol is illegal in Afghanistan - he, just like some other proprietors, started serving them in teapots. You had to ask for red tea or white tea, depending on what kind of wine you wanted.
MONTAGNE: I know his wife, Nabila, must be absolutely heartbroken. But she did tell you something about what it meant to her, that there was so many people who missed him.
NABILA HAMADE: I am touched beyond words and this is one part of feeling great about Kamel, that everybody was able to see him as he really is, a genuine person, very helpful, very supportive. I appreciate every single word, every single person who remembered Kamel, and I really hope they will never forget La Taverna du Libon and Kamel Hamade.
NELSON: There's no doubt that I won't forget him and I know there are many others who feel the same way, because Kamel had a way of just making you forget where you were for a few hours, I mean sort of transporting you away and just, you know, like you were relaxing with friends.
MONTAGNE: Well, Soraya, thank you for sharing this with us, and it's a sad story among so many over there in Afghanistan.
NELSON: Thanks, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson was NPR's bureau chief in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2010. This is NPR News.
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And President Obama has a new phrase he's been using a lot lately.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I've got a pen and I've got a phone.
MONTAGNE: That was Mr. Obama at a recent cabinet meeting. What he's talking about are the tools a president can use if Congress is not giving him what he wants. In this case the tools are executive actions and calling people together.
NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith tells us these are other avenues the president is using to pursue his economic agenda.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Since the start of the year, the president has announced three new economic promise zones: a college affordability initiative and a manufacturing research hub. These are all part of what the White House is calling a Year of Action. And they're all things that didn't require Congress to do anything, something the president makes a point of saying.
OBAMA: I am going to be working with Congress where I can to accomplish this, but I am also going to act on my own if Congress is deadlocked. I've got a pen to take executive actions where Congress won't, and I've got a telephone to rally folks around the country on this mission.
KEITH: The mission is an economic one, and something the president has talked about many times before, trying to make sure the economic recovery reaches everyone. President Obama is pressing for an extension of unemployment benefits and an increase in the minimum wage. Those things will require Congress. But encouraging public-private partnerships, that doesn't.
John Podesta recently joined the administration as a senior advisor.
JOHN PODESTA: In a couple weeks we're bringing together more than 100 CEOs who are committed to hiring the long-term unemployed, which is a significant problem that still overhangs our economy, so those are the kinds of things that the president can do without legislative action.
KEITH: Long before joining the administration, Podesta urged the president to use his executive authority to get things done. His hiring was seen as a sign the president would be taking more executive action. But using these powers is nothing new for this president, or others, for that matter. John Woolley is a professor at UC Santa Barbara, and is co-director of the Presidency Project.
JOHN WOOLLEY: He's by no means the first president to make a public point of the fact that he's doing that, and it's not the first time he's done it.
OBAMA: This morning, Secretary Napolitano announced new actions my administration will take to mend our nation's immigration policy.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: At 12:01 this morning, a major thrust of our war on terrorism began with the stroke of a pen.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Today, I am signing an executive order to create a fair, open, streamlined system of regulatory review for our government.
KEITH: For the record, those were Presidents Obama, George W. Bush and Clinton. Two years ago, the Obama administration had what it called the We Can't Wait Initiative, which also relied on administrative actions. But generally speaking, Woolley says presidents would rather have Congress pass their ideas into law than use executive orders or other similar actions.
WOOLLEY: Presidents use it, and have often used it effectively, and - but it's not as powerful as legislation.
KEITH: On Capitol Hill, the pen-and-phone strategy is getting a mixed reception.
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: I would remind the president he also has a Constitution and an oath of office that he took.
KEITH: House Speaker John Boehner, at his weekly press conference, said the president was choosing this approach rather than looking for ways to work together.
BOEHNER: There's no reason that this year can't be a bipartisan year to work on the issue of our economy and get Americans back to work.
KEITH: And while Republicans see this as another example of executive overreach, progressive Democrats like Minnesota's Keith Ellison see opportunity. He's been pushing for the president to sign an executive order raising the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors.
REPRESENTATIVE KEITH ELLISON: Right now the federal government funds more low-wage jobs than Wal-Mart or McDonald's. There are two million workers who work for federal contractors, and in these contracts there's no provisions that there be a responsible wage paid to these people.
KEITH: The White House offered no comment on this proposal, but administration officials are doing their best to make it clear executive actions and working with Congress aren't an either/or propositions. Tamara Keith, NPR News.
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The Winter Olympics in Russia are coming up fast. And this week, the U.S. Olympic cross-country ski team names the athletes who will be going to Sochi. Veteran Kris Freeman is vying for a spot again. He's already been to three Olympic Games and he's considered the country's best long distance racer over the past decade. And he has diabetes. Freeman has had a successful career filled with challenges, but perhaps none bigger than this past year when his long relationship with the national ski team ended abruptly.
NPR's Tom Goldman reports.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Here you go, men's 30 kilometer.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Thirty-three-year-old Kris Freeman broke from the start at this month's U.S. Nationals in Utah, his unusual pre-race checklist, complete: ski wax - check, race strategy - check, blood sugar level - check.
In 2000, Freeman was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. It's a condition where the body doesn't make the insulin needed to convert sugar and other food into energy. In a 2006 NPR interview, Freeman demonstrated how he jabbed his finger, multiple times a day, to measure the sugar in his bloodstream and make sure the amount wasn't too high or low.
KRIS FREEMAN: Stick, drop blood. Result, OK.
GOLDMAN: Freeman now uses a device that continuously monitors his blood sugar level. The improved technology allows him to do a good job managing his sugar state, as he calls it - most of the time. At the 2010 winter Olympics, in the 30 kilometers, Freeman describes how he stopped because of low blood sugar before finishing the race. Actually, he collapsed.
FREEMAN: I did fall over. That would be another way to say I stopped, I suppose.
(LAUGHTER)
GOLDMAN: Vintage Kris Freeman, a stoic from New Hampshire who tries to keep his attitude as level as his blood sugar. But that attitude was seriously rocked last spring when the U.S. Ski team cut him.
FREEMAN: They said that my trajectory was not what they were looking for, that I had been skiing at kind of a plateaued level. I couldn't really argue with that except I thought my plateau was pretty high.
GOLDMAN: Domestically, it was. Last April, he won the latest of his 16 national titles. But a spokesman for the U.S. Ski Team, which declined an interview request, says criteria for team selection are based on international results, including a world cup overall ranking in the top 50. In 2013, Freeman ranked 75th; in 2012, 86th. The team felt its limited funds would be better spent elsewhere.
Freeman says as a result, he lost tens of thousands of dollars of support and, perhaps more importantly, health insurance.
FREEMAN: There was a lot of stress and a little bit of a steep learning curve this last year, trying to figure out how I was going to pay for certain things. And what I was going to do for health insurance once my COBRA ran out.
GOLDMAN: Personal savings and sponsorships helped make up the deficit. Then a couple of months ago, more help arrived.
CHRIS SUNUNU: This is a guy that has put himself on the line for the United States year after year. And to be dumped like that just didn't seem right.
GOLDMAN: So Chris Sununu, co-owner of Waterville Valley Ski Resort in New Hampshire, offered local hero Kris Freeman a job - teaching racing clinics in exchange for a little stipend and health coverage.
(SOUNDBITE OF A CROWD)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: And Kris Freeman out of Maine, powering his way towards the finish. What a phenomenal race.
GOLDMAN: After two third-place finishes at this month's national championships, Freeman says he's 99 percent sure he'll be named to the U.S. Olympic team. If he is, he'll still represent the U.S., even though he won't be a member of the U.S. Ski Team. But Freeman says that won't give him any extra competitive drive in Sochi. He simply wants his best Olympic performance yet, which Freeman believes, is ahead of him.
Tom Goldman, NPR News.
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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne.
The United Nations has invited Iran to take part in peace talks intended to end the Syrian civil war. And that brought immediate objections from both the U.S. and the Syrian rebels. That's because Iran has been a strong ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The U.S. says Iran must agree that the talks will lead to Assad stepping down. And the Syrian opposition - which had just agreed, under a lot of U.S. pressure, to attend the talks - said that if Iran is there, the opposition might stay away. The talks are supposed to start Wednesday in Switzerland.
We turn, as we often do, to Rami Khouri, for more. He's director of the Public Policy Institute at the American University in Beirut.
Good morning.
RAMI KHOURI: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: First of all, Ban Ki-moon said - and I'm quoting him - "Iran needs to be part of the solution." I think many people will agree with that. But why, precisely, is Iran so important?
KHOURI: Well, it's not just Ban Ki-moon. It's really the whole world, almost - with very few exceptions - notably, the American government, that says the Iranians should be in Geneva. And they're important, because they're the most significant supporter, funder, armer, backer, trainer and everything else of Syria. And if this is a discussion to find a way to make a political transition to some kind of resolution of the conflict in Syria, you've got to have the main parties who are the outside backers. I mean, that includes the Saudis, the Americans, the Russians and the Iranians.
MONTAGNE: The sticking point, though, with the Syrian opposition - and also with the U.S. - is whether Iran agrees that the conference needs to lead to a transitional government, meaning that Assad will eventually go. Has Iran agreed to that, in principle, that Assad needs to go?
KHOURI: No, Iran hasn't agreed to that, and it will not agree to that, a priori and publicly. And because that's not a decision that the Iranians necessarily make for themselves any more than the American can make these decisions from the other side. The whole point of Geneva is to get the key parties to this conflict to sit down and talk about: How do they chart a peaceful, political, diplomatic, humanitarian path away from this spiraling conflict which has really threatened the whole Middle East? And how do they move towards a political solution?
The assumption among most people is, I think, is that the Assad government has really lost credibility, cannot remain as it is governing the country after all this violence that it has inflicted, and therefore, will be part of a transition that will bring in some other kind of government. How that happens - and if it happens - is really for the people in Geneva to negotiate, and not for anybody to talk about ahead of time.
MONTAGNE: Can there be a transitional government with Assad still there?
KHOURI: If it's for a transitional period, probably, for a very short period. You can imagine a technical, logistical mechanism that starts the process of transition with, for instance, ceasefires, humanitarian corridors, refugee repatriation, reconstruction in some areas, and an evolution of executive authority that includes people from the government and from the opposition together, for instance, dealing with maybe food delivery, or something like that. So I think a transition is going to be gradual. And my own guess is it will see Assad step down, eventually.
MONTAGNE: Well, just, finally, is there any indication that the opposition will now pull out of these talks, now that it's been announced that Iran is involved? And if they do, can the talks go forward?
KHOURI: Oh, if the opposition pulls out, there won't be any talks, clearly. But I don't think the opposition is going to pull out. I think the opposition will be assured that Iran is invited to the Geneva talks on the basis of the mandate for those talks, which came out of the first Geneva conference in 2012. And that is to create a transitional governing body by mutual consent. You know, the phrase mutual consent is in that official statement, and that speaks a lot. That means you can't do anything without the opposition. You can't do anything without Assad. There's a whole range of groups inside Syria fighting Assad, and most of them are not probably going to be in Geneva. So there's already a limited reach and credibility to the opposition groups that will be in Syria, and it is in their interest to stay there and to negotiate to enhance their credibility.
MONTAGNE: Rami Khouri is director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Thank you very much for joining us.
KHOURI: Thanks for having me.
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Another big issue between the U.S. and Iran: Today is the day that Iran starts carrying out a temporary deal to limit its nuclear program. International inspectors are in Iran to see that some of its nuclear equipment is dismantled and that radioactive fuel is diluted. But this is just a six-month deal. Negotiators must now reach a new permanent nuclear accord. NPR'S Peter Kenyon is following this story, and he reports that there's a lot of skepticism about whether such a deal is possible.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: The interim accord that begins today may be a high watermark for nuclear diplomacy, but the shadow of the difficult second round of talks is looming. Each side is sniping at the other's interpretation of the relatively modest steps agreed to thus far. Iran's President Hasan Rouhani has been sounding nearly as provocative as his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, lately, boasting that the deal reached in November represents a total capitulation by the West. Israeli and American conservatives are sounding alarms about such talk, even though diplomats say it's intended to placate Iranian hardliners. Ali Ansari, professor of Iranian history at St. Andrew's College in Scotland, says Rouhani is indeed under increasing pressure, and not only from the hardliners.
ALI ANSARI: There is some criticism, interestingly enough, from reformists on the other side of the political spectrum, who are arguing that many of the promises that Rouhani made about political reform in order to win election in last June have really remained unfulfilled, and that he's really not addressing them at all. So, Rouhani finds himself really under attack from two quite distinct political groups, and both of them expose some of his fragility.
KENYON: Until now, there have been two tracks of discussions: one between Iran and the six world powers known as the P-5+1, and one between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Now, those tracks are beginning to converge. Starting today, IAEA inspectors will make daily visits to verify Iranian pledges to stop its highest level enrichment of uranium and reduce its existing stockpile. Iran analyst Ali Vaez at the International Crisis Group says the sides are far apart on all the remaining major issues, although he says if the political will is there, technically, most of the outstanding questions can be answered in the upcoming talks.
ALI VAEZ: I think all the remaining contentious issues have technical solutions. The real issue is finding a way that would allow each side to sell the deal back home to those who oppose it from a political perspective, rather than a technical perspective.
KENYON: Take one important issue: Iran's heavy-water reactor being built at Arak. Experts say there are ways to ensure that Iran doesn't create plutonium - useful for a nuclear weapon - from the reactor's spent fuel. But they would entail concessions that deeply disturb hardliners on both sides. Vaez says more bilateral talks between Washington and Tehran may be needed to keep things on course. Analyst Ali Ansari in Scotland says negotiators must be allowed to focus on the task at hand, without either the panicky cries of critics or the unrealistic optimism of those who want to imagine a completely new relationship between Iran and the West.
ANSARI: And to my mind, I have to say, I think the optimism of the early days and the great euphoria I think has been very unhelpful, and we would've been much better to play down the prospect of success and see a success, rather than raise expectation and find that we are all bitterly disappointed, because the disappointment will be quite disastrous, if it happens.
KENYON: There are at least two moves afoot that critics say will scuttle the talks. A bill with bipartisan support in Congress would add new sanctions soon after the six-month interim period expires. In Tehran, lawmakers say if any new sanctions are imposed, they will require the country to enrich uranium to 60 percent - dangerously close to weapons-grade fuel. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.
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We've got health care news from two states now. In a minute, a story about how the Republican-led state of Michigan came to embrace a key part of the Affordable Care Act. Let's go first to Florida, where Miami Children's Hospital is embarking on a new era of clarity on what its health care costs. It's going recalculate its charges and make that information public. As WLRN's Sammy Mack reports, the hospital wants to make it easier for consumers to make good health care choices.
SAMMY MACK, BYLINE: Every hospital has a price list, but it's hard for the average consumer to figure out what a hospital really charges for care. Traditionally, the price on that list is nowhere near what it actually expects you or an insurance company to pay.
TIM BIRKENSTOCK: It's very misleading.
MACK: Tim Birkenstock is chief financial officer for Miami Children's Hospital.
BIRKENSTOCK: It is the equivalent of the sticker price on a car, or some other starting point for a conversation. But it certainly doesn't represent the answer to the question most of our families want to know, and that's: What's this going to cost me?
MACK: Birkenstock says the new list of prices will be closer to what the hospital really expects to be paid, which, he says, helps parents make decisions for their children even if they already have insurance. There are six children's hospitals in South Florida, and so far, this is the first one to announce it's rewriting its prices. Helen Darling heads the National Business Group on Health. It represents nearly 400 of the country's largest employers providing health insurance. She says she's impressed.
HELEN DARLING: Good for them for doing that, and wanting to help move the field towards, sort of, reasonableness.
MACK: Miami Children's and other hospitals have said they can't release the actual reimbursement rate, because insurance companies require nondisclosure agreements in their contracts. But Birkenstock says this is one step towards more transparent pricing. For NPR News, I'm Sammy Mack, in Miami.
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Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne.
Bao Bao, the baby panda made her big debut this weekend here at the National Zoo in Washington. The cub's many fans were so excited to see her that they didn't mind waiting in long lines, as one visitor exclaimed: It's better than the royals having a baby. Unfortunately, Bao Bao was not quite as excited as the fans were. After being brought out to greet the oohing and awing crowd, she promptly curled up in a corner and went to sleep.
It's MORNING EDITION.
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NPR's business news begins with a film phase out.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: Paramount Pictures will be the first major Hollywood studio to stop releasing movies on 35 millimeter film. The Los Angeles Times reports the motion picture studio is now distributing its films to U.S. theaters in digital format only.
Oscar-nominated "The Wolf of Wall Street" is Paramount's first movie to be distributed entirely in a digital format. Its last movie on film was "Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues."
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And today's last word in business is: The Fixer.
People in the Bay Area are familiar with San Francisco's many complicated parking laws and the very expensive consequences of disobeying them. Nearly half of all parking tickets are dismissed in court, but fighting a ticket takes time and some knowledge.
Now there's an app for that. David Hegarty started Fixed, an app that fights parking tickets for you. He thought it up after a very tiring morning.
DAVID HEGARTY: I came back from paying I think it was four separate parking tickets - two of which I think were a little questionable. And I came back to my car and found another two on the windscreen.
MONTAGNE: Hegarty contested those tickets and won. And once he figured out how easy it is when you do go to court, he wanted to help other people do it too. Here's how it works: You give the app details about your parking ticket and send photos of your car and the app find one of its parking exports to fight the ticket so you don't have to. If you advocate wins, you pay 25 percent of the cost of your ticket to Fixed. If the advocate loses, you pay nothing except the ticket, of course.
For the moment, the app is only available in San Francisco, where it's been so popular there's currently a wait list. Fixed will soon be expanding to other cities to fight parking tickets everywhere. And Hegarty says he is already getting pleading emails from drivers in L.A.
And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
Over the weekend, President Obama signed the 1,600-page spending bill to keep the government operating. The bill passed Congress with huge bipartisan margins in both the House and the Senate. The president's signing ceremony came after his speech on Friday, in which he outlined new proposals for the way the National Security Agency collects intelligence. That speech also prompted some bipartisan reaction. But in this case that bipartisan shift meant that each party had members who were both pro and con.
Joining us as to look at what's behind these relatively calm political winds and what could stir them up shortly is Cokie Roberts. Good morning.
COKIE ROBERTS, BYLINE: Hi, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Let's start with those NSA proposals. Remind us of the highlights of what the president said and what the reaction was.
ROBERTS: Well, the president said that the data collection - the phone records that the NSA is collecting - should continue, that it should be somewhat more limited. We learn these terms, you know, all the time - new terms as we get into these stories - the so-called Third Hop. They can look at one set of records and then who those people called, but not then who those people called - so somewhat more limited. And that also that the records should be kept by some outside entity outside of the government. An unnamed entity, maybe the phone companies, maybe something else. And that in that special courts where these cases are heard, that there should be a public advocate, somebody other than the government represented there.
The response, as you said, was both positive and negative from both Democrats and Republicans, some people saying that it was going too far in reigning in the National Security Agency, others saying it wasn't going far enough in protecting privacy.
There was also bipartisan condemnation of Edward Snowden, that young contractor who revealed all of these things. The chairs of the intelligence committee in both - committees in both the House and Senate - Republican Mike Rogers in the House, Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate - both raised questions yesterday about whether he had been getting some help from the Russians all along.
But you know, what was interesting was that the parties - people didn't retreat automatically into partisan corners on this, as they have been doing on almost every single issue for the last several years.
MONTAGNE: Well, so does this in fact seem like this is a more bipartisan moment that, I guess, we've seen in the last four years? I mean is that possible, and how long does it last? Is this possible?
(LAUGHTER)
ROBERTS: Well, it's interesting - the chairman of the appropriations committees in the House and the Senate are both saying that after they crafted together this big spending bill. But the - and that is Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, and Senator - Congressman Hal Rogers, a different Rogers from the intelligence committee. But interesting that both of the chair - Senate chairs that I've talked about here are women, Renee. And it is true that the women in both the House and Senate have been part of a bipartisan push, saying let's just get things done.
MONTAGNE: And one of the things, of course, needs getting done, really - what is likely to happen about the debt limit?
ROBERTS: Well, that's right and that is the big partisan cloud overall of this happiness. Republicans are going into a retreat shortly to decide what they want to do about that. They have always said that they're not going to raise that debt limit without some - getting something in return. But they know now that they can't shut down the government - that didn't work for them, that they've really played out the string on Obamacare.
And so they don't really quite know what they want to say to the president that they have to have in return for agreeing to let the country continue to pay its bills. The president, of course, says he's not going to negotiate on the debt limit. So that's where we're likely to see partisanship rear its head again.
MONTAGNE: Cokie Roberts, thanks very much. That's Cokie Roberts.
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People in Kabul are still grieving this morning for the 21 people who died in a suicide attack on a popular Lebanese restaurant. Thirteen of the dead were foreigners living and working in Afghanistan. They were dining at the restaurant La Taverna, partly because it was considered safe.
Now the international community is there reassessing what is or is not safe. NPR's Sean Carberry reports.
SEAN CARBERRY, BYLINE: A little before 7:30 last Friday night, a loud blast shook an upscale neighborhood of Kabul. Explosions aren't all that unusual in the city so people don't instantly panic here when something goes boom.
WILLIAM VAN HEERDEN: It took a few minutes to realize that there was something serious going on.
CARBERRY: William Van Heerden is the security director for Oxfam International. He says that when the blast was followed by gunfire that lasted for 10 to 15 minutes, it clearly meant trouble.
HEERDEN: Then, of course, you're to go into a sort of procedure mode, cease all movement, stay where you are.
CARBERRY: And make sure everyone is accounted for. Reacting to the incident is the easy part, he says. The hard part is trying to figure out the longer term response.
HEERDEN: There were an awful lot of indicators that we are in for a rather rough ride this year.
CARBERRY: He says that with the upcoming elections and the drawdown of foreign troops, the expectation was security would gradually deteriorate this year and they would have to tighten restrictions. But...
HEERDEN: This kill, we did not expect.
CARBERRY: Historically, attacks in Kabul have targeted military or government compounds. An outright massacre of civilians, mostly humanitarian workers, is completely unprecedented and it means a strict reevaluation of locations that organizations will allow their people to go.
NIGEL JENKINS: We have to analyze the event to see if this really is a change of tactics.
CARBERRY: Nigel Jenkins is the country director for the International Rescue Committee.
JENKINS: I think before the incident on Friday, our biggest fear was wrong time, wrong place.
CARBERRY: He says the concern was that you could be collateral damage, not be the target of an attack. The challenge now is determining from a single data point if attacks targeting civilians are the new normal.
JENKINS: Will there be another one, we don't know. And that uncertainty is the problem.
CARBERRY: For now, most organizations are in some form of lockdown. Some have instituted a complete ban on going to restaurants or restaurants that serve alcohol, since the Taliban said they attacked the Lebanese taverna because people drank there.
MOHAMMAD AZEEM POPAL: (Speaking foreign language)
CARBERRY: Mohammad Azeem Popal is the owner of Sufi, an Afghan restaurant usually packed with international workers and Afghan officials. He says he's seen about a 95 percent drop in business since the attack on the Lebanese taverna. Popal is adding new security features to the restaurant in hopes of staying on the approved list for international organizations.
But that might not be enough, given the expectation of increased violence as the April election gets closer, says Van Heerden.
HEERDEN: A lessening of restrictions is more or less out of the question.
CARBERRY: The attack on the Lebanese taverna has taken away some of the international community's little freedom here, as well as the lives of friends and colleagues. But it also might forge a deeper connection to the Afghan people who live with this kind of violence every day. Sean Carberry, NPR News, Kabul.
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Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. Dean Martin may have been on to something when he equated a big pizza pie with amore. After saying I do, or I dough, a British couple surprised their guests with Domino's pizzas. This delivery was not your average order. The pizzas were portraits of the newlyweds. Food artist Nathan Wyburn created the pizza masterpieces using the dough as his canvas, and tomato sauce, cheese and toppings as his paints. It's MORNING EDITION.
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The Super Bowl is set. The Seattle Seahawks will face the Denver Broncos. The Broncos handily dispatched the New England Patriots. Seattle, in an extremely close game, beat the San Francisco '49ers. NPR's Mike Pesca is here to give us some game day details. Good morning.
MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Hello.
MONTAGNE: Tell us about the Seahawks versus '49ers game. It came down to a rather amazing defensive play.
PESCA: Oh, yes. It came down to that play. This was a great defensive game, in fact, in the first half. There were really three plays that matter that led to points. The score was 10-seven in halftime, I believe, and that was just based on a long pass, a long run, and a turnover. And then in the second half scoring actually increased a little bit.
Last play of the game San Francisco, needing a touchdown to go ahead and really win the game, seconds left, Colin Kaepernick puts the ball at the back of the end zone. And here comes Richard Sherman, deflects it with the back of his hand, pops over to his teammate Malcolm Smith. Interception in the end zone.
After the game Richard Sherman couldn't stop telling everyone how he's the greatest player ever and Michael Crabtree ain't that good a receiver. Hey, look - it was a great play and they deserve to be in it. And Richard Sherman, I suppose, is allowed to exalt.
(LAUGHTER)
MONTAGNE: Well, all right. So a real nail biter. Then the game in Denver...
PESCA: Yeah.
MONTAGNE: ...turned out to be a breeze. How did the Broncos beat the Patriots so handily?
PESCA: You know, it was just a marvelous performance by Denver who, you know, totally stymied the Patriots' offense, which is unusual. Bill Bellichick, the coach of the Patriots, found ways to score, always not against Denver. And then we take it for granted what Peyton Manning did, the Broncos quarterback, throwing for 400 yards and two touchdowns. That has only happened a couple of other times in the playoffs.
And it wasn't only that. As you watched the game he was such a masterful orchestrator of the offense. There were times when he would audible, you know, changed the play through his voice. And he'd yell - and I picked this up - he'd yell Montana Batman and that would mean a draw play out of the shotgun. And it worked every time that he did it.
They would always get a first down or significant yardage. So even in the non-passing stats he was just, you know, running that offense with precision. This is why it's the best offense, statistically, in the history of the NFL.
MONTAGNE: And what can we expect when these teams face each other?
PESCA: Number one defense in the league versus the number one offense in the league so that should be good. Number one seeds in each conference. That rarely happens - it's only the second time in the last 20 years that the top seeds have faced each other. Peyton Manning actually was one of those other times. Even Las Vegas doesn't know what to do.
You know, early on they said Seattle was going to be the small favorite but of course they're affected by who bets on who. The public loves Denver. They started betting heavily on Denver. Now most places, Denver's the small favorite. But I think that's probably accurate. Small favorite should be the way we look at this game for either team.
MONTAGNE: OK. So the Super Bowl is coming up in just two weeks in the month of February in northern New Jersey, outdoors.
PESCA: Yes. Yes.
MONTAGNE: Will that be a factor for either team?
PESCA: You know, I have noted skittish brides who are less concerned about the weather on their big day than these big tough guys in the NFL. Eww, what if it rains? Eww, what if it snows? And, yeah, weather could play a factor. And at this point, I think I have an obligation to trot out the Peyton Manning cold weather stats and they're far less good than the Peyton Manning warm weather stats.
You know, I think the statistic is he's four and seven in games where the temperature is freezing or below, but there are a lot of caveats to that. All those games were road games and everyone doesn't do as well in the cold. Almost everyone - maybe Tom Brady's the exception. So, yeah, it might be cold. It might be rainy. That might favor the Seahawks. But it's still going to be a very good game, I think.
MONTAGNE: Mike, thanks very much.
PESCA: You're welcome.
MONTAGNE: NPR's Mike Pesca.
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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. Governor Jerry Brown has formally declared a drought emergency in California, saying the state is facing possibly the worst drought it has ever seen since record keeping began more than a hundred years ago.
This month, California has seen little or no rainfall - a pattern that's following much of last year's dry spell. Water reservoirs have plunged, in some cases, to half of their usual capacity. Mountains and forests continue to get dryer and more susceptible to wildfires. Farmers and ranchers face tough production choices as they deal with three years of water shortages. To better understand the impact of these unusually dry conditions we reached Michael Hanemann. He's a professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Berkeley. Good Morning.
MICHAEL HANEMANN: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: So all of what I've just said is pretty bad. And I happen to live in California so I also happen to know that it is very, very dry there. What does a formal declaration of a drought emergency actually do? What will it get for the state?
HANEMANN: First of all, it gives sanction to water supply agencies to invoke special rules that they've developed banning lawn watering, washing cars. Secondly, it orders the Water Rights Agency in California to move some water from agriculture to urban uses and also to ecosystem protect. But most of the water in California, maybe 75, 80 percent of the water, is used in agriculture.
MONTAGNE: When you speak about transferring water from agricultural uses to urban uses, California is the nation's salad bowl. So the food a lot of people in the country buy and eat comes from California. I mean, what are these farmers going to do if they don't get as much water as they say they need?
HANEMANN: A drought will reduce the supply of foods produced in California. Prices will rise, but to some extent, the U.S. will import more from other sources. What farmers have done and will do on this occasion is shift water from annual crops like lettuce or tomatoes to tree crops - for example, almonds or pistachios - because it takes six or seven years to reestablish the trees.
Agriculture historically can bear cutbacks in surface water supply more easily than cities.
MONTAGNE: Well, just to that, finally, the urban water users. And that's more or less most of us. Back in '70s - and I'm from California; I remember that drought very well - we used to put buckets in the bathtub when we took showers. And we used that water to water the plants in the yard. Californian's are pretty good-or were pretty good about conserving water when they were asked. What are they going to have to do this time?
HANEMANN: It's going to be like that period you were describing. I remember it. It was my first winter in California, '76 and '77, and it looks as though it's going to be more severe this year than, for example, in '91 and '92 which was the last major drought. So it's going to be big restrictions for most of us using water in the cities.
MONTAGNE: Well, just a final simple last question, because I think there's a simple answer to this. Any relief in sight?
HANEMANN: You don't know. The drought could break tomorrow or a month from now or three months from now. It could happen any time, if we're lucky.
MONTAGNE: Well, I gather there's a lot of praying for rain out there. So thank you very much for joining us.
HANEMANN: You're very welcome.
MONTAGNE: Michael Hanemann is director of the California Climate Change Center at UC Berkeley.
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In South Sudan, the fighting that began in December continues between groups loyal to two powerful rivals: President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, his former vice president. The conflict, which has left thousands dead and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes, caught many by surprise. It was just a short time ago - 2011 - that South Sudan became an independent nation after a decades-long rebellion against Sudan.
Alex De Waal heads the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, and he's a scholar of the region, including South Sudan. Welcome to the program.
ALEX DE WAAL: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: Now, trying to make sense of this new, very vicious cycle of ethnic violence, can we just begin with a simple fact? And it's that these two top politicians - Kiir and Machar - they actually have more of a history of fighting each other than actually working together.
DE WAAL: Well, the ruling Sudan's People Liberation Movement emerged from a rebellion back in 1983, and it was run as an army. There wasn't a political infrastructure; it was a highly centralized army. But then in 1991, it split. There was a mutiny by some commanders - and Riek Machar was one of those - who objected to the dictatorial tendencies of the then-leader of the rebellion. And their rebellion against him turned into an ethnic war.
DE WAAL: It didn't start off as an ethnic war; it started off as a political dispute. But the moment the movement began to divide, it divided on ethnic lines. And unfortunately, that is something of a forerunner of what has happened in the last few months - a political dispute, the moment it became violent, turned into an ethnically colored war.
MONTAGNE: I think it might, though, be worth adding that the atrocities committed against each other are still reasonably fresh from that time. And there was a famous massacre, for instance, that Machar was responsible for, against the people of Salva Kiir.
DE WAAL: One of the nastiest realities of the war in South Sudan was that actually, more of it was spent the Southerners fighting one another, than actually fighting against the North. And there were efforts for reconciliation among the Southerners. But sadly, when the North-South agreement was signed in 2005, those internal to the South reconciliation peacemaking efforts were all put on one side, and those wounds were left unhealed.
And there is blame on both sides, but I think the fundamental problem was that the SPLM, as a liberation movement, did not develop the accountable political institutions or, indeed, the ethos of respecting human rights.
MONTAGNE: Well, as you've suggested, the creation of South Sudan as an independent state took, for one thing, years; but also, the U.S. - and the West - has been pouring billions into that very poor country. A lot of time and money - what did it buy?
DE WAAL: Well, the way that the reconciliation among the different militias was handled was a massive cash payout; really, accountable to no one. And up to half of the national wealth was actually spent on supposedly, salaries for up to 200,000 soldiers. The army of South Sudan has almost as many generals as the U.S. Army. So what appears to resemble a national army is, in many respects, really just a coalition of different armed groups who have personal loyalty to their individual commander.
And unfortunately, when there was a political dispute, the moment it turned violent, then the powder trail immediately led to an explosion that split the country along the lines of these ethnically constituted units with personal loyalties.
MONTAGNE: Would you say there are virtually no political institutions in South Sudan?
DE WAAL: Almost none. The ruling party doesn't function, the government is largely dysfunctional, and the army itself is hardly functional. So when this current crisis is resolved, all that work of state-building really needs to start very, very nearly from zero.
MONTAGNE: At this point, though, with all this bad blood - literally - do you think that's a reasonable expectation?
DE WAAL: It's very tough. And one of the problems, unfortunately, is that because of the justice of their cause, many of the foreign friends of South Sudan held them to a lower standard than others. And I think the time has come for some really rather tough love for the Southern Sudanese. The U.S. government and the friends of South Sudan - to begin to apply the same standards as they would elsewhere and say, we're going to try and encourage a much more properly representative form of governance that really allows the people of South Sudan, who've suffered so much for so long, to have a stay in something that is supposed to be a government of liberation.
MONTAGNE: Alex de Waal has written extensively about South Sudan and the region. He's director the World Peace Foundation, at Tufts University. Thank you very much.
DE WAAL: You're very welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: You're listening to MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.
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Roger Ailes is a hero to the political right and a boogeyman to the left for leading the Fox News Channel to be the top rated force in cable news. The competition is not even close. A new biography argues Roger Ailes has used Fox to divide the nation.
NPR's David Folkenflik has reported extensively on Fox for this network and in his own book, "Murdoch's World." As David reports, the book, "The Loudest Voice in the Room," paints a picture of Ailes as a television news executive operating unlike any of his rivals.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Author Gabriel Sherman says Fox reflects Ailes' world view, which Sherman depicts not just as conservative but paranoid.
GABRIEL SHERMAN: It's funny how the sets on Fox are the most candy colored and bright in cable news, but the news itself is black and white. And so he has divided the country by framing headlines in ways that there are only one or two answers: Is Obama a socialist, is he a capitalist? It goes back to his network. He has divided the nation into two camps: Fox fans and Fox haters.
FOLKENFLIK: Sherman, a contributing editor at New York Magazine, reaches back to Ailes' small town beginnings in Warren, Ohio; a sickly boy with an abusive father, who grew up to be a star television talk show producer, an adviser to the White House bids of Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush, and a top executive at CNBC - all experiences that Sherman says combined in a cocktail of flash and bombast and theatricality that you see on Fox every day.
SHERMAN: And so, when you hear the phrase: The second floor wants, you know that Roger Ailes wants a certain story on the air. And that's why the producers, you see the story lines that run throughout the day: Fast and Furious, the Benghazi terror attack, the Solyndra bankruptcy. Over and over again, these story lines percolate out through the network.
FOLKENFLIK: Each story worth covering - each damaging to the Democrats and the Obama administration - and each given extraordinary treatment on the network. The motto: We Report You Decide - a marketing fiction in Sherman's telling, as Sherman argues Ailes very much wanted to tell the nation what to think: Achieving political ends by media means.
But there is another way to look at Ailes. Christopher Ruddy is the CEO of the conservative Newsmax Media group
CHRISTOPHER RUDDY: The reason that Fox is such a success is that there is a market for the news and information that he's offering.
FOLKENFLIK: Ruddy argues that Ailes is simply tapping into an already existing and legitimate resentment, against elites on both coasts, especially stories told by news and entertainment media in New York, Washington and Hollywood.
RUDDY: Take their thing about Christmas. You know, there's been an increasing trend in society to do away with saying Merry Christmas. And Fox was really the originator in bringing this up. And they have countless stories about it every Christmas season. It's a big ratings winner to talk about it. It touches a nerve with the public.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS CLIPS)
BILL O'REILLY: Thoughts on the war on Christmas.
SARA PALIN: When you start to say you can't say Merry Christmas.
O'REILLY: And you can't have Christmas carols by school choirs.
PALIN: Right.
O'REILLY: That's part of our culture.
PALIN: Well, and that's the double standard that's applied and that's what I'm not going to sit down and accept...
FOLKENFLIK: There, Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin. Sherman says there is no such true trend and that the storyline is cynical, but that Ailes actually believes Christmas is under attack and that he is fighting liberal forces on and off the air.
SHERMAN: Roger Ailes and Fox get away with so much that any other media organization would be brought to heel for. And Fox would probably be on the barricades demanding someone's head if the very same thing was found to be taking place inside, you know, The New York Times or The Washington Post.
FOLKENFLIK: Back in spring 2011, a Fox News national security analyst named K.T. McFarland traveled to Kabul to meet General David Petraeus, then overseeing U.S. operations in Afghanistan. McFarland carried an urgent message from her boss, Roger Ailes. Petraeus tells her repeatedly that he's not going to challenge President Obama for the White House in 2012, even with Ailes' promise to run his campaign.
K.T. MCFARLAND: I know, I know.
GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS: But if I ever ran, I'd take him up on his offer.
MCFARLAND: OK. Alright, so we're...
PETRAEUS: He said he would quit Fox.
MCFARLAND: I know.
FOLKENFLIK: That tape was later obtained by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward. Ailes claimed to be joking but Sherman reports Ailes was serious and had also been urging New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to run for president. Several former executives at other television news divisions said that would be a firing offense, but that Ailes is insulated; first, by Fox's huge profits and the backing of a boss who plays in politics too, media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Yet as Newsmax's Chris Ruddy notes, Ailes didn't get his favored candidate and Obama won twice.
RUDDY: So the idea if Roger Ailes got up and said: I'm going to run the Republican Party, I'm going to pick the Republican candidate for president in the primaries, I'm going to then get him elected - you know, none of that happened. So it's a bit laughable sometimes that people have this view that somehow he's controlling the Republican Party.
FOLKENFLIK: Media critics reviewing Sherman's book in Slate and The Washington Post questioned whether it proved Ailes influence in dividing the nation. Fox News's best rated show commands about one percent of the country nightly. Its ratings are falling and the average age of its audience is rising.
Sherman says that misses the point.
SHERMAN: Cable news defines where the end zones are and where the terms of debate are. And it's this kind of ambient background conversation that's on in doctors' offices, and airports and people clicking on at home. And while the numbers are small, it's always there. And so, you know, whenever there's a headline - heath care debate, debt ceiling - the impact on American life is huge.
FOLKENFLIK: Ailes and Fox refused to cooperate with Sherman and have denounced him for failing to review his findings with them before publishing. Nor did Fox respond to requests for comments for this story.
David Folkenflik, NPR News, New York.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Let's turn now to another network. NBC, it's gearing up for one of TV's flagship events: The broadcast of the Winter Olympics.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: It'll be an exciting night at Central Arena in Sarajevo. We're going to see the finals of pair's figure skating...
MONTAGNE: Of course, the kind of carefully produced primetime specials of the games that work nicely in 1984 are woefully behind the times. Now people want to watch high-profile events live - no matter the time of day, no matter where they are.
Brian Steinberg a Variety.
BRIAN STEINBERG: These days there's so much available so quickly, even the Olympics has to work a little harder to get everyone's attention. Mobile viewing, tablets, video streaming, these have become mainstream behaviors that cannot be ignored.
MONTAGNE: There is no ignoring going on over at NBC. The network has planned a thousand hours of digital coverage of the games in Sochi. It will stream all competitions and debut video coverage on Facebook.
STEINBERG: They want to maximize their result. They want to make sure people are watching. And I think that Facebook is a way of kind of generating chatter: did you see this; hey, look at this - (unintelligible) passed along.
MONTAGNE: All of the broadcast on television and on the Web add to some 1500 hours of Olympic coverage. That's good news for fans of lower profile sports that got limited broadcast-time in years past. So, all of you friends of curling, get excited.
And you're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Okay. Want to get away? About this time of year a trip to a sunny beach with warm water and a gentle surf is a very nice thought. But one might want to think twice before actually wading into the surf. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on a sea creature that can transform a beach vacation into a world of pain.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: No, this is not a story about sharks which attack maybe a few dozen people each year. This is a story about stingrays - timid, shellfish eating cousins of the shark that aren't looking to attack anyone. Yet every year stingrays inflict excruciating injuries on thousands of swimmers and surfers from the Bahamas to Bahrain to both coasts of the United States.
Last year, one of the victims was Eric Stern. He's a doctor from Washington, D.C. who likes to go surfing in California. Back in August, Stern was near Santa Monica, giving a surfing lesson to his sister. He remembers casually hopping off his board into waist-deep water.
ERIC STERN: The moment my foot hit sandy bottom, just strike. Bam. I mean immediate, instant knife-like pain.
HAMILTON: Stern's first thought was shark.
STERN: Fear taking over, I wasn't thinking stingray. I was thinking, get out of the water.
HAMILTON: Which he did in a hurry. Then Stern checked out the damaged to his foot.
STERN: The bleeding was so pronounced from what appeared to be a two to three inch gash. I still wasn't thinking stingray.
HAMILTON: He wasn't, but the lifeguards were.
STERN: One of them ran down the beach and unwrapped the towel, took a look and said, no, that's a stingray injury.
HAMILTON: The third one they'd seen that day. Stern says by that time his injury wasn't feeling like a bite or a cut anymore.
STERN: The pain had transitioned already to a much deeper, darker migrainous-type pain, almost like if you put your foot or ankle in a vice and twist it.
HAMILTON: In a lab at Cal State, Long Beach, an hour's drive south of where Stern got injured, a scientist named Chris Lowe explains why the pain was so intense. Lowe says the reason is a powerful toxin secreted by the stingray's tail.
CHRIS LOWE: That toxin is an amazing vasoconstrictor and it causes blood vessels to constrict, reducing blood flow. And what it does is it causes this intense pain sensation, a throbbing kind of aching pain sensation. And it literally takes hours to go away.
HAMILTON: But Lowe says if you've ever felt that pain, don't blame the stingray. They only sting in self-defense. And he says the round stingray that probably got Eric Stern is especially shy. Lowe just happens to have one in a tank.
LOWE: We can pull this ray out and take a look at it. Would you like to do that?
HAMILTON: Yeah, that would be great.
But first he gives me a quiz.
LOWE: Okay. So we're going to play the game, find the ray.
HAMILTON: That doesn't look like a ray. That doesn't look like a ray. That's a crab 'cause it's crawling sideways. That guy over there?
LOWE: No.
HAMILTON: No? Which one is it?
LOWE: 'Cause you see, this is the name of their game. The name of their game is disappearing.
HAMILTON: Now I can just barely see a faint outline in the tank's sandy bottom. It's about the size of a dinner plate. I can also make out two eyes and two nostril-like openings called spiracles. Lowe scoops the stingray into a net and shows me how Eric Stern's foot got filleted.
LOWE: So right at the end of the tail is the spine. Trying to do this without getting stung. And you can see it's fully intact. There's the spine there. And it rests in a sheath right at the base of the tail. So when you are to harass this ray or accidentally step on it, it has the ability to quickly flick its tail up. And that barb comes up like an arrow point.
HAMILTON: Piercing your flesh and delivering the toxin. The spines on round rays are maybe an inch long, but Lowe says other stingrays, like the Australian Bull Ray, have spines big enough to kill a person.
LOWE: Those stingrays are enormous. Their spines are the size of a steak knife. They're huge.
HAMILTON: It was Bull Ray on Australia's Great Barrier Reef that killed the wildlife expert Steve Irwin in 2006. Irwin was best known for hosting "The Crocodile Hunter" TV series.
LOWE: Believe it or not, Steve Irwin was not the only fatality. I mean, usually in Australia, maybe about every five or six years or so, somebody is killed by one of those large stingrays.
HAMILTON: There aren't good statistics on stingray injuries, but what data there are suggest that thousands of people are stung each year worldwide and that the number may be rising. Lowe says in some places stingray populations appear to be growing because there are fewer predators, like sharks and seals and sea lions. Also, more and more people around the world are spending time at the beach.
LOWE: I get calls from resort owners on the East Coast, even in the Middle East, where they have really high-end resorts. They have stingrays in those areas. They have had people injured, and they call us up asking us what should they do.
HAMILTON: People have been asking that question for a long time at Seal Beach, which is just a couple of miles from Chris Lowe's lab. Lowe thinks that about 16,000 rays live along just few hundred yards of shoreline here, and the area reports more stingray injuries than any place on Earth, about 400 a year.
Take a stroll down Seal Beach and there's a good chance you'll run into this guy.
MICHAEL PLESS: Hi. I'm Michael Pless from M&M Surfing School.
HAMILTON: With a truck up there.
PLESS: With a truck up there, yes. I've been here for 30 years.
HAMILTON: Ever been stung?
PLESS: I'm known as the king of stingray stings. I've been stung 21 times.
HAMILTON: The parking lots around Seal Beach have signs warning about stingrays. But Pless says he still gives all of his students a special lesson in how to do the stingray shuffle.
PLESS: I generally tell the students to shuffle your feet. If you step on something gushy, move your feet very quickly, jump up, okay? Otherwise the stingrays will sting you.
HAMILTON: The lifeguards at Seal Beach also try to warn bathers. But Nick Bolin, a marine safety officer, says a lot people still learn about stingrays the hard way.
NICK BOLIN: Usually our tower guards will spot them seconds after they've been stung because they'll come hopping out of the water and usually send a person from the group to run up towards the lifeguard tower.
HAMILTON: Bolin says then, assuming the wound isn't too serious, the lifeguards begin a familiar routine.
BOLIN: We'll take them back to our lifeguard headquarters where we have a dedicated lifeguard assigned to a stingray shift and we soak the foot in hot water until their pain subsides enough that they can go on their own way.
HAMILTON: Bolin says when the beach is busy and the tide is low, there may be dozens of victims.
BOLIN: We've had days where our hot water heater actually can't even keep up with the amount stings.
HAMILTON: Scientists say hot water is critical because heat neutralizes the stingray toxin, and that's about the only way to reduce the pin. Just take it from Eric Stern, the surfing doctor.
STERN: The moment you take your foot out of the hot water, the pain just shoots back up within, you know, five to 10 seconds, and the moment you put it back in the hot water, another five to 10 seconds and it's tolerable again. It's really quite remarkable.
HAMILTON: Unfortunately for Stern, several hours of hot water treatment wasn't the end of his stingray adventure. The gash on his foot had to be sewn up at a local emergency room. And once the wound healed, Stern realized he had another problem.
STERN: I began to notice that I didn't have any sensation in the dorsum or top of my foot around the base of my fourth and fifth toes.
HAMILTON: The sting had caused nerve damage, and Stern eventually needed surgery. But he's better now and ready to get back in the waves.
STERN: I'm already eagerly awaiting my next trip to Southern California. But this time I think I'm going to stay on my board until I'm out in deep waters.
HAMILTON: In the meantime, Stern is helping Los Angeles County lifeguards write an informational pamphlet they can give to people who get stung. Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
I'm looking at a headline from The Onion. A man watching football is pictured. The headline is: Defense Needs to Be More Physical, Reports Man Slumped on Couch for Past Five Hours. Well, if you're a couch potato, new devices on the market will allow you to use even less physical effort. That's thanks to high tech headgear that allows people to control objects with their minds. Amy Standen of KQED reports makers of these products say the idea is to train ourselves to become more focused.
JOHNNY LIU: OK. So this is the Mindwave Mobile.
AMY STANDEN, BYLINE: Johnny Liu, from the San Jose company Neurosky is holding up an EEG headset. EEG is short for electro encephalogram and it picks up patterns in the brain's electrical activity - like what happens during sleep, or an epileptic seizure. And some other things too.
LIU: How focused somebody is, how calm and relaxed somebody is.
STANDEN: In recent years, these headsets have gotten cheaper and easier to use. The Mindwave Mobile costs about a hundred dollars. And that opens up the possibility of connecting EEG headsets to consumer gadgets. Like the one Liu brought with him today. It's a toy called the Orbit Brain Controlled Helicopter - which pretty much describes it. It's about eight inches wide, with three small propellers. Liu straps on his headset and tries it out.
LIU: So I'm driving up my attention level past a certain point.
STANDEN: The more he concentrates, the higher the helicopter soars.
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LIU: And that will allow the helicopter...
STANDEN: And then crashes onto my face.
LIU: I'm so sorry.
STANDEN: Next, I'm up. Liu tells me to focus on the helicopter.
LIU: As if you actually had these had these telekinetic powers.
STANDEN: Which I clearly don't. It's not really working, is it? OK.
LIU: ...all the way.
STANDEN: You can't get frustrated with the helicopter because that's different from concentration. What works is to focus on just one thing, really concentrate on it. This amplifies what are called beta waves inside the brain, which are picked up by the EEG which in turn flies the helicopter.
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STANDEN: In my case, for about three seconds. There's another EEG gadget that works better, at least on the radio.
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RICHARD WARP: The beat is quite fast because I'm quite sort of excited.
STANDEN: This is composer and inventor Richard Warp. And he designed a program called Neurodisco. It also connects to an EEG headset. But instead of flying a helicopter, a Neurodisco translates brain electrical patterns into music.
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STANDEN: At first the beat is heavy and the notes are kind of all over the place. But as Warp focuses his mind, the beat sort of recedes in the background. The notes are closer together, more shimmery. As with the helicopter, the idea here is to reach a deep meditative state. Warp says he's always been an anxious person. He wanted to feel more grounded. And that's part of what led him to work on this project.
WARP: I personally find it somewhat difficult to get into a relaxed state. What I was interested in doing is to create an environment where people can really commune with their internal state.
STANDEN: Commune with an internal state. You hear that kind of thing a lot in this industry. And at this, even Richard Warp has to laugh, because is more technology really the thing we need to help us relax?
WARP: You're doing the same thing as a meditator, a Buddhist monk might do. It's just we in the West maybe need a device to do it.
STANDEN: And it's true. You can't just tell everyone to go meditate.
ADAM GAZZALEY: A lot of people don't have access to that or they find it very difficult.
STANDEN: Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at University of California San Francisco, says you can even imagine EEG games one day helping kids with attention problems learn to focus better.
GAZZALEY: They put on a mobile EEG cap that helps guide the game so that it's challenging those processes that need the most help.
STANDEN: Technology helped get us into this mess, maybe technology can help get us out. For NPR News, I'm Amy Standen in San Francisco.
INSKEEP: This is NPR News.
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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Sled-racing at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, next month, will look very different from races at the 2010 games in Vancouver. Both games were marred by the death of one athlete and by many other serious crashes.
As North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann reports, the controversy in Vancouver is still sending shock waves through the sport.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: The first thing you have to know about sled racing is that it's little like NASCAR. Tracks built all over the world, including the new one in Sochi, are really different.
STEVE HOLCOMB: They all kind of have their own personalities. And each engineer is different. Has their - puts their own like mentality and mindset into designing it.
MANN: That's Steve Holcomb who won a gold medal in 4-man bobsled at the Vancouver Olympics four years ago. That track on a mountainside in Whistler was designed to revolutionize the sport, making it more aggressive, boosting top speeds from around 85 miles an hour to more than 95 miles an hour.
Justin Olsen, a bobsledder who raced on Holcomb's team in Vancouver says every run in 2010 was about survival.
JUSTIN OLSEN: Hold onto something, bite your teeth, close your eyes, do something, we're either going to make it or we're not. Most tracks you go through the most difficult portion kind of early on. And Vancouver just, you know, it just never lets up.
MANN: John Morgan, a former bobsledder who now works as a sled racing analyst for sports networks, says that high-octane, X-games edge was by design.
JOHN MORGAN: Canadians wanted to build the biggest, baddest, fastest track ever and they did.
MANN: Morgan says sled racing is inherently risky - danger is part of the sport. His own brother died in a bobsled accident in Italy in the early '80s. But Morgan says there's agreement now, that for all but the top athletes, Vancouver's track was too aggressive.
MORGAN: It's a great track for the elite top 10, 15 athletes in each discipline. But it was too much for the, what I call second level athlete that qualifies into the Olympic Games.
MANN: The design sparked horror and controversy when an inexperienced young luge racer from the Republic of Georgia crashed on a training run. Howard Berkes reported on the tragedy for NPR.
HOWARD BERKES, BYLINE: The violent death of 21-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili prompted Olympic organizers to reconfigure the luge competition, raising to 12 feet the side wall that the young Georgian catapulted over at 90 miles an hour into a steel pole.
MANN: Steve Holcomb, captain of America's bobsled team, says fall-out from Vancouver also changed the way sledding sports will look on the new track in Sochi.
HOLCOMB: Sochi, they were in the process of building it as Vancouver was taking place. Sochi was supposed to be faster than Vancouver.
MANN: Before Georgian sledder's death, the plan was for bobsleds in Sochi to hit speeds topping 100 miles an hour. Holcomb says that escalation, that international one-upmanship, was quickly scrapped.
HOLCOMB: They told Sochi to tone it down a little bit. So they actually had to change the design a little bit in putting three uphill sections to slow the sled down. Not good for the spectators, probably - they like the crashes.
MANN: So the Sochi track's track design is extremely rare in sliding sports. Most tracks don't even have one uphill section, Sochi has three. Justin Olsen says viewers won't see as many wrecks or the same kind of breakneck speed, but they will see sled drivers navigating incredibly complex twists and turns.
OLSEN: There's this one curve, you're going uphill and into a curve that kind of peaks and then goes back down hill. So you think about it, you're losing speed, losing speed, losing speed, then when you go into the curve, you lose more speed but you got to time it coming out.
MANN: The Sochi track is so unique that American sledders worry it could give a huge home-court advantage to the Russians, who've had more time to practice on the course and perfect their runs.
For NPR News, I'm Brian Mann.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. We're embarking this week on stories about Latino Americans. They're a growing part of the U.S. population with evermore influence on politics, culture, and more and we will be using a new survey of Latinos in America to guide our storytelling. It was conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health.
And to give us just a taste of what we found - because this was a very ambitious poll and as I said, we're going to be using it throughout the week - is Gene Demby. He's the lead blogger for NPR's Code Switch team. Good morning.
GENE DEMBY, BYLINE: Hello. Good morning, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Good morning. So first off, just who did you talk to in the poll? When I say ambitious, what am I saying?
DEMBY: So this is a really, really big poll sample size. There are about 1,500 people which is a sample size big enough to let us actually compare the answers from different populations. So there were Cuban-Americans, there were Mexican-Americans, Dominican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and there were Central Americans and South Americans in the poll sample.
MONTAGNE: All right. So just a couple of samples of what sorts of things you were asking them.
DEMBY: They were broad lifestyle questions about religious affiliation, about income, about quality of life, about the issues that were of most concern to them, about homeownership. We just wanted to get kind of a sense of what people felt about their lives.
MONTAGNE: Well, so give us the big takeaway of how people saw themselves.
DEMBY: You're probably going to hear a lot about the Latino voter and the Latino consumer, but one of the things this poll really underscored was just how many distinctions we tend to flatten when we use terms like that. These are groups who live in different parts of the country, who have different countries of origin, who have different religious affiliations and different ethnic heritages.
And so people had different preferences as to whether they identified by their country of origin or as Hispanic or Latino.
MONTAGNE: Hmm. So even what you call yourself might be different, depending on who you are within that community. So give us a couple of examples of the distinctions that these different Latino-Hispanic groups were making between themselves.
DEMBY: Right. So let's look at the Mexican-American population. They are by far the biggest group in our sample size, which is reflective of the reality of American life. They're the biggest Latino group in the country. They're nearly three times as likely as people of Central American or South American or Dominican heritage to say that they were born in the U.S.
Even though Mexican-Americans are the largest immigrant group in the country, when it came to something like the American Dream, right, nearly a third of our Mexican-American respondents said that they'd already achieved it. And a solid majority of Mexicans said they had not achieved it, but they would eventually. They were also more likely to say that their personal finances were in good or excellent shape.
More so than, for example, Cuban Americans who are, otherwise, ahead on a bunch of issues. They were more likely to own their own homes, they were more likely to have earned a college degree or more.
MONTAGNE: But they were worried about their finances a little bit.
DEMBY: Right. Nearly half of Cuban-Americans said that their finances were in poor shape. And six in 10 employed Cubans said they were concerned that either they or someone in their family will be out of work in the next 12 months.
MONTAGNE: Hmm. So those are the sorts of distinctions that will come out in the stories we're going to be hearing this week.
DEMBY: Right. There were also some distinctions between people who described themselves as immigrants and people who were native born. Immigrants were significantly more likely to say that they felt that their children would have better educational and economic opportunities than they had themselves.
MONTAGNE: Gene Demby is from Code Switch, our team that covers race, ethnicity, and culture. Gene, thanks very much.
DEMBY: Thanks for having me, Renee.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now, along with those questions Gene mentioned, about finances and the American Dream, our joint poll on Latino Americans also asked about health. We're told that Latinos can be genetically predisposed to diabetes. Environment and diet can increase that risk. NPR's Patty Neighmond went to Boyle Heights in east Los Angeles, a neighborhood dominated by Mexican-Americans.
PATTI NEIGHMOND, BYLINE: Rebecca Martinez-Rocha says she's 100 percent East L.A.
REBECCA MARTINEZ-ROCHA: I was born there, raised there, and still live there.
NEIGHMOND: And like many of her friends and family members, Martinez-Rocha struggles with her weight. At one point she was extremely obese.
MARTINEZ-ROCHA: I was well over 320 pounds. I don't think I realized it at the time, whether it was denial or I just stopped getting on the scale. I was morbidly obese.
NEIGHMOND: And, as it turns out, she was prediabetic, a diagnosis she received at the local health clinic.
MARTINEZ-ROCHA: I wasn't aware of the fact that I was ill. I figured since I was relatively young - I was in my late 20s, early 30s - and it was kind of one of those a-ha moments in life where you look at it and you put it all together and you think how did I get here?
NEIGHMOND: Her doctor, Anne Peters, is a diabetes specialist who also heads a diabetes research program at the University of Southern California.
DR. ANNE PETERS: Type two diabetes is the plague of this Latino community. Individuals here are getting diabetes at rates we've not seen before.
NEIGHMOND: Rates of about one in 10 people.
PETERS: I have seen more suffering from diabetes; from blindness, from kidney failure, from heart disease, from amputations. Untreated, diabetes is awful.
NEIGHMOND: Peters says if nothing changes, the rate of diabetes could rise over the coming decades to one-in-four. Peters told Martinez-Rocha she was on her way to becoming an insulin-dependent diabetic. Martinez-Rocha got really scared and made major changes. She lost 160 pounds. But many patients don't do that, in large part because pre-diabetes is silent. And if they don't go to a doctor and get their blood sugar measured they'll never know, which is a shame, says Peters, because pre-diabetes can be turned around.
PETERS: If somebody has pre-diabetes, they need to lose weight and they don't need to lose a lot of weight. It may only be 10 to 15, 20 pounds. It doesn't mean they have to become skinny.
NEIGHMOND: But weight is key, says Peters. Studies show that just moderate weight loss can reduce diabetes risk by half. Now, losing weight is hard for everyone. But Martinez-Rocha says it's even harder when you live in a neighborhood that offers lots of high-fat, high-sugar food.
MARTINEZ-ROCHA: Drive around my neighborhood, every corner you'll see a taco stand, a fast-food restaurant, a panaria(ph) which is, you know, sweet-bread store. You'll see a place that sells tamales. You'll see a place that sells some sort of other desert or fried food.
NEIGHMOND: In our poll with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard School of Public Health, we found that one-in-five Mexican-Americans say they have poor to fair access to fresh fruits and vegetables.
Alex Ortega is a professor of public health at UCLA. He calls neighborhoods like this food swaps, where corner markets typically don't offer healthy food.
ALEX ORTEGA: They'll sell lottery tickets, liquor, cigarettes. They might sell some fruits and vegetables, but they're typically in the back of the store and they tend to be of very poor quality.
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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Spanish spoken)
NEIGHMOND: About a month ago at the Euclid Market in East L.A., storeowner Maria Avila worked with Ortega and local high school students to transform store. They added windows, a new paint job and, most importantly, healthy food. Now, when you walk in, the first things you see are fresh fruits and vegetables.
ORTEGA: Fresh tomatoes, you see some squash, you see avocados, you see apples, you know, a wide variety of fruits and vegetables that were not here couple of months ago.
NEIGHMOND: This is the fourth corner store in the area to be converted. It's part of a special project at UCLA. Ortega says storeowners tell him they have more customers. They're selling more fruits and vegetables and they're making more money - all around good news. But the big question, of course, is: Will it make a difference in the health of the neighborhood and the epidemic of diabetes.
Nineteen-year-old college freshman DeeDee Barba has been part of the store conversion project for two years. She's also learned about nutrition.
DEEDEE BARBA: We've always liked salads though. Like, that's actually been a big thing in our family - we do like salads a lot. But, you know, we would always eat them with dressing. And that's like, you know, when we started finding out, like, it's not so good with dressing and stuff. So we usually are salads with like, olive oil and lemon now. That's actually really good.
NEIGHMOND: For 17-year-old high school senior Steven Cardona, the family diet has changed dramatically.
STEVEN CARDONA: Before we would, you know, go to like Jack in the Box or something. You know, eats dinner with whatever. But the other day, we had some steamed vegetables, rice and a piece of chicken on the side. And, you know, little things like that, you know.
NEIGHMOND: Researcher Alex Ortega says the hope is the availability of healthy food in low-income neighborhoods like this will make a difference in rates of obesity and diabetes in the Latino community.
Patti Neighmond, NPR News.
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INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
On a Tuesday, it's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments today in a case that could have big implications for public employee unions. The high court will be considering whether states may recognize a union to represent private health care workers who assist the elderly and disabled in their homes rather than in state institutions.
NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: To understand why a growing number of states actually want to recognize a union to represent home health care workers, listen to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, talking about her state's Medicaid program for adults with disabilities.
LISA MADIGAN: The home services program has about 28,000 home care aides, and these people are working in homes all over the state. There isn't a centralized workplace, and the goal for the state here is creating and retaining a professional group of home care aides to meet the needs of what is an ever-increasing population of older people with disabilities. And we need to do that in a cost-effective manner.
TOTENBERG: Prior to the state recognizing the union in Illinois, turnover was huge, leaving large gaps in coverage for disabled adults. In the 10 years since unionization, though, wages have nearly doubled; from $7 to $13 an hour. Training and supervision has increased, and workers now have health insurance. It's not a surprise, then, that retention has greatly increased. What may surprise many is that the home care system is cheaper than nursing home care, with savings of $632 million, according to the state.
Nobody has to join the union, but non-union members - and there are three, in this case - do have to pay the costs of negotiating and administering the contract. Under long-established labor law, when a majority of workers vote to approve a union, those who do not join cannot be forced to pay for political activities of the union. But if the union is accepted by the public employer - as the service employees union was in Illinois - non-union members still have to pay their fair share of the expenses of negotiating a contract. That's to prevent non-members from free riding on the due of members.
For some workers, however, even that is too much. William Messenger, of the National Right to Work Committee, is their lawyer.
WILLIAM MESSENGER: They just don't want to deal with this organization whatsoever.
TOTENBERG: Or as Pam Harris, who cares for her son at home, puts it...
PAM HARRIS: I object to my home being a union workplace.
TOTENBERG: Harris, however, is part of a separate group of workers, most of whom care for family members at home. They voted down union representation. Her only claim in this case is that she fears there will be another vote.
Those who care for the bulk of disabled adults are quite different. Not only did they approve union representation, most care for people who are not relatives.
Those challenging the union representation have several claims. First, they say that the state is not their employer, since under this program, the individual patients - known as customers - hire and fire their own aides. The state replies that the aides are trained and supervised by the state, paid twice a month by the state, and that the state can fire them.
The objector's second claim is that the union is little more than a lobbying group. Again, Bill Messenger.
MESSENGER: Wages paid to government employees should be deemed a matter of public concern.
TOTENBERG: So, you're saying, in essence, because they're public employees, they can't have an effective union, because they're dealing with the government, and the government, per se, involves political issues.
MESSENGER: Yes, to a large degree, yes.
TOTENBERG: In other words, messenger views bargaining with the government for wages and health care as a political act.
MESSENGER: So I reject the notion that the SEIU somehow got higher reimbursement rates for them, and that can be a justification. Illinois could raise the reimbursement rates unilaterally.
PAUL SMITH: There's three people who are complaining, out of 27,000.
TOTENBERG: That's Paul Smith, the lawyer who will argue for the state and the union in the Supreme Court today.
SMITH: Not one of the plaintiffs has turned down the wages they've gotten as a result of the union negotiations, or even said there's anything that the union is trying to get for them that they don't approve of.
TOTENBERG: And Smith notes that no one here claims that any of the fair share money has gone for lobbying or political campaigning.
Still, Bill Messenger of the Right to Work Committee sees it differently.
MESSENGER: The question is: Can individuals be forced to support a union if they don't want to? And our position is no.
TOTENBERG: In the end, what makes this case remarkable is that the Supreme Court, for decades, has allowed public employee unions to operate as long as non-members are not forced to pay for political activities.
But the current conservative court has not been enamored of labor unions, hinting just two years ago that it might be time to revisit decades of doctrine on this issue. Paul Smith.
SMITH: If they say you can't have an exclusive representative union, that would be a stake in the heart, not just of unions in the public sector, but all unions.
TOTENBERG: And if the court were to say unions could not have a mandatory fair share contribution...
SMITH: You'd have a serious free rider problem. People have no incentive to pay their share of the costs if they can free ride on everybody else. So, this would substantially weaken unions.
TOTENBERG: A decision in the case is expected by summer. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
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Nestled in a barren, narrow valley in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a small community of Palestinian herders was raising sheep and goats. They made salty cheese sold in town. They were doing this in an area that Israel long ago declared to be a closed military zone. Recently, NPR's Emily Harris paid them a visit, and as it turned out, she arrived just hours before the Israeli soldiers did.
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EMILY HARRIS, BYLINE: It's 20 minutes by four-wheel drive up a rocky canyon to Khirbet 'Ein Karzaliyah, a near-barren plain with a small spring. A handful of families live here, including more than a dozen children and over 700 sheep and goats.
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HARRIS: Meshchas Bne Menneh unzips the door to her home, a large tent on a sturdy square frame. She flicks on a battery-powered lamp and lights a propane burner for tea. Outside, children fill buckets of fresh milk.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHILDREN LAUGHING)
HARRIS: This land is in an Israeli military zone. The herders have been struggling with Israeli authorities off and on for a decade. In December, an Israeli court rejected their petition to stay. Meshchas Bne Menneh says the women and children live in town part of the year, but this is home, because of the sheep.
MESHCHAS BNE MENNEH: (Through translator) Our life is around the sheep. We have no other income source. This is our way of living.
HARRIS: The next morning, Israeli soldiers bulldozed the tents into tangled piles. Guy Inbar, spokesman for the Israeli administration in the West Bank, says the homes were put up without permits.
GUY INBAR: All of them were removed after the high court of justice had denied their petition and after the end of the 30 days that were given for appeals.
HARRIS: Later that day, Meshchas said the military came early.
MENNEH: (Through translator) We were trying to get our belongings out and dismantle our tent without really destroying it. They didn't allow us.
HARRIS: As she talks, Meshchas keeps doing what she does every day. She unwraps bundles of soft, fresh cheese, squeezes out extra water and wraps them up again. Belongings that weren't destroyed were arranged on a rug, like yesterday. Now, there were just no walls and no roof.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAMMERING)
HARRIS: But help arrived. The International Committee of the Red Cross put up new tents. Herder Atteyah Bne Menneh says the community's lawyer advised setting up these new tents at least a hundred yards away from the old sites.
ATTEYAH BNE MENNEH: (Through translator) Because if we build there, they can destroy immediately, because they already have the order. Here, it will take time. They will bring us the first paper, then the second, and our lawyer will also do something to buy time. And it could take two years.
HARRIS: Instead, it takes just four days until the military confiscated the Red Cross tents. The herder families spent that night under the stars and plan to stay in this valley. Emily Harris, NPR News.
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The American Postal Workers Union is fighting back against a deal that puts U.S. Postal Service counters inside Staples stores. The Postal Service is facing a deficit and increased competition, so it's developing retail partnerships with companies like Staples.
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The Postal Service says this adds to convenience, since people could buy stamps and mail packages while shopping, even while the regular post office is closed. The controversy comes because the counters are staffed by Staples employees instead of postal workers.
MONTAGNE: The Postal Workers Union wants the counters run by its members. Union leaders wrote a letter to store managers reading, quote, "Only U.S. Postal Service postal employees are sworn to uphold the sanctity of the mail." They had that message hand-delivered.
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Scientists are celebrating after receiving a signal from a spacecraft on a very long journey. The Rosetta is traveling through the heavens to study a comet in more detail than ever before. As NPR's Rob Stein reports, the Rosetta spacecraft's call home meant the robot onboard had successfully awakened itself from a long hibernation, and is now on course to achieve its historic mission.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: The European Space Agency launched Rosetta nearly 10 years ago. The 6,400-ton, unmanned spacecraft's goal was ambitious: to orbit and study a comet as it hurtles through space. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: The spacecraft weights 6,400 pounds, not tons.] One of the mission's directors, Gerhard Schwehm, says scientists think that could provide exciting clues to how Earth and other planets formed and even, possibly, how life began.
GERHARD SCHWEHM: Comets are the messengers that bring material that we had at the beginning of the evolution of the planetary system.
STEIN: But Rosetta had to take a long, circuitous journey to catch up to the comet. The trip would take Rosetta around the sun almost four times, through the asteroid belt twice, and skittering close to Mars once and the Earth three times. To preserve power, Rosetta was placed into hibernation, in 2011. Finally, on Monday, Rosetta was programmed to wake itself up and call home. Scientists around the world waited anxiously for Rosetta's signal. Tension mounted when the window opened to receive the transmission and there was nothing, just silence. But finally, the signal arrived, and a celebration erupted at mission control in Germany.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERS, APPLAUSE AT MISSION CONTROL)
STEIN: Rosetta now continues its journey to rendezvous with a comet in August. Rosetta will even, hopefully, do something never tried before: Drop a small probe to land on the comet in November, to drill into the surface. French scientist Jean-Pierre Bibring says that should yield a wealth of data.
JEAN-PIERRE BIBRING: We've been to comets far away. We know what a comet is. We never landed. And we are absolutely convinced that when we do that, then the entire reality of a comet will finally be revealed.
STEIN: And that will - hopefully - reveal many of the secrets comets carry with them as they journey through space.
Rob Stein, NPR News.
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In India, the latest thing in politics is the common man. That sprawling Democracy - the biggest in the world - also has a big reputation for corruption. And with a national election coming up, the many Indians who are weary of corruption may be poised to throw out the ruling Congress Party, partly because the Congress Party faces a stiff challenge from its usual big rival, but also because a new political player has captured the public imagination. It's fascinating stuff, and we turn to NPR's Julie McCarthy in New Delhi to find out more. Good morning.
JULIE MCCARTHY, BYLINE: Good morning, Renee.
MONTAGNE: And, Julie, we're talking here about a new party that's making national news. Tell us more about it.
MCCARTHY: Yes, yes. This is a huge anti-incumbency year here in India, and the ascendance of what's called the Aam Aadami Party - which translates as Common Man - is all part of that, perhaps the leading edge of that wedge. They were unexpectedly voted into power in December to run the local government in the capital. Delhites are fed up with violence against women and with corruption. The infamous Delhi gang rape of 2012 still reverberates here. The 2010 Commonwealth Games here in Delhi ran into trouble - lots of corruption - and sullied the name for a lot of people who live here. And the AAP - this Common Man Party - their style has also gained followers. These local officials now want no security entourage. They refuse the big houses that Indian politicians get. In fact, as we speak, Renee, the newly elected chief minister of Delhi - which is like the governor of the capital city - Arvind Kejriwal, has spent the night in the streets leading a sit-in against the central government. This is confrontational politics with the central authorities.
MONTAGNE: So, he is the - as you just said - chief minister of Delhi. And he's actually sitting in the capital, Delhi, protesting against the national government. But what exactly are they protesting?
MCCARTHY: Well, Kejriwal has taken up the cudgel of reforming the Delhi police, which is under the national government right now. And his party says, you know, the police, they're unresponsive at best and complicit with criminal elements at worst. And he wants several of these officers who allegedly shielded offenders, criminal offenders, to be suspended. And he wants the police basically under local control, not the national government's. And so Kejriwal and his ministers have hit the streets and told police and honest cops to join them. And this is like, you know, the mayor of Washington, D.C., Renee, calling on Washingtonians to rise up against the federal government over home rule. It's novel stuff here, and it goes to the heart of who governs whom and how.
MONTAGNE: OK. But he's in a sit-in, in a protest camp, of sorts, but he's still doing the government business. Do people that he's serving buy that?
MCCARTHY: Well, the headlines say things like: "Delhi Government Gone Missing." The chief minister insists, look, I'm working at this sit-in, I'm - files are being brought to me. But it is a bit of a media circus. And you've got critics saying he's behaving more like the chief agitator than the chief minister. When central Delhi is shut down, the metros are closed, and there's worry that these protests, if they continue, are going to disrupt the Republic Day parade on the 26th, which honors the date the Indian constitution came into force. But on the other hand, this new party is saying, look, under that constitution, we have a right to be heard. And their claim is that Gandhi was called a disruptor. Gandhi was called an anarchist when he challenged the establishment. We're not anarchists. We're democrats with a small D. You know, but all this good will that swept them to power, Renee, could evaporate over all this disruption.
MONTAGNE: Well, what do you think? Can the performance of this Common Man Party in Delhi have an impact on the national landscape?
MCCARTHY: Well, no one really knows that yet. They've only been in power for about three weeks. But their membership across the country is growing, and their uncompromising message on corruption has caught the public mood in a country that's fed up with self-enrichment by the political class. And the fact that the opposition BJP Party and the ruling Congress Party - two very traditional parties - are running a bit scared of this new kid on the block and its ability to plug into public disgust over business as usual may suggest that they're doing something right.
MONTAGNE: OK. Thanks very much, Julie.
MCCARTHY: Thank you.
MONTAGNE: NPR's Julie McCarthy, speaking to us from New Delhi.
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Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep with best wishes to Alex Benda. He graduates this spring from the University of Michigan at Flint. He's a business major and he's making a business of his graduation. Mr. Benda says he is selling advertising space on his graduation cap. He wants 300 bucks for an ad that's one square inch. It may be hard to see an ad of that size from the audience. But if he could sell 100 ads, he would pay off his student loans.
You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
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The Japanese cuisine known as washoku was recently named by the United Nations an Intangible Cultural Heritage. That's a craft or creative skill passed on from generation to generation. Tofu, mochi and miso are a few examples, but it's the buckwheat noodle or soba that many consider the humble jewel of Japanese cuisine.
It's not easy to find in the U.S. But as Sasa Woodruff reports, one woman in Los Angeles is helping preserve the craft of making soba.
SASA WOODRUFF, BYLINE: In a cooking classroom off a busy street in L.A., Sonoko Sakai, is teaching about the simplicity of making buckwheat noodles.
SONOKO SAKAI: Basically, soba is only two things: flour and water.
WOODRUFF: A handful of students gather around the slender Sakai as she shows them how to mix the flour and water together.
SAKAI: We want to distribute the water into the cells of the buckwheat and wheat flour as quickly as we can.
WOODRUFF: The key ingredient is buckwheat and despite its name is not part of the wheat family.
SAKAI: This is what buckwheat looks like.
WOODRUFF: The triangular brown seeds are actually more closely related to rhubarb or sorrel.
SAKAI: See how it's white?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Oh, yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Yeah.
SAKAI: That's the flour.
WOODRUFF: One of the students who came to the class is Mikie Shioya. She's a native of Japan and wants to eat authentic soba here in the U.S.
MIKIE SHIOYA: Soba is my favorite food.
WOODRUFF: But finding genuine versions in the U.S. is difficult. The packaged noodles available in grocery stores are made mostly of wheat flour. And only a handful of restaurants stateside serve it up in the traditional way, meaning the chefs make the dough and cut and boil the noodles in front of customers. Shioya hopes to recreate that taste in her own kitchen.
SHIOYA: I don't know anybody who makes soba at home.
(LAUGHTER)
SHIOYA: But if you live in Japan, like, you can just go to the really good soba place. But here in L.A., there's nowhere to go, so like...
SAKAI: You get so desperate you have to make it.
(LAUGHTER)
SHIOYA: Yeah, you have to make it.
WOODRUFF: Sakai explains the beloved noodle is a Japanese creation, unlike, say, the Ramen noodle, which originated in China.
SAKAI: It came to Japan as a porridge. And the Buddhist monks who studied in China, had it during their long, meditative journeys and they brought it back to Japan. And the people in Japan turned it into noodles.
WOODRUFF: From start to finish, it takes Sakai only 15 minutes to make and cook the noodles from scratch. She can't imagine doing it any other way. For her, there's a joy in making something by hand. And while Sakai loves the taste, soba is more than just food, it's an art form.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHOPPING)
SAKAI: It's a rhythm.
WOODRUFF: Sakai and the her students cut the noodles into long, slender strips as thin as matchsticks. They're dunked in boiling water for just a minute and then shocked cold in an ice bath.
The students get a new appreciation for the subtle flavor as they taste it plain, in broth and with soybean powder.
SAKAI: It's very much like wine 'cause it's like eating fresh fruit and you don't want to mask it with other things. So, yes, it's a very bland flavor. But if you acquire the taste for it and you begin to really appreciate the depth of soba, of buckwheat and the work of the artisans
WOODRUFF: And Sakai is going beyond just crafting and teaching soba, she's learning to grow buckwheat and even bought a stone mill to make her own flour.
For NPR New, I'm Sasa Woodruff.
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This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
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And I'm Steve Inskeep.
The violence in Iraq is getting even worse. To recap here, the ongoing Syrian civil war next door created lawless areas where Muslim extremists - Sunni Muslim extremists - from both countries could operate and find safe havens, which helped fuel a wave of hundreds of bombings in Iraq.
Let's talk a little bit more about what's going on there. We're joined from Baghdad now by Prashant Rao of the French Press Agency or AFP. Welcome back to the program.
PRASHANT RAO: Hi.
INSKEEP: I want to understand what's happening here. There's been a series of bombings just in the last day or so and the government seems to be responding with airstrikes. Is it really that intense?
RAO: Well, the reports conflict in terms of how exactly the government is responding. But you're right to say that there have been numerous bombings. I mean we at AFP have confirmed that at least 25 car bombs in the past week in only Baghdad. I mean there have been several other bombings north of the capital and cities such as Tikrit, Kirkuk, Mosul, Tuz Khurmatu.
In terms of how the government is responding though, it varies depending on the area. In Baghdad, they have locked out a lot of areas. They've sort of increased checkpoints and they've sort of tighten those checkpoints. But in Anbar, the response have been a combination of the deploying of U.S.- supplied Hellfire missiles and also clashes in some towns in between Ramadi and Fallujah, where the Iraqi army and Iraqi police, allied tribal fighters are all looking to take back territory that the government lost about three weeks ago.
INSKEEP: Let's remember here Anbar. Of course, that's the Sunni-dominated province west of Baghdad. You're saying that's where some of the heaviest fighting is taking place. So is this sectarian violence Sunni versus Shia?
RAO: Well, it might be slightly over-generalizing it to say it's sectarian. But there is a perception of sectarianism, in that the Iraqis security forces are perceived in Sunni areas to be a Shia force, especially some of the more elite fighting units. And, of course, Anbar, as you say, is a predominantly Sunni province - so it takes on that color. That is certainly part of the perception.
INSKEEP: Here's another thing that I'm wondering. You mentioned 25 car bombs in a very short period in Baghdad alone. That causes me to wonder are there multiple groups that are lashing out at the same time. Or is there some coordinated offensive going on here that's directed by a single hand or a few hands?
RAO: It's probably a little bit of both. If you talk to analysts that (unintelligible) Iraqi security officials, the situation in Anbar seems to be pushed by multiple different fighting forces, from tribal fighters who are opposed to the Iraqi government to a large group of fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Islamic State of Iraq in the Levant. But there also other sort of old insurgent groups, like the 1920 Revolutionary Brigade; fighting groups like that that have reemerged after sort of long periods of being dormant.
But when it comes to Baghdad, the kind of attacks that have been carried out in Baghdad are typically the hallmark of the Islamic State of Iraq in the Levant, in that they were coordinated. There was use of car bombs in multiple areas within a short period of time. All of the sort of three waves of attacks in Baghdad in the past week have seen at least a half-dozen car bombs in multiple different neighborhoods, mostly targeting civilians. And that's sort of the calling card, is typically attributed to ISIL or ISIS.
INSKEEP: And will just remind people Islamic State of Iraq, that's a name for this umbrella group of a variety of militants organizations linked in some way with al-Qaida.
Can I just ask, Preschant Rao, how are casualties so far this year - how many deaths have there been in Iraq so far in this New Year compared to the year before?
RAO: Well, we keep a tab on how many we can track. And all of these are sort of independently double-sourced or to a credible single source who we can name. And so far, less than three weeks of January, we've had 691 people killed, at least, and nearly a thousand others wounded. The U.N. and the Iraqi government will release their own figures at the end of the month.
But in terms of how that compares to previous years, in January of last year there were about 250 people who were killed. So we're already more than double of that and we're not even close to finishing January yet.
INSKEEP: So way ahead of the pace of what was a very deadly year.
RAO: That's right. I mean last year gradually became more and more violent. But if you just compare month to month, the toll this month in January of 2014 is more than two times higher than January 2013.
INSKEEP: Prashant Rao of AFP is in Baghdad. Thanks very much.
RAO: Thank you.
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In Egypt, the military-led government took charge last year with a violent clampdown on Islamists. Since then, it's been targeting many others who criticize its leadership. A high-profile liberal is being charged with a crime over a tweet. And there are at least five journalists behind bars in Egypt, including a team of Al Jazeera English journalists who are being accused of terrorism and other crimes. Egypt is now one of the most dangerous places for reporters to report.
NPR's Leila Fadel has the story of one of them.
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Mohamed Fadel Fahmy is a journalist. His family says he was drawn to the job because of his love of adventure. The 39-year-old Egyptian-Canadian has worked for CNN, the BBC and other Western media outlets. He wrote a book about the war in Iraq and he's won awards. Now, his job has landed him behind bars, a prison called Scorpion. His brother is Adel Fahmy.
ADEL FAHMY: He's in very harsh conditions, where he's held in solitary confinement in a very unhygienic cell with so many insects. He doesn't see the sunlight at all.
FADEL: His crime? Speaking to members of the Muslim Brotherhood as sources for stories while he was a producer at Al-Jazeera English. It's something journalists commonly do here. The Muslim Brotherhood supported ousted President Mohamed Morsi who was toppled in a coup in July. But last month, it was declared a terrorist group and shortly after, security forces raided the Marriott Hotel in a swank district of Cairo and arrested Fahmy, his Australian colleague Peter Greste and Egyptian cameraman Baher Mohamed, all are still in jail.
In local media, they're referred to as the Marriot Cell. People who know Mohamed describe him as a fun-loving guy who was just about to get engaged but was trying to make enough money to start a life with his fiancee.
Again, Adel Fahmy.
FAHMY: He's a very normal person with a normal life, seeking always to further his career and to live a happy life.
FADEL: He suffered a fall prior to his incarceration and his shoulder injury was worsened in jail. He's received no medical treatment, his family says. Egypt's authorities are accusing Fahmy and his colleagues of reporting false news to destroy Egypt's image. Now, his brother says, he's also being investigated for feeding false news to his former employer, CNN.
FAHMY: Right now, we don't know what's going to happen and what exactly is being prepared for him or devised. We just feel that this thing is prolonging for a reason and we're very afraid now of what will happen next.
FADEL: Former president Morsi was no friend to the media either and many human rights abuses were committed under his rein. But since Morsi's ouster, many television channels have been closed down and dissenting voices are being silenced, including non-Islamists.
Al-Jazeera also has become enemy number one in Egypt because it is funded by Qatar, which supported the Muslim Brotherhood when it was in power.
Sherif Mansour is the Committee to Protect Journalists' Middle East and North Africa director. He says the case against Fahmy says one thing; that independent journalism in Egypt is now a crime.
SHERIF MANSOUR: Right now, we've seen the most deterioration in press freedom in Egypt since 1992.
FADEL: That means it's worse for journalists in Egypt than it was under Morsi and under former dictator Hosni Mubarak.
MANSOUR: Now it's widened to include editors and journalists and bloggers who are not approving of the government narrative of the situation in Egypt. We've seen the government throw the word terrorism at legitimate journalistic work.
FADEL: And the issue of freedom of expression doesn't just affect journalists, he says. Over the weekend, a liberal politician who was once a darling of the Egyptian press and quite a heartthrob too, was charged with insulting the judiciary. It's because he condemned on Titter the prosecution of 43 employees of foreign NGOs.
Amr Hamzawy was critical of the Brotherhood but since Morsi's ouster, he has also been critical of the military. In response to his criminal charge he wrote a column in which he made a promise: I will never agree for the truth to be silenced as long as I live, and I will continue using the tools at my disposal to call upon the people to wake up, to demand justice, and to oppose tyranny.
Leila Fadel, NPR News, Cairo.
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MONTAGNE: You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
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NPR's business news begins with the world's richest people.
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INSKEEP: In particular, a focus here on the 85 richest people in the world. Those 85 rich people have a combined wealth of $1.7 trillion, we're told, which is the equivalent to the amount of wealth shared by the poorest half of the entire world population.
The new findings were part of a study released yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The same study also calculates that the world's richest 1 percent - so a slightly larger group now - controls almost 50 percent of global wealth.
The report also says that tax rates for the richest people have fallen in most developed countries since the 1970s.
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Anyone who's lived through home construction knows that delays and higher costs than expected are inevitable, and that is playing out on an enormous scale at the Panama Canal.
Work on expanding a 50-mile long commercial waterway has been under constant threat of a work stoppage because of a dispute over who will pay huge cost overruns, now estimated to top $1.6 billion.
NPR's Carrie Kahn reports.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: That's right $1.6 billion with a B. That's how much the contractor, a consortium of mostly European construction companies, says it needs to finish building a third lock in the Panama Canal. The new lock will be wide enough for so-called super max container ships to pass through the waterway. The expansion will double the Canal's shipping capacity.
But before that can happen, someone has to pay up. The consortium says the Panamanians should do it, and they threatened to stop all work yesterday unless the Panama Canal Authority stepped up. The Authority stuck to its guns and said no way.
Despite the standoff and the threatened deadline, construction in the Canal continued yesterday, but at a substantially slower pace. The Canal Authority says work has been cut by as much as 70 percent and meeting next summer's completion deadline looks difficult.
In a press statement, the consortium appeared to back away from its threat of a work stoppage and said it is not a scenario being considered at this moment.
But that doesn't mean the overrun cost dispute is any closer to being resolved.
The consortium blames the inflated costs on faulty terrain studies provided by the Canal Authority. The Panamanians say the problem rests with the consortium's gross underestimation of just how much it would cost to expand the Canal.
The consortium's bid was the lowest by far among bidding contractors, about a billion dollars less than second place runner up, U.S. construction giant Bechtel.
Carrie Kahn, NPR News.
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Many cities across this country have paved over their streams, often to make way for urban development. The streams go underground. Now cities are realizing that uncovering those streams can have environmental and economic benefits.
Ann Thompson of member station WVXU reports so-called daylighting could be coming to a stream near you.
ANN THOMPSON, BYLINE: Cincinnati is under a government mandate to reduce its combined sewer overflows. This is because for years, heavy rains have caused those combined sewers to back up into buildings and overflow directly into local creeks and rivers. Part of the solution is bringing a stream buried 100 years ago to the surface.
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THOMPSON: This is the sound of the one place where Lick Run sees daylight before heading to a sewage treatment plant. It was put underground in a 19-inch pipe for urban development. In another two years or so, a mile of it will be above ground and serve as a buffer to slow the flow of stormwater.
Deputy Director of the Metropolitan Sewer District, Mary Lynn Loder, stands on a hillside in Cincinnati's South Fairmount neighborhood...
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THOMPSON: ...where dozens of buildings are being bulldozed to make room for the stream. She points to where Lick Run will be daylighted.
MARY LYNN LODER: So it's going to have some plantings, some trees around it, an access path, a bike trail.
THOMPSON: One of first daylighting projects was 30 years ago in Berkeley, California. They revitalized Strawberry Creek which had been covered by a rail yard and turned the area into a park which is now an integral part of the community.
Experts say uncovering these lost streams is an opportunity to breathe life back into forgotten creeks and surrounding communities. That happened in Yonkers, New York with the daylighting of Saw Mill River in 2011. The documentary "Lost Rivers" captured the excitement.
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THOMPSON: Ann- Marie Mitroff, whose group Groundwork Hudson Valley helped lead the Sawmill revitalization, says the $48 million project now protects against flooding and the economic benefits are big.
ANN-MARIE MITROFF: Beforehand, there were people who owned building, you know, along this stretch of a parking lot. It's kind of like why would you invest around a parking lot? Now it's a beautiful park with a river flowing through it.
THOMPSON: It's been almost seven years since Seattle spent $14 million to uncover Thornton Creek. It's spurred $200 million in private development, including a retirement community and a movie theatre.
Back in Cincinnati, Mary Lynn Loder is counting on similar revitalization, flood control and a cost savings for taxpayers when the Lick Run project is finished.
LODER: So it's really about repurposing our assets and considering, how can we get the biggest value for our ratepayers as we're embarking on project Groundwork?
THOMPSON: She says daylighting Lick Run is $200 million cheaper than replacing the pipes underground to contain it. The EPA is holding up Cincinnati's project as a national model. Other cities are watching. San Francisco, New Orleans and Washington, D.C. have called to find out how the project will work. And there's another benefit: It gives people a chance to experience nature without leaving the city.
For NPR News, I'm Ann Thompson in Cincinnati.
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And our last word in business this morning: Cool Runnings.
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MONTAGNE: That's a line from the movie about the Jamaican bobsled team that went to the Olympics in 1988
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The heroes of the movie "Cool Runnings" raised money by singing in the streets and setting up a kissing. But they did not have the Internet.
MONTAGNE: Fans of this year's Jamaican bobsled team do. They appealed for money online - crowdfunding, as it's called - raising more than $100,000.
Maybe that generosity got Jamaica's Olympic Council in the giving mood because the council said it will pay the bobsled team's travel expenses. The teams says it can now save the money raised online to spend in non-Olympic years.
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MONTAGNE: And that's the business news from MORNING EDITION on NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
INSKEEP: And I'm Steve Inskeep.
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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
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And I'm Renee Montagne.
After a weekend of drama surrounding peace talks for Syria, it appears nothing changed. The UN secretary-general invited Iran to join those talks. It was a big deal because Iran backs Syria's President Bashar al-Assad.
INSKEEP: But then Iran was disinvited for not accepting the basic idea of these talks. The United States insists the Syrian talks are supposed to create a transitional government designed to ease Assad from power. Now the talks are scheduled to go forward as before with the same people at the table. The United States will take part.
MONTAGNE: And so will Syria's ally, Russia. The Russians and Americans agreed on a framework for these talks, but that does not mean they always agree.
This morning we'll report on two nations seeking to influence a brutal war. First, here's NPR diplomatic correspondent Michele Kelemen.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: From Secretary of State John Kerry's point of view, the goal of the peace conference is clear: to implement a deal that world powers reached back in 2012 in Geneva.
SECRETARY JOHN KERRY: So for anyone seeking to rewrite this history or to muddy the waters, let me state one more time what Geneva II is about. It is about establishing a process essential to the formation of a transition governing body, with full executive powers established by mutual consent.
KELEMEN: More than 30 countries have backed the Geneva I communique, Kerry says, and that includes Russia.
KERRY: And since Russia is one of the primary benefactors of the Assad regime, we believe the Russians have a high stake in helping to make certain that Assad understands exactly what the parameters of this negotiation are.
KELEMEN: But the U.S. and Russia never really agreed on what the Geneva communique meant. The Atlantic Council's Fred Hof was an advisor to the State Department at the time it was signed and remembers the Russians saying it had nothing to do with Assad.
FRED HOF: That, of course, is nonsense. It makes a mockery of the text. If the Syrian president is exempted from this process, then what in the world would it mean when you say that the transitional governing body is exercising full executive power?
KELEMEN: The U.S. has tried all sorts of approaches with the Russians, first trying to shame them into using their influence with Assad to end the conflict. Matthew Rojansky, who runs the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center, says Kerry seems to be trying a friendlier approach, speaking often with his Russian counterpart.
MATTHEW ROJANSKY: The idea of communicating with a player that has obvious leverage - and I'd argue a fair bit of knowledge that we'd love to have access to - is a lot smarter than moral bludgeoning. Moral bludgeoning just, as a general rule, never works with the Russians.
KELEMEN: And he thinks part of Kerry's approach is to let the Russians look good.
ROJANSKY: Kerry was a big part of teeing up Vladimir Putin for a victory, for a diplomatic victory that's gotten him a lot of mileage on the chemical weapons issue.
KELEMEN: Last year's U.S.-Russia deal to rid Syria of chemical weapons was a victory for everyone, says Fred Hof, the former State Department advisor. But he adds there was a downside.
HOF: Unfortunately, and this is one of the many unintended consequences of American policy, such as it is, Bashar al-Assad interpreted all this as giving him a permission slip to do anything else he wanted to the Syrian population, as long as he did it without chemicals.
KELEMEN: The U.S. now accuses the regime of using starvation as a weapon of war. Kerry has been trying to appeal to Moscow on humanitarian grounds to help ease the suffering. But Hof thinks Washington should keep in mind that Russia is more worried about the rise of extremism than about Assad's crimes.
HOF: Russia's real interests would be to facilitate genuine political transition in Syria, so that there is a fighting chance to clean up the al-Qaida and foreign jihadist presence in that country. Bashar al-Assad is a magnet for that presence.
KELEMEN: And Assad has been a disappointment to Russia, says Rojansky of the Kennan Institute.
ROJANSKY: For all the weapons that have been provided, for all the defense that the Russians have played on his behalf, he hasn't actually defeated the rebellion. And in fact he's allowing the growth of a cancerous Islamist force, in Russia's view, which may actually threaten Russia's interests.
KELEMEN: Secretary Kerry says Assad has been funding extremists to make them look like a problem only he can solve. No one, Kerry says, should be fooled by that.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: And I'm Corey Flintoff in Moscow.
Ahead of the Geneva talks, Russia emphasized its continued support for the Assad regime as Sergei Lavrov met with his Syrian counterpart, Foreign Minister Walid Al-Muallem. The Russians say that they have never bought into the idea that a transitional government meant that Assad would step down.
They say it was never an explicit part of the Geneva One agreement in July of 2012. In an interview with a German television channel, ARD, almost a year ago, Sergei Lavrov says it was only later that the U.S. and its allies began trying to persuade Russia to change its position.
SERGEI LAVROV: And then we ask what kind of change do you want, well, you must tell Assad that he must go. And we answer that Assad's fate must be in the hands of the Syria people, but apart from this in purely pragmatic terms, he's not going to listen to anyone.
FLINTOFF: Russians stress that Assad is still president, finishing out a seven year term that ends this summer. Irina Zvyagelskaya, a professor of history at Russia's Institute of Oriental Studies, points out that before the outbreak of the civil war, most Western governments treated Assad's regime as the legitimate government of Syria.
IRINA ZVYAGELSKAYA: They were recognized by the international community as legal. And by the way, Assad, whether we like it or dislike it, and we know what kind of elections he had, still he's legal.
FLINTOFF: And that, from the Russian point of view, means no outside force has the right to depose him. Zvyagelskaya says the deal that led to the removal of Syria's chemical weapons gave Assad even more legitimacy because it made him a partner to a landmark international agreement. Russia says the agreement made at the first Geneva conference, that the transitional government would be chosen by mutual consent, means that the Syrian regime must give its approval to an interim leader, which will likely mean that it will choose Assad.
Russians have little patience for the idea that Assad is a magnet for jihadis in Syria and that removing him would somehow create an opportunity to fight and defeat Islamist radicals. Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Moscow Institute, says the Russians believe the real attraction for jihadis is the chaotic situation that seems to offer opportunities to gain power.
The Russians, Trenin says...
DMITRI TRENIN: Clearly saw the danger of the uprising in Syria morphing into a civil war and the civil war acting as a magnet for all the unsavory characters around the Middle East.
FLINTOFF: Trenin says that the Russians have seen their worst fears realized by the emergence of various radical Islamist groups, including al-Qaida, which are now fighting both the Syrian regime and the more moderate groups in the opposition. Russia is very sensitive to the threat from Islamist militants because it has its own large Muslim populations and an ongoing insurgency in the South that has taken thousands of lives.
Trenin says the realities of the Syrian situation have actually brought the U.S. and Russian negotiators closer because both sides now realize that the Islamists pose a threat to both the Assad regime and the Western-backed Syrian opposition. He knows that the Russians are talking with moderate elements of the opposition because they realize that the moderates are militarily weaker than the radicals, but politically stronger.
TRENIN: As long as the war rages on, the very fact of the fighting gives more boost to the more radical elements. Once you stop the war, once you start a political process, you boost chances for moderate elements.
FLINTOFF: And if those moderate elements show up at the Geneva talks, they may be a force that Russia will be willing to work with. Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Moscow.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne with today's weather report for Largo, Florida: Just under 70 degrees and sunny. Pretty typical winter weather, which is why the local ABC affiliate jumped on a tip that Largo had spent more than $20,000 for two snow plows. It turned out not to be a case of corruption. The public works director says the plows are for clearing debris after a huge storm - something this coastal city can expect. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Norwegians were already putting their ice to the test this past weekend.
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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
We're hearing sounds of the annual Ice Music Festival, as they echoed off the mountains near the village of Geilo. A composer from that village, Terje Isungset, is behind that festival.
INSKEEP: And when we say ice music, we do not mean music to figure skate by. We mean music made on instruments constructed of ice, along other natural materials like birch wood or slate.
TERJE ISUNGSET: To get a piece of ice to sound well or to kind of sing is really difficult. But, first of all, you have to find the ice that is good.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: The composer says man-made ice doesn't work.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINERY)
MONTAGNE: But the right natural ice can sing when carved into instruments by the musician's American collaborator Bill Covitz.
BILL COVITZ: The majority of the ice that we use comes from the lakes around and we have to go up by snowmobile. And we have to shovel snow off of lakes and use chain saws and cut the ice out, pull it out and bring it back to the venue here in Geilo.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPLASHING)
INSKEEP: Covitz carves everything from marimbas and chimes to intricately sculpted ice cellos and even ice horns.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: Tuning is a particular challenge.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
COVITZ: I help them kind of tune it but it's their ear. I try to bend the ice, or turn the ice, or make it thin, or make it narrow or wider. And it changes so easily and so dramatically with just slight changes.
MONTAGNE: And Terje Isungset says keeping ice instruments in tune isn't easy.
ISUNGSET: If it's below zero, it's normally no big problem, you know. But you have plus-degrees and it starts melting, we are in trouble. Then the instruments stop sounding, quite quickly.
INSKEEP: And the art of ice music becomes even more complicated when designing a wind instrument.
ISUNGSET: Because if you play an ice horn then it will gradually melt inside, because you put warm air into it and then the phonology changes.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: So ice musicians must be able to improvise.
ISUNGSET: You cannot go on stage and expect a certain sound. You have to play with the sound that instrument actually can make. And then try to create good music out of this.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "A GLIMPSE OF LIGHT")
INSKEEP: That's "A Glimpse of Light," one of the pieces performed at this year's Ice Music Festival in Geilo, Norway. Give a listen before it melts.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "A GLIMPSE OF LIGHT")
INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
MONTAGNE: And I'm Renee Montagne.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "A GLIMPSE OF LIGHT")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Commentator Frank Deford is thinking of the run-up to the Olympics 20 years ago and the attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, arranged by the ex-husband of a rival skater.
FRANK DEFORD: It's difficult to understand why certain athletes are harshly singled out by the media, but I've never been so baffled as by the criticism displayed toward Nancy Kerrigan. As incredible as the physical attack upon her was, even more astounding to me was how little sympathy was subsequently given her; how even Tonya Harding, who benefited from the assault, herself came to be something of a folk hero.
You probably recall the outline of the episode. On Jan. 6th, 1994, an assailant ran up to Kerrigan and clubbed her right knee. She collapsed, crying: Why? Why? But she then somehow managed to recover sufficiently. And when she skated in the short program in Lillehammer against her teammate Harding, the competition gained the sixth highest ratings in television history.
Harding bombed while Kerrigan barely missed the gold, losing to the new darling of the competition, Oksana Bauil of Ukraine, who won when all the former Iron Curtain judges voted for her. Kerrigan, who'd somehow managed an incredibly gritty rehabilitation in but seven weeks' time, was dismissed as too plastic.
Her case is what so often happens, classically, to pretty female athletes. Initially they're singled out for being both beautiful and competitive, but then the worm turns and they're criticized for the emphasis that others have placed on their good looks. Kerrigan, whose elegant beauty recalled Audrey Hepburn, was put down as a snooty ice princess when in fact, she was merely shy and came from a blue-collar family.
Comics made fun of Kerrigan's reaction to the assault - when she called out, why? why? - which was certainly the most natural of responses. David Letterman did a knee-slapping top 10 on her knee injury. In wrestling - yes, even wrestling - Hulk Hogan worked up what he called the Nancy Kerrigan angle, getting fake clubbed. Perhaps worse, Kerrigan was invariably lumped with her nasty rival; the Nancy-Tonya thing as if we would say the Kennedy-Oswald thing.
And at the end of the year, The Washington Post headlined: "Forget O.J. Kick Back, Relax and Relive Those Golden Days After Nancy Got Clubbed." Meanwhile, the gutless, out-of-shape Harding somehow became our new Rosie the Riveter - portrayed in Ms. magazine as heartbreaking. People magazine found her amongst the "25 Most Intriguing Personalities In The World"; Esquire embraced her as one of the "Women We Love."
A few years later, Nancy reluctantly agreed to let me interview her, but she was still wary of the vindictive press. Oh, yes, she said - only sighing, not whining now - I was a victim again.
At this Olympics, this anniversary, I hope Nancy Kerrigan gets the honor due her. She was courageous and she was mistreated.
INSKEEP: You hear Frank Deford right here on MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Let's talk next about a double-edged word: gentrification. It brings up images of poor, or homeowners and renters, being forced out of the neighborhood as more affluent people move in. Now, a series of new studies is showing that gentrifying neighborhoods may be a boon to the longtime residents who are able to stay.
NPR's Laura Sullivan reports.
LAURA SULLIVAN, BYLINE: On the corner of 6th and H Streets Northeast in Washington, D.C., there's a wooden bench outside Murry's grocery store. Murry's has been an anchor in this neighborhood for decades - through the crack wars of the late '80s and the urban blight that followed, when most other businesses packed up and left. On the bench, you'll often find Bobby Foster Jr. reading the newspaper.
BOBBY FOSTER JR.: Sun shines over here this time of day. It's always good where the sun shines.
SULLIVAN: Foster is a retired cook. He's cooked in kitchens all over D.C.
FOSTER JR.: I could take liver and make it taste like steak.
SULLIVAN: And he's lived in this neighborhood for 54 years. But now, this neighborhood, and hundreds like it across the country, are changing - gentrifying. Every other shop is a new restaurant, a high-end salon or a bar. The term makes people feel excited and guilty. It's been several decades since the middle and upper class began returning to the cities. That kind of movement is bound to hurt someone. But recent research is starting to show the impact might not be as harmful as people feared. Even longtime residents, like Bobby Foster, are conflicted.
FOSTER JR.: Some things are good. Some things are bad, you know. But sometimes, the good outweighs the bad.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING OF RIOT)
SULLIVAN: Gentrification burst into the social consciousness on Aug. 6th, 1988, with the Tompkins Square Park riot in New York City. Residents carried signs reading, "Gentrification Is Class War." Police carried batons. The bloody battle that ensued left more than 100 people injured.
The protesters' fury centered on the idea that the poor would be homeless so the rich could live in their neighborhoods, destroying whatever character they may have had. Professor Lance Freeman is the director of the Urban Planning Program at Columbia University. And he says, yeah, that's what he figured had happened, too.
LANCE FREEMAN: My intuition would be that, you know, people are being displaced, so they're going to be moving more quickly. I was really aiming to quantify how much displacement was occurring.
SULLIVAN: Freeman launched a study first in Harlem, and then nationally, calculating how many people were pushed out of their homes when wealthy people moved in.
FREEMAN: To my surprise, it seemed to suggest that people in the neighborhoods that were classified as gentrifying were moving less frequently.
SULLIVAN: Yes, less frequently. Freeman's work found that low-income residents were no more likely to move out of their homes when a neighborhood gentrifies than when it doesn't. Freeman says higher costs can push out renters; especially the elderly or disabled, or those without rent-stabilized apartments. But it turns out, a lot of renters overall end up staying; especially if new parks, safer streets and better schools are paired with a job opportunity right down the block. That squares with a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
DANIEL HARTLEY: We're finding that the financial health of original residents in gentrifying neighborhoods seems to be increasing, as compared to original residents in non-gentrifying, low-priced neighborhoods.
SULLIVAN: Daniel Hartley is a research economist with the bank. He found credit scores of original residents went up - regardless of whether they rented or owned - if they stayed put.
HARTLEY: There may be these kind of side benefits to gentrification that we've been less focused on; that it can actually help the original residents of the neighborhood.
SULLIVAN: As for Bobby Foster, he's staying. He and his family own their home. He's very concerned about what will happen to the beauty salon across the street. Its owners often do the elderly people's hair for free.
FOSTER JR.: They are beautiful people. They've been here as long as I've known this place.
SULLIVAN: But he says he kind of likes the new people, too, and he wasn't sure he would. He says he likes that they sweep their stoops, just like his grandma did.
FOSTER JR.: The people are still good. People are still good.
SULLIVAN: Two months ago, city officials announced a new retail apartment complex was coming to this street corner. Murry's will be closing. In its place will be a Whole Foods. Bobby Foster says he just hopes Whole Foods puts a bench out front.
Laura Sullivan, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FOSTER JR.: You’re listening to MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
In the lead-up to the Winter Olympics, we're bringing you a series called The Edge, looking at what athletes are doing to give themselves the upper hand. Today, we learn about Jamie Anderson. She's considered one of the top female snowboarders in the world, and she's recently secured a spot on the first-ever U.S. Olympic team doing the extreme sport of slopestyle.
Will Stone, of Reno Public Radio, has this profile of the athlete and the sport she's mastered.
WILL STONE, BYLINE: The first time Jamie Anderson performed a cab 7, it was not in the script.
JAMIE ANDERSON: I didn't have to do that trick. But I really wanted to, and I knew could do it.
STONE: The trick involves a snowboarder launching off a jump and spinning two full rotations. Anderson had tried it in practice but never fully executed it.
JAMIE ANDERSON: For me, it was more about the principle of knowing that I can do something even that was really challenging and difficult.
STONE: That was the 2007 X Games. Now, she calls the cab 7 one of her favorite moves and does it often, along with other high-flying stunts, like in last year's X Games, broadcast on ESPN.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED ESPN BROADCAST)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Coming into the down pavement with a big old cab 7 there into the money booter, switch backside 5 for Jamie. Wow.
(SOUNDBITE OF HONKING GEESE)
JAMIE ANDERSON: (Laughter) Hey, settle down.
STONE: On the dock outside her home in Lake Tahoe, Calif., the 23-year-old catches the end of a pink sunset.
JAMIE ANDERSON: Often, I'll come out on my little medicine walks in the morning and see the bald eagle - which is always just amazing.
STONE: Anderson has stayed close to the Sierra, where she got her start at age 9, after receiving a hand-me-down snowboard. Her family couldn't afford to buy a new one. She and her seven siblings were home-schooled.
JAMIE ANDERSON: So I had a lot of time on the mountain. It was like my day care. (Laughter)
STONE: Off the slopes, Anderson has a Zen-like calm. It's surprising, given the intensity she brings to her sport. At age 13, she qualified for the Winter X Games. Two years later, she won a bronze, and was the youngest ever to medal there. Now, she's taken gold in the X Games four times.
JAMIE ANDERSON: Ultimately, it kind of reminds me of like, a playground on the mountain. There's different features - like rails and boxes and jumps, sometimes hips and quarter pipes; all kinds of random features.
STONE: But Anderson is not just a risk-taker. She likes to crochet, and one of her trademarks is hugging a tree before a big run - or that's how it looks on camera. The first time she did it, she was actually meditating to clear her mind, while wrapping her arms around a tree. She tries to bring that sensibility to her sport.
JAMIE ANDERSON: So when I get to a competition and feel out the slopestyle course, and kind of see which directions the jumps are flowing and which way I feel like I could do my tricks - maybe having an idea in my head but being open to changes, and kind of seeing what flows most effortlessly.
STONE: Jamie's older sister, Joanie, is also a professional snowboarder. She says Jamie's style is authoritative.
JOANIE ANDERSON: She goes a lot bigger than a lot of the girls out there. And she's super smooth. She has a way of always landing on her feet - she's kind of like a cat. (Laughter)
STONE: The point was driven home in a recent episode of a National Geographic show, when Anderson propelled herself off a jump and traveled 65 feet over a roadway. Now she has hopes of executing a new trick, one that involves spinning 900 degrees.
JAMIE ANDERSON: Sometimes I'll even have a dream of the trick I want to do, and I'll land it perfectly. And I'm like, OK, I'm ready. I want to do this trick. But it takes so much courage.
STONE: Whatever trick she pulls off, Anderson will continue pushing this growing sport to the limit - including, for the first time, all the way to the Olympics.
For NPR News, I'm Will Stone in South Tahoe.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
A change in subject now: Let's talk sharks, the kind in the sea. Of the thousand-plus species of sharks and rays in the world, a new study finds nearly a quarter are threatened with extinction, making these ancient fish among the most endangered animals in the world. NPR's Richard Harris reports on the latest assessment of these feared, yet vulnerable creatures.
RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: A group called the International Union for the Conservation of Nature maintains the so-called Red List of species threatened with extinction. They've been worried about sharks, rays and related species for more than 20 years. And the IUCN has finally totaled up the risk to these species, and published the results in the online journal eLife.
SONJA FORDHAM: It's quite bad, I'm sorry to say.
HARRIS: Sonja Fordham, who helps run the assessment, says it's not news that a lot of shark species were in trouble, but 25 percent of species at risk of extinction? That's a big number.
FORDHAM: And of those, the rays are actually worse off than the sharks.
HARRIS: Rays include mantas and skates, but also fish that look more like sharks, such as the sawfish, with a snout that looks like a double-sided saw.
FORDHAM: So, the sawfishes are the most endangered of the group, by far.
HARRIS: Fordham, who is president of Shark Advocates International, says some sawfish populations have already been driven to extinction. They're critically endangered elsewhere because they live along fragile coastlines, and because they're a prize catch for the Asian market.
FORDHAM: People know about the global trade in shark fins, but few know that some of the most valuable fins that are used in shark fin soup come from the shark-like rays, species like sawfishes and wedgefishes and guitarfishes.
HARRIS: Rays are also often snagged by fishermen actually trying to catch other species. For instance, the ironically named common skate is now extinct in some European waters because it was wiped out by fishermen angling for other species. When Fordham and her colleagues dug into the fisheries' catch data, they discovered that more rays had been fished out of the water than sharks.
FORDHAM: They're also not getting much conservation attention. They tend to be a little underappreciated.
HARRIS: The scale of the problem is breathtaking to Boris Worm, who was not involved in the IUCN study, but who has been studying the plight of sharks and related species at Dalhousie University in Canada.
BORIS WORM: It's shocking to me, one in four sharks and rays.
HARRIS: One reason he's surprised is information about these species is often hard to come by. Worm's group has been scouring global fishing records to get a sense of the magnitude of the problem.
WORM: We estimated that, globally, we're catching at least 100 million sharks a year. That's 11,000 each hour, every day, 365 days a year. So that's a lot of sharks.
HARRIS: Overall, he estimates that 6 to 8 percent of the global population of sharks and rays gets caught each year. And they simply can't reproduce fast enough to keep pace. These species evolved before the dinosaurs were on Earth 400 million years ago.
WORM: And they're like a, you know, version-one model of a fish, if you will. So, they have an extremely slow life history. They grow very slowly, and their populations are depleted very quickly.
HARRIS: The good news is that there are a few conservation success stories for certain species of sharks. Sonja Fordham says the challenge now is to spread those practices around the world and to include many more species that are currently heading toward oblivion. Richard Harris, NPR News.
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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep.
We're tracking the lives and views of Latinos in America this week. A new survey finds Latinos feel they're doing well, or getting there. Large numbers say they've achieved the American Dream, or are on their way.
Among Latinos, no group may have achieved the American Dream quite so fully as Cuban-Americans. Survey show they graduate from college at greater rates and have higher levels of homeownership than most other Latino groups.
But there's some trouble, here. Many Cuban-Americans feel the American Dream is becoming more difficult to attain. NPR's Greg Allen reports.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Floresdilia Martinez is 24, a second-generation Cuban-American. She's looked for work ever since graduating from high school more than five years ago, without success.
FLORESDILIA MARTINEZ: I would fill out application upon application, trying to find a job. And no one ever called back.
ALLEN: Martinez says her parents arrived in Miami from Cuba at a time when the economy was booming - her father in the 1960's, her mother a little later. For them, she says, finding work was easier.
MARTINEZ: Oh, yeah. My Mom was working ever since she was, like, 14.
ALLEN: Martinez is discouraged about her finances, and a new survey shows, among Cuban-Americans, she has lots of company. A poll conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health finds that 45 percent of Cuban-Americans say their finances are not so good, or poor.
MARTINEZ: They see themselves as financially troubled at rates higher than any other Latinos. Robert Blendon with the Harvard School of Public Health says that was unexpected.
ROBERT BLENDON: And not only are they more likely, Latinos, as a whole, to see themselves financially troubled, they are more so than other Latinos - if they're employed or have an employed family member - to be worried about losing a job in the next year.
ALLEN: Blendon suspects one reason for the economic worries among Cuban-Americans is where they live. It's been more than 50 years now since the Cuban revolution that prompted tens of thousands of Cubans to begin fleeing their homeland. Most arrived in Miami. Today, more than half of the nation's Cuban-Americans live in Miami-Dade County.
For years now, Miami's unemployment rate has been above the national average. Many homeowners still owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.
Nicholas Jane is a young Cuban-American, just 22, who took part in the poll. He's discouraged about his financial outlook, and also that of his parents.
NICHOLAS JANE: My Dad is the only one that has a steady job, and even he, between 2003, 2004, he was completely unemployed, you know, and he couldn't find a job. My Mom has not been able to find a steady job, and neither have I. So, it's been tough.
ALLEN: The financial uncertainly and job worries of Cuban-Americans has a lot to do with their concentration in an area still struggling to recover. But Guillermo Grenier, a sociologist at Florida International University in Miami, believes it reveals something else about Cuban-Americans. Their demographics are changing.
The wave of Cubans who arrived here in the early 1960s, he says, came as Miami was just beginning to transform from a small Southern city into an international metropolis.
GUILLERMO GRENIER: They've benefitted from the growth. Cubans are the Brahmins of the community, in many ways.
ALLEN: But that earlier generation now is becoming outnumbered by Cubans who've arrived more recently. In the last decade, as Grenier points out, more than 300,000 Cubans arrived in the U.S.
GRENIER: The Cubans arriving now are way poorer. They get hired at minimum wage jobs. They get very few benefits, and their English is not great.
ALLEN: It's a combination of factors: a slowly recovering South Florida economy and changing demographics that are making Cuban-Americans more like other Latino groups in the U.S.
For a young person like Nicholas Jane, who's graduating from college with a B.A. later this year, what he's finding is not what he feels he was promised.
JANE: The American Dream - at least for Cuban-Americans of my generation - it just doesn't seem like it's even plausible anymore. Like, it's very hard just not to get an anxiety attack from thinking about the future and thinking about, like, oh, am I able to have this nice house and all these other things?
ALLEN: Researchers say data shows today that Cuban-Americans do better economically if they leave Miami. Jane is taking the advice to heart. After graduation, he says he's not even looking for work in Miami. His most recent interview was for a job in Japan.
Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's go next to Switzerland, where the Syrian peace conference began this morning, with diplomats making public statements filled with accusations and acrimony - just how you'd want to start a peace conference. The civil war has gone on for almost three years now, killing well over 130,000 people and displacing some nine million others. Much of the fight hinges on whether Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should remain in power. Let's go now to NPR's Deborah Amos, who's covering the talks. Deborah's on the line. Hi, Deborah.
DEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: Hi, there.
INSKEEP: OK. So, we talked about, just a moment ago, about the rather harsh speeches. Secretary of State John Kerry made a strongly worded statement.
AMOS: He did. You know, this was a day of competing narratives, and here's where U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry took it: to the beginning of the rebellion. He said it wasn't armed. It started out with boys in Daraa, which is a town in southern Syria. They were armed only with graffiti cams, and when their parents came to protest, 120 people died. Now, we have 130,000 dead, he said, who've been killed by barrel bombs and scuds. Starvation is used as a weapon of war. He indicted to Assad regime for this kind of violence.
INSKEEP: Meaning that he said that there's absolutely no way that Assad can remain in power, can personally remain in power, that he can have legitimacy after being responsible for such brutality. But, of course, the Syrian foreign minister was pretty harsh, as well, and maybe beyond harsh.
AMOS: That was the most explosive moment this morning. He dramatically repeated the regime's narrative, that this is war on terrorism. But he went on to call out Turkey. He said the Turks have blood on their hands, because they are responsible for arming these terrorists. He said that we don't want to go back 1,000 years with these medieval ideologies that come from Saudi Arabia. He sparred a bit with U.N. Chief Ban Ki-moon, who tried to cut him off, but Moualem would have none of it. And he said the opposition had sold themselves to Israel. He called them traitors. He said the Israelis helped them militarily. He said they all stay in five-star hotels while Syria is burning. It was a real stem-winder, which will be wildly popular with the Syrian regime's base back in Syria.
INSKEEP: Maybe not so popular with the opposition in Syria.
AMOS: Not at all. And it was interesting to listen to Ahmad Jarba, who is the head of the delegation of the opposition. He asked a simple question: Who do you believe? And do we have a Syrian partner in this room? He said that the only thing we are here to talk about is a transitional government. We need a state that accepts diversity. And what he said is we're against terrorism, too, but he accused the regime of facilitating terrorism, not just by helping out al-Qaida. He also pointed out that Hezbollah militias from Lebanon have come to support the regime, and militias from Iraq have come to support the regime. So, we heard everybody's maximalist positions today at a day of speeches. Now, the big business happens on Friday, when the two delegations sit face to face.
INSKEEP: Well, now, you said everybody maximalist position, which implies that maybe they're actually just negotiating, here, rather than posturing. Is there behind the scenes, behind the words, some sense of some common ground here?
AMOS: No, there's not.
(LAUGHTER)
INSKEEP: Well, that settles that.
AMOS: And you could actually see that with the two sponsors of this conference: the United States and Russia. They, too, had diverging opinions about the narrative of the Syrian crisis. So, there is a lot of work to do to salvage these negotiations. Ban Ki-moon talks about them as a train. Can we get them on the track? Never mind if they move an inch, but getting them on the track is the goal.
INSKEEP: And they don't - there's no shape - in just about 10 seconds - is there a shape of any smaller scale, or temporary agreement that could be reached?
AMOS: Ceasefires, possibly, some opening for humanitarian access. Those talks are going on simultaneously.
INSKEEP: OK, Deb. Thanks very much.
AMOS: Thank you.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Deborah Amos. She is covering the opening of peace talks for Syria today.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
The Catholic Church has a complex history with Jews. Pope Francis wanted to make that relationship more kosher. The pope had 16 Argentine rabbis over for lunch, and the Vatican wanted to make an impression. A rabbi boiled the kitchen utensils and heated the oven to render it kosher, fit for cooking under Jewish law. The owner of the kosher restaurant who catered the affair said the menu for the event was simple, in the style of the pope himself.
It's MORNING EDITION.
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We've been following the demonstrations in Ukraine since they began last fall. Those protests were sparked by the president's refusal to sign a trade deal with the European Union, apparently under pressure from Russia. Over time, hundreds of thousands took the streets in the capital, Kiev, to demand that the government look more toward the West than to Russia. And, this morning, the protest took a deadly turn: reports that at least two protestors have been killed in clashes with police.
We go now to David Stern, who's in Kiev for the BBC. Good morning.
DAVID STERN: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: Now, these protestors had been more or less peaceful until recent days. But now, this morning, we're seeing scenes of riot police and heavy snow, burned-out buses and cars. What are you seeing?
STERN: Well, clashes have been going on for four days, and it's been a remarkable scene. The protesters have been hurling Molotov cocktails and also bricks that they've pried up with crowbars. They're constantly beating on drums or barrels, I guess you could say metal barrels and lampposts. And the police have been responding with stun grenades and with plastic or rubber bullets. But, as you said, it's taken a deadly turn. But, undoubtedly, this will help will help inflame passions even more, and the situation could get even worse.
MONTAGNE: Why did these protests turn more violent in these last few days?
STERN: Probably a number of reasons. Most recently, there's been an added element that's inflamed passions. This is a packet of laws that parliament passed last week, and it went into effect today. The protestors call them the dictator laws. They're anti-protest laws, which administer a number of very heavy fines, and also jail sentences for a wide range of activities, including wearing helmets at the protests. Obviously, people wear helmets because they don't want to be beaten on the head or clobbered. And critics have said that, in fact, they cracked down on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in general.
MONTAGNE: I'm wondering: We have heard stories that provocateurs might be among the crowd, causing violence, giving the government a pretext to do just this.
STERN: The opposition has - says that there are agent provocateurs, outside forces that are trying to discredit them, or to make the situation even worse. It should be said, though, that people that are throwing the Molotov cocktails are members of the protest movement. They're, in fact, right-wing extremists. There is an ultra-nationalist element to the protests, although it's not the majority, but they are a very committed and vocal part. And they are the ones who decided that enough was enough, that it's time to fight back.
MONTAGNE: So, this all started over this trade deal with Europe. And in these weeks of protest, what are the other issues that have developed?
STERN: Well, the issues - as you say, that it started out as a protest movement demanding closer ties with the European Union, after President Viktor Yanukovych unexpectedly pulled out of a deal. But yes, they've expanded considerably, and the protesters are now demanding the resignation of President Yanukovych. They want early presidential elections. They want early parliamentary elections. So, it's an extreme position.
So you have these two sides that are, I guess you could say, dug into their respective positions, and there's very little common ground between them. They're trying to hold talks, but obviously, if one side is demanding the president resign and the other side is saying the president's going nowhere, there's not a whole lot of room for compromise. And that's leading a lot of observers to think that this is going to go on for a while, and, in fact, could escalate even further.
MONTAGNE: Journalist David Stern was speaking to us from Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Thank you very much.
STERN: Thank you.
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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep.
Let's report on a news story that, for many Americans, is right outside the car window.
MONTAGNE: Heavy snow slammed the East Coast yesterday.
INSKEEP: Providence, Rhode Island was hit with 11 inches of snow.
MONTAGNE: Philadelphia got 13 inches.
INSKEEP: And Long Island was covered in 14 inches by yesterday afternoon.
Charles Lane, of member station WSHU, talked with drivers who used the Long Island Expressway.
CHARLES LANE, BYLINE: Rush hour so was not the word for it. No one was rushing anywhere, and it took a lot longer than an hour to get there. A typical 90-minute commute from Queens to suburban Long Island took four to five hours.
KARA FITZGERALD: Yeah. And I went to the bathroom before I left, but I have to go so badly again. Bye.
LANE: Kara Fitzgerald was one of many making an emergency stop at a gas station off the Long Island Expressway, which was really just a virtual parking lot.
FITZGERALD: It's moving five miles an hour, no more.
LANE: That's actually a better estimate than what I've heard from other people.
FITZGERALD: Yeah, it's really bad. It's really bad, and people are sliding all over. It's horrible.
LANE: States of emergency were declared in New York, New Jersey and Delaware. Schools from West Virginia all the way to Boston are closed on Wednesday.
While the storm stretched from Chicago to Washington, drivers along the I-95 corridor probably had the most frustrating go at it. The snow wasn't expected to start until noon, but then the snow came early and fast, about one to two inches an hour.
On Long Island, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone says they started pre-treating the roads early with salt brine late Monday, but still, he was concerned.
STEVE BELLONE: We're taking this very seriously. We also have extreme low temperatures throughout the day. So it's going to make it very difficult to, you know, number one, remove the snow, but it's going to create really icy conditions throughout the day.
LANE: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio warned New Yorkers to just stay inside.
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: If you have to go out and you have a mass transit option, please choose that over your cars. The fewer vehicles on the road, the better job that sanitation can do.
LANE: Amtrak did dial back service, but other mass transit riders made out the best with local trains in and out of New York about on time.
RICHIE GRANT: I did pretty good then. I got lucky.
LANE: Richie Grant took the Long Island Rail Road from Brooklyn.
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LANE: And now he's brushing eight inches of snow from his car. He says it came at the worst possible time at day.
GRANT: Because this is the one that, you know, you got to go into work, or you look like the wimp, and then they won't let you out early, and then you got to deal with all this.
LANE: Some 3,000 flights were canceled on the East Coast yesterday, and another thousand are canceled today. Morning commutes will also likely be difficult. Even if workers get the snow out of the way, the ice melt won't work if temperatures don't get above 15 degrees. The National Weather Service says some parts of the Northeast will get that warm - barely, for a couple hours in the afternoon.
For NPR News, I'm Charles Lane, in New York.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And this latest winter storm and those freezing temperatures are putting a strain on already low supplies of propane in the Northeast and Midwest. Millions of Americans use the liquefied gas to heat their homes. And as NPR's Tovia Smith reports, they're paying more and getting less this winter season, which started early, thanks to the extreme cold of the polar vortex.
TOVIA SMITH, BYLINE: As temperatures plummeted this winter, so did supply of propane. But the problem was more than just that winter storm. It was more of a perfect storm that left inventories depleted.
ROY WILLIS: Well, they had a double whammy.
SMITH: Roy Willis, head of the Propane Education and Research Council, says suppliers started out this season already in a pinch, after farmers - who use propane to dry crops - had an especially wet harvest and used five times their usual amount.
WILLIS: The increase in consumption represented about 15, 20 percent in total when you look at crop drying and the current winter heating demand over what we've experienced over the last decades.
SMITH: And complicating the picture even more, the same brutal weather that's got demand for propane extremely high is also making delivering propane extremely tough.
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SMITH: In South Central Indiana, where wind chills were below zero yesterday, Dennis Clark was navigating messy rural roads to deliver the relatively little bit of propane he had.
DENNIS CLARK: Around 8,000 gallons right now. Usually I keep, you know, around 25,000.
SMITH: Clark has owned his propane business more than 30 years, and can't remember things ever being so tight.
CLARK: This propane shortage is just like it was in the gas and fuel shortages back in the '70s, you know.
SMITH: Prices have almost doubled from $1.79 a gallon last year to 2.99 today. And Clark says some of his customers are looking at other ways to heat their homes.
CLARK: Some of them get mad. I've even had a couple that quit. That's it.
SMITH: Many states have declared states of emergency, which allows propane delivery truck drivers to work longer hours.
They're also calls for emergency federal assistance for the millions of low income residents - especially those in rural areas beyond the reach of utilities, who depend on propane.
Jeff Petrash, with the National Propane Gas Association, says meantime, some foreign suppliers are jumping into the mix.
JEFF PETRASH: For the first time in four or five years, tanker ships have been coming in to New England bringing in foreign propane to try to meet the demand there.
SMITH: But Petrash says that's not likely to bring consumers any price relief, since the imported propane is more expensive. And he says, demand will likely continue to outpace supply.
PETRASH: I think the situation will be challenging for the industry for the balance of this winter to meet consumer needs.
SMITH: How challenging, he says, depends on the weather. Tovia Smith, NPR News.
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In the western United States, it's unseasonably hot and dry. Monday August program, we learned that California is experiencing its worst drought in recorded history. The extreme conditions are affecting farms, they affect water reservoirs, they increase the threat of wildfires. And then, there's the air quality.
NPR's Nathan Rott reports.
NATHAN ROTT, BYLINE: Standing up here at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook in Culver City, California, you can usually see most of Los Angeles. You can see downtown LA, the Hollywood Hills, even the ocean, all the way to the west. Today though - and for the last couple of days - they've all been shrouded in a haze of gray.
Telvin McMillin just hiked up to the top of the hill and he's looking over towards the ocean.
TELVIN MCMILLIN: You can actually see the line of the smog and it's really disgusting.
ROTT: California's weird winter weather is having a big effect on air quality here. San Francisco has been socked in smog. Parts of the Central Valley have been on high alert, with fine particle counts that are more than three times the federal standard. And it's not just noticeable in the air.
DR. ALAN KHADAVI, ALLERGIST: Their throat is irritating them, and their chest is irritating them and patients who have never had asthma are complaining of cough and shortness of breath.
MCMILLIN: Dr. Alan Khadavi is an allergist in LA. He says he's been seeing far more patients than he normally does this time of year. The reason? California's long running drought. 2013 was the driest year on record in California and 2014 hasn't been any better.
ROTT: Anthony Wexler is the director of the Air Quality Research Center at UC, Davis. He says that drought can affect air quality in a lot of ways.
ANTHONY WEXLER: One, of course, is just dust.
ROTT: It gets blown into the air off of the parched landscape.
WEXLER: Yet another one are wildfires.
ROTT: Which Angelinos experienced just last week, when a fire engulfed nearly 2,000 acres like it was late August. It filled the air with smoke.
WEXLER: Another way is that when weather fronts come through, they kind of blow all of the air pollution out and we get a fresh start.
ROTT: And that's the key. Without a significant weather event - rain or wind - air just sits stagnant, collecting more and more pollution - which is bad news for West Coasters. Forecasters aren't predicting any rainstorms or significant weather events through the end of the month.
Nathan Rott, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And while Californians worry about air quality, West Virginians worry about water quality, again.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Two weeks ago, a chemical spill into the Elk River left 300,000 residents with contaminated water supply. The water was tainted with and MCMH, a chemical used to wash coal.
MONTAGNE: That pollutant was cleared from the river and tap water declared safe to drink. But these reports of clean water may be exaggerated.
INSKEEP: A different chemical called PPH also leaked from the tank. Officials are just now learning about the PPH and so they never tested for its presence in the local water supply.
MONTAGNE: The water company is now testing for PPH. Although, authorities contend the chemical has low toxicity.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
NPR's business news begins with a Chicago farewell.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: Sears announced it's closing its flagship store in downtown Chicago, as part of an ongoing effort to cut expenses. It was once the largest retailer in Chicago. In fact, it was the namesake for the Sears Tower, the country's second-tallest building.
One executive said that ever since it moved from the Sears Tower - which is now the Willis Tower - the downtown Chicago Sears has lost millions of dollars.
Sears joins other retailers announcing closures - J.C. Penney said last week it's closing 33 stores; Macy's is closing five.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Now despite the news of brick-and-mortar retail closures, the International Monetary Fund says U.S. and global economies are strengthening. In an update of its World Economic Outlook, the IMF boosted its forecast for global growth slightly for the first time in a couple of years.
NPR's John Ydstie reports.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: The IMF says the world recovery is strengthening and that economic activity is likely to expand 3.7 percent in 2014. Advanced economies are leading the way. The IMF says it now expects the U.S. economy to grow 2.8 percent this year.
Olivier Blanchard, the IMF's top economist, says even Europe is healing.
OLIVIER BLANCHARD: Even there things are better. We'll predicting positive growth in all the Eurozone members.
YDSTIE: It's been years since that's happened. But the IMF says there are still dangers in Europe, including a 10 to 20 percent chance of damaging deflation which could curb consumer demand and increase debt burdens.
Japan, which has struggled against deflation in the past couple decades, is growing again, helped by big government stimulus. The IMF boosted its estimate for growth in Japan's by nearly half a percent to 1.7 percent. The IMF says the world's second largest economy, China, will grow seven-and-a-half percent in 2014, faster than it had predicted in its original estimate. But it says China faces a difficult balancing act containing risks in its financial sector.
While advanced economies are expected to expand faster, major emerging markets like Russia and Brazil had their growth forecasts downgraded.
John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
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Over the past week or so, most of the country's banks have reported their profits for the last quarter of 2013. The numbers, mostly, have better than most analysts expected. After a rough few years, most big financial institutions are faring pretty well. But there's some debate about how sustainable the numbers really are.
NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: The American banking sector may have survived the subprime mortgage crisis and the long slow recovery that followed it. But banking consultant Bert Ely says the economic environment is still a challenging one for many banks.
BERT ELY: While we are experiencing economic recovery, it is not a robust recovery and so loan growth in many areas is not as strong as many would like.
ZARROLI: The major banks have managed to survive and even prosper in part by diversifying their revenue streams. They may have taken a big hit during the financial crisis but big banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America were able to make a lot of money more recently by trading bonds and other assets. Now, with the passage of new regulations like the Volcker rule, and the rise in interest rates, a lot of banks are cutting back on trading.
Daniel Marchon is an analyst at Raymond James and Associates.
DANIEL MARCHON: they saw that this was coming down, you know, at that point years to come, but they knew get out now, and that then when it's time for the final rules to be written, it won't be as much of a shock for our country and our businesses.
ZARROLI: In recent years, a lot of banks have been able to increase their profits by raising customer fees and closing branches. Bert Ely says banks also beefed up their profits in another way. They had set aside a lot of money to cover bad subprime loans, but Ely says as the economy improved, they've able to take that money out and add it to their balance sheets.
ELY: Problem with that is it's not sustainable. It doesn't last forever. Eventually, the piggy bank is empty.
ZARROLI: Ely says banks have been making profits through one-time-only measures that can't be repeated forever. The question now is how much more toothpaste can be squeezed out of the tube.
Bank analyst Richard Bove is pretty optimistic. Bove believes the last quarter of 2013 was a sort of turning point for the banks. He says the economy has finally improved enough that banks are beginning to make real money again.
RICHARD BOVE: When we get to 2014, there's every evidence that we will be switching from, you know, we'll say this questionable source of earnings to a more solid source of earnings.
ZARROLI: Bove says rising interest rates have dealt a big blow to the home refinancing business, which was a big source of profits for banks. But other categories of lending, including autos and mortgages and commercial loans, are showing signs of life again.
The lending outlook looks really good for 2014, and it's basically because we're seeing an improvement in the economy which carries through to banking.
Still, the U.S. economy remains far from robust and the banking sector continues to face headwinds. New regulations like the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul have, at least for now, reined in the ways that big banks do business.
The last round of earnings reports shows that banks have managed to keep earning money, but they sometimes had to resort to unconventional measures to do so.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News.
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And our last word in business is: Beating the odds.
Quicken Loans says it will pay $1 billion if you do.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
The Detroit-based finance wants your attention if you're one of the people who filled out an NCAA Tournament bracket. You can now get a $1 billion prize if you correctly pick every single game.
INSKEEP: The company has offered all sorts of details about how it will pay this price, and it says Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway is backing the offer.
MONTAGNE: Well, let's just think about that for a minute. Warren Buffett is not known for blowing billion-dollar bets.
INSKEEP: Turned out the odds of correctly picking every single NCAA Tournament game are more than nine quintillion to one. Odds are pretty good that Quicken Loans will get all the attention for its promotion for free.
MONTAGNE: In unrelated news, MORNING EDITION is offering $1 trillion to the first person who danced Gangnam Style on Jupiter.
INSKEEP: We may also give a price to the first person who is able who counts to nine quintillion.
That's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
MONTAGNE: I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
Our colleague David Greene is on the road this week. He's in Idaho, a deep red state with just two congressional districts. In one of those districts, a fierce battle for the House seat is well underway. A new Tea Party candidate is getting lots of help and money from groups around the country, and that's energized the more moderate GOP to fight back on behalf of the eight-term incumbent. In a place far from Washington, we're seeing a fierce battle for the soul of the Republican Party.
We got David on the line in Idaho Falls to tell us more. Good morning, David.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning, Renee, a very cold Idaho Falls.
MONTAGNE: Alright, well, stay warm there while we're talking. And with me here in the studio in Washington is NPR's Peter Overby, who covers money in politics. Good morning, Peter.
PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: Let's start with you, David. Tell us what we need to know about Idaho Falls.
GREENE: It's a small city, Renee. And so, you know, there's just nothing breaking the view of one of those big Western skies. You can see for miles to the mountains. I'm standing overlooking the Snake River and the actual falls.
I was excited to come here because this is not a place that we often come during election season. We spend so much time in some of the well-known swing states. This is a deeply red state but one that could tell us a lot about this election year. This district, you know, it's so spread out; a lot of ranching here - a lot of potatoes, of course; a lot of mining and a lot of federal land. More than half of Idaho is owned by the federal government so a lot of jobs depend on the federal government.
One other note: A huge number of minimum wage jobs in this state, so people trying to get by. And we're just going to see if they want to send back the congressman from this district who's held this seat for 16 years now.
MONTAGNE: Tell us about that particular congressman. And help us to understand what this race could tell us about the future of the Republican Party.
GREENE: Yes, his name is Mike Simpson and he's, I guess, a 15-year veteran now. He's a close friend of House Speaker John Boehner. He's known for being part of the establishment in the Republican Party. The Idaho National Lab here, which is an important job creator, he's brought money to that lab, which is something he's known for. And he's up against a Tea Party candidate, a local attorney named Brian Smith who's a new face in politics.
And Brian Smith has been campaigning full time since June, which tells you how much a Tea Party wants this seat. And Renee, this is the really important thing that we need to note here. Right now we are seeing the establishment of the Republican Party rise up with money and resources this early in a race that is Republican against Republican.
It's a pretty safe Republican seat. It's going to be a Republican. You've got to establishment spending money because they want to get fewer radicals in the House. They want to create a face of the House that they feel like they can work with it.
MONTAGNE: So this is a good time to bring Peter into the conversation. This is a kind of fight, as David described, that means dollar signs.
OVERBY: That's right. The Tea Party candidate, Brian Smith, he has a couple of big outside groups backing him. One is the Club for Growth. They endorsed Brian Smith, first of all their candidates this year - they're really committed to him. And there's another group called the Madison Project that's been influential this year, and they are also backing Brian Smith.
Now, on the moderate side of the Republican Party, you have a new group called Main Street Advocacy. They endorse Mike Simpson, the incumbent here. And they have said they intend to match the Club for Growth dollar for dollar in sort of an advertising slugfest. And the superPAC that's connected to Main Street Advocacy has raised a significant amount of its money this past year from labor unions.
MONTAGNE: Which sounds highly unusual, am I right?
OVERBY: Extremely unusual. Labor unions have not done stuff like this with the Republicans for years and years.
MONTAGNE: Which sounds like it means, for those voters in Idaho in this district, they're going to be seeing a lot of TV ads.
OVERBY: They're going to be lunging for their TV remotes. Now, the thing is that the ads from the outside groups are basically made by consultants in D.C. A lot of the time these ads are sort of cookie-cutter things. Mike Simpson, 15-year incumbent, solid Republican, is being depicted by some of these groups as a secret ally of House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.
MONTAGNE: Which, you have to say Mike Simpson is a Republican, and a fairly conservative-slash-moderate.
OVERBY: There's no mistaking him for an ally of Nancy Pelosi, but this is how he's being depicted. The Republicans in Idaho have a history of basically supporting federal programs as they affect Idaho, except at certain times when they reject them. This may be one of those times, and that's what the Tea Party groups are trying to capitalize on.
MONTAGNE: And David, before we let you go, what are we going to be hearing from Idaho later this week?
GREENE: A lot of voices, Renee. We're going to hear from both candidates. We're going to be hearing from people here in the city of Idaho Falls and also in some remote communities up in the mountains, and I should say it's not just listening. People can see some photos too. We've set up this Tumblr. It's at NPROnTheRoad.tumblr.com and I'm sending photos already so that people can see online.
There's one of the three bearded men in this black and white photo. They're sitting in front of the cabin they built in Idaho and they happen to be the great, great, great uncles of the Tea Party candidate in this race, Brian Smith. I interviewed him. He brought out this photo in his office and he said, look, you know, people can accuse me of a lot of things, David, look at this photo.
They can't accuse me of being a carpetbagger in this state.
MONTAGNE: All right. David Greene in Idaho. I'm looking forward to that. And NPR's Peter Overby, thanks, both of you, very much.
OVERBY: Good to be here.
GREENE: Thank you, Renee.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Some other news now. Each year, Japanese fishermen herd dolphins into coves. They select choice ones for marine parks and they kill the others. The dolphin hunt goes on for several months each year. But as NPR's Elizabeth Shogren reports, this time it has sparked criticism from the brand new U.S. ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy.
ELIZABETH SHOGREN, BYLINE: Ambassador Kennedy tweeted that she's deeply concerned by what she calls the inhumane-ness of the hunt. She says the U.S. government opposes this kind of hunting. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf says the ambassador's comments line up with U.S. policy.
MARIE HARF: We are concerned with both the sustainability and the humane-ness of the Japanese dolphin hunts. The ambassador was expressing our view that we have made public for a long time.
SHOGREN: But Kennedy's brief tweet gives new exposure to the issue. Japanese officials defend the hunt as a traditional fishing practice done according to Japanese law. They point out their critics also kill animals for food.
MELISSA SEHGAL: There's nothing cultural, traditional about this. It's all about profit and greed.
SHOGREN: Activist Melissa Sehgal says marine parks pays tens of thousands of dollars per dolphin. Segal represents Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The group has been on the ground documenting the hunts in Taiji, Japan since September.
SEHGAL: We have seen almost 1,200 dolphins driven into the cove. Of those, 628 have been killed and 149 have been taken captive.
SHOGREN: Scientists have published a study on the way these Japanese fishermen kill the dolphins. One of the authors is Diana Reiss, a marine mammal scientist and professor at Hunter College in New York.
DIANA REISS: They repeatedly drive this knife-like object into the heads of the dolphins, causing great pain to the animals.
SHOGREN: Reiss studies the way dolphins think and communicate with each other.
REISS: This goes beyond belief and the fact that any modern country, like Japan, that really appreciates nature can continue to do this is unbelievable and unjustifiable.
SHOGREN: Reiss and other opponents of the dolphin hunts were thrilled to see Ambassador Kennedy weighing in on the issue. Jon Davidann is a professor of history at Hawaii Pacific University who focuses on U.S./Japanese relations. He says it's not unusual for a U.S. ambassador to criticize Japanese policy.
JON DAVIDANN: But it is unusual to find the American ambassador voicing disapproval of what could be characterized as Japanese cultural practices.
SHOGREN: Davidann says in the two months Kennedy has been in her post, she's distinguished herself from her predecessors.
DAVIDANN: The new ambassador, Ambassador Kennedy, has taken a little bit more aggressive approach with the Japanese, a little bit more critical approach with the Japanese.
SHOGREN: Opponents of dolphin hunting hope she will keep up the pressure on Japanese officials to end the practice. Elizabeth Shogren, NPR News, Washington.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The United States is considering what to do about deepening violence in Iraq. Car bombings and other attacks have killed hundreds of people just since the start of this year. The violence is blamed on extremist groups and on Iraqi Sunni Muslims who feel excluded by the government. Yesterday, reporter Prashant Rao told us the U.S. is offering the Shia-led government advice, and more.
PRASHANT RAO: It's already supplied quite a few Hellfire missiles. It's providing unarmed ScanEagle reconnaissance drones, and of course the U.S. has also said that it's going to be supplying a large number of small arms, M4s and M16s, rifles, that kind of thing, to Iraq.
INSKEEP: A former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, James Jeffrey, argues the United States should be doing even more for the Iraqi forces.
JAMES JEFFREY: What they need is air support and probably some training of some of their people, because urban warfare, as we found in 2004 in Fallujah, is something that you don't do overnight.
INSKEEP: Is this conflict America's problem?
JEFFREY: Yes, it is. It is America's problem for several reasons. First of all, like it or not, the Iraq of today is a partner and a quasi-ally of the United States. Secondly, an al-Qaida force anywhere in the Middle East in ungoverned territory is a danger both to the stability of the region and to the United States. Thirdly, moving into an area, Fallujah, the biggest and most intense fighting for the U.S. ground forces since the Vietnam War, this is the kind of thing that sends chills down the spines of everybody in the Middle East when they fear that America will not respond to something as dramatic as this.
INSKEEP: Do you think that the Obama administration has made this a priority, a sufficient priority?
JEFFREY: I think they have made it a priority. I think that they're going to make it more of a priority. I think that they are a little bit concerned about getting bogged down, just as they were with Syria on the chemical weapons issue, on any kind of engagement in the Middle East because they feel that it's a third rail. It's radioactive with the American people.
True. American polls show that Americans are unhappy with the Middle East. They're unhappy with engagement. But for my mind, they're unhappy about large scale commitments and thousands of Americans dying, such as Afghanistan and Iraq. That's not what we're talking about here. It's not what we were talking about with strikes against Syria.
INSKEEP: Are there efforts underway to more directly advise the Iraqi military, to get Americans involved in some way more directly with the Iraqis on the ground?
JEFFREY: There are both reports of training in Jordan, and from what I've heard, from what I know, there are such efforts both being planned, being evaluated and perhaps already underway.
INSKEEP: When you say Jordan, just to state the obvious here, Iraq has forbidden U.S. troops to be on its soil, at least under terms that the United States can accept, and so they just go across the border and do the training there?
JEFFREY: Exactly. Technically, Iraq didn't forbid the troops. They said, you're welcome to have a training presence. We just won't grant them legal immunities, but that is a sine qua non for us and that's how it all came down in the fall of 2011.
INSKEEP: Isn't this something that has been tried before? When you talk about training Iraqi troops in Jordan, I immediately think of 2005, 2006, 2007, when the United States was trying to do that on a large scale.
JEFFREY: We were training police there. There's a whole story behind that and I'm pretty confident that training troops, if we use U.S. government personnel, either uniformed or non-uniformed...
INSKEEP: Like CIA people...
JEFFREY: U.S. government personnel, uniformed or non-uniformed, I'm pretty sure that they'll get the job done.
INSKEEP: And do you think that they actually have the knowledge that is needed in this situation?
JEFFREY: If there's one thing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans have learned in the last 12 years, it's how to do low intensity warfare in the broader Middle East. We're experts at it.
INSKEEP: Last thing. Are you worried at all about the United States being dragged back into this conflict?
JEFFREY: I'm worried very much about the United States being so worried about getting dragged into another conflict like Iraq, Vietnam or Afghanistan, not doing anything, however minor, however reasonable, however low cost, however low risk. That's what we saw with the Syrian CW, that's what I was afraid we were seeing with Iraq, but I think the administration's got over it and they're jumping in now.
INSKEEP: Ambassador, thanks for coming by.
JEFFREY: Thank you.
INSKEEP: James Jeffrey is a former United States ambassador to Iraq.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Amazon got a lot of publicity and not a few jokes out of its idea to drop packages on your doorstep with drones. Now the company's quest to cut deliveries to the shortest time humanly possible has taken things to a higher level. Amazon is planning to ship goods your way before you even hit the buy button. You could say it will be reading your mind. In a patent Amazon calls it anticipatory shipping.
Tim Stevens, editor at large for CNET, has been following this story. Thank you for joining us.
TIM STEVENS: Thank you for having me.
MONTAGNE: What are we talking about here? I mean this is sort of the headline. Amazon is going to ship stuff you want before you even know you want it or certainly before you ordered it.
STEVENS: That's right. It may be things that you want. It may be things that you've added to your wish list, but it's not things that you've committed to buying yet, at least not knowingly. Amazon's going to be basically looking at what you're shopping for, things that maybe you've added to your cart but decided not to check out for yet, or even things that you've maybe hovered your mouse cursor over longingly, but decided not to actually buy.
Amazon wants to develop a system that will allow it to actually use those cues as indicators that you're going to buy this thing at some point in the future and then go ahead and ship that thing to you so that when you do decide to buy the package, it will just be either on a truck ready to go to your house or in a warehouse not far from you, so instead of even having to wait two days, you might even be able to get it same-day.
MONTAGNE: Clearly this is not a totally new concept, the idea of purchasing patterns, what people in some parts of the country want or need. How is Amazon fine-tuning this so much that it can ask for a patent on it?
STEVENS: Specifically what they're patenting is the monitoring of you buying purchases and the application of your history as applied to other people in your area with similar interests to you, and then the other part of it is actually the logistics of getting those packages to these shipping centers and getting them closer to you.
So it's basically the whole package describing the algorithms for finding out what you're going to buy and then finding out how to figure out the best way to get that close to you in a way that's not going to cost Amazon a whole lot of money, of course. In fact, they describe a scenario in which they ship a package to you that you decide you don't want after all and they may actually just give that package to you for free because it might be cheaper than shipping back to Amazon.
And they consider that an act of good will.
MONTAGNE: So what is the patent for exactly?
STEVENS: The primary focus is definitely the algorithms where they can rank and score the different indicators of your behavior and then once that score crosses a given threshold, ship that package to you before you even know that you want it. So that's the primary focus of this patent.
MONTAGNE: You follow this area of the news. Does anything strike you in this as not doable?
STEVENS: Parts of this definitely seem like the kind of thing that Amazon could implement very quickly. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they're using some aspects of this right now to move packages between fulfillment centers just to make that part of the process a bit smarter. But they also describe things that would require a lot of partnerships with UPS, having these packages sit at UPS shipping depots without a proper address on them and then having someone at UPS basically go in and apply the correct address and ship that package out.
I haven't heard any deals like that going on at this point, but that sort of thing, I think, UPS and the USPS would be very open to because they need all the money they can get.
MONTAGNE: Tim Stevens is editor at large for CNET. Thanks very much for joining us.
STEVENS: Thank you for having me.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne, and if I had to guess what your computer password is, my best bet until now would be P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D. But Internet users finally got the message that password is a pretty terrible one if the goal is security. According to SplashData's annual survey of bad passwords, password has fallen to second place as the most common password now that more people are turning to: 123456. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Yet another document released sheds light on the Catholic Church. Thousands of pages of internal church documents show that for decades top leaders in Chicago's Catholic archdiocese tried to hide allegations of sexual abuse by priests. The documents were released yesterday as part of a settlement agreement between the archdiocese and victims. And as NPR's David Schaper reports, the survivors now accuse church leaders of orchestrating a cover-up.
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: Forty-eight year old Angel Santiago is a little anxious as he waits in a downtown Chicago hotel meeting room with his wife and with several other survivors of clerical sexual abuse. Within minutes, for the first time, documents detailing decades of criminal sexual acts committed by 30 priests in the Chicago archdiocese would be going public. And Santiago is a little apprehensive.
ANGEL SANTIAGO: For me, it just brings back a lot of horror and a lot of nightmares.
SCHAPER: Nightmares about Santiago's once trusted parish priest, Father Joseph Fitzharris, and what he did to him more than 30 years ago. Santiago says it's taken him decades to begin to recover.
SANTIAGO: I just want to make sure that whatever is on these documents doesn't really affect me or bring me back down to where I was.
SCHAPER: But in that hushed voice, Angel Santiago says the release of these documents is critical to helping expose the deliberate steps taken by Chicago's most revered Catholic leaders to protect abusive priests and the church's reputation, rather than protect children. Attorney Marc Pearlman represents several clerical abuse survivors.
MARC PEARLMAN: It shows a pattern of repeated abuse, repeated allegations, the archdiocese working hard to keep that all bottled up and secret, and then transferring these gentlemen from one parish to another so they can abuse again.
SCHAPER: Pearlman says the paper trail implicates the Chicago church hierarchy, including the late Cardinals John Cody and Joseph Bernardin, as well as current Cardinal Francis George and his handling of recent abuse cases. None of the documents reveal any effort by archdiocesan leaders to turn over accusations or the abusers to law enforcement. Here's another of the victims' attorneys, Jeff Anderson.
JEFF ANDERSON: It's ugly, it's sorrowful, it's painful, it's disgusting, and it discloses complicity in criminal conduct by top officials.
SCHAPER: In a statement, the archdiocese acknowledges that, quote, leaders made some decisions decades ago that are now difficult to justify, but those decisions were made, quote, in accordance with the prevailing knowledge at the time. In the past 40 years, the statement continues, society has evolved in dealing with matters related to abuse. Cardinal Francis George apologized for the abuse in a letter sent to parishes last week, and he has acknowledged that mistakes were made in past. But the apology means little to Jim Laarveld, whose son was abused by a priest.
JIM LAARVELD: They have done nothing in the Archdiocese of Chicago, and that probably hurts more than anything else, because being brought up a Catholic and the faith and trust you have, and then to be disappointed like this and have your child abused like this, there's no excuse for it, I don't care what they say.
SCHAPER: Laarveld and other survivors point out that not one Catholic Church official in Chicago or elsewhere has ever been demoted, fired or otherwise disciplined in the sex abuse scandal. They're hoping that the release of these documents, with more files on at least 35 more abusive priests still to come, can lead to some church leaders eventually being held accountable. David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. This morning we're following the opening of the peace conference on Syria in which began with a series of verbal attacks. Syria's foreign minister and the leader of the opposition group representing rebels traded accusations and insults. At the heart of this conference in Switzerland is whether the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad can remain in power.
The civil war is going into its third year with more than 130,000 people dead and millions more having fled their homes. As the talks began, we reached Wall Street Journal reporter Sam Dagher in the capital, Damascus. Good morning.
SAM DAGHER: Good morning to you.
MONTAGNE: You know, I'm wondering, are people there in Damascus focused a lot on this peace conference?
DAGHER: Absolutely, Renee. People are desperate. I mean, this is a war that's had a tremendous toll on civilians.
MONTAGNE: You, in this morning's paper, The Wall Street Journal, described horrific conditions in one of those residential areas where people are trapped. Tell us what you saw.
DAGHER: It was just horrible. I mean to see some of these people who eventually came out - women who were carried on stretchers, others who could barely walk. I mean I met a woman who was 95 and she told me that kids were picking grass in order for her to eat. And then she broke down in tears. Another woman told me that she was reduced to eating cat and donkey meat.
And then she appealed to the people in Geneva who are meeting, you know, today and saying, you know, let everyone out. Let people out of this hell that we're living. You know, open the road and take food in. That was her appeal. So it was absolutely horrendous.
MONTAGNE: Because the government has been using food and medicine - withholding it - as a weapon - along, actually, though, with the other side as well.
DAGHER: It's mainly the government that's using food and medicine as a weapon of war, but rebels are doing it as well, mainly in the north of the country in places around Aleppo, where Islamist rebels are the strongest. And there they're besieging government installations, military bases, and actually not allowing any food into these places.
And also they're besieging a couple of villages that are seen as loyal to the regime.
MONTAGNE: Well, what about that? If you're talking on the battlefield who would you say at this moment in time as these peace talks begin has the upper hand between the government and these myriad rebel groups?
DAGHER: Well, I'll tell you. It's a very complex checkerboard on the ground. In central Syria the regime does have the upper hand, but it only gained this upper hand because of tremendous military help it's gotten from Iran and Hezbollah. But in other parts of the country it's certainly more complicated. In the south it's 50/50. Rebels there, mainly actually moderates who are backed by Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. control almost half of the province.
In the north it is extremely complicated now with shifting battle lines. We have a mishmash of rebel groups, mainly Islamists, a couple of groups that are linked to al-Qaida, and now these rebels are fighting each other.
MONTAGNE: Well, given that the fighting is complicated - the government controls parts of the country, various rebel groups, other parts, and there seems to be at this moment in time something of a standoff, do you feel like either side wants a peace deal now? Are they tired enough? Or is this fighting going to continue?
DAGHER: I think everyone, including the regime and the fighters, want a break. Everybody has been stretched to the max. And I think maybe, sadly, we may not find the final solution but we may get a reprieve in the fighting, which will allow some humanitarian aid to get into some of these hard to reach areas. I tell you, Renee, I can't emphasize that even more, the civilians, the combatants, everybody is tired. Everybody wants a break.
MONTAGNE: That was Sam Dagher with The Wall Street Journal speaking to us from the capital of Syria, Damascus. Thank you very much.
DAGHER: My pleasure.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now let's get some analysis of the Syrian peace talks from former U.S. diplomat Nicholas Burns. He's on the line today from London. Ambassador, welcome back to the program.
NICHOLAS BURNS: Thank you.
INSKEEP: Does the moment seem right at all to make progress in these peace talks?
BURNS: It's a critical moment. I don't think that early progress is going to be possible, just because Syria - the Syrian government, the Syrian rebels, Russia, Iran, the United States, they're all disunited. They're all feuding with each other. But there is a moral imperative to act because the International Crisis Group says there are nine million Syrians of a population of 22.4 million who have lost their homes, 100,000 dead. So at the very least, if the Russians and the Americans can agree with the Syrian government to a temporary ceasefire - at least in parts of the country - and to let the United Nations and refugee aid agencies in to give help to people, that is at least a place where they've got a start.
INSKEEP: You're pointing the way toward a partial deal or a localized kind of deal. Is that what seems to be practical here?
BURNS: What doesn't seem to be practical is a full gauged, you know, settlement, where they agree that they're not going to fight anymore; they agree on the transitional government away from Assad. That's the goal on the distant horizon. But there's so much cynicism here. There's so much barbarism. There are new allegations of Syrian war crimes against its own citizens. And the Russians and Chinese are going to act to protect Syrian government.
So I think what the United States has to do - and I think what Secretary Kerry is going to try to do - is to say a long-range goal is that Assad has to leave; a new transitional government comprised of the various parties, and the various groups in Syria, will have to take power at some point. But in the immediate time the refugee situation has to be addressed urgently, because it's the greatest humanitarian catastrophe in the world today.
And that's where the moral imperative is. And I think that's where said Secretary Kerry is going to focus a lot of his energies.
INSKEEP: We heard from San Dagher of the exhaustion of the populace and even of the fighters, after the years of war. But, of course, the calculus of leaders may be a little different, because they're thinking in terms of their own survival. Is there any way that this desire for peace that you do here among the populace would begin to operate on one side or the other?
BURNS: I don't think you're going to see it, Steve, inside Syria, because this is a fight to the death between President Assad and the rebel groups facing him - particularly the jihadi groups, the al-Qaida type groups that have taken control of all of a lot of the rebel movement. And, you know, they don't play for compromise. They play to win. And that's why you see the Syrian government and the rebels fighting so intensely.
And so, what the outside powers have to do is try to influence them, and push them at least towards some kind of temporary cessation of the fighting. I think it's too much to ask out of this conference - it's not realistic - that a general cease-fire would take place. So perhaps a ceasefire in Aleppo or in other parts of the country, where you can create some zones that people can go to just to escape the fighting.
And for the U.S., they're facing all bad options because they can't live with Assad but the Russians will protect him. The president has said categorically the United States will not intervene militarily, and I think that's probably the right decision. But then again, we can't do nothing.
INSKEEP: Well, I'm thinking about the implications of what you're saying may be practical here, which is temporary ceasefires, localized ceasefires that might allow humanitarian aid to flow. But I'm wondering if there were such an agreement, if that would bolster Assad in power, because it's yet another agreement, somewhat like the chemical weapons agreement, that leaves him sitting there.
BURNS: Well, you know, the reality is, Steve - and this is the really difficult work - when you're dealing with diplomacy, is that if the United States is unwilling to intervene decisively against Assad - and we are unwilling to do that - then we're going to have to deal in the short-term with his government. It's the only way to get help to the refugees. It's the only way to begin to, at least, city by city or region by region basis, to begin to chip away at this war.
And so, you have to deal with him. You have to deal with the government. We detest him. But that's the short-term imperative to save human life.
INSKEEP: What if the talks produced nothing?
BURNS: You know, that could be the case, because, you know, the Iranians have been kept out this conference. So they're not at the table so they're going to be spoilers. They're going to be urging the Syrian government to be recalcitrant. If the talks don't produce anything, then what you've got to do with diplomacy is come back and back again and try to get, you know, try to get the minimum, the modicum of progress here.
And that's the record of over the last three years; nothing really good has happened but you can't give up trying to make it happen.
INSKEEP: Former U.S. diplomat Nicholas Burns is now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Ambassador, always a pleasure to talk with you.
BURNS: Thank you, Steve.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And let's review some music now. NPR music's First Listen at NPR.org gives you the chance to hear an upcoming album in its entirety before it is released. Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton helped choose the featured albums. They're the hosts of NPR's ALL SONGS CONSIDERED. Today, Bob and Robin have a hypnotic new release from the Boston-based group Gem Club. It's called "In Roses."
BOB BOILEN, BYLINE: Robin Hilton, what do you think of when you think of roses?
ROBIN HILTON, BYLINE: They're very beautiful and thorny, covered in thorns.
BOILEN: Good, 'cause that notion of the rose is right in the title of Gem Club. It's called "In Roses" and the rose is both full of sadness and beauty, right? The hospital, sickness, love, all those things, right in this music.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
HILTON: Yeah, so the songs are very, very beautiful and at some times very sad. The previous record this band Gem Club put out was a bedroom recording. This one they did in the studio all to analog equipment, and they got an orchestra, a house orchestra to play with them, so it's very lush, and some of these songs, you can hear how the music just sort of swells and then gently lingers.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "POLLY")
BOILEN: So this song, "Polly" Christopher Barnes, the writer of these songs, is talking about his aunt. She had Alzheimer's. He, as a young guy, didn't visit her, didn't do the things that we all should do to help. He's kind of full of regrets. It's about life not turning out quite the way you expect it to turn out.
HILTON: Yeah. The previous record was very inward looking. This one's very outward looking. One of the songs, called "Soft Season," is about Joey Stefano. He's a gay adult movie actor from the early '90s who died of a drug overdose when he was just 26 years old. And on this song, "Soft Season" Christopher Barnes captures that whole notion of beauty and pain when he says, Might try to hurt me, might try to love me too much.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOFT SEASON")
BOILEN: You hear Christopher Barnes' voice, but right behind him you hear this ghost voice, he calls it. This is Ieva Berberian. She sort of doubles his voice and it's a really beautiful effect. But not only that, they then double their own voices again when they do the recording and there's this weird, wonderful mystery about the sound of this record.
This whole record has this vibe. It changes the room when you put this record on.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
INSKEEP: Consider the room changed. That was ALL SONGS CONSIDERED hosts Robin Hilton and Bob Boilen. And you can hear the full album at NPR.org/Music.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
When many think of worship at a Roman Catholic Church, they think about St. Patrick's Cathedral, incense, candles, rituals, alcoves. That is, unless you're part of the Charismatic Catholic movement, which emphasizes a highly expressive and individual relationship with God. A new survey finds Latinos participate in the Charismatic movement in particularly high numbers.
Maria Hinojosa, host of the public radio program "Latino USA," has more.
MARIA HINOJOSA, BYLINE: Wednesday night at the Saint Anthony of Padua Church in the Bronx is prayer meeting night. Enter the spare assembly room and forget everything you know about Catholic Sunday Mass. This is totally different.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
HINOJOSA: For one thing, the service is led by a woman who's part of the congregation rather than a male priest. She preaches excitedly, spontaneously, while a rock band of young Salvadoran immigrants backs her up. Some people in the audience hold their hands up, others are swaying gently. Then the woman stops speaking in Spanish and begins speaking in tongues.
It may sound indecipherable, but for the faithful, it's a sacred language given to them by the Holy Spirit. Tears stream down faces in the audience. Welcome to a different kind of Catholicism. For the carismaticos, members of the Charismatic Catholic movement, worship centers on establishing a personal connection with God.
According to a recent survey conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, about a third of Latino Catholics in the U.S. identify as Charismatic, compared to only a tenth of non-Latino Catholics, according to an earlier poll by the Pew Research Center.
Marvin Rodriguez, who is attending the prayer meeting, says he joined the movement seven years ago. What does it mean for you to be a charismatic Catholic?
MARVIN RODRIGUEZ: It means happiness. We like to express ourselves in a different way, like applauding, and happy and laughing, and joy.
HINOJOSA: At charismatic meetings, there's also miraculous healings and prophesying. It's very similar to what you'd expect to see at a Pentecostal church where the number of Latino converts is growing quickly. But by joining the Charismatic movement, Latinos don't have to cut their ties with the Catholic Church to have those kinds of intensely personal spiritual experiences.
Seventy-three-year-old Belinda De Los Santos says she had her first direct encounter with the Holy Spirit after becoming a charismatic.
BELINDA DE LOS SANTOS: (Through interpreter) In that moment I cried, I laughed, I fell into the Holy Spirit.
JOHNNY TORRES: When I came, the first time I came over here, it's like I started crying. My body started shaking, but I didn't know what it was.
HINOJOSA: Bronx native Johnny Torres is a former drug addict. He says if he hadn't found the Charismatic prayer meetings, he'd probably be dead right now or in jail. Growing up, his parents' more tempered style of Catholicism never really caught his interest. Charismatic Catholicism in the U.S. dates back about 50 years. Today, Latinos are a driving force in the movement.
Father Jim Sheehan, a Charismatic priest and chaplain at Bronx Community College, says traditional Catholicism just isn't connecting with the Latinos he ministers to, especially recent immigrants who are struggling.
FATHER JIM SHEEHAN: The question the charismatic renewal puts in our face is: Do you have the faith that God cares about your life today? And I think many of us have a distant relationship with a God of the future; Charismatics, Latinos expect God to come today, hoy dÃa.
HINOJOSA: Despite the Charismatic movement's record of engaging Latinos, Father Sheehan says some more conservative members of the Catholic Church disapprove of all the healings and speaking in tongues. It makes them uneasy. But, says Fordham University theologian Michael Lee, they'd better get used to it.
MICHAEL LEE: I would argue that, especially now with the papacy of Pope Francis, that there's an openness to this worship. And given the numbers of Latinos and Latinas in the country and in the future of Catholicism, I definitely think it's a way forward.
SHEEHAN: I was told in the seminary, and I believe it, that the Latinos are the future of the church.
HINOJOSA: And, Father Sheehan adds, it's a crying shame we haven't celebrated that more. For NPR News, I'm Maria Hinojosa.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It was 100 years ago, in 1914 the First World War broke out in Europe. There are many plans to mark the centenary; histories, documentaries, ceremonial parades. Britain's National Archives in London aimed for a remembrance that was more human scale. And even though the last British veteran past away four years ago, it's been able to tell the story of that long ago war in the words of those who fought it.
NPR's Ari Shapiro paid a visit.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: We're here in the basement of the British National Archives in the staff reading room. And introduce yourself for me.
WILLIAM SPENCER: I'm William Spencer. I'm the principle military specialist here at the National Archives at Kew.
SHAPIRO: And what have you got in front of us?
SPENCER: I have just one box of the diaries of the British Army for the whole of the First World War. And we've placed the first 300,000 of one and a half million pages on the Internet.
SHAPIRO: And though these pages are online, what you've got here is the actual ink from 100 years ago written on the pages. It says Fourth Battalion the Middlesex Regiment, August 1914.
These are the official diaries recording the day-to-day activities of British Army units in the First World War. The scale of death is huge. Nearly a million British soldiers died in the war, half of them on the Western Front in France and Belgium. But the daily routine was not all explosions and gunshots. These diaries include cold clinical descriptions of marches, of boredom. Sometimes they record sports.
SPENCER: It's usually soccer. That was the great thing for the British Army on the Western Front. So, for example, the first day of the Battle of Somme, the First of July 1916, at least one regiment are known to have advanced towards the enemy kicking a football.
SHAPIRO: I'm sorry, really?
SPENCER: Yep. So if you want to, in a way, get your people pointing in the right direction, you kick a football over the top, and they followed it and kicked it.
SHAPIRO: These are mostly unit diaries - more like official military daily agendas. But there are a few personal journals as well. Here's the diary of Captain James Patterson, September 16th, 1914.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Reading) All the hedges are torn and trampled, all the grass trodden in the mud, holes where shells have struck, branches torn off trees by explosions; everywhere the same hard, grim, pitiless sight of battle and war. I've had a belly full of it.
SHAPIRO: This diary entry ends with: I must try and write to my mother now. Captain James Patterson died six weeks later.
CAROLINE JAMES: It really does change how you feel about it. I suppose they're no longer just images in photographs.
SHAPIRO: This is Caroline James. Though she works at the archives, we spoke by phone. She unearthed the story of one of her own relatives in the World War I diaries.
JAMES: You think those were real men. They had mums. They had brothers and sisters and girlfriends and wives and children.
SHAPIRO: On the day her relative died, the diary entry is almost clinical.
JAMES: (Reading) After a tiring march at 11:30 PM, B Squadron captured a German car and a tank. Casualties: Second Leftenant RFT Moore and 11 men missing.
SHAPIRO: One of those 11 men was her great-great uncle, Charles Alfred Hunt. He died less than two weeks after arriving in France. He was 26 years old.
Many older people here in Britain knew veterans of World War One. But the diaries provide a different level of detail. Michael Brookbank is 84, drinking a coffee in the archives cafeteria. He's come to here to learn more about his father.
MICHAEL BROOKBANK: My father very rarely talked about the war. And I think that is common with most of the veterans of the war. The experiences that they went through and the conditions that they lived in were just something that, unless you were actually there, nobody could really comprehend.
SHAPIRO: Now that the diaries are online, anyone in the world can read them. At OperationWarDiary.org, the archives recruit what they call citizen historians. It's a way of crowd-sourcing the research, so people at home can classify and tag some of the 1.5 million pages.
Of course, these diaries only tell one side of the story. Archivist William Spencer hopes that someday Germany may digitize its remaining World War I diaries.
SPENCER: So to be able to just pick a given day, say, in the autumn of 1918, and look at that one day through the records of all the belligerent parties.
SHAPIRO: Spencer says that that would be the ultimate - soldiers from Britain, America, France and Germany, each telling the same 100-year-old story from their point of view.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, London.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
All right, most of the sports in the upcoming winter Olympics involve great physical strength or agility. The goals are easy to understand: go faster, jump farther or more spectacularly than your competition. But one Olympic sport is as much about strategy and physics as physicality: curling. To give you an edge when watching this sport, NPR's Tamara Keith spent some time learning how to curl.
(SOUNDBITE OF STONE ROLLING OVER ICE)
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Curling is some combination of bowling, bocce ball, billiards and chess, all on ice. Oh, and there's sweeping involved, too, so throw some basic housekeeping into that mix. It's one of those sports people love to mock for not really being a sport. But don't tell that to Kevin White.
KEVIN WHITE: Well, I curled last Friday, twice on Saturday, once on Sunday, once on Tuesday, once on Thursday, once on Friday and then today.
KEITH: White is an instructor at the Potomac Curling Club in a Washington, D.C., suburb, where about a dozen newbies like me gathered for a lesson. We put rubber grippers over our sneakers.
WHITE: Come on down on the ice.
KEITH: White senses the group's nervousness.
WHITE: Please. And you'll notice that it's not real smooth, like you might expect. It has a textured surface. What we do is we spray water droplets on here to give it what we call a pebbled surface.
KEITH: And that helps the stone move on the ice, a stone which instructor Joe Rockenbach says is quite specialized.
JOE ROCKENBACH: The rocks are made of granite, a specific type of granite from Scotland. They weigh between 38 and 44 pounds.
KEITH: They are smooth and round and squat like a Saturn peach, with a handle on the top. And White says the idea is to push the stone from one end of the ice to the other, aiming for the center of a bull's-eye-looking thing called the house.
WHITE: What do you think we call that?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The bull's-eye.
WHITE: The button. Anybody heard the term right on the button?
KEITH: But getting the stone right on the button? That's harder than it looks.
WHITE: First thing is we're just going to press forward and slide everything forward.
KEITH: Launching the stone involves getting into a low lunge position, pushing off with one foot, sliding on the other, and then when your body is moving along the ice at the perfect speed, releasing the stone with just the right amount of spin. When done right, it works like a curveball, and the stone curls to the spot you're aiming for.
(SOUNDBITE OF STONE SLIDING OVER ICE)
KEITH: Oh.
WHITE: You started to lean forward. That's the thing.
KEITH: (unintelligible) come off.
WHITE: That's OK.
KEITH: The stones I threw, not so much. But unlike bowling, say, the fun doesn't stop when the big heavy thing is launched down the ice. That's, says Rockenbach, is when it's time for other members of the team to start sweeping.
ROCKENBACH: This is where the it-feels-like-a-sport part comes in. And trust me, it does.
KEITH: A broom is used for sweeping, though it actually looks more like a spongy mop. Sweepers go out ahead of the stone, melting the ice ever so slightly with the friction of the sweeping.
ROCKENBACH: Sweeping accomplishes a couple of things. It can make the rock go further. It can straighten out the path that the rock's traveling. It can burn calories. It can make you warm.
KEITH: Rockenbach says the top-level sweepers can burn 500 calories an hour.
ROCKENBACH: And we're just going to go back and forth in front of the rock, back and forth in front of the rock.
KEITH: Each round is called an end - yes, this sport has a language all its own. Each team has four players, and each player throws out two stones.
(SOUNDBITE OF STONE SLIDING OVER ICE)
KEITH: As the stone rolls down the ice, it sounds like an airplane overhead. Then add to the cacophony the squeaky squeak of sweeping.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
KEITH: The team with the rock closest to the center of the button after all those throws wins the end. And knocking your opponent's stone out of the house...
(SOUNDBITE OF CLANGING)
KEITH: ...or blocking their path in are key parts of the game. How many points the winner gets depends on how many stones the winning team has closer to the center than their opponents' nearest stone. After eight or 10 ends, the game is over, but Rockenbach says the players are not done.
ROCKENBACH: The most important rule in curling is the winning team buys the first round after the game is over.
KEITH: Even sometimes at the Olympics, which brings us back to that whole argument about whether curling really, truly is a sport. All I'll say is that the next morning, my arms were sore from all that intense sweeping. Tamara Keith, NPR News.
INSKEEP: She is NPR's curling correspondent, and we have put together an animated guide to curling. See that at npr.org.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And today, Spain officially ends its reliance on bailout loans from Europe. Madrid requested a financial rescue 18 months ago to shore up its banks, after a real estate collapse. Spain is the second of five eurozone countries to cleanly exit its bailout program, Ireland was the first.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Lauren Frayer reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTESTERS, WHISTLEBLOWING)
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: A year and a half ago, demonstrations like this one erupted outside banks here almost daily. Record numbers of Spaniards were losing their homes in foreclosure. Unemployment soared past 25 percent and kept rising.
Money was flying out of the country. Spanish banks were holding mortgages that would never be paid back after the housing bubble burst.
The Spanish government nationalized the country's biggest mortgage lender, Bankia, but couldn't afford to rescue them all. So Europe stepped in, with about $56 billion in loans.
MEGAN GREENE: The idea is to kind of stuff the banks full of cash, so that they can finally start taking the losses that they're sitting on.
FRAYER: Megan Greene is the chief economist at Maverick Intelligence in London. She says that unlike in Greece, where the government went broke, in Spain it was the banks. They needed loans from Europe to stay afloat, and cut their losses from the housing crash.
But Greene says the banks haven't dumped their bad debt - and they're hoping they might not have to.
GREENE: The big deal that politicians and bank CEOs are playing is extend and pretend. Sort of if we pretend that our banks are really healthy, then eventually all the assets that are underlying things on our balance sheets will regain value, and we won't actually have to take such big losses. So that's the game everyone in Europe has been trying to play. And you know, Spain might get away with it, just because sentiment in Europe, generally, has improved so much.
FRAYER: The Spanish government is paying lower rates to borrow money. There's confidence it can handle the interest on its debt. The economy is out of recession. And the International Monetary Fund has tripled its growth forecast for Spain this year.
Even Microsoft founder Bill Gates just bought a $150 million stake in a Spanish construction company, says economist Gayle Allard, at Madrid's IE Business School.
GAYLE ALLARD: Foreign capital has come in because Spain is now such a bargain. Because salaries have gone down, values have gone down - asset values. And the man in the street has borne the brunt of all of that.
FRAYER: And Allard, an American who's lived in Spain for decades, says the view from the street is far less rosy.
ALLARD: The reality is that, you know, one in four people looking for a job can't find one. The young people are leaving the country. Spain has become a net exporter of persons again for the first time in decades. Salaries are down by, I think, eight percent now. There's nothing pretty about the picture at home.
FRAYER: So while Spain celebrates the survival of its banking system, thanks to bailout loans from Europe - there's still work to be done on the overall economy. Youth unemployment is pushing 60 percent.
Today's bailout exit means Spanish banks won't tap any more European loans - but they'll have to pay back what they've already borrowed, over the next 15 years.
For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer in Madrid.
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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. Good morning.
Major data breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus have compromised the personal information of at least 70 million Americans. Analysts say even more consumers are at risk because the card-swiping technology Americans use is not hard to hack.
And as NPR's Elise Hu explains, a more secure payment method is already up and running in other countries, forcing the U.S. to play-catch up.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: Sophisticated cyber-thieves got so much consumer data by injecting a virus into Target's card payment terminals. From there, the bad guys systematically captured the information found on every card swiped, from Thanksgiving through just before Christmas.
AVIVAH LITAN: We've seen hacks as big as this before - in fact bigger. But what we haven't seen is something this sophisticated and well organized.
HU: Avivah Litan is a security analyst for Gartner, which retailers hire to assess their cyber security gaps. She says the magnetic stripes on the backs of our cards, which carry our data, are way too easy to exploit.
LITAN: It's totally unprotected and it's static, so it's the same data that's read every single time. It's just about the worst security you can put into a payment system.
HU: And you don't have to travel into the future to find a more secure, harder-to-hack payment system. You just have to leave the United States.
(SOUNDBITE OF DIAL TONES)
HU: So I called up a friend that you and I know well who just moved across the Atlantic.
(SOUNDBITE OF RINGING PHONE)
HU: Ari Shapiro is NPR's new London correspondent. When he left D.C., he took with him his American-issued credit cards - the ones with those magnetic stripes.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: I can't use the self check-out line at the supermarket. I can't use the automated machines in the subway system or the post office. Some merchants charge me an extra charge just because of my American credit card.
HU: That's because, as Litan explains, magnetic stripes are so outdated that most other countries have moved beyond it. They use cards with tiny gold or silver chips embedded on them that payment terminals can read. In Europe and elsewhere, it's called the chip and PIN system.
LITAN: It's standardized all over the world and used all over the world, except in the U.S. and perhaps one country in Africa.
HU: Chip-enabled cards are more secure because the data on the chips is hidden behind encryption. So even if criminals intercept what's on it, they can't re-use it. Ari's new British pal, Ben Thompson, explains how he pays for purchases without swiping or signing.
BEN THOMPSON: I put the card in the machine. The retailer - the cashier will hand me a little key pad. I'll type in my number and that verifies the transaction. It means I don't have to sign, don't have to use a pen. I literally type in four little numbers.
HU: Visa aims to get the majority of U.S. consumers on chip-based cards by 2015. But changing over all those cards and card readers costs a lot of money, which is part of the reason why it hasn't happened sooner.
Again, Avivah Litan.
LITAN: You have to upgrade all the terminals that are out there that are used by the merchants. You have to upgrade all the ATM machines. You have to issue new cards to consumers. So it's a lengthy process.
HU: Interestingly, Target actually tried to collaborate with Visa 10 years ago to use chip-cards in 1,000 stores. But executives shelved the effort over worries that chip-based cards slowed down checkout speeds.
MALLORY DUNCAN: It's going to take time. And it's going to be extraordinarily expensive. But it's going to be something we must do.
HU: That's Mallory Duncan of the National Retail Federation. He says fallout from the big breach is creating consensus around making chip and PIN the American standard sooner.
DUNCAN: If you start bringing out the new PIN and chip cards, then retailers will begin to reconfigure their point of sale equipment to accept those cards. Eventually everyone's going to have to make this change.
HU: The change will take at least a few years. So until mag-stripes go away, watch your credit card statements closely. And if you're moving or even traveling overseas, you can do as Ari did.
SHAPIRO: Well, I opened a British bank account and so now I actually have a chip and PIN card.
HU: Much safer than a magnetic stripe, and they work most everywhere else in the world you want to be.
Elise Hu, NPR News, Washington.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. Here's a look at the next step in the fight over same-sex marriage. That fight is accelerating in states where it's still banned.
INSKEEP: Last year, the Supreme Court struck down a federal marriage law and California's gay marriage ban. The court did not rule on bans in dozens of other states, leaving gay marriage advocates to press additional lawsuits.
MONTAGNE: Today, they have a new ally. Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring tells NPR his office is switching sides. He will support the lawsuit to overturn his own state's gay marriage ban.
MARK HERRING: There have been times in some key landmark cases where Virginia was on the wrong side - was on the wrong side of history, and on the wrong side of the law. And as attorney general, I'm going to make sure that the person presenting the state's legal position on behalf of the people of Virginia, are on the right side of history and on the right side the law.
INSKEEP: Virginia's history includes a famous Supreme Court case known as Loving vs. Virginia. The high court struck down a ban on interracial marriage. Now that the issue is same-sex marriage, advocates have lined up high-profile lawyers for two Virginia couples who sued for the right to marry.
The previous attorney general - who's Republican - defended Virginia's law. Then Democrat Mark Herring won a very narrow election last year, by 907 votes. He tells us that today, he's moving from the defendant's side of the argument to that of the plaintiff's.
HERRING: After a very careful and thorough analysis, I believe Virginia's ban on marriage between same-sex couples violates the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution. And as attorney general, I cannot and will not defend laws that violate Virginians' rights. And so instead, the Commonwealth will be siding with the plaintiffs who have brought this case, and be siding with every other Virginia couple whose right to marry is being denied.
INSKEEP: I want to make sure that I'm clear on what's happening here, because it is a little unusual. You are the attorney general of the state of Virginia. Ordinarily, you or the lawyers working for you would defend state laws when they're challenged in court. But in this case, you're going over to the other side, and you will argue to change state law. You will argue to overturn state law, in fact.
HERRING: That's right. And an attorney general has a duty to support those laws that are constitutional and validly adopted and - whether I agree with the policies behind them or not. And an attorney general also has just as strong a duty to not defend laws that he has concluded - after a careful and thorough analysis - that are unconstitutional. And it's that simple. Just less than two weeks ago, I took an oath to uphold both the Virginia and United States Constitutions. Beyond my duty to uphold the Constitution, and to represent state agencies and agency heads, I also answer first to another client. It's the people of Virginia. And that's what I have pledged over and over to do, is to put the law and put Virginians first.
INSKEEP: Although you mentioned the people of Virginia, and that adds some more complexity here. Because if I'm not mistaken, this is part of Virginia's constitution because the people of Virginia explicitly voted on it not so many years ago, and in fact, you were in favor of having them vote on it. Are you at risk of here of going against a substantial portion of the people of Virginia - possibly even a majority, depending on who you'd ask.
HERRING: Well, that's one aspect that I thought very carefully about, but it's about what the law requires here. And, you know, we have concluded - I have concluded that the law is unconstitutional. And I think the Supreme Court - which ultimately will have to decide this issue - if confronted with the facts similar to what we have here, would find the law unconstitutional.
INSKEEP: Do you see this as a case that could go to the Supreme Court and lead to the overturning - if your side wins - of all state bans on gay marriage?
HERRING: Well, ultimately, the Supreme Court is going to have to be the one to decide this issue. Whether this is the case that's going to do it or not, I don't know. My focus is on my responsibilities as attorney general in Virginia, and making sure that the rights of Virginians are protected and vindicated.
INSKEEP: I understand why you need to say that, but I'm just wondering what you would think if your action ends up contributing to the nationwide overturning of same-sex marriage bans.
HERRING: Well, I think, for me, what's important is doing what's right. And we'll have to wait and see how the courts play out. There's certainly facets to the case which I think are of interest. Certainly, the stories of the couples involved in the case bring the issues that I think will need to be decided, front and center. I think Virginia's history is one that is important in advancing democracy and freedom, and being the home of one of our first freedoms - religious freedom; but that on some key landmark decisions - including one, the Loving case, which enunciated the right to marry. And it's instructive that in that case, the court didn't say that there was a right to interracial marriage. It said that everyone - all individuals - have the right to marry. And all individuals means all individuals.
INSKEEP: When you say the biographies of the people involved, you're saying that the plaintiffs here, by all appearances, seem to be upstanding citizens: an English professor, a real estate person, someone who works with people with autism. We're talking about people that could stand before the country and effectively, become symbols of this effort.
HERRING: I think the plaintiffs in this case have been loving and committed couples for a long time - I think 25 years. One is a Virginia couple. The other, Carol Schall and Mary Townley, live in the Richmond area. Their relationship of three decades was formalized in 2008 by a marriage in the state of California, and together they have a 15-year-old daughter. So, I think in that sense, they bring together a lot of the legal issues that, you know, courts are grappling with right now.
INSKEEP: How much of a personal journey has this been for you, attorney general?
HERRING: Well, you mentioned earlier - I had voted against marriage equality eight years ago, back in 2006, even though at the time, I was speaking out against discrimination and ways to end discrimination. And I was wrong for not applying it to marriage. I saw very soon after that how that hurt a lot of people, and it was very painful for a lot of people. After that, I talked to a lot of people - constituents I represented as a state senator, co-workers, my family, including my children - and I've come to see the issue very differently now.
INSKEEP: You said your children. What did your children tell you?
HERRING: Well, I think they were instructive about the relationships that people have. And they were helpful in getting me to see a different perspective.
INSKEEP: How did they phrase that? Come on, Dad - what did they say?
HERRING: You know, they pressed me for the position I had taken and made me continue to question it. And I just came to the conclusion that it was the right thing to do.
HERRING: Mark Herring is the new attorney general of Virginia. He's announcing today that his office is switching sides in a challenge to Virginia's ban on gay marriage.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey - a government agency that's obscure to most Americans, or at least has been until now - it's at the center of the controversy involving New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and lane closures at the George Washington Bridge. NPR's Joel Rose reports on how an agency partly designed to fight corruption found itself in a political scandal.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: The name Port Authority is a bit of an understatement. It manages the biggest port on the East Coast, along with three major airports, the key bridges and tunnels across the Hudson River, bus and rail lines, even the World Trade Center site. The Port Authority controls a pot of money for long-range construction projects that's bigger than many states' annual budgets. The name is a holdover from the way the Port Authority was created.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS REEL)
ROSE: Back in 1920, business at the port of New York was bustling, but there was a problem. The port is spread across two states: New Jersey on one side of the Hudson River, and New York on the other. And the two states could not agree on how to manage it.
JAMESON DOIG: The Port Authority was to be truly a bi-state effort.
ROSE: Jameson Doig wrote a book about the Port Authority called "Empire on the Hudson." He says it was designed so that the governors of each state would appoint half of the Port Authority's commissioners. That was supposed to prevent local politicians from putting their friends in charge, and to encourage interstate cooperation.
DOIG: That was the key element, to not have a tug-of-war between the two states, but rather how to improve the transportation and the economic development of the New York-New Jersey region, as a whole.
ROSE: And for a while, Doig says, that's pretty much how it worked.
(SOUNDBITE OF A NEWS REEL)
ROSE: The Port Authority built the George Washington Bridge - the one at the heart of the current scandal - on time and under budget. For most of the 20th century, Jameson Doig says the agency was a model of government competence and cooperation, even as it got bigger and drifted further from its original mission.
Fast-forward to the 1990s. That's when Republican New York Governor George Pataki began the tradition of appointing political allies to positions of power at the Port Authority.
THOMAS WRIGHT: What it did was, clearly in hindsight, was it started to create two separate agencies within one building.
ROSE: Thomas Wright is executive director of the Regional Plan Association in New York. Since the 1990s, he says Port Authority commissioners, from both sides of the Hudson, have gotten more calculating about how they steer billions of dollars in spending back to their own states.
WRIGHT: They took the budget. They split it down the middle, essentially. And so, for every dollar invested in one side of the river, a dollar has to be invested in the other side of the river. It's absurd.
ROSE: That process has only accelerated since New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie took office. Since then, the agency has moved even further from its bi-state roots, for example, spending billions of Port Authority dollars to rebuild the Pulaski Skyway, a road that never leaves New Jersey.
And historian Jameson Doig says Christie, a Republican, appointed political allies to dozens of positions.
DOIG: When Chris Christie became governor, he added a new passion, you might say, to have patronage appointees at the agency.
ROSE: Doig is also critical of New York Governor Cuomo, a Democrat, for all but ignoring the Port Authority. Two of Christie's top appointees, David Wildstein and Bill Baroni, have resigned over their roles in the plan to close toll lanes at the George Washington Bridge last year, apparently as retribution for a political enemy.
Whenever that scandal dies down, Thomas Wright hopes the conversation will turn to reform.
WRIGHT: You go back to the original intention of the Port Authority. It was kind of fiscal accountability with political independence. And we've got the worst of both worlds right now.
ROSE: But any changes will require dialogue across the Hudson River. That is exactly what's been missing at the Port Authority for a quite a while.
Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's talk about the national implications of Virginia's gay marriage case. NPR's justice correspondent Carrie Johnson is in our studio. She's following the story. Hi, Carrie.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: So is this a case - in Virginia - that could end up before the United States Supreme Court?
JOHNSON: This Virginia case is one of several that's barreling its way to the high court. It's hard to predict at this early stage which one, or how many, will actually get there and be combined together. But we have this big case in Virginia; as you heard, a very attractive, kind of symbolic set of plaintiffs there. There also are disputes on moving forward in Oklahoma and Utah, Steve, where lower court judges have invalidated state bans on same-sex marriage; and those cases have been stayed while higher courts consider them.
INSKEEP: There has been some debate in the gay rights movement about whether to argue this on the political side - because more and more people seem to support gay marriage - or to go forward with court cases. It sounds like at least some people are ready to go forward with the court cases and look for - what? - a sweeping Supreme Court ruling on this issue?
JOHNSON: Steve, I think these people are being very strategic. In the minds of some gay rights advocates, this issue is too important to wait, and too important to take the several years to make it through the political process. And so it makes sense to target the courts and the politics simultaneously.
INSKEEP: Are opponents of gay marriage still willing to argue these cases, even though some of their public support has been slipping away?
JOHNSON: Indeed, they are. There are some pockets, and some organizations, that are devoted to defending marriage as an institution between a man and a woman. They have the money and the legal firepower to continue to fight these cases. And one can expect that they will, especially in states where these ideas are so very unpopular - and may remain so for some time to come.
INSKEEP: NPR's justice correspondent, Carrie Johnson. Thanks very much.
JOHNSON: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: And you can read more about Mark Herring's announcement at npr.org. It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.
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The southern leg of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is up and running. This week, a section of the project starting in Cushing, Oklahoma, began carrying crude oil to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. And as Mose Buchele from member station KUT reports, landowners who have long opposed the project are vowing to continue their fight.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINERY)
MOSE BUCHELE, BYLINE: The Keystone pipeline runs under Julia Trigg Crawford's North Texas farm. Just this weekend, she noticed what she calls an unusual flurry of activity. So, she picked up her camera and videotaped it.
JULIA TRIGG CRAWFORD: Track hoes, skids, water trucks, electrical trucks and construction crews showed up. They unearthed the pipeline - both above and below - attached wires and sensors, covered up and were gone as quickly as they, you know, showed up.
BUCHELE: TransCanada, the pipeline's owner, later said it was routine work. But Crawford's interest goes beyond that isolated incident. For years, she's battled the company over its use of eminent domain to take land, including hers. Since she and her allies in the environmental movement failed to stop the southern part of the Keystone, they now plan to keep it under intense scrutiny. Communicating through a website and Facebook page, they hope to make this stretch of pipeline the most closely monitored in the country.
CRAWFORD: This is like a neighborhood watch. We are going to be out there with every means of technology and boots on the ground to watch this stuff, because if you follow what happens a lot of times with unfortunate pipeline spills, it's the landowners that find these things.
BUCHELE: That takes on wider implications when you consider that the Obama administration has not decided on the fate of the northern section of the Keystone. That's the part that would tighten the connection between Texas refineries and the oil sands of Canada. Opponents think bad news from the south might influence that decision. Supporters say the pipeline will bring jobs and help keep crude from being transported by rail. Russ Girling is CEO of TransCanada. He wants to showcase the southern leg, as well.
RUSS GIRLING: Showing people that this isn't an export pipeline, can be operated safely should provide the baseline opinion and evidence that the Keystone XL is, at the end of the day, just another piece of energy infrastructure. It is just a pipeline, and it can be built and operated safely.
BUCHELE: Before the administration decides, the U.S. State Department needs to complete an updated environmental impact study of the pipeline. Girling says he expects that will be done within weeks. For NPR News, I'm Mose Buchele, in Austin.
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And now, an update on an Olympic athlete we met Monday on this program. Kris Freeman became one of America's top cross-country skiers, even as he was dealing with Type 1 diabetes.
Last spring, Freeman was cut from the national U.S. ski team. He lost a lot of his funding and his health insurance, so Freeman skied on his own this season. Yesterday, some good news: Top-ranked Freeman was named to the 2014 Olympic team, and he's off to Sochi.
This is NPR News.
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Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.
By tradition, the Super Bowl comes on Sunday - Super Sunday, as the perfect alliteration. But this year's Super Bowl is outdoors. In case of disastrous weather outside New York, the league is making contingency plans for Super Saturday or Friday or Monday. Even if the game takes place on time, the weather may be tough. Crews are ready to remove snow. And as for fans, this year, wardrobe malfunction would generally tend to mean you forgot your gloves.
It's MORNING EDITION.
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The World Economic Forum is underway at the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos. It's an annual meeting of the world's business elites but also in attendance are world leaders and academics, celebrities and charities.
Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times. He's a regular at Davos and he joined us from there. Good morning.
GIDEON RACHMAN: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: Tell us about who is there this year and if there are some names that you're surprised to find are not.
RACHMAN: OK. Well, Davos is advertised as the World Economic Forum. So you have central bank governors, the head of the IMF, the head of the World Bank, those kinds of people are all here in force. You also have a huge business presence, people like Jamie Dimon from J.P. Morgan or former businessmen like Bill Gates.
But for me, what's particularly striking is how many top politicians they drew in. So yesterday, for example, I interviewed Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan about relations with China. Coming up soon is President Rouhani of Iran who will obviously be followed with great interest. So there's a kind of very interesting overlapping world.
MONTAGNE: One big topic this year: growing income inequality, the gap between rich and poor. What sorts of things have you heard from participants about this?
RACHMAN: To be honest, it's always slightly hard to take Davos very seriously when it talks about poverty and inequality, because there are more billionaires in this place than anywhere else I've ever come across. To be a little less cynical, I think there is a sense this year that we are more conscious of the flaws in the economic system. In one of those flaws is this concentration of wealth because it's become a political issue, a dangerously destabilizing political issue.
MONTAGNE: Well, what else then might be on the agenda for this very elite group?
RACHMAN: You know, all the fashionable issues that would fill up the op-ed columns of newspapers in your country and mine. On the first day, for example, I went to a session moderated by Al Gore, of course, on climate change. And next door they were talking about cyber security and privacy. And then there'll be is the mainstream economic session because the core business remains economic and political.
MONTAGNE: You know, you've touched on this but I'm curious. Last year, European debt did seem to top the agenda. This year, what is the feeling and the sense there that's may be different from last year?
RACHMAN: Well, I certainly think that the sort of terror of the European financial collapse has receded. But I think that Europe is probably (unintelligible) of economic concern. I ended up talking to the Finnish prime minister and he was saying, Look, I'm very worried that the European Union could still fall apart, because of the tensions created by the economic crisis that we've been living through.
I think geopolitically, there's a lot of concentration on the tensions between China and Japan. I mean when I interviewed Shinzo Abe, I asked him directly whether it was possible that there would actually be a war between China and Japan. And I half expected him to say no, no, that's ridiculous - that would never happen. And he didn't actually say that.
He said in some ways the situation between China and Japan now reminded him of the situation between Britain and Germany before the First World War, which is obviously a fairly worrying comparison. I mean he wasn't saying that they were about to go to war. But he said that they had a very strong training relationship, as Britain and Germany did. But that wouldn't be enough, necessarily, to mean that the strategic tensions between them would just go away. On the contrary, they were very, very serious.
MONTAGNE: What actually gets achieved at this World Economic Forum?
RACHMAN: Well, that is a good question. I've always slightly wondered about that. But if you ask yourself why is somebody like Abe here, there's a chance that it is a kind of one-stop shop to do a number of things; to have diplomatic talks, maybe whip up a bit of investments to get your message across to the world media, and also I think everybody finds it a place where they have interesting random conversations - and that's part of the point, as well.
MONTAGNE: Speaking to us from Davos, Switzerland, Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, thanks very much for joining us.
RACHMAN: My pleasure.
MONTAGNE: This is NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep.
In election years, we hear a lot of reporting from swing states: Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin. We do not usually hear as much from a place like Idaho, because it is so deeply one color: red. But this midterm election year, Idaho is home to one of the most closely watched races in this nation. A Republican is battling another Republican in a primary campaign that may point to where the party, as a whole, is heading.
Our colleague David Greene is spending time in Idaho's 2nd Congressional District this week. And he picks up his political coverage in a place where he learns an awful lot: a diner.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK, it's just a reality we have to accept. You really can get the sense of a community, a feel for what people are talking about, in places that just so happen to serve food.
(SOUNDBITE OF SIZZLING)
GREENE: Welcome to the North HiWay Cafe in Idaho Falls. That's the sound of chicken sizzling in a vat of oil. Now, don't think Southern fried chicken. They do things a little differently here in Idaho. This is broasted chicken.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: The inside's going to be really juice, and the outside is going to be really crispy. And it seals it instantly, so you don't get any oil or grease inside.
GREENE: OK. That - I'm ready to dig in.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: OK.
GREENE: We dug in while chatting with two fellow diners who told us about a debate that's sizzling around here, over how to protect the Idaho National Lab. This is one of the federal government's biggest nuclear research facilities. Don't think scientific building with people in lab coats. This lab is spread over nearly 900 square miles of Idaho desert, employing thousands of people around Idaho Falls.
BECKY LAZDAUSKAS: You know, in my neighborhood, out of the cul-de-sac of maybe eight families, four of them, five of them work there. And that yeah, they're very watchful of the money that they receive out there, because it brings in a lot of money for the economy.
GREENE: That's Becky Lazdauskas, who works for the Federal Bureau of Land Management, one of the other huge employers in Idaho. And here lies the tension: Many people in this deeply red state have been drawn to the message from the Tea Party, that federal spending should be reined in at all costs, even if that means never compromising.
Then again, the federal government plays a huge role in so many peoples' lives here. Now, neither Becky nor her seatmate Deena Teel were ready to talk about specific candidates. This primary election isn't until May. But Deena said the lab is on everyone's mind. It's that important here.
DEENA TEEL: My father actually retired from there, and my father-in-law also retired from the INL. When I was growing up, I thought I would be working for them. It was just an assumption that most people that grow up around here around here make.
GREENE: Leave the diner, drive maybe five minutes or so, and you're in the center of Idaho Falls.
(SOUNDBITE OF A LOCOMOTIVE)
GREENE: It's a quiet downtown. Here on Shoup Avenue, there's the Idaho Youth Ranch Thrift Store. There's a bank, the courthouse, and some law offices, including one with the name Bryan Smith on the door. He's a political newcomer, who's getting a lot of national attention. Some of the big Tea Party Groups have made his bid for Congress a priority, hoping he can knock off eight-term Congressman Mike Simpson in this primary.
Hi. Bryan Smith? I'm David Greene.
BRYAN SMITH: David Greene, Bryan Smith.
GREENE: We sat down on a bench, and I asked Smith about the big budget agreement recently passed in Congress. Republican leaders in the House compromised with Democrats.
SMITH: I would not have supported it.
GREENE: The deal he would not have supported included money for the Idaho National Lab. But Smith said there is something even more important than that lab, and that's protecting what he says is a core value for many people in Idaho: not spending more than you can afford. Standing for that principle, he said, is sacred, even if it means never compromising.
If that approach is one that you bring to Congress, how do you both govern effectively and sort of hold the line and take a hardline approach like that? Can you do both?
SMITH: Well, this is why we have 435 representatives across the nation. Representatives go back to Washington, and they represent the people in their district. They shouldn't go back to Washington to represent Washington, and that's the problem that we have here with Congressman Simpson. He is out of touch with the values from the people of this state. And what people from this state want, in my district - running as a conservative Republican - they want me to represent their values, and that's what I intend to do.
GREENE: Let's look at Congressman Simpson's career and Idahoans. He's gotten some credit for bringing a lot of money, a lot of jobs to Idaho with the Idaho National Lab, for example. Tell me how that debate is going to play out. How are you going to sort of state the case that that's not something that people here should give him credit for?
SMITH: Well, let's look at the facts. In 1998, when he first was elected and ran for office, he - there were over 10,000 jobs at the INL. After 16 years in government, we now have less than 5,000 people employed at the site. So I disagree with the assumption that jobs have grown at the site during his tenure as congressman.
GREENE: But he has a seat on the Appropriations Committee. I mean he's able to bring money into that program. I mean are you confident that as a newcomer in Congress, that you could tell people in Idaho that you could continue, you know, a funding stream that's important to a lot of people here?
SMITH: Well, a couple things. We don't know who the next speaker of the House is going to be. And as I understand it, people who sit on those committees serve at the pleasure of the speaker of the House. So we don't know who that's going to be, and that could readily change in 2015.
GREENE: What he's suggesting there is that if enough Tea Party candidates get into the House, John Boehner might lose his position as speaker. And that risk is one reason the party's establishment is rising up this year with money and resources to fend off the Tea Party. Their man in this race is longtime congressman Mike Simpson, who spoke to us from Boise, a four hour drive to the west.
We're on opposite ends of your district, I'm in Idaho Falls and you're in Boise. This is one huge district you have here.
REPRESENTATIVE MIKE SIMPSON: It is a very big district. I'm surprised I can hear you from clear over there.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: First off, I ask the congressman about his opponents charge, that the Idaho National Lab have lost jobs while he's been in office. His reaction...
(LAUGHTER)
SIMPSON: I kind of have to chuckle. It seems like we can't do anything right, according to Mr. Smith.
GREENE: Truth is, the lab has lost jobs, in part the congressman says because the Tea Party has put such a squeeze on funding. He says to get anything done in Congress, lawmakers need to know how to find common ground.
SIMPSON: You know, compromise have been a part of the politics since the beginning of time. It's become a bad word now. But it's an essential part of governing.
GREENE: And how to govern is clearly at the center of this campaign.
SIMPSON: This election is about the future of the Republican Party and whether we're going to be a governing majority or whether we are going to be an ideologically pure minority. But, you know, even within the Republican Party, we have differences of opinion about what ought to be done. That's OK, that's good and healthy. But if you become an ideologically pure minority, you know, you get nothing done, and you become a minority party of 100 members that stand there and yell at the moon, but you never get anything done. I'm one of those that believes that a governing majority, where we get 90 percent of what we want is the right thing to do.
GREENE: Congressman Simpson's future is now in the hands of voters here. People like Leon Matejka, who we met outside the bank downtown - he retired after working at the National Lab for 15 years. He's been leaning Tea Party, not feeling much of a connection with Congressman Simpson.
LEON MATEJKA: I'd have to really think about it, because I know he's a little bit more liberal on a lot of things than I am.
GREENE: Sounds like such an interesting moment for a lot of Republicans here. Because on one hand you have a place that is so important to the economy that it's gotten federal money for a long time. And on the other side, you have a real desire right now to control federal spending in general. How do you kind of work that out in your head?
MATEJKA: Yeah, that's why I'm a little bit, you know, contorted in that whole thing, you know because I think we do need to quit spending our federal money like we are. But we're going away with so many crazy things that what I think will happen is one of those things that's crazy.
GREENE: And that really is the conundrum for a lot of people here. They feel like too much federal spending is crazy. But spending money on the lab isn't.
From Idaho Falls, we headed deep up into the mountains, where there are communities with as few as a 100 people. We'll hear from that part of the state tomorrow.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: And you can follow David on the road, which is a nice thing to do, he goes to scenic places, often stops for something to eat. If you want to join David on these travels, there's a Tumblr account where you can do that. Check out photos from the trip at nprontheroad.tumblr.com.
You hear our colleague, David Greene, right here on MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
NPR's business news begins with a Netflix surge.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: The video-streaming company's shares spiked more than 17 percent yesterday during after-hours trading. That's thanks to better-than-expected fourth quarter results. Netflix reported a net income of $48 million for the last quarter of 2013 - up from 8 million a year ago.
The company also announced it added more than 2 million subscribers during that time. Now, nearly 32 million Americans subscribe to the online video service, beating out the premium network, HBO, which has an estimated $29 million.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Although, maybe not so many people subscribing in Argentina, that country has just imposed a heavy tax on international online shopping and it is restricting international online purchases to two per year.
NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports on the government's attempt to shore-up dipping reserves of foreign currency.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: Online shopping is supposed to be about convenience - order by your computer, sometimes tax free, and bam, it's delivered straight to your door. But in Argentina, new rules have put in place a whopping 50 percent tax on orders above an annual $25 allowance. And you're only allowed to order internationally twice a year. To make sure you pay what you owe the government, your goods won't be delivered to your home, but rather to your local customs office, where it can take hours and lots of paperwork to get your boxes out.
Add this to the other economic restrictions already in place and you have an economy that analysts say is struggling. Argentines already have a quota for buying dollars that has given birth to a currency black market. Inflation has also skyrocketed, so many Argentines are struggling to even buy basic goods. Foreign credit card transactions, too, face a 35 percent tax.
Argentina though says it's been forced to take drastic measures. The country's hard currency reserves have fallen 30 percent in a year.
In 2001, its economy crashed and the government had to devalue the peso resulting in $200 billion default. Since then Argentina has had trouble securing international loads. It's used its foreign reserves to service its debts.
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And our Last Word In Business is buyer beware. Police in the city of Ceres, Calif., have a warning, and this is the warning: If someone comes up to you in a silver Lexus at dusk, offering a ridiculously cheap iPad - don't buy it. And the TVs in the trunk? Don't buy those, either.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It may be one of the oldest scams in the book, but several people have fallen prey to the alluringly low prices. They've shelled out hundreds of dollars, thanks to some very clever packaging. The TVs, for example, were...
DETECTIVE DARREN VENN: ...wrapped in really tight bubble wrap. You could see through the bubble wrap, and there was an energy sticker. And then there was a remote and it looked like maybe a - instruction booklet.
INSKEEP: That's Detective Darren Venn, who is trying to save more people from that sinking feeling of being a sucker - because what was under all that decoration masquerading as a flat screen was nothing more than a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood.
VENN: Once you open up the bubble wrap, the piece of plywood was wrapped tightly with black, heavy, thick plastic. And even in the back, there was actually a power cord, which was attached to nothing.
MONTAGNE: Then there were the iPads, which turned out to be white floor tiles - really giving the victims there in Ceres, Calif., something to - hmm, grout about?
(LAUGHTER)
INSKEEP: Well, you know, if you get enough of those iPads, you can redo the bathroom.
(LAUGHTER)
INSKEEP: Come on, you've just got to repurpose it. Why are you complaining?
MONTAGNE: It could be cheap, actually, considering the cost of tiles.
INSKEEP: That's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
MONTAGNE: And I'm Renee Montagne.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
The Sundance Film Festival is in full swing in Park City, Utah, which means time for us to check in with our critic, Kenneth Turan, about some of the must-see movies. So let's get right to it. Good morning, Ken.
KENNETH TURAN, BYLINE: Morning, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Knowing you, Ken, I think we should just start right in with the documentaries. There is, this year, a documentary that is quite personal to you.
TURAN: Yes. This is a documentary called "Life Itself." It's directed by Steve James, who did "Hoop Dreams" and a number of other excellent documentaries, and it's about Roger Ebert, who was the celebrated film critic. And it's kind of his biography. It covers his whole life, but it also kind of goes in detail through the kind of - they didn't know while they were filming it - but what turned out to be the last months of his life.
You know, it's both painful and kind of heartening to see how Roger struggled against the disease and how he continued to be - there's a phrase by Werner Herzog, the director who called him kind of a soldier of cinema. He just would not let the disease beat him and it's extraordinarily moving to me to see him kind of be victorious in that way.
MONTAGNE: What else stands out for you in this year in the documentaries?
TURAN: Well, there are two documentaries that are about subjects that have been in the news a lot, but when a documentary is really good, as these two are, they take you kind of below the surface. You really see things that you didn't know about. The first one is called "The Internet's Own Boy." It's about a man named Aaron Schwartz, who was an Internet prodigy.
He was an activist for open access. He was a remarkable person, and he got caught in the coils of kind of federal charges. They threatened to put him in prison for 35 years and it just was all too much for him and he committed suicide at age 26. This was a big deal when it happened and this film really shows you why he was important, why this was such a tragedy, why it was so unnecessary. And it's really, in its own way, a heartbreaking film as well being very informative.
MONTAGNE: And then there's another, "Happy Valley"?
TURAN: Well, "Happy Valley" is the name that the residents of State College, Pennsylvania, you know, use for their area, and State College is the home of Penn State, and this film is about the scandal around Jerry Sandusky, an assistant coach at Penn State who was arrested for multiple charges of child sexual abuse. This, you know, sounds like a sensationalistic story and it has some new news elements.
Matt Sandusky, Jerry Sandusky's adopted son, talks about his own experiences with his father as he's never spoken about this before. But really, this is not a sensationalistic film. This is a film that is looking at a much broader picture.
MONTAGNE: Let's leave the documentaries and turn to the dramatic films, the feature films, and I gather there's one in particular, one drama, coming out of a country not really known for making movies.
TURAN: That's true. This is Ethiopia and the film is called "The Threat." This is a film that's based on a true story. There is a custom in Ethiopia, or there has been a custom in Ethiopia of what's known as abduction into marriage, where young girls are kidnapped and raped and then married to their rapist, and what happened in the case of one girl was that she shot and killed her attacker.
And this became a big, huge to-do and a woman came from the city, a lawyer came from the city who specialized in these kinds of things to defend her and really to try and change the way Ethiopians have thought about this custom and it's just a fascinating film and really one of my favorites here.
MONTAGNE: Well, I think we have just enough time to get to one last movie that we can look forward to in your opinion.
TURAN: Yes, well, there's a charming little musical called "God Help The Girl." It's written and directed by Stuart Murdoch, who's the lead singer and writer for a group called Belle and Sebastian. This is a film about three young people coming together to make music in kind of a magical summer in Scotland, and it's just - people break into song and they're young and they're attractive and they have adventures.
It's a tiny film, but it is so, so, so delightful. And, you know, also the screening was at 8:30 on a Sunday morning and the director, Stuart Murdoch, gets up and says, you should be in church, and simultaneously from three different parts of the auditorium, people yelled out: We are. Really, I mean, you know, there's a lot of talk about the commercialization of Sundance and how everything is, you know, not the way it used to be, but that spirit is still here.
MONTAGNE: Well, speaking to us from the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, Kenneth Turan, who reviews movies for MORNING EDITION and the Los Angeles Times. Thanks very much, Ken.
TURAN: Oh, thank you, Renee.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. Lately we've heard about the wonders of basketball diplomacy. Running could be the next thing for North Korea. The Pyongyang Marathon celebrates the birth of the fearless leader who founded the country. For nearly three decades it's been for elite athletes only. Now North Korea's marathon is open to everyone. The runners start at Kim Il-sung Stadium and they end there too, offering no chance to run for the border. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Protesters in Ukraine have given their country's president an ultimatum. They say he must call early elections or unrest will grow even worse. This country of 45 million people is fighting over which way it leans - toward European nations to the West or eastward toward Russia, which once controlled Ukraine. Protests began when the president gave in to Russian pressure to block a trade deal with the European Union. And those protests have turned deadly this week with at least two people killed - more by some estimates.
We go now to Washington Post reporter Will Englund. He's in the capital, Kiev. Welcome to the program.
WILL ENGLUND: Thanks very much.
INSKEEP: Now, when we say two people dead, can you explain why that is so shocking to Ukrainians? There certainly have been more deadly protests in the world.
ENGLUND: Yes, but not here. In the whole history of protests in Ukraine since 1991 even, there's been nothing like this kind of violence. And I think people have gotten used to the idea that you can protest and have fights with the police and no one is going to get seriously hurt. So this has really been a tremendous shock to a lot of people.
INSKEEP: Even when a president was driven out of office a few years ago, no one was killed in the streets?
ENGLUND: That was in 2004, the Orange Revolution, and no, there was not any kind of violence like this.
INSKEEP: Yesterday was very different though. What did it look like?
ENGLUND: It was pretty ugly. You had the riot police on the street near the parliament twice during the day sweeping down that street and then pulling back again to the original line. Burned out buses, protestors throwing stones and fireworks at them. There was some shooting; no one has quite determined who did it, but two people were killed. Many were taken into detention.
Quite a few people were injured as well by perhaps rubber bullets, by splinters flying through the air, and by these stun grenades that the police are throwing, which don't send off a lot of shrapnel, but if you're right next to one when it goes off, it can do quite a lot of damage.
INSKEEP: So what are people talking about today?
ENGLUND: Well, everyone's waiting. It looked very grim yesterday afternoon and there was a thought that the police might try to sweep the square. They did not. The three opposition political leaders met with President Viktor Yanukovych for about three hours. No one seemed very pleased with the way the talks went but they're going to meet again today. In the meantime, they've announced, as you said, by the end of the day today if they're not moving towards new elections or some other resolution, that's the deadline that they have set.
I don't know how strictly they're actually going to be able to adhere to that deadline but we'll have to see what happens.
INSKEEP: You mentioned President Yanukovych. He's the central guy here. He did win an election in 2010 and is now under pressure to call an early election. Is he even legally able to do that? And is he in any sense willing to do that?
ENGLUND: Well, he won an election in 2004 as well, but it was so obviously rigged that this led to the Orange Revolution, and Ukrainians found a way to call a new election, which they did, which he lost. He came back, he won in 2010. It was an ordinary election and he won because the people who beat him in the Orange Revolution had done such a bad job of governing Ukraine.
If he felt that the only way to solve this was to accede to the demand and have new elections, I know they could find a way to do it.
INSKEEP: Is there fear of chaos there?
ENGLUND: Yes. This is a part of the world where people do have a little bit of a genius for solving problems at the absolute last moment, but it is hard to see how the country can be brought together after this.
INSKEEP: Will Englund of the Washington Post is in Kiev, Ukraine. Thanks very much.
ENGLUND: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. Last night Texas executed Edgar Tamayo. There's no doubt about whether he committed the crime - it was 20 years ago in Houston that Tamayo, sitting in the back of a patrol car, pulled out a gun and shot a police officer in the head. There has been great cross-border controversy, however, about Tamayo's execution. He was Mexican and the Mexican government protested the death penalty up until his execution.
Even U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry weighed, in urging Texas Governor Rick Perry to stop it. Reaction to the execution has been strong in Mexico and we're joined by NPR's Carrie Kahn in Mexico City for more. Good morning.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Good morning, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Let's start with a little background. I've offered a few details. Give us some more.
KAHN: Sure. Edgar Tamayo was 46 years old and he grew up in a small town in the Mexican state of Morelos and that's south, here, of Mexico City. By all accounts he had a rough life here. His family was very poor and not very stable. He left Mexico when he was a teen for the U.S. to work and he entered illegally. He had several run-ins with the law for fights and robbery of a convenience store.
It was in January of 1994 when he was arrested following an incident in a Houston bar. Tamayo had been drinking. He was handcuffed and put in the squad car, as you said, by Houston police officer Guy Gaddis. So Tamayo was in the back of the car and apparently Gaddis had not found a gun that he had had hidden in his pants. And even though Tamayo was handcuffed he was able to pull out the gun and fire off six shots.
Three hit Gaddis in the back of the head and killed him. Tamayo was arrested a few blocks away, still handcuffed. Gaddis at the time left behind a wife who was pregnant.
MONTAGNE: So not a sympathetic character, if you will, but still again this execution has been controversial. But why? I mean, the U.S. has executed people from other countries before, including Mexicans nationals who have been executed in Texas. Why did Mexico object in this case in particular and why did Secretary of State Kerry get involved?
KAHN: So this case is one of many that's created tensions between the U.S. and Mexico. And the issue really stems from whether Tamayo and other Mexican nationals accused of a capital crime were advised of what's known as their consular rights. And that just means that any foreign national accused of a crime in the U.S. has the right to speak with somebody from their nation's consulate.
Tamayo was not informed of that right before trial and Mexico says they could've helped prepare his defense, possibly could've gotten his sentence commuted to life in prison instead of the death penalty. And Mexico actually took Tamayo's case and 50 others like it to the world court and they accused the U.S. of violating this international law. The court ordered the U.S. to review Tamayo's conviction and that of the other 50 Mexicans on Death Row in the United States. But that didn't happen.
MONTAGNE: Well, again, it's a big storey there in the Mexican press. Tell us what the headlines are.
KAHN: Sure. There's been quite a lot of press about the case and that's because there is no capital punishment in Mexico and really there are no life sentences, either. Prisoners, when they reach an old age, are usually released on humanitarian grounds. There are reports that he's been described as slightly mentally disabled - all issues that Mexican officials say were not properly considered by the U.S. jury when he was sentenced to death.
There have been some protests in his home state of Morelos. A group burned a U.S. flag last week and closed off a McDonald's and a Burger King. The Mexican ambassador in the U.S. said this issue over the Death Row inmates continues to be a significant irritant, is what he called it, in the two countries' relations. And Secretary of State Kerry warned that this case could affect the way Americans are treated abroad.
MONTAGNE: That would seem to be a concern.
KAHN: Definitely.
MONTAGNE: There are dozens more Mexican nationals on Death Row in the United States. Will this affect any of those?
KAHN: Well, we're going to be hearing more about these cases. There are still 48 Mexican nationals on Death Rows in the U.S. Tamayo was the third executed since that world court ruling that the U.S. violated the international law by not informing inmates of their rights to speak to a consular official. That ruling was in 2004 and then-president, George Bush, ordered Texas - he actually ordered Texas and the other states with Mexican nationals on Death Rows to review the case.
But the U.S. Supreme Court then stepped in and ruled, four years later, that the president didn't have the authority to order states to abide by a ruling of the international court. So we're bound to hear about more of these cases when these prisoners on Death Rows come up again for execution.
MONTAGNE: That's NPR's Carrie Kahn speaking to us from Mexico City on the execution last night of convicted murderer Edgar Tamayo. Carrie, thanks very much.
KAHN: You're welcome, Renee.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Wow. For all we know this could be the next European TV program to become a hit in the United States. You've heard of "Downton Abbey," this program goes a little more continental. The program by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation is spreading to other countries, sparking a discussion of the edgy subject of inheritance.
Sidsel Overgaard reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SERIES, THE LEGACY)
SIDSEL OVERGAARD, BYLINE: An eccentric baby boomer artist, her four grown children, a country manor, and a will favoring the daughter given up for adoption, that's the background for "Arvingerne," translated as "The Legacy." The dramatic fallout: That is the starting point for what's become a national run on legal advice in Denmark.
BODIL RAVN: This mess we're watching on TV right now, we have to make sure that's not going to happen in our family.
OVERGAARD: Attorney Bodil Ravn says she's been hearing that a lot as people call her office looking for help with wills.
RAVN: Just one day, there were seven new cases, and I would think that would normally get for a whole week.
OVERGAARD: Denmark's largest legal chain, Advodan, says online inquiries about inheritance issues are up by 143 percent. And while lawyers aren't revealing dollar figures, it's fair to say "The Legacy" and a simultaneous documentary on this subject have sparked a little gold rush for family attorneys here.
Very few Danes have wills when compared to the U.S. That's partly because the country has more built-in rules about inheritance. But as family structures get complicated and parents have more to give, says Ravn, it all gets tricky.
RAVN: The need for a will is a lot bigger today. And the issue has gotten a lot harder, because it's a lot more difficult to make a will when you have my children, your children and maybe children together.
OVERGAARD: In that sense, she says, "The Legacy" symbolizes a new chapter in the unfolding story of the baby boom generation. And it's a discussion that's likely to spread. The series has been sold to the U.K. and other European countries, and as far away as Australia and Mexico. Danish Broadcasting is also working out a deal that could bring "The Legacy" to American TV screens soon.
"The Legacy's" sales success is largely based on the stellar reputations of earlier Danish series like "Borgen" and "The Killing," both of which were shown in the U.S. But the corporation's head of drama, Piv Bernth says this program was meant to be a change of direction and even she has been surprised by its reception.
PIV BERNTH: It seems that there was a need for it in the audiences. You know, they really wanted this very close, emotional family drama.
OVERGAARD: A drama that could translate into extra business for family lawyers elsewhere in the world.
For NPR News, I'm Sidsel Overgaard in Billund, Denmark.
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INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. Let's hear a response to some news we've reported on today's MORNING EDITION. Virginia's attorney general, Mark Herring, told NPR today his office will oppose the state's own ban on gay marriage. He wants to overturn that ban in court. Instead of defending it, he'll work against it. Those who still support the ban include Victoria Cobb, who is president of the Family Foundation, an advocacy group based in Richmond, Va. She's on the line. Welcome to the program.
VICTORIA COBB: Thanks for having me.
INSKEEP: So how much damage has the attorney general done to your side?
COBB: Well, it's just disappointing, and really frightening, that whether one agrees with or not the marriage amendment, the idea that over a million Virginia citizens can be left defenseless by the attorney general after legally voting for an amendment that he himself supported, it's chilling.
INSKEEP: The million, you're talking about, those are the people who voted for a ban on gay marriage eight years ago?
COBB: Yeah, that's right. It was a 57 percent issue, and it is something that is - was popularly supported and is in our constitution. And it is the role of the attorney general within the last - what? - 12, 13 days, you know, he took an oath to defend the constitution, yet we have him going against that.
INSKEEP: We'll remind people, he is the new attorney general of Virginia, was elected last November. Do you feel in any way misled by Mark Herring? He didn't promise to do this, but he was clear that he was in favor of gay marriage.
COBB: Well, it's incredibly disappointing that he wouldn't have been honest about his intentions and very straightforward about this issue while campaigning in office. This lawsuit was moving forward. He certainly should have spoken about it and said, hey, I want to jump in on it. And even more so, the fact that he criticized, time and again, Attorney General Cuccinelli - you know, I can look at a quote that he said, you know, he said, time and again - he, referring to Cuccinelli, his...
INSKEEP: His predecessor, sure. His Republican predecessor.
COBB: He has bent and twisted the law, and misused and abused the power of the office in order to advance personal ambition, and an extreme ideological agenda. So that was his commentary about our previous, you know, our previous attorney general. And yet I see him doing exactly the same thing here.
INSKEEP: Can the lawsuit go forward without the attorney general of Virginia to defend the law in court?
COBB: Well, if you're citing Cuccinelli's refusal in the past to have defended one particular incident, he needs to move forward with the same precedent, which is that he needs to be questioned on why he wouldn't at least appoint outside counsel to defend the lawsuit.
INSKEEP: Although we're told that there will be lawyers - still - who will be defending the gay marriage ban, just not attorney general of the state of Virginia lawyers.
COBB: Yes, but they need to be appointed by the attorney general's office, not simply friends of the court and so forth.
INSKEEP: OK. Let me ask about the broader issue here. The plaintiffs in this lawsuit clearly want it to go to the United States Supreme Court. They clearly are hoping, eventually, for some national ruling on gay marriage. And I'm just interested, as you think about this case, do you also hope that it goes to the Supreme Court; that there is some kind of national settlement on this?
COBB: Well, I struggle with the fact that we have 67 percent of Americans that are living in states that - they have gone to the ballot and put a one-man-one-woman statement in their constitution. Only 4.5 percent of Americans live in a state where they've chosen same-sex marriage from the ballot. This movement is coming just through the courts, because it can't be won with the people at the ballot box. So it's disappointing that the courts would be the place that we need to go on this.
INSKEEP: Although, in just about 10 seconds, does your case lose some force? Because surveys show that in recent years, since those ballot initiatives, there's been a lot more support for gay marriage.
COBB: Well, the only problem is surveys is they're not the ballot box. We saw in Maryland, for example, where you had folks voting for Obama in overwhelming numbers, but you saw 13 percent less at the same election, same day, voted in favor of gay marriage. So I don't think that one can say just because of polls that we would have a different reaction.
INSKEEP: And in just about 10 seconds, do you think the Virginia case is going to go to the Supreme Court?
COBB: I certainly think it has that potential.
INSKEEP: OK. Victoria Cobb, thanks very much.
COBB: Sure, thanks for having me.
INSKEEP: She is president of the Family Foundation in Virginia, which supports the state's ban on gay marriage. And again, we're reporting today, we had an interview with Mark Herring, the new attorney general of Virginia, who has switched sides; his office has switched sides. They will now oppose that ban in court.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss will not be seeking a third term in the Senate this year. His decision to bow out has eight other Republicans, including three Congressmen, scrambling for his seat. Democrats, meanwhile, have their hopes pinned on the daughter of a well-known and widely admired former senator. NPR's David Welna traveled to Georgia for this report.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: Georgia's gone from a bastion of conservative Democrats to a place where, for the first time since Reconstruction, all statewide offices are now held by Republicans. Still, Merle Black, who teaches Southern politics at Emory University, says going into this Senate race, neither Democrats nor Republicans in Georgia have a majority.
MERLE BLACK: And the issue for the Republicans is whether they can come out united behind a candidate who can put together the different factions of the Republican Party and also appeal to independents. And right now, that's a big open question.
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JOHN PADGETT: I want to welcome you to Adel, Cook County, Georgia.
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WELNA: Last weekend in a high school auditorium deep in south Georgia, state GOP chairman John Padgett kicked off the first debate among the Republicans vying for Saxby Chambliss' Senate seat. A nearly all-white crowd of several hundred showed up for the debate, as did seven of the eight GOP contenders. Conservative radio talk show host Martha Zoller moderated; this slew of Republican rivals, she said, have their work cut out for them.
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MARTHA ZOLLER: And whoever comes out of this primary is going to be bruised, bloodied and broke.
WELNA: The debate largely boiled down to those candidates trying to out-conservative one another. Karen Handel is a former Georgia secretary of state.
KAREN HANDEL: I am a proven conservative, with a track record of actually getting the job done.
WELNA: Not to be outdone was 11-term Congressman Jack Kingston.
REPRESENTATIVE JACK KINGSTON: I'm a consistent conservative with an A plus NRA rating.
WELNA: Fellow congressman Paul Broun one-upped the others.
REPRESENTATIVE PAUL BROUN: I'm the only true conservative with a proven, consistent record of that conservatism.
WELNA: Phil Gingrey, the other member of Congress who's running, skipped the debate for a fundraiser. He's made repealing the Affordable Care Act his campaign's centerpiece; so too has Broun.
BROUN: We've got to get rid of Obamacare. And as the true conservative in this race, I've got the plan to do it.
WELNA: And Kingston, who's considered more moderate than the other two congressmen, chimed in that Obamacare was, quote, "an absolute assault on the American dream".
KINGSTON: That's why I have voted 40 times to repeal it.
WELNA: That's not good enough, though, for Broun, who chides his House colleague in this web ad.
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BROUN: Jack Kingston wants to keep Obamacare. He voted to fund it, and now he's trying to fix it. I think that's wrong.
WELNA: Kingston has also caught some grief for suggesting last month that low-income children do something in exchange for free school lunches.
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KINGSTON: Why don't you, you know, have the kids pay a dime, pay a nickel to instill in them that there is, in fact, no such thing as a free lunch? Or maybe sweep the floor of the cafeteria.
WELNA: That prompted the NBC TV affiliate in Savannah to highlight some of Kingston's own free lunches.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We took the past three years - first, in official business, Kingston and his staff expensed nearly $4,200 in meals for business purposes to his congressional office, paid for by the American taxpayer.
WELNA: Kingston says such criticism just indicates how well he's doing.
KINGSTON: I know dogs don't bark at parked cars.
WELNA: Two days later in Atlanta, 46 year old Michelle Nunn, the daughter of former Senator Sam Nunn and the Democrats' likely nominee, is greeting a largely African-American crowd at a Martin Luther King Day march.
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MICHELLE NUNN: Thank y'all so much for being here and joining in to remember and to celebrate and to act on behalf of Dr. King.
WELNA: Nunn cannot win without a major turnout by black voters, but she must also woo independents. In an interview, Nunn pointedly notes she's headed the first President Bush's Points of Light Volunteer Service Institute.
NUNN: And certainly I have a great deal of affection and admiration for President Bush, for his family and I think I've demonstrated the capacity to roll up my sleeves, work together with people across the aisle.
WELNA: Still, in the same interview, Nunn sides with President Obama's Affordable Care Act, saying it should move forward. Emory's Black says that's reassuring to Democrats, but it could turn off some crucial independents.
BLACK: And so if Michelle Nunn does take this position of defending the health care issue, boy, you're going to see that in Republican ads all over the state.
WELNA: Meanwhile, Nunn is raising money and traveling the state while Republicans gird for six more debates. David Welna, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Let's take a look, now, at an innovation from an earlier age, The Mac, Apple's iconic personal computer, turns the big 3 - 0 today. Ancient by the standards of the computer world and still much in demand.
NPR's Steve Henn sat down with one of the Mac's original creators, and now Apple CEO, Tim Cook.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: Thirty years ago the Mac was launched with possibly the most famous Super Bowl ad of all time. Filmed by Ridley Scott, it was a nod to George Orwell with IBM cast as big brother.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh and you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984."
HENN: Apple's CEO Tim Cook says he doesn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about the past. But today is an exception because the Mac is turning 30.
TIM COOK: It's pretty exciting when you think about it, that not only that the product and the brand can live 30 years, but the values. The idea that we were going to take computing power that was for the privileged few, for a few universities and big corporations that had tons of money and give to all of us.
HENN: From it's beginnings as a research project the Macintosh was conceived as a computer for people - affordable, and incredibly simple to use.
BUD TRIBBLE: It requires some very deep thinking to design things that are approachable - that don't require you to read the manual.
HENN: In 1983, an approachable computer was more or less unheard of. Bud Tribble, who was part of the original Mac design team, says one reason was that 30 years ago computers were slow - and the convention wisdom was...
TRIBBLE: Any extra computing cycles you had should be used to make the spread sheet run faster. The Mac team had a different approach and we said, well, as - with this very precious computer power, lets devote some of it to painting pictures on the screen.
HENN: Why? Because people relate to pictures. They could use a mouse to click on picture and begin using computers almost intuitively. And the team that built the Mac was an eclectic group, not dominated by computer scientists or engineers.
TRIBBLE: Yeah, in the early days, of course, it was just a handful of people.
HENN: There was a brilliant self-educated drop out.
TRIBBLE: There was myself.
HENN: He was in the midst of an M.D. PhD program.
TRIBBLE: There were musicians. There were...
HENN: And artists.
TRIBBLE: There was an archeologist.
HENN: Tribble says all these different perspectives made the Mac possible. The team was building a tool they wanted to use - and they were a diverse group.
COOK: We define diversity with a big D.
HENN: Tim Cook.
COOK: It's not just the traditional measures of diversity, which are incredibly important, but also diversity of thought.
HENN: For a company that says its doesn't look back, Apple still draws lots of lessons from the development of that first Mac. For example, Tribble says Steve Jobs insisted that the Mac be more than just a machine - he wanted it to be a work of art.
TRIBBLE: Artifacts in our lives should be beautiful, they're part of the warp and woof of our life.
HENN: The team took a field trip to a Tiffany's factory in New York. Jobs once suggested redesigning a circuit board for aesthetic purposes only. And when the Mac finally shipped, every member of the team had their signature embossed on the inside.
TRIBBLE: That's a theme in my time with Apple and with Steve - that's an underlying current that is - was strong back then and if anything is even stronger now.
HENN: And 30 years ago, as a final reward for the folks who created the Mac, Steve Jobs bought the team a beautiful black Bosendorfer grand piano. That piano is still at Apple - a reminder that a technically brilliant instrument could also be beautiful - and a pleasure to touch and play.
TRIBBLE: So here it is.
HENN: So what do you want to play?
TRIBBLE: Robert Schumann.
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COOK: Technology by itself is nothing.
HENN: But Tim Cook believes the Macintosh will still exist 30 years from now because it's designed to help people make their own mark on the world.
Steve Henn, NPR News, Silicon Valley.
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MONTAGNE: You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's Friday, and that means it's time now for StoryCorps. Today, we'll hear about Alexis D'Luna. Alexis had a rare genetic condition called CHARGE syndrome, which leads to a number of birth defects. She was mentally disabled, legally blind and had hearing problems. She was very short because of deformities in her legs and back.
Most children with CHARGE Syndrome don't live past 5 years old, but Alexis lived into her mid 20s. Her parents, Debra and Lionel D'Luna, came to StoryCorps with her sister Adrienne, to remember her.
LIONEL D'LUNA: From the time she woke up to the time she went to bed, she was always doing something.
ADRIENNE D'LUNA DIRECTO: She would wake up and ask what was on the agenda for the day. And once you got out of saying the things that you had planned, she'd say: And then?
LIONEL D'LUNA: Yeah.
DIRECTO: Then?
LIONEL D'LUNA: And Mom had this calendar for the month. The moment it was the end of the month, she wanted Mom to do the next month's calendar. You know, at the football games, she would be cheerleading, doing kicks, even though it was only 6 inches above the ground, and you just marveled at that energy.
DEBRA D'LUNA: She was charismatic. I mean, she attracted people wherever she went. And she was unabashedly a fan of whatever she was a fan of. For example, street artists...
DIRECTO: Even weird stuff, like bald heads and crooked teeth.
(LAUGHTER)
DEBRA D'LUNA: Yeah, crooked teeth.
DIRECTO: Let's talk a little bit about Alexis' death.
DEBRA D'LUNA: Yeah, um...
LIONEL D'LUNA: On the evening of the 14th of December, as I was tucking her into bed, she jokes with me and says, I'm going to climb into your mouth, Da-Da, and give you a pink polish. You know, she had been to the dentist for a tooth cleaning, where they use a pink compound. So she was joking me about that. So I say, you silly girl. And I kissed her and went to bed.
I woke up at 8 and usually on a Saturday morning, Alexis comes into our bed, but she hadn't. So I immediately went to her room, and then I opened the door; and I didn't hear anything. She had died somewhere in the middle of the night. The cause of death is listed as complications from CHARGE Syndrome, and I had to call you and let you know two weeks before your wedding.
DEBRA D'LUNA: She was to be a bridesmaid, of course.
LIONEL D'LUNA: All the bridesmaids had strapless dresses, but Alexis's body would not allow that to be. So mom had put straps on them for her. She had tried it on just a couple of days before.
DIRECTO: I'm glad I had gotten to see her in that bridesmaid's dress.
LIONEL D'LUNA: You know, every morning when I wake up, I give thanks for the day; and then I say, may I use it the way Alexis did.
DIRECTO: If you could talk to Alexis right now, what would you want to say?
LIONEL D'LUNA: We are so proud of you, and all that you have taught us. We are what we are because of you.
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MONTAGNE: Lionel and Debra D'Luna with Adrienne D'Luna Directo, remembering their daughter and sister Alexis, who died in 2012. The StoryCorps podcast is at npr.org.
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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne.
These days, you can hail a ride in some cities with the quick tap of a smartphone. The app for Uber connects drivers for hire to riders. And that car service has gotten attention lately because of its pricing system. At times, Uber rides can be cheaper than metered taxis. But when demand for a ride is high, the fare can be three, five, or even nine times as much as the regular rate.
Lisa Chow of NPR's Planet Money Team took a ride with an Uber driver, during this week's big snow storm in New York City, to explore the fast-changing rates.
LISA CHOW, BYLINE: I was in the car for about an hour, a ride that normally would have cost me 65 bucks. But when it came time to pay, my driver, Kirk Furye, was concerned for me.
KIRK FURYE: Are you going to get trouble with NPR? You are almost at three times the amount.
CHOW: Furye had been driving me around in the middle of a snow storm at a time when Uber was engaged in what they call surge pricing. In a snowstorm, there's high demand for cars. And when there's high demand, Uber raises it prices.
I'm a little worried. What's your guess?
FURYE: Three times the amount. Best guess, 150 maybe.
CHOW: Actually, the bill ended up being $192. A hundred and ninety-two dollars for a ride in a snowstorm. A lot of people might call this gouging. But Uber says this helps people because the high price sends a signal to all the drivers out there: Hey, you can make a lot of money if you stay out on the road. Case in point, my own driver, Kirk Furye, he hadn't even stopped for lunch that day.
FURYE: I take little breaks here and now. But when the surges are on, you want to try to push yourself a little harder. Ride it out. And you're also not doing it for the money. There's people out here that really just don't want to be standing out in the snow, in the cold, and you do what you can and get them to their destination safely.
CHOW: Money helps though, right?
FURYE: Money does help.
CHOW: In more ways than one. Uber tracks customers and drivers down to the street level. So sometimes fares are popping in one part of the city and not another. And in theory, what should happen is as more drivers see a part of the city where fares are high, they all go there. Now supply has met demand, and prices should come down.
Furye says, he sees that happen all the time. It's a pain in the butt.
FURYE: When I first started out, I used to chase the surge. But that became exhausting because it would always go somewhere else by the time I got there.
CHOW: And did you ever catch it? Catch the surge?
FURYE: Do I ever catch the surge? When I was running for it, I think I might have caught it, like, once, twice tops. And then I realized it wasn't worth it. I missed it a lot more times than I caught it.
CHOW: So this appears to be working as it should. But it doesn't feel like that to a lot of people.
Would you pay double the price to get a cab today?
SHALONDA MCNICHOLSON: No.
CHOW: Shalonda McNicholson is near Penn Station waiting for a cab. She had never heard of the company Uber. When I explained the way Uber prices its rides she said this...
MCNICHOLSON: That's ridiculous. Ridiculous. It's not fair. We didn't ask for the snow.
CHOW: Richard Thaler, an economist at the Chicago Booth School of Business, says no matter what most economists say surge pricing just feels inherently unfair to most people, which means Uber might be treading in tricky territory.
RICHARD THALER: I think the question will be: How big a multiple the market will stand up for. And my intuition is it's a number in the ballpark of three.
CHOW: That consumers will tolerate three times the normal fare but not really more than that. Thaler says, if you look at industries in which prices do respond quickly to demand. Take hotels, for instance. If you're booking a room during Christmas, you'll probably pay a lot more. But you'll rarely pay more than three times the normal price. Uber sometimes goes way above that - seven, eight, nine times.
But Uber is hoping this gets their drivers to do what my driver did. When I called Furye the day after the storm, he told me he ended up working a 17 hour day; riding the surge as long as he possibly could.
Lisa Chow, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And concern is growing over safety in Sochi, which is the host of the Winter Olympics, of course. With just two weeks to go before the games, Russian security forces are searching for potential suicide bombers, at least one of whom may already be in Sochi. The suspects are thought to be linked to Islamist militants who are fighting to throw off Russian control, and create a fundamentalist Muslim state in Russia's North Caucasus Mountains.
When President Vladimir Putin brought the Winter Olympics to those mountains, he also presented the militants with the chance to carry on their fight in front of a worldwide audience. NPR's Corey Flintoff has more.
COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: Police have been circulating leaflets to hotels in Sochi, warning about women who may be part of a terrorist plot. They're known as black widows - women sent to carry out suicide bombings in revenge for husbands or family members killed by the security forces.
It's a tactic that's been used before, to devastating effect, by a Chechen rebel leader named Doku Umarov. Last June, Umarov released a video that showed him in a forest, flanked by Jihadi fighters.
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DOKU UMAROV: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: He called on Islamist militants to do everything in their power to wreck the Olympics, which he called satanic dances on the bones of our ancestors. Umarov has claimed responsibility for a number of deadly suicide attacks in the past, including bombings in Moscow in 2010 and 2011, that killed more than 70 people. Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security issues, says that Umarov is an important influence on other jihadists in the region.
MARK GALEOTTI: But his actual authority within the insurgent movement is exceedingly limited. Essentially, it's symbolic more than anything else.
FLINTOFF: Galeotti, a professor at New York University, says that's because the insurgency is composed of autonomous cells scattered across a rugged area that stretches for hundreds of miles. It makes the rebel network hard to combat because each cell plans and carries out its own operations. Earlier this week, an insurgent group based in Dagestan posted an online video showing two men in explosive vests, saying that unless Putin canceled the Winter Games, they were preparing a present for him and the Olympic visitors.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: The video also claims that the two men pictured were the ones who carried out a pair of suicide bombings that killed 34 people last month in the southern Russian city of Volgograd. Although it's only a little more than 400 miles from Sochi, Volgograd is considered to be outside the North Caucasus, a reminder that the insurgents have the power to strike terror beyond their region.
Some analysts, such as Andrei Soldatov, say that terror may have been only a secondary purpose of the attacks.
ANDREI SOLDATOV: The biggest fear is that these attacks in Volgograd might be some sort of a diversion tactics. Before every big terrorist attacks in Russia, militants used diversions. They organized small terrorist attacks in some other regions.
FLINTOFF: Soldatov is editor-in-chief of Agentura.ru, a website that acts as a watchdog on the Russian security services. It was only after the suicide attacks focused intense attention on Volgograd that reports emerged that a black widow might have infiltrated the security cordon around Sochi.
A leaflet that's been distributed in the Olympic city shows a mugshot of a woman with dark, impassive eyes. She wears a Muslim headscarf. The leaflet says that she is Ruzanna Ibragimova, the 22-year-old widow of an insurgent, and that she's been spotted in recent days in central Sochi. Mark Galeotti points out that once a suicide bomber has been prepared, he or she must be must be used fairly quickly.
GALEOTTI: Suicide bombers are actually quite fragile weapons. These people have been groomed; they have been brought to a pitch, where they're ready to give their life. And once they're at that pitch, you can't then put them on the shelf until you're ready.
FLINTOFF: Even if there is no bomber, and even if the Olympics go off without a hitch, the terrorists may have already succeeded, to some degree, in disrupting the games. Russian officials acknowledged last week that so far, only about 70 percent of the tickets for the games have been sold.
Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Moscow.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
The dramatic story of Marlise Munoz moves to a North Texas courtroom Friday afternoon. Munoz has been on life support since she was found unconscious in her home in November. At the time, she was 14 weeks pregnant. Her family says it has medical evidence she's brain-dead and wants to take her off life-support, but the hospital has refused to disconnect her from the machines. Lauren Silverman of member station KERA reports her husband's lawsuit to get the hospital's policy changed gets its first hearing in court today.
LAUREN SILVERMAN, BYLINE: Marlise Munoz has attracted national and international attention for more than a month.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: In Texas, a wrenching life and death struggle is going on involving a woman who is being kept on life-support because she is pregnant. Her family's saying...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN TWO: A paramedic married to another paramedic, the couple expecting their second child when it happened.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Foreign language spoken)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN THREE: If that means that you are actually brain dead or if you're in a persistent vegetative state or...
SILVERMAN: When Marlise Munoz arrived at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth seven weeks ago, the media focused on her health - specifically, whether or not she was brain dead. As today's court hearing approaches, attention has turned to the health of her unborn baby. This week attorneys for her husband released a statement describing the fetus - now 22 weeks along -- as distinctly abnormal. With heart problems, deformed lower extremities and hydrocephalus, or fluid in the brain.
DR. SHEILA CHHUTANI: Knowing of these abnormalities this early in gestation, the likelihood of having a good outcome for the fetus is definitely decreased.
SILVERMAN: Dr. Sheila Chhutani is an OB/GYN at Texas Health Presbyterian, Dallas. She says cases of pregnant brain dead women are extremely rare. A 2010 study at Heidelberg University in Germany focused on a number of such women around the world. The results for the babies were mixed. Five died in utero, and 13 were delivered by C-section -- one died a month later.
CHHUTANI: In dealing with these types of cases, you know, one of the first things is finding out if there are any abnormalities within the fetus because that can help determine whether or not you take on the burden of keeping this woman alive in order to grow the fetus.
SILVERMAN: The family has made a decision. For weeks they've asked the hospital to remove Munoz from the machines, but the hospital says a state law makes that illegal.
TOM MAYO: The law that they say compels them to continue ICU level support for Ms. Munoz is the so-called pregnancy exclusion provision in our Advanced Directives Act.
SILVERMAN: Tom Mayo is a medical ethicist and law professor at in Southern Methodist University Dallas. He spoke with NPR yesterday.
MAYO: And I think the pregnancy exclusion provision doesn't apply because I don't think the act doesn't applies to someone who is dead. This is all assuming now that the husband has it right and that we'll see confirmation of her brain death as a result of the hearing.
SILVERMAN: Mayo says more than 30 other states also have pregnancy exclusion provisions on the books but this is the first time he's heard of a hospital insisting on treatment over the objection of the family. For NPR News, I'm Lauren Silverman in Dallas.
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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
The Egyptian capital of Cairo has seen a lot of turmoil over the last three years, but not truck bombings until this morning. There was a large blast and then an angry crowd gathered in the streets.
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MONTAGNE: That was outside one of the city's main security headquarters where at least four people were killed and dozens injured. Egypt was already heading into a tense weekend. Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the 2011 revolt against former dictator, Hosni Mubarak.
NPR's Leila Fadel joins us now from Cairo. Good morning, Leila.
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: And you've been to the site of a car bombing. Tell us what you saw.
FADEL: Well, this bombing was so powerful that it shook people awake for seven miles. There was nearly a mile of buildings with shattered glass and we saw angry mobs gather very quickly and blamed the Muslim Brotherhood - the organization that was ousted from power in the summer, saying, we want the execution of the Brotherhood.
MONTAGNE: Well, there has been ongoing fight between the Islamists and the Brotherhood, between them and the military led-government - which the security forces have killed and arrested hundreds. But this truck bombing seems to be taking things up a notch. What is this going to mean?
FADEL: Well, there is a lot of concern that this will then be to a further crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. People here want stability and many Egyptians blamed the Brotherhood for the violence. The Brotherhood says, of course, that they want to continue what they call peaceful protests. They say they are not involved in these bombings and they're being unfairly blamed. So the biggest concern going forward is what will happen next. The government has excused a lot of human right abuses under the guise of the war on terror, saying it necessary to stabilize Egypt and to protect Egyptian citizens.
MONTAGNE: Tell us a bit about the political backdrop that these attacks took place. I mean the basic bottom line part of the backdrop is that the military pushed the Muslim Brotherhood out of power.
FADEL: On July 3rd, Mohammad Morsi, the former president of this country elected, was ousted from power and since then we've seen your daily protests and weekly contest from the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters. And we've seen a lot of deaths. More than 1,000 of them have been killed since then. But this interim government wants to move forward. We've seen a referendum that happened that was free but many people say not fair because dissenting voices were being silenced. And now this government wants to move on with presidential and then parliamentary elections.
Many believe that the head of the military, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, will run for president. And critics say that Egypt is really reverting back to the military dictatorship of the past where the military backed dictatorship of the past. They're saying a lot of that openness that we were seeing in the last three years, despite the instability, is now really closing and dissenting voices are really fearing to speak out - and even those who are not Islamists and not the Brotherhood, liberals as well.
MONTAGNE: Well, tell us just briefly, about when you say the past. I mean there has been that terror in Egypt even in the past.
FADEL: Right. Some analysts are saying this is reminding them of the 1990s when the Muslim Brotherhood was working underground and more radical groups than the Brotherhood were carrying out these kinds of attacks against police and against government officials. So they're saying now that these attacks are coming to the capital, we may see a resurgence of that insurgency that the government faced in the 1990s.
MONTAGNE: OK. Well, that's NPR's Leila Fadel speaking to us from Cairo. Thanks very much.
FADEL: Thank you.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
We have been looking at what some are calling the civil war inside the Republican Party, and doing it through the lens of one congressional primary race in Idaho. It pits an established incumbent against a Tea Party upstart. Yesterday, David Greene talked to the candidates. We also heard from voters who have depended on federal money that the incumbent, Rep. Mike Simpson, has brought into the district.
When we last heard from David, he was heading away from the more populated parts of the district into an area where Tea Party challenger Bryan Smith's message takes hold.
DAVID GREENE, BYLINE: We drove out of Idaho Falls, and went a couple hundred miles up into the mountains. And it is really remote. We're on this one-lane road, mountains on both sides. And off to the right here, this valley with ranches and cattle. I mean, you spin the FM dial in an area this isolated, and the dials just spins around. It stops on one place - this station, KSRA from Salmon, Idaho.
We were driving to meet up with Mike Barrett. He's the local Republican Party chair and also a gold miner, which, believe it or not, remains a pretty common trade in this area.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
GREENE: This is really pretty country.
MIKE BARRETT: Right over there is the Boulder White Clouds area.
GREENE: OK. Down this way.
BARRETT: Yeah. So, the...
GREENE: But why do they call it that? What am I looking at that would make it Boulder White Clouds - that name?
BARRETT: Because it's a big old boulder in the middle of nowhere, and there's clouds above it.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: Joking aside, the Boulder White Clouds are two mountain ranges full of resources like gold, silver and copper. Like much of Idaho, these mountains mostly belong to the federal government. Environmental groups have been urging President Obama to add more protection by declaring the area a national monument. Barrett hates the idea because, he says, it will make it harder for miners, ranchers and other local people to use the land.
BARRETT: It's already federal land so it's locked up, for the most part. So when you make it a monument, basically what you're doing is, you're throwing away the key.
GREENE: Barrett is in no mood to give up ground on this, and that's why the Tea Party candidate in this race speaks to him more than a longtime congressman, who Barrett says is too eager to compromise.
Now, I gather that the argument of some conservationists and people who support the monument, their position is a federal government should be able to protect the most beautiful parts of a country. That's sort of their role.
BARRETT: Well, I disagree with that because I don't think that was ever the intention of the federal government. I don't think the theory behind the federal government was hey, if we create a strong federal central government, we can lock places up to look at later. I don't think the founding fathers ever envisioned that an individual with a stroke of a pen could just lock something up forever. I think that's exactly what they were trying to get away from.
GREENE: And Barrett thinks deep questions like that aren't even on the minds of politicians these days, who he says are too obsessed with bargaining and small victories.
BARRETT: And I know everybody says, oh, nobody gets everything they want, but that's really a dim view of it. To me, compromise is mutually assured destruction. Take baking an apple pie. This is how the government would do it: We're going to make an apple pie. So the Republicans say, well, we want Granny Smith apples. Democrats say, oh, not - red delicious. So they fight back and forth. We get up against the deadline, which is how we manage now - it's crisis management - get up against the deadline, and guess what the compromise is? We're going to make an apple pie without apples.
GREENE: Baking is probably a little different than governing, right?
BARRETT: No, it really isn't.
(SOUNDBITE OF KSRA BROADCAST)
(RADIO JINGLE)
LEO MARSHALL: Here's Urban and Lambert, "We Were Us." Thanks for listening.
GREENE: That lone radio station was still playing as we drove away from the Boulder White Clouds towards the small town of Salmon and the studio that was sending out the signal. Leo Marshall doubles as mayor of Salmon and voice of KSRA.
MARSHALL: This is a fallout shelter.
GREENE: The fallout shelter?
MARSHALL: This is from the old emergency broadcast system.
GREENE: This room down here in the basement?
MARSHALL: This is designed so if there was a - the Russians dropped a bomb over here in Arcola, we would broadcast from here.
GREENE: You said if they dropped a bomb on...?
MARSHALL: Wherever.
GREENE: Wherever. Keeping far-flung communities informed - that remains the station's mission today. Marshall says he tries to limit politics on the air. Then again, when the two candidates in this primary, Congressman Mike Simpson and Tea Party challenger Bryan Smith, want to talk to this part of Idaho, KSRA will have them on. They're the only game in town.
MARSHALL: We're it. This station - we're 169 miles from the Idaho Falls area. Montana, the closest town is Hamilton, which is 90 miles, and look at the mountains around us. So, we're pretty much the station here. Pretty soon we're going to have a talk show. We have one that's called "Voice of the Valley" at 9:30 Monday through Friday. And today, the American Legion are going to come in and talk about whatever the American Legion's got in mind, so - and I've got to get ready for that.
(SOUNDBITE OF KSRA BROADCAST)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: "Voice of the Valley" is brought to you by Jones and K.C. Funeral Homes.
MARSHALL: All right. We have in the studio today none other than Ron Adams and Jan Johnson. And, of course, we also have John Wayne.
(ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHN WAYNE: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America...
GREENE: "Voice of the Valley" was going out to tiny communities - in some cases to people who may live miles from their closest neighbor. Many here see the federal government intruding on that way of life, and the Tea Party seems to be tapping into that. Shirley Sullivan works at the radio station here. She said she was upset recently when a federal court got involved in whether to restrict the hunting of wolves in this community.
SHIRLEY SULLIVAN: People scream when you kill one of them, but they don't scream when they kill cows and baby calves, which happens a lot.
GREENE: One of the solutions, some people say, is that federal land should be given back to the state of Idaho so the state's more in control. I mean, is that an idea that you like?
SULLIVAN: I think in a lot of ways I think the state could manage a lot of this land better than the federal government could, because so many rules are made for heavily populated areas. We're not out here.
GREENE: And this is what has some incumbents in the Republican Party nervous these days. It's one of those days where anger at Washington is strong - so strong that people like Shirley Sullivan area little defensive about their feelings.
SULLIVAN: Am I anti-government? I'm not anti-government. This is the best country in the world to ever live in.
GREENE: Inside the studio, Leo Marshall cued up this, the next song. Soon, his airwaves will likely have more political ads and campaign news as the May Republican primary approaches; and some of the views we heard will be turned into votes.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: This is KSRA, Salmon, Idaho.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: That's our David Greene in Idaho. And those are just some of the views we'll hear from that state. We'll keep following this race through the primary in May. It's MORNING EDITION.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne.
When Cambridge, England, removed apostrophes from its street signs, grammarians were aghast. The city council said apostrophes could confuse people, especially emergency services. So in the home of one of the world's great universities, no more did Paul possess Paul's Court or scholars possess Scholars' Walk.
Yesterday, though, the apostrophes reappeared, inked-in by what the Daily Mail calls Grammar Guerrillas.
You are listening to MORNING EDITION.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
The attorney general of Virginia surprised the state's political circles by deciding not to defend Virginia's ban on same-sex marriage. It goes before a federal judge next week. Democrat Mark Herring told this program yesterday that he wants the state to be, quote, "on the right side of history."
NPR's Brian Naylor has this report on reaction to Herring's decision.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: Herring, in office for less than two weeks, had little choice but to act quickly on same-sex marriage. A lawsuit challenging the ban comes before a federal judge in Norfolk next week. He told MORNING EDITION he believes the anti-gay marriage law violates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And he pointed to another Virginia law that once limited marriage, in that case multi-racial marriage that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down.
MARK HERRING: The court didn't say that there was a right to interracial marriage. It said that everyone, all individuals have the right to marry. And all individuals means all individuals.
NAYLOR: But backers of the prohibition on gay marriage see it differently. Kirk Cox is the Republican majority leader of the Virginia House of Delegates.
STATE REPRESENTATIVE KIRK COX: The attorney general has a constitutional and statutory obligation to enforce and defend the duly adopted laws and constitution of Virginia. This is not an obligation that can be taken lightly. The attorney general's decision demonstrates a great deal of disrespect for that obligation, as well as the legislative and democrat processes for which those laws are adopted.
NAYLOR: Virginians had varying reactions to Herring's decision. Interviewed outside a diner in Crozet, near Charlottesville, Mary Linn was unhappy.
MARY LINN: I'm absolutely negative on that. Don't want it, because I'm a Christian and the Lord says that's a no-no. That's the reason. And what I try to do is to live my life according to the Bible.
NAYLOR: Retiree Stan Gray says he ambivalent on the issue of same-sex marriage.
STAN GRAY: I consider myself not involved in that particular fight. It doesn't bother me one way or the other. I think there are a lot of good reasons for them to be allowed to get married. And there's a lot of history that says we're better off without it. But it doesn't bother me I can accept either decision.
NAYLOR: In 2006, the referendum that banned same-sex marriage, was approved by 57 percent of the state's voters. But in keeping with national trends, a recent Quinnipiac poll showed 50 percent of Virginians surveyed now support allowing gays and lesbians to marry. It's another example of how Virginia is trending social and politically. All three of the states' top office holders and its two U.S. senators are Democrats.
Democratic State Senator Adam Ebbin is the first openly gay member of the Virginia General Assembly, a legislature that goes back more than 400 years. Ebbin says he's glad his state is, in his view, coming around on the issue.
STATE SENATOR ADAM EBBIN: We have a conflicting history of both being the birthplace of civil liberties and the Bill of Rights. And at the same time, being the state that resisted interracial marriage and integrating one of our colleges and desegregating our schools. So it's good to be proud of being a Virginian today.
NAYLOR: Herring's decision not to defend Virginias ban on same-sex marriage in court comes after several federal judges have overturned similar bans, including in Utah and Oklahoma. Pennsylvania's attorney general also refused to defend that state's ban, a case now making it was through the courts. In all more than a dozen states have lawsuits challenging laws forbidding same-sex marriage. And in the end, it's likely to be an issue that's finally decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
NPR's business news begins with a nod to American manufacturing.
Wal-Mart announced yesterday it plans to create a $10 million fund to spur U.S. manufacturing. The fund will supply grants to projects aimed at creating new processes and jobs in the sector. The fund will be launched in March, and Wal-Mart will fund the grants for five years.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And the latest housing numbers show that home sales for 2013 reached their strongest level since before the housing crash. Home prices are on the rise too.
As NPR's Chris Arnold reports, the new study predicts that going forward, prices will be up, down or sideways, depending on where you live.
CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: Home prices nationally were up about 11 percent last year, according to one major index. But that's across the country. And most people probably don't care about that. They want to know what prices are going to be doing in their area. Yeah, that's what MIT housing economist William Wheaton is forecasting for about 70 different U.S. metro areas.
WILLIAM WHEATON: Each one of them going forward is likely to experience very different things.
ARNOLD: Wheaton says the housing crash has made it very hard to tell where prices are going to go next.
WHEATON: It's completely dislodged prices from their long run trend.
ARNOLD: So Wheaton is using a bunch of different metrics to try to correct for that, city by city, and forecast where prices will be in 2020. And he's been surprised by how different the results are for the different areas.
WHEATON: There's just like these huge differences. San Francisco, you're going to be 45 percent ahead of where you were in '07.
Or you double your money if you bought at the bottom a year ago. Pittsburgh and Minneapolis are going to do well, he says, compared to the peak in '07. But if you bought in Las Vegas at the peak.
You're never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to get back to 2007.
ARNOLD: So if you bought in 2007, just throw the keys down...
WHEATON: Just throw your keys away. You're never, you're never, never, never, never going to get your equity back.
ARNOLD: Well, if you like your house, you shouldn't, of course, actually throw your keys away. William Wheaton is posting his full report on his website later today.
Chris Arnold, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Montreal was the first city in North America to bring in bike sharing. The concept is simple. You rent a bite from a giant rack in one location and return it to another rack somewhere else in the city. Now Bixi, the Canadian company behind bike sharing programs in London, New York and Chicago, has filed for bankruptcy.
Montreal Gazette transportation reporter Andy Riga is reporting on the Montreal-based company's financial woes and what it means for the future of bike sharing.
Good morning.
ANDY RIGA: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: What exactly was the city and its then mayor back in 2009 thinking when Montreal got involved with Bixi?
RIGA: You kind of have to go two years back - 2007, when the city and the mayor wanted to improve transit and transport around the city. And one of the items on that list was bike sharing. The mayor and the city were convinced basically that we could develop a really robust kind of system. It would be very solid and we would sell it to other cities around the world and that would finance bike sharing in Montreal and it wouldn't cost taxpayers a cent. But, of course, it didn't work out that way.
MONTAGNE: What happened? When did things start falling apart? And what hurt Bixi so much?
RIGA: Within a year the city's auditor general started being concerned that it was spending way too much money and it was going to end up costing taxpayers. Then in 2012, it got embroiled in a legal dispute with the developer of the software that kind of runs the system. Bixi decided OK, fine, we're going to develop our own new software that'll work in cities like New York and other big cities where we sell it. And there were all kinds of problems. Several cities had to delay their systems. Customers were angry and it kind of started the ball rolling down the hill kind of.
MONTAGNE: When Bixi started having glitches and other bad experiences with its software, that really hurt it, right? Because it had sold the system to cities like New York and Chicago, who then got mad, but they also stopped paying millions of dollars for this system that they owed Bixi.
RIGA: Right. New York owes $3 million, Chicago 2.5 million almost. And New York also says it wants damages for software delays to the tune of I think about $11 million.
MONTAGNE: The city of Montreal ended up giving a loan and a line of credit - a great deal of money - to Bixi to keep it, what, going?
RIGA: To keep it going and to kind of help with the cash flow through the difficulties, is what we were told. That happened in late 2011. The city said, you know, it's just a temporary thing. We don't want this company to go into bankruptcy because we've got a good thing going. Look at all these big cities, you know, our interest - London has got it. So the city into that $37 million loan.
MONTAGNE: So Montreal is now on the hook for about $37 million as Bixi teeters on the brink of bankruptcy?
RIGA: Correct. What happened this week is the mayor - we have a new mayor - who came in in November and - but what they tried to do is sell the international arm again, the second time now that they were close to selling it and then the buyer - we don't know who - took a closer look at the books and stepped away from the deal. So - and when that happened this month, the new mayor said, OK, we've got to cut the cord here. He forced it into bankruptcy protection and so it's now trying to restructure, but it seems like we're - the city of Montreal is going to be stuck with maybe tens of millions of dollar loss on this deal.
MONTAGNE: Well, if in fact Bixi fails as a company, what does this mean for systems that it has sold to other cities like New York, Chicago? Can they survive if Bixi doesn't?
RIGA: That's hard to say. Bixi says yes and New York, I think, said it doesn't foresee any problems. I mean they own the bikes and the systems. The problem is the software, and these cities have spent a lot of - millions of dollars on these bikes and bike stations, and presumably won't want to just kind of throw them aside and start over. Although some people in New York are suggesting that.
MONTAGNE: Andy Riga is the transportation reporter at the Montreal Gazette. Thank you very much for joining us.
RIGA: Thanks for having me.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And our last word in business is bridal makeover
The wedding store chain David's Bridal is getting into the upscale boutique business with a new store near Beverly Hills. David's Bridal is famously known for carrying cheap bridal dresses, some for less than $100. Now the company wants to offer an elevated experience for brides to be - with chandeliers, marble tiling, plush chairs and price tags to match. As much as $2,000. No need to worry though. The bridal store still accepts its coupons.
And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne. In Geneva there had been hope that this would be the day the two bitter rivals in the Syria peace talks would at least get in the same room together, but even that initial step is in doubt now. Mediators are struggling to find terms that could bring representatives of the Syrian government to talk with the rebel opponents trying to overthrow that government. NPR's Deborah Amos is at the talks and joins us now to unravel some of what's happening there. Good morning.
DEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: Look, it took a long time to get the two sides to even come to Switzerland to have these talks and then they made angry opening statements a couple of days ago, very bitter statements. What was the goal for today and what exactly happened?
AMOS: Well, today the goal was simply talks about talks. They were going to set an agenda and the idea that they would be in the same room with no flags. They wouldn't talk to each other but they would talk to a U.N. mediator. Now, this all broke down last night. Now we have them meeting but not in the same room and not at the same time. One is early. The Syrian representatives of the government will meet in the morning and the opposition will meet later in the day.
It seems to have broken down yet again over this notion of negotiating over a transitional government. The opposition head, Ahmed Jarba, continues to say time is blood. And what he means is the longer these talks go on without any concrete results, more Syrians will die.
MONTAGNE: Well, you have got world powers there and primarily the U.S. and Russia. They are backing the talks, but the U.S. and Russia are on opposite sides of what these talks actually are about, ultimately. So break down the issues in that regard.
AMOS: The U.S. and the Russians are in agreement that the talks should take place. I think where the disagreement is, is where they should end up. They both have signed on to this Geneva One communique which talks about a transitional government by mutual consent. How the Americans read that is there's no place for President Bashar Al-Assad because how could the opposition mutually agree to have him in a government.
That's not quite how the Russians see it, so that is yet to be fixed, fudged, whatever language you want to use for the superpowers who are clearly behind these talks. They are in the hallway when these two delegations meet, either with the U.N. representative or with each other, if that should turn out how these talks proceed.
MONTAGNE: OK. So if they're clearly not ready for a big agreement at this moment, there are, though, Deb, smaller issues that they can take up that could make a difference there in Syria.
AMOS: This is what we thought was going to happen today, that they would take on things like humanitarian quarters, so there could be more aid to people who are literally starving inside Syria, sometimes because the regime has besieged their neighborhoods. Also, cease fires, local ones. Prisoner exchanges. Those were all on the agenda.
But what seems to have blown up the talks today is the opposition's insistence that the transitional government negotiations should be at the beginning of the talks. I remind you again of Jarba's time is blood. So he wanted to get that on the agenda and he wanted an explicit agreement from the regime that they back Geneva One.
Now, we heard on Wednesday the Syrian U.N. ambassador said that they did but they've never explicitly said so. Once you accept the invitation to this conference, it is that you have accepted it. But the opposition wants something harder from the regime and they are not willing to give it.
MONTAGNE: Well, just briefly, there must be a lot of pressure to keep working on this after all it took to even get everyone to Switzerland.
AMOS: And all the money that was spent to get everybody here. Yes, there is. No one has said the talks have broken down. Nobody's left. Nobody's gotten on a plane and decided to quit. What we just have is two delegations meeting at two different times. So I think that we will see how the day plays out. There will be plenty of spin on whose fault this all was, that there was a pause in these negotiations.
But regime officials told me that they thought it would go on for seven days, maybe even 10. And so we may still see that.
MONTAGNE: That's NPR's Deborah Amos in Geneva at the Syria peace talks. Thanks very much.
AMOS: Thank you.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
For Syrian refugees just over the border in Turkey from Syria, peace talks in Geneva seem a long way away. Many of these people dismiss them as irrelevant. But NPR's Alice Fordham reports that others welcome any hope for peace.
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: Here in the physical therapy center of a health clinic run by and for Syrians just on the Turkish side of the border, most people have been injured in bombings or fighting. There's one little boy here, Saddam, who's seven years old. He was hit by shrapnel and damaged his spinal cord. Now he's here learning to walk again.
SADDAM: (Through interpreter) I get shrapnel in my back.
FORDHAM: How did that happen, Saddam?
SADDAM: (Through interpreter) I was walking and there's mines. It explodes and I get shrapnel.
FORDHAM: One young man winces in pain as he pedals an exercise bike with his damaged legs. An older man builds up the muscles in his shattered hand. There's a woman whose paralysis isn't the result of the war, but she says there are no hospitals in Syria anymore. No one's exactly confident about talks in Switzerland, but they are watching them and in the face of so much suffering, some people seem to think, well, why not? It might just be a good start.
YASSER AL SAYID: (Speaking foreign language)
FORDHAM: Yasser Al Sayid, who runs the clinic, says that Ahmed Jarba, the opposition leader, is doing his best. Mr. Sayid says the international community should support the overthrow of what he calls a criminal regime. Mr. Sayid's not a doctor. He's a lawyer who says he defended activists and fled the country when he himself was threatened with prosecution.
SAYID: (Speaking foreign language)
FORDHAM: He says the Americans could order Bashar al-Assad to leave power and he would. He says that Americans were able to force the Syrian president to give up his chemical weapons and that if they wanted to, they could end his rule. Many people are angry and cynical. One patient, Abdulrahman Alloush, was a rebel fighter along the Syrian/Lebanese border. He says that the political opposition never did anything for him.
ABDULRAHMAN ALLOUSH: (Through interpreter) I do not believe in the Geneva conference. It's useless. After the conference, the regime will just back to killing Muslims. The coalition does not represent me and does nothing for the people inside Syria.
FORDHAM: In a room across the hall lies Kheiry Staif. She says she was paralyzed when a helicopter dropped a barrel full of explosives on her village outside the city of Hama.
KHEIRY STAIF: (Speaking foreign language)
FORDHAM: She was trying to protect her infant daughter, who survived unharmed. She says she doesn't know much about the peace talks.
STAIF: (Through interpreter) I don't know. God willing, it will be - there's some solution about.
FORDHAM: Who do you think has the power to change the situation in Syria?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Through interpreter) God willing, the opposition.
FORDHAM: Obviously there are many opinions. After all, the UN says there are more than 70,000 Syrian refugees now living in this Turkish border province of Hatay. Many of them are in the city of Antakya. We're walking down Mezerlik Street. This where lots of the Syrians come to hang out together in the evening.
HANI NAJJAR: This area here, this street, most of the people here are Syrian. We have here some Syrian brothers, most of them, you see all labels in the Arabic font.
FORDHAM: That's Hani Najjar from Aleppo. He used to work as a designer, but now he helps run this grocery. When Syrians get together, he says they mostly talk about the revolution. Lately, they've been discussing the talks in Switzerland, but he doesn't hold out much hope for the meetings between the Syrian regime and the political opposition.
NAJJAR: No one represent the revolution in this conference in Geneva. All this opposition, they are made by other countries.
FORDHAM: The shopkeeper's friends aren't sure what they expect from the talks. One says he's suffered under Assad, but now he just wants to go home and he doesn't care whether it's under Assad or the opposition. Alice Fordham, NPR News, Antakya.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Hundreds of mayors converged on Washington, D.C., this week for the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors. There were some big names in the group: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, New York Mayor Bill de Blassio. Also in the mix were mayors from some of the country's smallest towns and cities. NPR's Laura Sullivan spent the day with the mayor of Ville Platte, La., who like most small- town mayors, was trying to find a way to stand out in the crowd.
(SOUNDBITE OF BACKGROUND CHATTER)
LAURA SULLIVAN, BYLINE: For three days at the Capitol Hilton in D.C., hundreds of mayors swamp the hallways and coffee stations, eating danishes and picking up free pens. It's a parade of veritable celebrities in suits and heels, moving from panel discussion to podium to televised press conference. So there's really only one way to manage this kind of crowd if you're a mayor from one of the country's smallest towns or cities. You come in bold.
MAYOR JENNIFER VIDRINE: I'm the mayor of Ville Platte, La. It's a Southern town, about 8,000 people. The best people in the world, the best food in the world. We're like a jewel.
SULLIVAN: Jennifer Vidrine has been Ville Platte's mayor for three years, where budgets are always tight.
VIDRINE: I sacrificed to come to this conference so I can find out what other mayors are doing, what's available out there for small cities. And that's why I'm just like - I'm a sponge. I'm getting all of the information that I can so I can go back home and get on the phone and start writing letters.
SULLIVAN: Small-town mayors are at a disadvantage and not just at this conference. Small towns often don't qualify for funding grants and federal programs that fix roads and build buildings. And because they're small, it's difficult to attract new businesses. So while she's here, Vidrine is determined to get Ville Platte on the map, and she's ready with the facts.
VIDRINE: We have 10 seasonings, food seasonings that are made and manufactured right in Ville Platte. The famous Slap Ya Mama seasoning, I don't know if you all know about it, but you know now. Jack Miller Barbeque sauce, the barbecue sauce is so good, you don't need to barbecue.
SULLIVAN: And she brought some local cuisine.
VIDRINE: We have something called boudin; it's a stuffed - type of sausage. I did bring that with me.
(LAUGHTER)
SULLIVAN: You brought that to the U.S. Conference....
VIDRINE: I did. I brought that to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and it's like, where is that boudin mayor? We want to taste some of that stuff. (Laughter) Like, where are you from? I'm like, Ville Platte, La.
SULLIVAN: Mayor Vidrine tells other mayors, and the people running the booths, and the conference staff about Ville Platte's 10 seasonings and barbecue sauce. And by mid-day in the hallway, it seems to be working.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: How are you, Mayor?
VIDRINE: I'm fine. Thank you. How are you?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Doing well.
VIDRINE: And you're from where?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Rochester, N.Y., barbecue capital of the world.
VIDRINE: Did you see? Didn't I just tell you? Barbecue sauce so good you don't need to barbecue. I told you...
SULLIVAN: The hallways are packed as mayors move by the dozens from one panel discussion to the next. There's a logjam at the moment because the mayors of Baltimore and Sacramento are holding a press conference at the end of a hall.
VIDRINE: This is the line.
SULLIVAN: The line for what?
VIDRINE: To get in. (Laughter) I think we can work our way through.
SULLIVAN: Eventually, the crowd thins as the next panels get underway. Vidrine has already marked up her agenda. She's going to the discussion on attracting entrepreneurs, managing budgets, and water. She needs to replace aging pipes. She took a seat close to the mayor of Indianapolis. She's got 8,000 people. He's got 800,000. But they both have the same problem - water quality and water quantity. As the day wears on, she notices that happening more and more.
VIDRINE: We have less people. We have smaller budgets, but I think all of the mayors here have one thing in common - is that they want to enhance the quality of life for their people.
SULLIVAN: But just as a reminder of her place here, a mayor walks by with an entourage of four staffers, all on their cellphones. It doesn't bother her, though.
VIDRINE: Yes, we are a small fish in a big bowl but still, we can still compete, you know. And we can still have what other cities have, just on a smaller scale.
SULLIVAN: And if she can't have that, in the very least, Mayor Vidrine says she's going to have a run on barbecue sauce.
Laura Sullivan, NPR News, Washington.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne with a news of a job opportunity in sunny South Florida, paying $25 an hour: Crocodile handler. The job involves responding to complaints about nuisance crocs. A state official tells the South Florida Sun Sentinel it's looking for someone who is low Key - not just calm while relocating crocodiles but also in handling those homeowners who are upset to discover they're living in a crocodile habitat and the crocs will stay. It is MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Nearly two weeks after a chemical spill contaminated drinking water for 300,000 West Virginia residents, the company involved revealed that it had spilled a second chemical as well. West Virginia officials say tests of drinking water samples collected since the still so far have not detected this second chemical but they will use a more sensitive test to see if they find it in smaller concentrations. Water company officials say they don't think there was any added risk to the public from that second chemical and it's told customers they can safely drink the water again unless they're pregnant. But as NPR's Elizabeth Shogren reports, the fact that a second contaminant went undetected reveals an important truth about how drinking water supplies are tested for contaminants.
ELIZABETH SHOGREN, BYLINE: The company whose tank spilled, Freedom Industries, identified this new chemical as PPH, a mixture of polygycol ethers. It was mixed in with a chemical that washes coal. The local water treatment plant hadn't noticed this second chemical in the water even with all the testing it was doing. Experts say that's because they only find what they looking for.
BRENT FEWELL: There's thousands of chemicals in use out there. To expect a water company to monitor for thousands of chemicals, it just is not practical and it would be cost prohibitive.
SHOGREN: Brent Fewell is vice president for environment, health and safety of a company called United Water.
FEWELL: When water companies do specific tests on contaminants like this they look for a fingerprint, if you will. Every chemical has a chemical fingerprint. And so when you focus on that fingerprint and you're not focusing on other fingerprints, you very well could miss a contaminant like this.
SHOGREN: Fewell says that's why it's so important for companies to tell utilities all the chemicals that might have spilled. Jon Capacasa directs the federal Environmental Protection Agency's water protection division for the region that includes West Virginia. He says there's a simple reason the water company didn't know about the second chemical.
JON CAPACASA: The substance involved here, PPH, is not a substance for which West Virginia American Water Company is required to test for under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
SHOGREN: The EPA does require public water systems to test for about 80 contaminants. How frequently water companies have to test varies on the kind of health risk the contaminant presents.
CAPACASA: Viruses and bacteria are monitored on a very short turnaround; within hours and days.
SHOGREN: Heavy metals, radiation and chemicals that may increase cancer risk are tested much less frequently - every few months or years. But water companies don't regularly test for tens of thousands of other chemicals. There are some ways labs can cast a wider net for unknown chemicals. Andy Eaton is the technical director of a water testing laboratory in California, Eurofins Eaton Analytical.
ANDY EATON: With an analytical technique called gas chromatography mass spectrometry.
SHOGREN: Eaton says 20 years ago his company was using the technology to analyze a routine water sample.
EATON: What happened was our chemists saw something that we weren't expecting.
SHOGREN: The chemists determined it was MTBE, a gasoline additive.
EATON: And everybody sort of said what? You know, what's MTBE? What's it doing there?
SHOGREN: He says it would be too expensive to use this technology to hunt for contaminants on a daily basis. But he says there's an important take away here for water companies that face chemical spills in the future.
EATON: Learn to not take the information that you're given at face value.
SHOGREN: American Water West Virginia says now that it knows about PPH, labs will analyze samples taken over recent weeks to see how much of it was and is in the water. Elizabeth Shogren, NPR News.
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MONTAGNE: This is NPR News.
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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
President Obama will deliver the State of the Union address next Tuesday. It's his biggest opportunity all year to address the American people. Yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner announced that Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers from Washington state would deliver the official GOP rebuttal. NPR's Mara Liasson has more.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: The goal of the Republican response is to provide a counterbalance to the president's speech. Although television audiences have declined over the years, Mr. Obama will still get a mighty helping of free media. Ron Bonjean, a former House Republican leadership aide who's been involved in planning the GOP responses, says his party wants a check on the president even if its audience is a mere fraction of his.
RON BONJEAN: The amount of people who watch the State of the Union completely dwarfs those who watch the Republican response. But it is important for our party to provide a response because it does make it in the news coverage.
LIASSON: The congressional Republican leadership had a lot of choices starting with a long list of 2016 presidential hopefuls. But once their biggest rising star, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, was sidelined by scandal, they decided to use the speech to address one of their party's biggest electoral deficits - women. Just hours after the Republican National Committee named five women as their 2014 rising stars, Speaker Boehner made no bones about why he chose Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
She's the highest-ranking Republican woman in Congress, he tweeted, but more importantly - a mom. the YouTube video introducing McMorris Rodgers showcases that new message. She has three kids. The eldest, Cole, was born with Downs syndrome.
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REPRESENTATIVE CATHY MCMORRIS RODGERS: I'm so grateful for Cole and his influence on my life. And I'm a better legislator. I'm a better person because of Cole's...
LIASSON: Lately, the job of State of the Union responder has been the kiss of death or at least a banana peel for political rising stars. Republican strategist Mike Murphy describes it as a rite of passage, a kind of hazing ritual for up and coming politicians.
MIKE MURPHY: It's our equivalent of being asked to eat 25 raw potatoes and chug nine six-packs of beer at the fraternity. It's a step along the way. But anybody doing it is never as bad or as good as it sounds going in. But there has kind of been this curse.
LIASSON: Cathy McMorris Rodgers doesn't have to worry about the curse. She's not running for higher office at the moment, and that may be lucky for her. Since President Obama's been in office, other Republican responders haven't fared so well. In 2009, the GOP response was delivered by Louisiana governor and presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal, who failed to impress.
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GOVERNOR BOBBY JINDAL: Like the president's father, my own parents came to this country from a distant land. When they arrived in Baton Rouge, my mother was already four and a half months pregnant. I was what folks in the insurance industry now call a preexisting condition.
LIASSON: Others did better- then Virginia governor Bob McDonnell gave the speech in 2010 from his state capitol surrounded by Republican legislators.
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GOVERNOR BOB MCDONNELL: I'm joined by fellow Virginians to share a Republican perspective on how to...
LIASSON: That speech was a hit, but some might say the curse caught up with McDonnell - just this week he was indicted on 14 counts of fraud. Then there was the response that sounded just fine but didn't look so good on TV.
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SENATOR MARCO RUBIO: Good evening. I'm Marco Rubio. I'm blessed to represent Florida in the United States Senate.
LIASSON: A promising beginning for the man who at the time was being called the Republican savior - but then Rubio got thirsty. Ron Bonjean.
BONJEAN: Senator Marco Rubio grabbed for a bottle of water when he was doing the speech. And anything that distracts you from that looks like a flop. So unfortunately, his entire speech was wiped out because of that bottle of water. You know, he was able to put behind him but it really didn't help him much.
LIASSON: So giving the GOP response can be a mixed blessing, but Republicans are hedging their bets. There are actually two Republicans responses: Utah Republican senator Mike Lee will be delivering the Tea Party response. Lee has no known presidential aspirations. Mara Liasson, NPR News, Washington.
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MONTAGNE: You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
A visit to the new National 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City will be one of the most costly museum tickets in town. Lacking government funding for ongoing operations, the museum's board of trustees yesterday voted to set the admission price at $24.
The 9/11 museum opens later this year in lower Manhattan and with almost 52 million tourists in New York City each year, it's bound to draw large crowds. Let's hear now about a different museum, a rather odd one where there is no room for mobs. NPR's Margot Adler recently made a visit and in an encore broadcast, we go along to New York's tiniest museum.
MARGOT ADLER, BYLINE: Imagine a museum that's only six feet square. It's simply called Museum and it's housed in an old elevator shaft in an alley not far from the city's courts. It has some odd exhibits on 18 small shelves. Only about four people at a time can fit into the space. It was created by three filmmakers: two brothers, Josh and Benny Safdie, and Alex Kalman. Josh Safdie says the three filmmakers would tell amazing tales to each other of what they had seen and found in the city, and the others would say, no way, and want proof.
JOSH SAFDIE: So we would be like, I saw these fake Sharpies and it was called Shoopay, and, you know, it was like no, you didn't. He was like, actually I brought one just for you. So we started to develop this kind of collection of stuff.
ADLER: And those Sharpies are in the museum, bootleg, apparently from China.
SAFDIE: You can buy them, you know, for, like, 40 for a dollar essentially. And they dry out really quickly and they are terrible, but each design is a slight riff on the word Sharpie.
ADLER: All the exhibits document the odd and delightful of modern life. Charnelle, Darryn, and Laura King, a husband, wife and sister from Sidney, Australia come by.
CHARNELLE KING: I love little pop up stuff. So I'm still trying to figure out what's going on, actually.
DARRYN KING: The display of vomit from all around the world is quite interesting. It's very enlightening.
ADLER: Yes, he did say a display of vomit from around the world. It's actually fake vomit, and many of the examples have a certain Jackson Pollock quality. There's a number you can call to find out about each object.
RECORDING: Welcome to Museum, please enter the object's reference number at any time.
ADLER: Most of the descriptions are serious, but Peter Allen, who collected the fake vomit, is clearly having a bit of fun at the art world's expense.
PETER ALLEN: This subtle palate of primarily beige tones intercedes with robust fragments of dimensional inner meaning.
ADLER: Another shelf has bullet proof backpacks, which came out after some of the school shootings. They are all in pastels and pinks with Disney-like characters.
SAFDIE: And they say things like blast off, or I believe in fairy tales, or nice day for flying.
ADLER: It's fairly creepy. There are three shelves devoted to the Late Al Goldstein, editor of Screw magazine. There's a pair of his gold Air Jordans, size 13. There is a shelf devoted to prison contraband, including a tiny, tiny pair of dice, molded from bread with the dots done in felt pen, easy to hide in a cell or even in your mouth. And then there's this shoe that the museum says was thrown at George Bush in Iraq in 2008 by an Iraqi journalist. Most reports say the shoe was destroyed. But Safdie won't give its provenance.
SAFDIE: We promised that we would never say who they were and where we got it from, and, you know, as much as we can believe it, you can believe it.
ADLER: It's one of their biggest attractions, he says, but it's just a shoe. Lily Ash walks in: She's an artist. She says the space is tiny and you wouldn't think it had much in it.
LILY ASH: But there is so much stuff and it's all really interesting to look at, and weird.
ADLER: The museum is only open on weekends, although you can look through a window on other days. Margot Adler, NPR News, New York.
MONTAGNE: You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Our theme music was written by BJ Leiderman and arranged by Jim Pugh. I'm Renee Montagne.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
All right. The music video has come a long way since the days when MTV was pretty much the only place to see your favorite artists. Today, of course, we go online for that sort of thing and one website in particular is often credited with helping to reinvent the music video, the French site, Blogotheque, is famous for what it calls takeaway shows. They're original, impromptu videos of musicians from across the U.S. and Europe as they play live in unlikely places.
Christopher Werth sat in on one of Blogotheque's video shoots and he sent us this profile.
CHRISTOPHER WERTH, BYLINE: We're on a busy, dimly lit street in Paris and the sun has just set over the city when a group of musicians spills out of a corner bar tuning their instruments. Cameraman Colin Solal Cardo follows close behind.
COLIN SOLAL CARDO: We were inside the bar and we got kicked out, so now we're in front of the bar in the streets and we're going to perform right in the streets. The night is falling in Paris and cars everywhere and it's total chaos, but I think it's going to be great. OK, guys. Let's be sure that we have no one in the frame that is not a member. Thank you.
WERTH: The band in this takeaway show is the American group, San Fermin, on tour with its debut album. And Solal Cardo says this is a typical Blogotheque shoot. The videos are filmed in one take, there's no overall plan, no lighting crew or fancy setups. The philosophy of the website is to put bands in unusual environments, often without their usual instruments and see what happens.
For example, San Fermin's frontman, Ellis Ludwig-Leone, has been handed a small toy piano in lieu of his full-size keyboard.
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ELLIS LUDWIG-LEONE: You know, what's exciting about it is, like, you write these songs, you practice as a band, then you just do the same thing over and over and over again, and for something like this, you're actually going to be called upon as a musician to make adjustments in time. It's refreshing in a way. I haven't had to think this sort of actively and creatively about our live setup since we started touring.
CHRISTOPHE ABRIC: The purpose is to get them out the comfort zone, to tell them, OK, you've done a record, you've got a way of playing your music live, but why don't we try and find a way to be the most sincere we can be.
WERTH: That's Christophe Abric, a one-time music journalist who started Blogotheque a decade ago and began filming bands in 2006. All of the videos are archived online and include big name groups such as REM and Wilco. Abric says one enduring draw of the takeaway shows is not just watching musicians play live, but watching them play live in Paris.
ABRIC: There is something amazing in the strength of Paris. The thing behind the takeaway shows is connect the music and the city and see what happens when you mix them. We want the city to be there in the sound. If you have kids shouting, if you have birds all around, it's part of the whole environment and you have to have that.
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WERTH: At the San Fermin shoot in Paris, someone passing by starts to sing, a car horn blares. The question is, how do you actually record music in the middle of all this noise?
ABRIC: What I'm going to do, I'm going to wire it here, so when you play the violin I can get the violin, and when you sing I can get you singing.
WERTH: To capture every note and voice, Blogotheque sound engineer, Francois Clos, fits small, wireless mics on to every band member, each recorded on a separate track and mixed afterwards. Clos says although video is a visual medium, sound quality is the most important element here. And since I'm a radio guy, I should say he's totally right about that.
FRANCOIS CLOS: The challenge is always to know how many mics you need, where you put the mike to preserve a song with sound quite real but which is post produced and not real at all, you know. But outside anything can happen, so you shouldn't record musicians if you don't think about how to record them. They're here to show that they can play music and if there's a crappy sound it's going to be like, omffff.
WERTH: Instead, each musician in the finished San Fermin video can be heard loud and clear, even as lead singer Rae Cassidy walks through traffic and sings and the camera twists and turns around the band.
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WERTH: Today, you can see San Fermin on a number of websites and there are scores more offering impromptu sessions with bands. And that's created a problem, says Blogotheque's founder, Christophe Abric. He says musicians now show up knowing exactly what to expect.
ABRIC: The landscape totally, completely changed since we began the takeaway shows. When we started, everything we were doing was experimental and new. And now we're in a completely different world where anybody can do a beautiful video and suddenly, when we're filming a band, we were the sixth person of the day filming that band and so you're, like, oh my God, we're not something new.
And with Blogotheque now, we're one of the requirements in a promo tour of a band. That's not what we wanted to be. We made the takeaway shows to break the routine and one day we became the routine. So all we do, we break the routine we created.
WERTH: Last year Abric's team made a video of the French rock band Phoenix outside of the Palace of Versailles, filmed with a flying drone. And Blogotheque is venturing outside Paris, filming performers everywhere from the North African Desert to the muddy banks of the Ohio River, and back here to San Fermin playing a Chinese Restaurant in Paris.
Look around, you just might see a band walking down your street and a camera following close behind. For NPR News, I'm Christopher Werth.
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LYDEN: You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
JACKI LYDEN: Now, to Broadway to talk with Bebe Neuwirth. Everyone may know her name, but not for this role.
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LYDEN: She played Lilith Sternin, Frasier Crane's tightly wound paramour.
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BEBE NEUWIRTH: (As Lilith) In certain company, when someone says thank you very much, I appreciate that, it means I don't thank you, I don't appreciate that, and I want you to shut your mouth.
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WOODY HARRELSON: (As Woody) Oh, thank you very much, Dr. Sternin.
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LYDEN: Bebe Neuwirth, who played Lilith, left the ice queen bit behind to return to Broadway, her first love. In 1996, she starred as the murderous Velma Kelly in the Broadway revival of "Chicago," for which she won a Tony Award.
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NEUWIRTH: (Singing) (As Velma) Come on, babe, why don't we paint the town, and all that jazz. I want to bruise my knees and roll my stockings down, and all that jazz...
LYDEN: She went on to play another lead character: the conniving, sexy Roxie Hart. Bebe Neuwirth now returns to the stage to play her third role in "Chicago"; this time as Mama Morton, the very unsexy matron at the Cook County Jail. She's a diminutive mama, it must be said.
NEUWIRTH: Walter Bobbie, our director, said the one thing to remember about Mama is that there's a reason she's called Mama. And what that translates to, in terms of playing her, is that as much as she is out for a buck and looking for the next dollar to be made, she is maternal. She really, actually cares for these people. The fact is that she might charge one person $50 to make a phone call. But if she sees someone's down on their luck, she'll charge them $5 to make a phone call. So she gives the girls a sliding scale.
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LYDEN: Yeah, yeah.
NEUWIRTH: So she's got a heart.
LYDEN: Bebe Neuwirth, you won a Tony in 1997 playing Velma, playing one of the lead characters. Did you have any trepidations about coming back as Mama Morton?
NEUWIRTH: Well, I was having a meeting with Barry Weissler, our producer, and we were just chatting about different projects and things; and he said, have you ever thought about playing Mama? And I burst into laughter. I said, well, you know, that's the joke. Now - the show's been running so long, I'm old now. I'm in my 50s, I can...
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LYDEN: You are strikingly beautiful.
NEUWIRTH: The role is really constructed for a Sophie Tucker.
LYDEN: Well, you took the words out of my mouth. I was thinking about that - the old vaudeville character. And she was a plump lady.
NEUWIRTH: Yes, she was - with a giant voice.
LYDEN: With a giant voice. And that was what I thought about when I heard it. I thought, Bebe Neuwirth is a dainty...
NEUWIRTH: She's a little thing.
LYDEN: ...beautiful - yeah.
NEUWIRTH: (Laughter) Yeah, well, I wondered about it myself. But then I thought it's - so many different women have played it; of all different shapes and sizes and ages. I thought, well, why not give it a shot? And really, most of all, I just thought it would be fun. So I thought, let me take a crack at it.
LYDEN: May I ask you, such a stunning dancer, something about the demands of this choreography. You really pioneered Velma in the revival. This Fosse choreography, it seems like it's so demanding. Did you miss not doing it? Did you feel like, oh my goodness, I have to get up there and be Velma or...
NEUWIRTH: No. I mean, you know, I had my time doing it. I'm fine not doing that. As far as the physical demands of the role of Velma, and having played both Velma and Roxie, I can say that Velma is the more demanding role physically, absolutely. The material is so fine. It's so well-choreographed. It's so well-written. And then the fact that I am the kind of dancer for whom the Fosse style and vernacular comes - it feels very natural.
The first time I saw Fosse choreography, I was 13 years old. And I went to see "Pippin." And I had no idea that Bob Fosse was God. All I thought was...
LYDEN: He did, I believe. I believe he did.
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NEUWIRTH: No, no. But when I saw the choreography, I felt like I recognized myself in some way. And I was just this kid - you know, trying to - you know, taking ballet class in a non-professional, regional ballet company. And I just thought, that's me. I know; I feel that. It resonated.
LYDEN: Jazz dance. Jazz dance.
NEUWIRTH: Um - it's a different thing. It was just Bob's world. It was his language. It was his sensibility. I could not have said this to you as a 13-year-old. All I could say was. that's me.
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NEUWIRTH: But thinking about it now, it's his world of light and dark, of irony, of sensuality, of - it's sort of beyond words, actually. It's just a feeling that you feel as a dancer. And as a dancer watching it, I knew that it resonated that deeply for me.
LYDEN: I was struck by a comment Stephen Sondheim said recently on an HBO special. He said: It was just my fate to be acclaimed as musical theater was waning. Do you think it has?
NEUWIRTH: I think that it's on a pendulum. It comes, and it goes. And trends come, and trends go. For a while, you had to send chandeliers crashing and helicopters in. And I don't know how the pendulum is swinging now. For a while, it was all revivals. Then it was all, you know, think-y things. And then, you know - so I don't really know. And I don't know that anyone knows really specifically what's going on, except that these waves come and then they go out; and then a new one comes in.
LYDEN: I have to ask this on behalf of my fellow Americans.
NEUWIRTH: I am really frightened now. (Laughter)
LYDEN: All right. All right. Do you get stopped on the street and - say, oh, Dr. Lilith, Dr. Lilith, I am so happy to see you; from, of course, your role in "Cheers" and then "Frasier."
NEUWIRTH: I do get stopped, and it's really interesting. Some people are very quiet about it. They say (Whispering) I just want you to know, I really loved you on "Frasier." And she goes, Lilith, thank you so much. And then sometimes people just stare at me and talk about me. It's just happened on the subway the other day. I was right in front of a couple; and they were looking at me, talking about me. I thought, I don't know how to be with that. But I am very, very grateful for the recognition, and the time spent playing that part.
LYDEN: So what's next for you, Bebe Neuwirth? This is an eight-week run, all - from start to finish, and then what?
NEUWIRTH: Right. I honestly don't know. I've got two CDs out. I hope people continue to listen to those. I'm about to shoot my fourth episode of "Blue Bloods," which is another smart, really nice show on CBS. I really don't know. I'm open to seeing what the universe has in store.
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LYDEN: Bebe Neuwirth joined me from our New York bureau. You can see Bebe on Broadway, playing Mama Morton in the musical "Chicago." It is fantastic. Thank you.
NEUWIRTH: Thank you so much.
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LYDEN: You can find more on WEEKEND EDITION on Facebook and on Twitter: @NPRWeekend. I'm there too: @NPRJackiLyden. B.J. Leiderman composed our theme music. And this is WEEKEND EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden. Scott Simon returns next week.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
For most of her readers, the American author Diane Johnson is wholly identified with France and especially, Paris. She's the author of many novels, including "L'Affaire," "Le Marriage," "Le Divorce," the last of which was made into a film; not to mention her literary criticism and biographies. So it comes as something of a surprise that Johnson's new book is about her roots in the American Midwest.
But not only is this the Midwest of her own youth in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, but of her centuries-old family tree, based on the diaries of pioneer forebears who suffered excruciating hardships, as many American pioneers did. The book is called "Flyover Lives: A Memoir," and Diane Johnson joins me now. Welcome to the program. It's so nice to have you here in person.
DIANE JOHNSON: Thank you, Jacki. It's fun to be here.
LYDEN: So Diane Johnson, as a biographer, you've been curious about other people's lives - you know, just the most minute details - so I was a little surprised that it took a minor snub - minor - from a French friend of yours, sort of a joke, to dig into your own history. Can you tell us what happened in Provence?
JOHNSON: Yeas. Our friend, Torrez(ph), which was her real name - not the name I used in the book - was kind of condescending about America. So, she said you Americans know nothing about your history and you're so indifferent to it. No wonder you keep invading the wrong countries. And I was kind of stunned by that. I agree that there have been some mistakes about what countries to invade. But it prompted me to remember that I have some manuscripts and other papers bequeathed me by my mother in a drawer somewhere that I never bothered to look at. And these turned out to be diaries of great-great grandmothers and testimonials from their ancestors going back to the very end of the 18th century.
LYDEN: So, you start looking into this material. And I have to say, Diane Johnson, you are from Moline, Illinois. You have an incredible wealth of material. I mean, you just mentioned, you know, some things lying in a drawer. But your family had been in that part of the country since 1826. Tell us about Catharine Martin. I was fascinated by her. You pointed out that she was living around the time of Jane Austen, had a much harder time of it and in 1876 she writes about the previous century.
JOHNSON: Yes. Thank heavens it was a little bit of a literary impulse. Catharine Anne Martin sat down an wrote her memoirs in 1876. But she was born in 1800. And she's about roughly contemporary a little bit younger than Jane Austen. And in 1826, when she went to Illinois, that's about the same time that the girls in "Pride and Prejudice" were much more comfortably outfitted and living a very different life than pioneer grandmothers on the American frontier, which was what Illinois was at that time.
LYDEN: The other thing is that Catharine Anne Martin isn't the only forebear. You can go back much further than that. You have letters from her mother, this woman Anne, who's born in 1779 in Claremont, New Hampshire. I guess that most of us couldn't imagine having documents going back that far. And you had no idea?
JOHNSON: I really didn't. I didn't know that it would go back that far and I didn't know about the first forebear that all of these people claimed as their ancestor - and it's pretty well documented. Rene Cosset, a Frenchman, must have been a French soldier, who enters history in 1711, and he was captured by the British because it was the time of the Queen Anne's War. And he, Rene, who is by now in America called Ranna, because they can't pronounce Rene, Ranna Cossitt is mustered to be, traded to the French, and Ranna enters history because he didn't want to be repatriated. He said no thanks, I'd rather be a prisoner my whole life and remain in America. No one quite knows why, you know.
(LAUGHTER)
LYDEN: Your parents never told you much or anything about these people?
JOHNSON: What they did tell me - and I tried to touch on this in the book - was about the tradition in the family of being descended from, you know, the King of France...
LYDEN: Ah, so you did have royalty.
JOHNSON: ...and everything else that. Oh, yes. And, of course, it does turn out that many Americans have some traditions, some family story about being descended from Mary Queen of Scots or the duke of something. So, where these tales creep in or how Americans early settlers tried to embroider of believed in these distinguished forebears or how they embellished their traditions is a pretty interesting thing in itself.
LYDEN: These noble lineages.
JOHNSON: Noble lineages, or splendid talents somewhere in the background.
LYDEN: Diane Johnson. Her memoir is called "Flyover Life." It's been a great pleasure speaking with you.
JOHNSON: Thank you very much, Jacki. It was a great pleasure to be here.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden. One of the world's most beloved books is "The Little Prince" by Antoine Saint-Exupery. Published in 1943, more than a million copies are sold every year in some 250 languages. If I were to ask you where do you think the French children's book was written, you might say Paris or Marseilles. You'd be wrong.
How about Long Island, as in Long Island, New York? NPR's Margot Adler reports.
MARGOT ADLER, BYLINE: When the late Nikos Kefalidis bought the house on Beven Road in Northport, Long Island in the late 1970s, he knew that 30 years before Saint-Exupery had written and illustrated part of "Le Petit Prince" in that house. It was something known in the community but not in many other places. His wife, Laurie Kefalidis, has stood in the room where Saint-Exupery wrote and is happy about the book's connection to her house.
She has copies of "The Little Prince" in some 30 languages. We sat in a coffee shop in Manhattan.
LAURIE KEFALIDIS: I think it's about life and death and what's important in life and I think he talks about falsehood or untruths or hypocrisy or duplicity in a very charming way actually.
ADLER: Saint-Exupery also wrote the book in Manhattan. The Morgan Library and Museum bought the original manuscript of "The Little Prince" in 1968 and many other drawings, including precursors to what ended up in the book. They had an exhibition on the 50th anniversary of publication 20 years ago, but their new exhibition here until May looks at the author's creative process.
The curator of the show, "The Little Prince: A New York Story," is Christine Nelson. Saint-Exupery, she says, was a meticulous craftsman, but his working habits were somewhat chaotic.
CHRISTINE NELSON: Wherever he went, he had stacks of onionskin paper with him and always a cup of coffee or tea by his side, always a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The manuscript we have here even has stains on many of the corners of the pages. One of the drawings even has a cigarette burn, which we've left for people to see.
ADLER: Saint-Exupery came to New York in 1940 after the Germans occupied France. Writer and aviator, he left just after the publication of the book and returned to fly reconnaissance missions for the allies. Before he left, he took his drawings and writings, many of which were deleted from the final book, and gave them in a brown paper bag to a friend, Silvia Hamilton.
Nelson shows me an extraordinary letter Saint-Exupery wrote and illustrated for a friend in 1940 when he was still in France. A man looking very much like the author is standing on a cloud.
NELSON: Of course in the book it becomes a planet and then all of this is floating above an image of Earth. And what do we see on Earth but a little sheep that looks very much like the sheep that appears in the opening lines of "The Little Prince."
ADLER: A flower.
NELSON: And of course a flower and the Little Prince has a beloved flower on his planet.
ADLER: The pictures evolve from an adult that looks like the author with thinning hair and a bowtie to the little prince. There are pages of writing all in French - he never mastered English - of sections that were deleted from the book, including several adventures on Earth and one page on the wall mentions places in New York.
NELSON: I'm going to point out right here a reference to Long Island. Do you see it there? Here's one to Manhattan. It's very tiny, but you see it.
ADLER: These were all deleted from the final text. There's a section where the narrator talks about humans inflated sense of self. He says, she notes...
NELSON: We think we dominate the Earth and yet we really don't take up so much space at all. He says, if we got everyone on earth together for a big meeting, we could fit everyone onto a small Pacific island. But in the manuscript, instead of a Pacific island, it's Long Island.
ADLER: When you ask people their favorite part of "The Little Prince" so many talk about the boa constrictor eating the elephant, how adults only see it as a hat, or the final drawing of a sheep, just three holes in a box, and the secret told to the little prince by the fox.
NELSON: What is essential is invisible to the eye. It reminds us of that beginning of the story. You know, what's essential is what you can't see; what's inside the snake, what's inside your heart.
ADLER: In the end, we will never know if the little prince makes it back to his planet or dies. One year after the book came out, Saint-Exupery also disappeared into thin air during a reconnaissance mission on July 31st, 1944. Years later, parts of the plane were found and a fisherman near Marseilles found a silver bracelet in his net, a bracelet that's in the exhibit. It has his name, the address of his publisher, and the words, "NYC, USA." Margot Adler, NPR News, New York.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
Pedro Reyes creates art using an unusual medium - guns. Reyes is from Mexico, a country plagued by gun violence in recent years. He's melted down firearms to create shovels used to plant trees. And now, using weapons confiscated from Mexican drug gangs, he's creating musical instruments. He calls it "Requiems for Lives Lost." NPR's Greg Allen recently caught up with Reyes in Tampa where his instruments are helping spark a discussion about gun violence in the U.S.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Pedro Reyes says being Mexican is like living in an apartment building under a neighbor who has a swimming pool - and it's leaking.
PEDRO REYES: Just what is leaking is hundreds of thousands of guns.
ALLEN: Reyes wants people to think about that - the availability of guns in this country that's also having an impact in Mexico. At workshops and in a performance this week at the University of South Florida, Reyes used theater to encourage a discussion about guns.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Welcome everyone to tonight's legislative theater: "Amendment to the Amendment."
ALLEN: Specifically, the Second Amendment, which guarantees Americans the right to bear arms. Reyes wants actors and the audience to consider if there are changes possible that might improve the amendment. Reyes believes art should address social issues, like gun violence, even when they're difficult and controversial.
REYES: We have to be allowed to ask questions. If you are not allowed to ask questions, you are not free.
ALLEN: Reyes first began working on the issue of gun violence in 2007 in the Mexican city of Culiacan. As part of a campaign to curb shootings, the city collected 1,527 guns.
REYES: Those 1,527 guns were melted and made into the same number of shovels. So, for every gun now, there's a shovel. And with every shovel, we planted a tree.
ALLEN: His new project transforms guns into something more musical.
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ALLEN: This is, what, a marimba I guess?
REYES: Yeah, sort of a marimba. You have these different notes, so you can bang and say, well, this is an A, this is a B, this is a C, depending on the length of the barrel.
ALLEN: As in gun barrel. A few years ago, a government agency in Mexico gave Reyes 6,700 guns that had been confiscated from criminal gangs and rendered inoperable. Since then, he's been turning them into electric guitars, violins, flutes and percussion instruments.
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ALLEN: Musicians and technicians help him make the guns playable. Reyes is mostly interested in the concept and how they look.
REYES: It's not that I draw or anything. It's more like a kind of assemblage, like a collage, no? That you put parts and you see how they make up a shape. And that can be, you know, like the body of the instrument.
ALLEN: Reyes' instruments are part of an exhibition called "Disarm" up through March at the University of South Florida's Contemporary Art Museum.
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ALLEN: Caleb Murray, a graduate student in the school's jazz composition program, had a few of Reyes' instruments in front of him. One looked like a small tenor saxophone.
CALEB MURRAY: Yeah, that's a tenor saxophone reed and I think that's a tenor saxophone mouthpiece. It fits really well on there. It sounds a little bit more like a clarinet, if anything. But, yeah, it's a saxophone made out of a gun, right, a gun barrel.
ALLEN: Murray played it in a concert this week.
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ALLEN: Dominic Walker and Teague Bechtel are both guitarists in the University's graduate jazz program. They were playing what looked like steel guitars fashioned from nine-millimeter semiautomatic handguns.
DOMINIC WALKER: I mean that was pretty surprising, you know, the first time that we went and saw them. It was like, oh, OK, this is what's going on here. But, you know, it's just a new experience or something.
TEAGUE BECHTEL: We just have to make sure the safety's on.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ALLEN: Zack Pedigo was playing a bass. The neck was made from a double-barreled shotgun. Curved magazines from AK-47s were used to form the body of the bass guitar.
ZACH PEDIGO: To me, at least, the concept is about taking weapons that are destructive in nature and chaotic and trying to make them for something else. So, instead of objects of destruction, they become objects of creation.
ALLEN: That's exactly Pedro Reyes' point. Art, he says, is about transformation.
REYES: It's the same metal, but it is no longer a gun. It's now a flute or a guitar.
ALLEN: And is that better than it being a gun? I mean, do you feel, like, guns are bad?
REYES: Yes, I do believe that guns are bad. Because, you know, it's an industry that to thrive, it needs conflict.
ALLEN: It's a political statement - one many will disagree with - but which Reyes says it at the heart of his work.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ALLEN: The instruments played in concert this week in Tampa are just the first generation of his music project. He's now beginning to turn guns into more sophisticated electronic instruments that can be programmed through a computer. Reyes says he expects to be working on this for some time. He still has thousands of guns to turn into art. Greg Allen, NPR news, Miami.
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LYDEN: And you're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. Scott Simon is away. I'm Jacki Lyden. Anti-government protests have broken out in Egypt on the third anniversary of the revolution that ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak. A series of deadly bomb blasts have rocked Cairo. The health ministry says that nine people have been killed in clashes around the country.
Back in 2011, crowds poured into the streets to defy Mubarak's rule, but today is a dark and bitter time for many young, secular revolutionaries. Some are behind bars and others have gone silent, afraid to speak out as the military and the ousted Muslim Brotherhood are locked in a battle for Egypt's future.
NPR's Leila Fadel sent this report.
NOOR NOUR: That moment I entered Tahrir remains the most significant moment of my entire life because I physically felt a wall being broken down; a wall of fear that they're working very hard at rebuilding, but at least I got a chance to see that break. So no regrets.
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: That's Noor Nour. He's a young revolutionary, the son of a prominent Egyptian politician, Ayman Nour, and a voice that may sound familiar to you. He was one of dozens of young activists who rose to fame during the 2011 uprising here. His life since that day has been a series of protests. He protested against Mubarak, then against human rights abuses under military rule.
He took to the streets again last year to protest against what he saw as the increasingly autocratic style of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. Now Morsi too has been ousted. The military is again in control and it is stifling dissenting voices. His father, a one-time presidential candidate in 2005, has left the country.
And his young curly-haired son has decided to temporarily step away from protests. He's become an environmentalist.
NOUR: Some of my friends joked about the fact that I went from one almost impossible cause, which is the protection of human rights, to the protection of the environment.
FADEL: Noor says he is tired and beaten down after three years of ups and downs, protests, deaths and political and economic turmoil. The last three years, he says, feels like 30.
NOUR: We've fallen victim to a power struggle not necessarily between political ideologies, but it's a power struggle between generations. And the 25th of January, 2011 was an attempt by the younger generation to undo the mistakes of their parents and their grandparents.
FADEL: And attempt that he says failed. The youth ultimately didn't provide an alternative and the older generation refused to be left behind. He is reminded of that every day on his bike ride to work, which takes him past Tahrir Square, where Egypt's revolution began.
NOUR: Were you trying to get in and get out as quickly as possible in order to avoid that bitter taste in your mouth. That's what Tahrir has become.
FADEL: He says at the time of Mubarak's ouster, he thought the people had the power. What's become obvious, he says, is that he and his cohorts were never in control. His words are echoed by other young revolutionaries, lauded by the world for their bravery three years ago. Today, some are hunted and many have gone silent. Embarrassing taped phone conversations have been leaked to smear some prominent activists on local television.
The head of the April 6th movement, one of the main youth groups that drove the uprising in 2011, is in prison along with others, as many Egyptians call them spies and traitors. After four bombs rocked Cairo yesterday, the arrests are only growing. Police spent two hours searching the home of video artist and activist Aalam Wassef before arresting him and later releasing him. More than 200 other people were detained. In an interview with NPR, before his detention he said he remained hopeful.
AALAM WASSEF: Because you can kill leaders, you can kill things, but again, we are led by ideas and ideas obviously cannot be killed, cannot be jailed.
FADEL: But there was broad popular support for the crackdown on descent after the turmoil and economic hardship of the past three years. Many Egyptians say they care more about stability and security than political freedom and human rights, especially in light of a recent spate of bombings. So human rights abuses go unchecked under the guise of a war in terror.
WASSEF: I feel used. I feel, not me personally, but I feel that everybody was used.
FADEL: Pierre Sioufi looks out from his balcony high above Tahrir Square where he's watched the past three years unfold. His apartment became a headquarters for young revolutionaries protesting in the streets. They worked in his backrooms, they took pictures and video from his balcony. Now, he feels only apathy. We were pawns in a game that the army and the state played, he says. Nothing's really changed and for now nothing will. Leila Ladel, NPR News, Cairo.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden.
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LYDEN: Ever since there have been puddles of water, human beings have gazed at their reflections. You remember the story of Narcissus and the pond. He saw his own reflection and fell in love. Our need to primp and preen, whether we live in the Bronze Age or the Space Age, can be seen in a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It's called "Vanities: The Art of the Dressing Table."
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LYDEN: Curator Jane Adlin offers a show that reminds us that while our vanity may ultimately be in vain, the instinct goes back a long way.
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LYDEN: The exhibit begins with an inlaid cedar cosmetic box from Egypt's Middle Kingdom. In fact, it was preserved in a Pharaoh's tomb. Found in 1910 by Howard Carter, who would later discover Tutankhamen's tomb, the box is 3,000 years old. Depicted on the drawer is a servant carrying a vessel.
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JANE ADLIN: He was a cupbearer, which was a high title. And it is a presentation piece.
LYDEN: So, you decided to start with something portable. People, we know they wanted to make up, we know they wanted to line their eyes with coal and their lips with rouge and their clavicles with exotic oils but was portable.
ADLIN: Absolutely. And when you think about it, the fact that it was buried in their tombs with them shows how important it was as a means of showing status and their ability to adorn themselves.
LYDEN: Inside the box is a hand mirror, which is made not from glass but of pumiced metal. It has a wooden handle decorated with gold. The Egyptians weren't alone. Through the ages, women have had their cosmetics and must-haves. Curator Jane Adlin said the French called their ornate cosmetic boxes necessaires.
ADLIN: You would find tiny little perfume flasks, combs, nail files, tiny scissors. These are clearly meant for the luxury market and were pieces that could have been owned by Madame de Pompadour or royalty, and were carried by their maids and brought out when the madam would ask for a comb or whatever.
LYDEN: Finally, someone placed the box on a table and drew up a chair.
ADLIN: When portables and tables come together and become the dressing table - and that's sort of late 1700s. And by the mid-1800s, the dressing table has become this sort of extraordinary furniture piece of the beginning of the era of the dressing table.
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LYDEN: Madam de Pompadour was the mistress of Louis XV and a style-setter. A painting shows her at her vanity table with her mirror, her makeup brush and compact, wearing a shockingly low-cut gown. Her preening went on for hours, so she'd receive visitors as she put on her makeup.
ADLIN: She had incredibly good taste, and hired only the most important, the most well-known furniture designers, painters. She was very cultured, and she created amazing furniture. And this table was made for her Chateau Bellevue. And it's impeccably made. The marquetry is fantastic. It's all about her life and who she is and her lifestyle. And so you should notice that on the top of the bronze-gilt mounts of the legs, there are little castle tops representing where she lives, her chateau. And then the top shows all of her interests - her interests in gardening and nature, her interest in music. And this was, obviously, commissioned by her and was to make to show her interests and her likes.
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LYDEN: There are exquisite combs in the exhibit. Some of them are decorated with precious gems, others made out of rubber, and some made out of ebony and ivory. But they were not all used for beauty alone.
ADLIN: The interesting thing about the double-sided combs: the wide tooth is to comb hair, and the narrow end is to comb out the lice.
LYDEN: And what about men? After all, they groom too, especially their beards. So, they need tables of their own. Well, these vanities aren't really tables. Men stood to shave at narrow cabinets with stacks of drawers for their grooming supplies. One glossy modern piece caught my eye.
ADLIN: It's red and it's plastic by Raymond Loewy. The design date is 1969. It was manufactured and he made variations on the theme. But this is the men's shaving stand. And as you see, there's no place to sit. So, he combined sort of the historical idea of men's dressing tables with new contemporary materials, the molded plastic. He has no handles, but the grips on the drawers come out of the molded plastic. And the mirror, again, pops up. When you pull it down, it looks like just one closed cabinet. But in fact it's a men's shaving stand.
LYDEN: What is it, do you think, in the human psyche that we - so many of us - I mean, look at the human history that's shown here in this exhibit - need to look at ourselves, at least for a time, to begin the day?
ADLIN: It is inexplicable, it's innate. It's something in our gene pool...
(LAUGHTER)
ADLIN: ...in our reflecting gene pool. Oh, my God.
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LYDEN: "Vanities: Art of the Dressing Table" is at the Met Museum in New York until April the 13th.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden. Republican Party leaders gathered in Washington this week for their annual winter meeting. They approved new rules for the 2016 presidential primaries designed to create a more orderly path to the GOP nomination and, the party hopes, to the White House. But this week's meeting also provided an opportunity to see how far Republicans have come in an effort they began a year ago to reach out to new voters, especially young people and minorities and women. NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea reports.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: For yesterday's luncheon speech at the Republican National Committee meeting, the party turned to one of its newest, high-profile stars. First term U.S. Senator Tim Scott - a conservative African-American businessman - who embodies what officials say is a party that can expand its base. Scott was very much on-message.
SENATOR TIM SCOTT: We are going to have to embrace people the way they deserved to be embraced. And I will tell you as we embrace people in a new and fantastic way, we will encourage them to find the potential within themselves to maximize their potential. And when we win people, elections will take care of themselves.
GONYEA: But over the course of the three-day RNC meetings there were some mixed messages on reaching out to new voters. Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee delivered a big speech. He spoke about ending divisiveness in the party. Some call it a civil war between the Tea Party and establishment Republicans. But Huckabee also stirred controversy with this line about winning the votes of women.
MIKE HUCKABEE: And if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing them with their prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. Let us take that discussion all across America.
GONYEA: It didn't exactly fit with the Republican Party's rebranding effort which began a year ago following the party's poor showing in the 2012 elections. RNC chairman Reince Priebus reacted cautiously to Huckabee.
REINCE PRIEBUS: I don't know what he was talking about. I can tell you that he was trying to make the comment that government can't be involved in every part of everyone's life.
GONYEA: Mostly, however, the GOP rebranding that was the talk of RNC meetings last year was in the background this year. Louisiana's Republican Party chairman, Roger Villere, said progress is being made, though he denied that Republicans have a problem with women voters or with minorities.
ROGER VILLERE: I think that the perception and what some of the Democrats want us to look like is, you know, that we have a problem with - we don't have a problem with minorities. Maybe we have a priority articulating our position. I think we have to show minorities how, you know, we feel like that they can do better being part of the Republican Party. We open with welcome arms.
GONYEA: Looking ahead to 2016, the party moved to ensure that the presidential primary season will be shorter, likely beginning that February and wrapping up as early as May. Chairman Priebus said the last primary cycle, which included a long season of many, many GOP debates, was damaging to the nominee and the party.
PRIEBUS: We don't want a six month slice-and-dice festival in our party. It's not good for picking a president and it's not good for our party.
GONYEA: There was also lots of chatter at this Republican gathering about one person they see as the likely Democratic nominee - Hillary Clinton. Though she was sometimes referred to as, quote, "she who must not be named." The line got laughs. But the party leadership wants the GOP as a whole to not get distracted by internal battles and to focus on what it takes to win. Don Gonyea, NPR News, Washington.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
Last year, there were more than two dozen shootings on or near college campuses in the United States. This past Tuesday, that number went up with the fatal shooting of a student at Purdue University. Then yesterday, another shooting - fatal - at South Carolina State University. It will, of course, tick up again.
On the other side of the world, in Afghanistan, two university colleagues went out for a Friday night meal in Kabul. Before they could finish their dinner, they were killed in a suicide bombing followed by a hail of bullets. We're outraged at that attack, and at the senseless loss of life. We're safer here in America, we tell ourselves, from targeted violence. And we know that isn't true because increasingly, our halls of higher learning, and the football fields and parking lots and plazas, are targets.
Whether at Santa Monica College, where five people were gunned down, or the University of Arkansas or Maryland - all over the country, we find ourselves vulnerable to gun violence. But the issue of campus security is a contested topic. Colorado's legislature is trying to reinstate a ban to make colleges gun-free. Yet some states, such as Georgia and Pennsylvania, have been considering whether to make it easier to bring guns to college. Legislatures in Texas and North Carolina have passed laws that allow students who are licensed gun owners to keep handguns in their cars.
In Florida, a group calling itself Florida Carry is contesting state restrictions against keeping guns on campus. Florida Carry has been advancing its cause in the courts. It successfully argued that Florida students have the right to stash guns in their cars. This year, the group is pushing for students to be able to keep guns in their dormitories.
Somehow, that's not the college experience I recall. Pizza, beer - and bullets? Quite the combination; everyone armed and pulling all-nighters. In an opinion piece for "The Chronicle of Higher Education," the former provost of Idaho State University, Gary Olson, said there is no recorded incident in which a victim or spectator of a violent crime on a campus has prevented that crime by brandishing a weapon. And most surveys show that students and faculties think having guns on campus is a terrible idea.
Perhaps it's not about knowing who the bad guys are but knowing ourselves which offers our best protection; which is, after all, the fundamental mission of higher learning. And those kinds of insights can't really be learned at gunpoint.
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LYDEN: You're listening to NPR News.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden. Scott Simon is away. After a day of delay and rancor with warring sides calling the others traitors and terrorists, the Syrian peace talks kicked off this morning for the first ever direct negotiations. The Syrian government delegation sat across the negotiating table with the Syrian opposition to find a political solution to a war in which more than 100,000 have died. After all the intense drama of the past few days, the meeting opened with little fanfare. NPR's Deborah Amos is in Geneva and she joins us to talk about the day's events. Hello there, Deb.
DEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: Good morning.
LYDEN: Many of us didn't think it would happen but the two delegations finally sat down face to face. Tell us about the dynamics in the negotiating room today and what you're expecting.
AMOS: What we heard from media sources that the meeting kicked off 15 minutes late. Every detail was negotiated. The delegates enter from different doors. There are no flags in the room but they can wear their flag pins. It's been decided which side of the table they'll sit on, how far apart. And as we heard from the U.N. negotiator, Lakhdar Brahimi, it's the most inaccessible room within the United Nations compound here in Geneva. The delegations - they won't talk directly to each other. Brahimi will be in the middle and they'll address him. The only thing common to all of them is language. Everybody at the table speaks Arabic. But aside from that, they are very far apart. They're there because both sides were under intense pressure from the U.S. and Russia not to walk out.
LYDEN: Well, as you said, at least they are in the same room. What are they talking about today? What's the goal?
AMOS: We heard from Brahimi that most of the day will be spent on process - how to have these talks. Western diplomatic sources tell us that the first thing on the agenda is an opening for humanitarian aid delivery in a single city, and that's Homs. That's in central Syria. For the opposition, this was the heart of the peaceful revolution but now it's a place besieged by government troops - and that's been for months. It's a place where starvation is a real issue. So, the idea is to have a confidence-building measure. There's already a plan on the table for aid deliveries to Homs. The International Committee of the Red Cross and Syrian aid groups have a plan. So, if this goes well today, you could see something by next week. And it's called a quick win for both sides.
LYDEN: Deb, is there any kind of reassessment about what might be possible? The meeting's unprecedented, the atmosphere's been a real roller coaster, but what else?
AMOS: You know, there's no expectation this is going to be easy. The Syrian war isn't confined to one country. It's a regional war. Two million Syrians are outside the country. More than half the country is displaced. Powerful extremist Islamists are in the north. Shiite militias from Iran, Lebanon and Iraq are fighting on the side of the regime. Some of the most important players are not even at the table. There's going to be lots of bumps. But I think you have to say that the fact that they are sitting down is a beginning, at least to start for a political process, something we have not seen in three years.
LYDEN: Anything that you're looking for, Deb, that you're going to flag?
AMOS: Well, I think the idea is to keep everybody at the table this week. The most contentious issue, of course, is going to be negotiating a transitional government. And it's possible that that topic will either not be called that this week to keep everybody sitting down, but they're going to have to get to it at some point, and that's what I'll be watching for. When those discussions start, will everybody stay at the table?
LYDEN: NPR's Deb Amos speaking to us from Geneva. Thank you so much.
AMOS: Thank you.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
While both sides try to reach an agreement at the Geneva II talks, many aid agencies and humanitarian organizations are watching from the sidelines, hoping that they will be allowed to move freely around Syria. At the moment, they cannot travel to certain areas and are prohibited from bringing supplies like vaccinations to those who need them. Khaled Erksoussi is the head of operations for the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. And he joins us from Damascus. Mr. Erksoussi, thank you very much for being with us.
KHALED ERKSOUSSI: Thank you.
LYDEN: So, what do you need from these talks to make it possible for the Syrian Arab Red Crescent to do its work inside Syria?
ERKSOUSSI: Well, we believe that as the biggest humanitarian agency here in Syria, to grant us access to all the people in need all around Syria and that we are allowed to bring all kind of material to those people, including the food, the non-food, the medical because they are in need of everything.
LYDEN: What about the international community. Has it done enough to help you?
ERKSOUSSI: To tell you the truth, a tap on the shoulder doesn't feed the people while hungry. We want to push those people meeting in Geneva now to put their money where their mouth is. Yes, very much - we like this nice talk but food parcels or the vaccine or the medicines, we are still in need.
LYDEN: I understand - speaking of vaccines and medicines - that these can be very hard to get to people. Why is this so difficult?
ERKSOUSSI: Dealing with the government side and sometimes dealing with other sides - and I mean sides because there are a lot of groups on the ground. It's sometimes very frustrating and challenging. You have to convince this official or that official that approval we got from the government, for instance, to get vaccines means that I need to make the vaccine happen. If this small official stopped me from taking syringes with me, that doesn't count that I made the vaccines. It's not that I carry the bottle of vaccines through his checkpoint. I need to administrate it to the people in need. And for the other side sometimes, it's hard to negotiate when you have, for instance, support coming from International Red Cross and Red Crescent societies. They see the cross sometimes on the boxes and say, no, we cannot let you back past because it have the cross. And you have to explain all the Geneva conventions stated to them that the Red Cross is not a cross. It came from the opposite of the Swiss flag. But they don't understand.
Now, they are meeting all together with all those foreign ministries. Yes, we care to find that they find a particular solution but we care also at least - if they don't agree about anything in this Geneva II - at least they agree that the humanitarian access be granted to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent or the Red Cross and the Red Crescent so we can reach those people. It may be one of the things that they can agree upon so they won't get back empty-handed.
LYDEN: So, just to follow on that, at least you want to see coming out of these talks agreement that you be allowed to move around more safely?
ERKSOUSSI: Yes. The Syrian government, from the beginning of the crisis, has admitted that the Syrian Red Crescent, at least on paper, is the humanitarian agency they accept. We are a Syrian organization after all. We want to hold the government for their word and we can't - we want the others to push for that and say to the Syrian government you have accepted the Syrian Red Crescent to be the humanitarian agency in Syria. But you need to let them enter. If you don't let us enter, it doesn't mean anything if we are staying out and people are dying in those besieged areas.
LYDEN: Khaled Erksoussi is the head of operations for the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and he spoke with us from Damascus. Thank you so much for being with us.
ERKSOUSSI: Thank you.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
All right. It's been a cold winter for much of this year - brutally cold, really - but think about it this way. It's only a few months and it could be worse - and has been. Take for example 536 A.D., when evidence suggests that the entire world entered a decade-long cold snap, replete with the bubonic plague and even temple burnings. With us now is Colin Barras. He wrote about that global chill for New Scientist magazine. And he joins us from WUOM in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Welcome, Colin.
COLIN BARRAS: Thanks. It's great to be here.
LYDEN: So, this is really an extraordinary piece. It's been known for some time that in the year A.D. 536 the sun had dimmed. Tell me about what scholars were describing then. Would you please?
BARRAS: To begin with, we heard accounts around the Mediterranean region of weather conditions going awry. But within a couple of years there were historical references to this major plague - an early form of bubonic plague - which was killing maybe 10,000 people a day, according to some of these accounts. We have accounts of empires in China losing maybe 75 percent of their people to famine, or something was killing these people anyway. Other accounts in Japan suggest things gotten very bad very suddenly. The mid-sixth century in general just really wasn't a great time to be alive.
LYDEN: So, these dire circumstances are happening in different parts of the world - Central America, China, Europe. And this had been known, as you say, from these records and scientists set up to look for these physical clues. How did they do that?
BARRAS: Yeah. Well, that's an interesting point, because with any historical account there's always the worry that perhaps people were maybe exaggerating things. So, what the scientists really needed was kind of an impartial witness just to double-check that things were as bad as they seemed. And they found that using a technique that involves looking at the rings in dead trees. And when you look at these tree rings from the mid-sixth century, you find that around this time the tree rings are really very narrowly spaced, which really does suggest that conditions were as bad as these early scholars were suggesting. And that's not just in one isolated area. Everywhere, they found this same pattern. So, this is worldwide prolonged winter period really when conditions were very cold and nothing was growing.
LYDEN: So, as they're carbon dating tree rings from around the world, they think, well, there has to be an explanation for this. And the likely candidate is what?
BARRAS: Well, there are two potential candidates really here. One obvious cause of environmental catastrophes of this kind of nature is major volcanic eruptions. We know that these eruptions can have that kind of effect. A very famous eruption in the early 19th century led to a year without a summer.
LYDEN: So, another possibility is Haley's Comet. Could you lay out the case for that explanation?
BARRAS: Right. Now, that's a really interesting one, 'cause obviously when you think of comet, the only comet that really everyone's heard of is Haley's, or Haley's ,Comet. And we know that the comet passed by Earth around the year 536 - just a few years previously. And luckily for us, the Chinese were making the very precise historical record. And they reported that Haley's Comet was quite a lot brighter than normal. And perhaps that reflects the fact that Haley's Comet may have been passing a bit closer to the sun during this passing through the inner solar system than normal. And it have done, it may have released more material. And if that material then rained down on Earth, then it's possible that that could be responsible for this cooling period. And as things stand right now, it looks suspiciously like both theories may actually be correct. Both of these camps have been pursuing their lines of inquiry now for a few years. And they seem to be coming up trumps in both spheres.
LYDEN: Colin Barras. His article about the decade-long cold spell following 536 A.D. is in New Scientist magazine. Thank you so much.
BARRAS: Thank you.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
The U.S. men's soccer team has just finished training in Brazil in advance of the World Cup there this summer. The Americans will have a tough lineup and a grueling schedule during the games. NPR's Brazil correspondent Lourdes Garcia-Navarro caught up with the team to talk about all things Brazil.
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LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: It's summer in Brazil and it's hot, which is just what the U.S. team practicing here on a pitch in Sao Paulo wants. The team got what most observers say is a very unlucky draw - what even the U.S. head coach called the worst of the worst. They'll be battling against stiff competition - Germany, Portugal and Ghana in the first round of the games and they'll be playing in hot and sticky Manaus in the Amazon.
JURGEN KLINSMANN: Originally, we wanted Brazil in the opening game. We didn't get Brazil in the opening game. We got a much easier group than we wanted.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: United States head coach Jurgen Klinsmann made light of the situation at a news conference here in Brazil. He said, despite the naysayers, the Americans are ready to face the big soccer nations during the World Cup.
KLINSMANN: We believe that we can give a lot of teams in this World Cup some trouble.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The Americans played two friendlies while here against iconic Brazilian Club Sao Paulo. They lost one, they won one. Kyle Beckerman plays center midfield.
KYLE BECKERMAN: Everybody watches Brazil play and the style is a little different. And I think it comes from not only the music and their culture but it comes from the way the weather is. And so each country plays different but the way Brazil plays, it's like they say - it's the samba, you know. And so anytime you get a chance to play against Brazilians or Brazilian team it always, it helps you out a little bit.
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GARCIA-NAVARRO: At an event at the U.S. consulate in Sao Paulo, where members of the team spray-painted a wall with young Brazilian players, many team members said they now know what they are dealing with here in Brazil. Brad Evans plays right back.
BRAD EVANS: We came with the purpose of getting a dry run and what we can expect this summer. And, obviously, it's been extremely dry and hot, you know, probably something that we'll face in June. But so far it's been a great experience.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Michael Harrington plays left back.
MICHAEL HARRINGTON: It's the World Cup. It's not an easy tournament. So, we're going to be ready. We've made strides in this camp - strides in our team chemistry and our fitness and our understanding of each other, the players around us. I feel like we're moving in a positive direction, moving forward, so it's been good.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: U.S. Ambassador Liliana Ayalde says there will be a lot of fans to cheer the U.S. team during the tournament.
AMBASSADOR LILIANA AYALDE: Americans have purchased more tickets than any other country. We've got more than 80,000 - the last time I checked - Americans who are planning to come who already have tickets.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Kyle Beckerman says after their 12-day visit here they feel pumped.
BECKERMAN: We're here, so we deserved it. We earned the right to be here. And so anything can happen.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Sao Paolo.
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LYDEN: This is NPR News.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
Something you may find on that vanity is a lipstick, so let's pucker up and head downtown to Soho.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIPSTICK ON YOUR COLLAR")
LYDEN: There's a little bit on Prince Street where people can go to find that perfect lip color. We're at Bite, a shop that lets you come up with your own lip shade.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIPSTICK ON YOUR COLLAR)
LYDEN: At the lip lab, powders look like lumps of chocolate on shelves, and the attendants in lab coats help you craft your perfect shade. Melissa Colon says that it all started when Bite founder Susanne Langmuir couldn't find the true color she wanted.
MELISSA COLON: She was having a hard time finding a natural lipstick that also had incredible pigment payoff, which sometimes is compromised when you're using natural ingredients. So, she decided why don't I just do a customized lipstick that is natural. It is edible. It's OK for you to ingest.
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COLON: Looks a little bit like we're in the chocolate factory. But what we're going to do is, do here is that we customize our lip colors.
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COLON: What takes the longest is actually deciding what color it is that we come up with that we're both in agreement with.
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COLON: I write down a little formula for it. You get to choose your color. You get to choose your finish, which is we have four finishes: matte, luminous creme, creme deluxe and sheer. Then you actually also get to choose your scent. So, we have a scents of oils: we have wild berry, cherry, violet, vanilla, citrus mango and mango.
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COLON: I'm going to use tannin to begin with. And I just kind of put a swipe of it on my palette. I'm going to start with that. I'm going to add a little bit of the creme deluxe finish. So, I'm just kind of mixing it up a little bit. Warming up the color.
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COLON: I just press through and it mixes everything together for me in a few seconds. Done. We have different molds. So, I'm going to grab a mold, make sure it's secure. I put on the timer. In six minutes your lipstick will be done.
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COLON: I really don't believe that there are any rules on any color. I think that any woman can wear any color as long as she's confident in it. I've seen women walk out of here with a blue lipstick.
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COLON: That means your lipstick are ready. So, we undo the mold. Anytime we do this and it doesn't break it's like a small victory for us. Yay.
LYDEN: Oh, look at that.
COLON: Here we go. Success.
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COLON: I love the look when we've completed and finalized and they've found that perfect color. And they're, like, I didn't think this was possible. You know, it's a really gratifying moment. And everyone leaves here happy.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
Last week, 21 people were killed when a suicide bomber attacked a restaurant popular with expats living in Kabul. Among the dead were two people working for the American University in Afghanistan. From behind its fortified walls, the university has operated relatively unscathed since it opened in 2006. It's benefited from a huge infusion of cash from the United States which sees the campus as an incubator of talent and entrepreneurship.
Despite the turmoil in Afghanistan, the university has been able to attract foreign professors and staff and has just partnered with Stanford Law School to start training lawyers. Joining us now is the president of the university, C. Michael Smith. Mr. Smith, before we even begin, we really want to offer our condolences on the death of two of your faculty, Lexi Kamerman and Alexandros Petersen. We're so very sorry.
C. MICHAEL SMITH: Jacki, thank you very much. We're all so just incredibly saddened here in Kabul. And, in fact, on Sunday we're planning a memorial service here for our students and staff members and faculty members so that they can express their grief and also their condolences for the families involved.
LYDEN: These deaths, as you must know, have probably changed the climate there. I'd like to ask you how they've affected your vision of the university's mission and what you do going forward.
SMITH: I mean, it has had an extraordinary impact obviously and it certainly has caused us to reassess some of the security preparations that we have. Having said that though, we're also mindful here that the two people who lost their lives were here because they were committed to a better Afghanistan and a better quality of education, especially higher education in this country.
And in a way, the best way to honor them and honor their intentions is for this university to be that much more resolute in its determination to offer high quality higher education to Afghan students and to continue to grow and develop programs that will help the country develop.
LYDEN: Soon the U.S. will be pulling out the remainder of its troops and that has to be a further concern.
SMITH: It is. My wife and I have been here for going on five years now in Kabul with the university and there is always that kind of concern as troops are being drawn down that things may move in a direction of more turmoil. On the other hand, it's also true, if you've been here for a while, you know, you can sort of see what's happened in terms of the buildup of the Afghan forces that are certainly much stronger now - the government forces - than they were before.
And so my sort of gut sense about this is that although there are going to be some rough spots in the long run there's been sufficient progress and sufficient improvements in the Afghan security forces that it may not be as problematic, perhaps, as some people think.
LYDEN: I want to step back for a moment. Kabul has had its own universities for quite a while. What do you think the presence of yours means for the future of Afghanistan?
SMITH: Education is just so important for any developing country. In the period of Taliban rule, where education was just decimated across Afghanistan at every level really and their only - at one point the figures I've seen, you know, something like 5,000 students total in higher education in the entire country, almost no women involved in education in the country and so forth. And then the loss of faculty members was, you know, just devastating to the Kabul University and other universities. So they're rebuilding.
LYDEN: I can remember being in Kabul in 2001 and a female classroom with no roof, roofless because of all the fighting; women sitting there with their grammar books trying to relearn after a decade of their learning being suspended.
SMITH: I think that's exactly right and I think given that, and given the fact that that was just 12 years ago, there really has been an extraordinary amount of progress in the country in education and other respects as well. And it tends to be not always noticed because of the very unfortunate, terrible violence that does happen still in different situations like the one we've been talking about. But overall the country has just made huge strides and that's true for higher education as well, and hopefully we're contributing to that.
LYDEN: Well, thank you so very much. We'll be thinking of you, your colleagues, your students on Sunday when you remember those you've lost.
SMITH: Thank you very much.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
We've been following a tale in the papers this week about an abandoned cruise ship drifting across the Atlantic, filled with cannibal rats. This ship, an old Russian liner called the Lyubov Orlova, broke free from its towing vessel in a storm and since then it's been making its way towards England supposedly with a cargo of rats who had nothing to eat except each other, which made the editors at the British paper "The Daily Mail" quite nervous, to judge by this article.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Could this Russian ghost ship infested with cannibal rats beach in Britain? Experts fear storms have driven an abandoned cruise liner towards land after Canadian tow ship lost it a year ago.
LYDEN: And not to be outdone by the Brits, the "New York Daily News" had this to say.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: The Lyubov Orlova has been detected off the coast of Scotland. Its only passengers are demented, disease-ridden rats feeding off each other.
LYDEN: The story of the bloodthirsty rats was attributed to one man, a salvage hunter named Capt. Pim de Rhoodes, who was quoted again and again. But when we reached Capt. de Rhoodes, he changed his tale. We asked him whether there are killer rats onboard the ship, and this is what he had to say.
CAPT. PIM DE RHOODES: I think that maybe if there were rats at all, they'd probably died anyway because it's a year ago. They can't survive longer than four or five days without water and food, so it's probably empty.
LYDEN: For all of us who were enjoying a good story, rats. You're listening to NPR News.
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JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden. The Olympics are getting closer, less than two weeks away. The Russian host city of Sochi is busily preparing for the influx of athletes and the media and making sure adequate security measures are in place. Sochi is close to the Caucuses region, home to the long running Chechen insurgency.
Last weekend, the video on a Chechen extremist website made threats against the games. Russian security forces are now reportedly searching for possible suicide bombers, women known as the black widows, one of whom is rumored to be inside Sochi itself. For more on this we spoke to Andrei Soldatov. He's the editor in chief of the website Agentura.ru based in Moscow.
I began by asking him what security measures have been put in place.
ANDREI SOLDATOV: We're talking not only about boots on the ground and in which case this might be 100,000 troops, but also we are talking about surveillance technologies introduced in the area of Sochi to control everything and everybody in the area of the games.
LYDEN: So surveillance, what about classic Russian intelligence to tell the people on the ground that, you know, where the terrorists presumably are?
SOLDATOV: So we have the problem of lack of trust between different departments inside of intelligence community. Some people in Moscow might not trust their colleagues in some of North Caucasus, especially in Chechnya or Dagestan, and there are some problems of dissemination of information within different departments because the countris, they are large and the connections and the relations between different departments might be different.
LYDEN: Let me ask you, besides having some difficulty in terms of sharing intelligence between organizations within Russia, what about with other countries? How are the Russians working with the U.S.?
SOLDATOV: Again, here we have some problems, maybe caused by the fact that the general put in charge of providing security in Sochi, this general is not the head of the counterterrorism department, but he's the chief of the counterintelligence department. And the problem is that he's a very experienced general, but he's spent his entire career in hunting down foreign spies and he's had some problems and his people had some problems with trust in foreign colleagues, especially if they're talking about (unintelligible) of sharing of intelligence and sharing of information between different countries.
LYDEN: Like Washington, D.C. and the United States?
SOLDATOV: Exactly.
LYDEN: Is it fair to ask you, Mr. Soldatov, what you're expecting at the games?
SOLDATOV: Well, I think it's a very hard question. The problem is we are facing not only the threat caused by Doku Umarov himself or his group. The problem that they have now insurgency in almost all republics of the North Caucasus and they have a number of cells, small groups of people who are desperate (unintelligible) cannot remain just because of the Olympics. And the Olympics present such a great opportunity for all these small groups to try their hand to do something at the Olympics.
And I think it's a very dangerous situation and now I think the Russian Secret Services not face a very difficult challenge.
LYDEN: Thank you very much for speaking with us. That was Andrei Soldatov, the editor-in-chief of the website Agentura.ru. Thank you.
SOLDATOV: Thank you.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
Where I come from, in Wisconsin, curling is a beloved and traditional sport; the game where players slide stones across a sheet of ice. Sometimes, though, it gets a bit maligned. In fact, one curling tradition has the winning team buying the losing team drinks. But it is now an Olympic sport.
Paul Savage took home a silver medal from the 1998 Winter Olympics at the age of 50, and he joins us from his home outside Toronto. Hello there, Paul.
PAUL SAVAGE: Hi, Jacki. How are you today?
LYDEN: I want you to defend curling. Tell us about the beauty of some of those curling moves. Tell me about the brush.
SAVAGE: So if you watch top curlers use the brush, they're using virtually every muscle in their body down the backs, to gain maximum brush head speed and power on the ice. And it can make a huge difference to the final resting place of the rock. I mean, when these people sweep a brush end to end, they get a heart rate of up to 190, 195. It's a real amazing 25-, 26-second workout.
In fact, the Canadian athlete of the half-century in Canada, his name was Jim Irons. He took up curling in 1957 in Toronto, and he referred to sweeping a brush out on the curling rock end to end as the toughest blast in sports.
LYDEN: You won a silver medal for Canada at the 1998 Winter Games. Tell me about that. You were somewhat older than a lot of Olympic athletes. How'd you train?
SAVAGE: Well, I played on the world curling tour for a number of years, starting in the early '70s up until about 1996. I played against Germany, which qualified me for a medal; and the boys played awesome. Had one little hiccough right at the end, and so we ended up with the silver medal.
LYDEN: Wow. Now, I understand that you had to shed a bit of weight leading up to those Olympics in 1998. They told you to lose 20 pounds.
SAVAGE: Well, that actually happened in the '88 Olympics, which took place in Calgary, Alberta. My skip and I - there were two of us on the team - were a little overweight, which wasn't abnormal in curling circles, back in those days. Anyway, we went to the camp; and we couldn't do any real sit-ups, and we couldn't do too many pushups, and we were both 20 pounds overweight. We were the best curling team in the world, at the time.
And we got a notice on the day that the press conference took place to announce which teams would go to the trials. And they said, the good news is that you're invited to the trials; the bad news is, you and Eddie have to lose 20 pounds each, and you have to improve your level of fitness.
LYDEN: What was your regimen?
SAVAGE: My skip, Eddie Varnek, he just stopped eating for about six weeks. He went on a crash diet, and I went to the gym every day. I worked out really, really hard. I loved food too much to stop eating. Anyway, we both lost close to 20 pounds, and the Canadian Curling Association agreed to let us go to the trials.
LYDEN: I understand that Eddie kind of was weak from not eating.
SAVAGE: Yeah, it really affected his ability to curl. And the Olympic trials were in Calgary, which was also hosting the Winter Olympics that year. So when we got to Calgary, Eddie was - he wasn't himself, and he played pretty poorly the first two games. So we lost the semifinal, and so we didn't get to play in the Olympics that year.
LYDEN: How would you train now? How does one train to become a champion curler?
SAVAGE: Well, it's quite a bit different these days. With the exception of the United States and Canada, most of the European countries and the Asian countries - China, Korea, Japan - all have full-time curling programs. And so they train, for example, the Chinese teams - the men's and women's teams - spend most of the winter in Canada. They pay big money for a training facility, and they curl seven days a week. They're on the ice six, seven, eight hours a day. It's a whole different game than it was when we played.
LYDEN: That's curling champ Paul Savage. He brought home a silver medal for Canada in 1998 and wrote a book about it, called "Canadian Curling: Hack to House." Paul Savage, thank you very much.
SAVAGE: You're welcome, Jacki.
JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
It's time for sports. Big tennis news today. Li Na from China has won the women's final at the Australian Open. And tomorrow, the men take the court. And on a sartorial note, have you seen the U.S. Olympic team's official outfits? If not, you might want to make sure you're properly caffeinated first. Howard Bryant of ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine joins me now from New England Public Radio. Hello there, Howard.
HOWARD BRYANT: Hi Jacki. How are you?
LYDEN: I'm great. Let's start with this tennis news. Li Na is this year's Australian Open Champ. Since a lot of people are just waking up to the news, tell us how she won.
BRYANT: Oh, it was just a fantastic win for her and I think how she won actually happened last year when she was up a set, she was very close to a championship against Victoria Azarenka and then hurt her ankle, and then hit her head on the court and ended up losing the match. And so she had a whole year to kind of think about this and get back to it.
And this year she didn't miss. She beat Dominika Cibulkova of Slovakia 7-6, 6-love, and a great championship for her. We talk a lot about athletes who can't handle the pressure and we spend a lot of time fixating on what they can't do and what they aren't. And she was under a lot of pressure and she almost quit the sport six months ago, and this time she saw the finish line and she didn't miss. Have a lot of respect for that.
LYDEN: Big win. A big win.
BRYANT: Excellent.
LYDEN: And the men play overnight U.S. time tonight, Howard. Rafael Nadal versus No. 8 seed Stan Wawrinka. What are we watching for there?
BRYANT: Well, you're watching for Rafael Nadal to make history. An unbelievable comeback for him. If he wins this match he'll be the only man in the history of the sport in the open era to win each Grand Slam twice. Nobody else has done that. Not McEnroe, not Connors, Federer; none of them. And it's amazing for him considering that he had missed seven months with a knee injury.
And it's a wonderful thing for Nadal as well because the way that he plays the sport is so physical and when you watch the way that these guys - last year - not last year. Two years ago, in 2012, he had lost a 5 hour, 53 minute marathon final to Novak Djokovic, so it'll be good to see him come back. And Stan Wawrinka is terrific as well. If he wins, it's his first final. You know, there's more to life than all of these big guys so, you know, maybe the underdog will get this one too.
LYDEN: That'll be exciting. Well listen, we can't leave our chat without talking about the official Ralph Lauren sweaters for the U.S. Olympic team. These cardigans, you know, Howard, I want to say they remind me, richly pattern of snow falling in the Caucuses.
BRYANT: Yeah, they're pretty dreadful. I think Ralph Lauren should probably stick to tennis because the tennis outfits - their Wimbledon and their U.S. Open outfits are fantastic. They're incredibly expensive, but at least they look good.
LYDEN: That's Howard Bryant of ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. Thank you as always.
BRYANT: My pleasure.
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LYDEN: This is NPR News.
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JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
Sam Harris says he's been a ham all his life. He's been drawn to the spotlight since he was a kid, belting out "Sound of Music" tunes in a makeshift nun's habit, in his family's garage. Practice, practice, practice - and plenty of audacity - paid off all the way to Carnegie Hall. In 1983, Harris won the very first season of the television show "Star Search" with his performance of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW")
SAM HARRIS: (Singing) Where troubles smell like lemon drops, way above the chimney tops, that's where, that's where you find me...
LYDEN: Since the '80s, Harris had been performing on Broadway and films and on television. He's written a hilarious memoir called "Ham: Slices Of A Life," about growing up in a small town in Oklahoma. He says his life in show business really began in high school when a black friend named Michelle Chambers(ph) invited him to church on the other side of the tracks.
HARRIS: At that point - I think I was 14 or 15 - Southern baptism was everywhere. I had been baptized, and it was beautiful, but I never went back...
LYDEN: You said you never went back after the big performance of it all.
(LAUGHTER)
HARRIS: I'd done the big 11...
LYDEN: You'd done that.
HARRIS: ...number. Done that. Moving on. But she, as opposed to a lot of the church people that were telling you, you had to be saved, I sensed that it was something that she wanted to share. And she was a great, great singer. So she invited me to church. And she picked me up, and we drove from my middle-class neighborhood down and through the poorer section and the poorer section. And then we crossed the tracks into Colored Town, which I had heard about but never seen. It was a ghetto, basically - like, clapboard houses and dry, clay yards; and this white, little church and all of these women wearing stripes and polka dots and architectural hats and, you know, these extraordinary, vivid, happy clothes.
And these people started singing with this sense of celebration and pain. I think in the book, I call it a nearly carnal joy rose up in my throat, and I started to sing. And this woman that was standing next to me, she grabbed my hand and she said, hallelujah! And it was like another tribe that felt closer to me than my own. But it was where I found a musical voice.
LYDEN: Pretty early on in your life, Sam Harris, you're still just in your late teens, maybe you're about 20, your father helped set you up with a producer; a man named Jerry Blatt, who had also produced Bette Midler. He becomes a real mentor to you. And I love the story of him getting you to open your act in this really crummy Italian place, little restaurant that has a back room.
HARRIS: (Laughter) We played every dump and dive. And we were in this horrible place. It was a restaurant called Gio's(ph), which I was certain was the next step for my destiny of stardom - and I was so desperate to be famous. And there was no dressing room. I was pacing back and forth in an alley, and Jerry runs out and says, think of it a rehearsal. And I'm like, what do you mean? We've been rehearsing for weeks. He said, the house is small. How small? Very small. How very small? No one is in the audience.
(LAUGHTER)
HARRIS: And I said, well, what are we going to do? And he said, well, you're going to do the show. You are being paid - not much. Actually, you're losing money. But you are billed, and you have to fulfill that promise. And we did the show. Two acts - it was two acts with an intermission. It was no one there. I think a drunk guy came in at one point, and smoked half a cigarette and left.
LYDEN: And isn't so long before you get - in fact, it's shockingly short - between that time and Carnegie Hall. That's just a marvelous moment - you know, to be a young man, you have a big stretch limo waiting up, you and the singers; roll the top down and you...
HARRIS: I pulled myself up with as many of us as could fit through the sunroof, and we literally yelled out: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? And some of the New Yorkers yelled: Practice! Practice! (Laughter) It was like a dream come - it was a fantasy. It was a fantasy.
LYDEN: This book is called "Ham." And what I like about your "Ham" is, you say there's a little bit of ham in all of us. What do you mean by that? Is it good to be a ham?
HARRIS: I think it is, and I think our hamdom comes out in different ways. Sometimes, it comes out of joy. And then there's a kind of ham that I think comes from a need to survive and matter; to try to find the positive when you're surrounded by something that doesn't necessarily promote self-assurance. And, you know, we do what we have to do. And we find our creative ways and how we express ourselves.
LYDEN: The story that you tell - you and Liza Minnelli grew very, very close over the years. She considers you just her best friend. And at one point, she's in rehab, and she asks you to come. You literally drop everything, fly across the country to be with her; and that's the process by which you learn that this also defines you, for at least that moment in time.
HARRIS: Absolutely. Because I was going there to be there for my friend because she has a problem, and she needs my help.
(LAUGHTER)
HARRIS: And of course, you know, they don't let you drink. They don't encourage the guests to drink. And so there I was, sort of detoxing and going through my own process. And after a week, when we went back to New York, I was having coffee with a person that was there as a help for her; and I just vomited it out - my whole drinking history. And I went back in tears to Liza's apartment, and stood in the doorway and just sobbed. And she said, what's wrong, honey? What's wrong? And I said, I'm an alcoholic. And she took me in her arms and rocked me and said: I know, baby, I know. And she had known all along.
LYDEN: Your experiences are so vivid. Some of these almost don't seem so long ago but of course, they were, you know, more than 30 years ago. And life has been good for a long time. You sound like you're extremely happily married...
HARRIS: I am.
LYDEN: You found a wonderful, supportive partner in Danny...
HARRIS: Yes.
LYDEN: And the two of you have a little boy...
HARRIS: The best.
LYDEN: What are your lessons and hopes for him, would you say?
HARRIS: For my son, Cooper, my lessons and hopes for him are that he gets exposure to all kinds of people and all kinds of ideas, and all kinds of literature, and all kinds of art and all kinds of music and all kinds of religion; and then he gets to choose - that there is no right way; that his responsibility is to be a good citizen. I want him to be happy, you know. I just want him - I want him to know he's safe.
LYDEN: The book is called "Ham: Slices of Life." And Sam Harris joined me from our studios in Culver City, Calif. Thank you, Sam. It's been great speaking with you.
HARRIS: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "USE WHAT YOU'VE GOT")
HARRIS: (Singing) When you're a hustler, there is one thing you should know. You have to hustle every day...
LYDEN: This is WEEKEND EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This year, Grammy Lifetime Achievement awards are going to bands like the Beatles and the Isley Brothers - long overdue you can say, but they look like young punks next to another Lifetime Achievement recipient: Maud Powell.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Powell was born in Illinois in 1867. She picked up the violin as a young child and really never put it down. At the turn of the 20th century, classical music in America was scoffed at by Europeans. Powell became the first American-born violinist - man or woman - to change that by winning over European audiences.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: She toured, playing her violin for audiences across this country. In those days, if a woman made music, she usually played the piano, and she did it in parlor rooms or at dinner parties - not in the spotlight on a stage.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Rachel Barton Pine is a violinist who has long been inspired by Maud Powell. Pine even released her own tribute recordings of Powell's work. And she's one of the people accepting the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award on Powell's behalf. Maud Powell died in 1920. Rachel Barton Pine joins us now from Los Angeles to talk about Maud Powell. Welcome to the show.
RACHEL BARTON PINE: Great to be here.
MARTIN: So, you have said that she is the violinist you admire most. How did you first encounter her?
PINE: You know, around age 5 or 6, my mom would take me to the public library and I would get children's books about the life of Bach or the life of Paganini. And I've always been an avid fan of music history and yet I had never encountered Maud Powell until I was 20 years old. And her biographer, Karen Shaffer, mailed me Maud Powell's biography. And it was a real revelation, not just because of how she was the greatest woman violinist in the world during her lifetime, and playing the works of black composers when white instrumentalists just didn't do that. But, you know, it was the values by which she lived her life, playing concerts for communities that had never before had a classical concert and using the recording technology as a further way to spread great music all over the place to people who had not yet had a chance to fall in love with it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: As you mentioned, she was daring and she was known for debuting important concertos by big names like Jean Sibelius. Let's listen to one.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: It's fascinating to listen to those old recordings. Is it really true a lot of Americans hadn't heard an American playing this kind of music beforehand?
PINE: Exactly. Maud Powell, she had to make her success in Europe to be then able to come back to America as a superstar. But then she didn't just rest on her laurels but she insisted that, hey, if you want me to play this concert, I am going to do the Tchaikovsky or nothing. And people wanted her badly enough that they were like, OK. You know, that was music that people were a little bit afraid of. And she insisted that if people got to know it, they would love it. And, of course, she was right.
MARTIN: How was she received in her own professional circles? I mean, presumably she was one of maybe just a handful of women who were making music professionally, performing it at that level. How was she received?
PINE: I'll give you a good example. There is a review quote that her husband/manager ended up using as her slogan. It's a little un-PC but it perfectly captured what the world thought of Maud Powell: (Reading) The arm of a man, the heart of a woman, the head of an artist. And in fact, those are still the three things that we all strive for today: great athletic ability on our instruments, a true understanding of the music and being able to convey all of the emotions of the music.
MARTIN: Let's listen to another piece she recorded. This is called "Deep River."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: So, when you listen to that, can you explain what about her music and that piece in particular pulls you in.
PINE: Yeah, this was a beloved Negro melody but Maud Powell pushed the envelope by including spirituals in her recital programs. White artists simply weren't doing that. But, you know, regardless of that interest history, just listening to the way that she shapes the melody line and her timing.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
PINE: You can just hear her voice just sing through the recording horn. And you can just imagine the impact she must have had on her listeners live in concert.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Why do you think she isn't more widely known?
PINE: Maud Powell was, you know, absolutely tireless in terms of her generosity, answering every snail mail letter that would come to her from young artists wanting advice. But because she was on the road constantly, she didn't have her own studio, and no doubt she would have. She also didn't write any original compositions. She also didn't live into the electric era. And Maud Powell, who is so associated with the Sibelius and the Tchaikovsky and the Dvorak, and, well, she didn't leave any of that to posterity because, you know, they invented electric microphones five years after she died. So, three ways in which violinists do achieve posterity, she just didn't have the luck to fall into any of those categories. So, that's why we have to do everything we can to try to bring her memory back.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Rachel Barton Pine. She is a violinist and she is receiving the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of the great American violinist Maud Powell, who died in 1920. Rachel, thank you so much for talking with us.
PINE: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: This is Rachel Barton Pine's version of "Deep River." And you're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Dreaming big dreams is part of being a kid, fantasizing about moving beyond real life and becoming someone else; someone who's in control when it seems that nothing else is stable. For a young kid named Pug, growing up in Baltimore, that fantasy means riding with a motorcycle gang, known as the 12 O'Clock Boys. They're called 12 O'Clock because that's how they ride their motorized dirt bikes; flipping dangerously high wheelies at top speeds down city streets. The police try to crack down on them but, for Pug, that only adds to the gang's allure.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "12 O'CLOCK BOYS")
PUG: Some people fall and hop off their bike and take it in the house. But if I fall, I'm going to still hop back on my bike.
MARTIN: The film's director, Lotfy Nathan , explains why a kid like Pug is drawn to this world.
LOTFY NATHAN: I think it's a kind of escape for these guys. You know, it's a kind of renegade sport. And I think, looking a little deeper and you see in Pug what he needs, is a kind of way of edification. He needs mentorship, which a lot of kids in inner-city Baltimore need. So he finds that in the group, partly because it's renegade, and partly because it's intimidating and dangerous.
That that kind of wholesome, building thing needs to also be cut with an edge for a lot of those kids.
MARTIN: I briefly described the way that they ride. But would you mind filling that in more contextually? Give us a sense of just what happens when these guys take to the streets.
NATHAN: It's a chaotic experience. I first saw it on the periphery. I saw them tearing down the street. I had no idea what they were about. And a lot of people in Baltimore - depending on what neighborhood you're in - don't know what they're about. But their presence on the street, and they're extremely loud, huge pack. I mean some of them have these bandannas on their faces - they certainly look intimidating. And it's all about the noise and presence, you know.
MARTIN: A lot of these guys are from really tough neighborhoods. There is a lot of crime but they're not out there trying to wreak havoc on neighborhoods - or are they in some way, psychologically?
NATHAN: I think it's impossible to deny that it is supposed to be rebellious. And as far as crime goes in Baltimore, I don't like the argument of lesser of two evils - but you can't ignore it in Baltimore. There are so many worse options for a kid like Pug. I mean when I met him there were drug dealers directly outside of his house, tempting him with a stack of hundred dollar bills; putting it in his hands, telling him to throw it up in the air.
You know, little kid who's not even 13 yet seeing that these are the only people on his block who have money. It's tempting to do a lot worse. So I think for a kid like Pug this is almost a wholesome activity.
MARTIN: How did you first meet Pug? How did you come to know his family?
NATHAN: I met him in April 2010. I started filming late 2008. I was for the most part getting guys in their mid 20's to early 30's. And when I was introduced to Pug, he was about a month away from turning 13. I saw that he had a totally different presence.
MARTIN: How so?
NATHAN: He was saying pretty much exactly what the older guys were saying. But, at the same time, he looked so innocent. He looked so vulnerable. He had this kind of transparency and delicacy.
MARTIN: He loves animals and talks about wanting to be a veterinarian. And it's like, on the one hand, he really does like animals but he kind of knows he's supposed to give that answer, right? Like, that's a respectable thing to do, even though I really just want to ride dirt bikes.
NATHAN: Yeah, but he also really does love animals. It's just something that isn't nurtured as much. You see his mother in the film; she's trying her best. It's difficult for her. And it's also difficult for Pug to get that kind of attention in the school system in Baltimore, for example. The dirt bikes are just an open invitation. It's an institution in Baltimore that's very easy to join.
MARTIN: So you follow him for three and half summers. How did you see him change over that period of time?
NATHAN: I think I saw the egg crack. It was starting to happen when I met him. Like I said, he was kind of emulating the older guys, he was talking like them. He was deciding what kind of man he wanted to be at the beginning. And then, by the end, I think he was just a lot more determined. He had lost his older brother...
MARTIN: Who had died. He passed away.
NATHAN: Right. His words started to take over, you know, above the authority of his mother, the authority of his teachers, his own friends.
MARTIN: The whole film is him aspiring to be part of this group. Do they let them in?
NATHAN: It's not necessarily a matter of joining the group. There's no initiation, per se. It's just a matter of keeping up. His mother is still really fighting for him not to go out in the street. But for certain time is just going to do it, if he wants to.
MARTIN: She does get fed up with him. We've got a clip of his mom, Coco, just at her wits end. Let's take a listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "12 O'CLOCK BOYS")
COCO: I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do. I'm getting him bikes. I'm letting him wear the best clothing there is. He has all these animals and pets and everything that he just left here for me to deal with. He's just roaming the streets, not listening and I can't deal with it no more.
MARTIN: So what is Pug doing now? He's how old?
NATHAN: Pug is 16.
MARTIN: Is he still in school?
NATHAN: Yes, he's still in school. He also is more interested in girls now.
(LAUGHTER)
NATHAN: So...
MARTIN: Which is its own kind of dangerous distraction.
NATHAN: Yeah. Yeah, I knew that would take over - I tried to tell him that actually.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: What do you think might happen to Pug? What path might be pursued in his near future?
NATHAN: It's difficult to say. He's liable to go in any direction but he's also got limited options living in Baltimore. And I try to tell him that his salvation would be to really try hard at school. It's just difficult to communicate at that age.
MARTIN: Does he still talk about wanting to be a veterinarian?
NATHAN: He does, yeah. I think he might start by getting a job at a pet store.
MARTIN: Lotfy Nathan, his new documentary is called "12 O'Clock Boys." He joined us from our studios in New York. Thanks very much.
NATHAN: Thank you for having me, appreciate it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: "12 O'Clock Boys" comes out in theaters and on video-on-demand this week.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A book about love and marriage, having a child, and then watching as that marriage disintegrates - that's not the stuff that usually makes for an experimental novel. But that's exactly what Jenny Offill does in her new book, called "Dept. of Speculation." Jenny Offill is with us now from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for talking with us.
JENNY OFFILL: Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: I'd like to start by talking about the actual crafting of this book because the form is unusual. It's a really short book - 46 small chapters - and rather than a narrative, the book is made up of short fragments, anecdotes, little bits of poetry. Why did you write it this way?
OFFILL: Well, the book came from the ashes of another book, which was much more linear in construction. But at a certain point, I realized I wanted to capture more of the fragmentary nature of thought, and especially of the way emotion moves in and out of people. And I began to write on notecards and shuffle them together; and I started to find these startling juxtapositions, which I thought were interesting, and led me down this path.
MARTIN: You also have an eye for capturing specific detail, and sometimes it's quite funny...(Laughter)
OFFILL: Good.
MARTIN: ...especially when you write about the experience of having a baby and a toddler as she grows. I'd love for you to read this next passage. This is on page 30.
OFFILL: (Reading) The days with the baby felt long. But there was nothing expansive about them. Caring for her required me to repeat a series of tasks that had the peculiar quality of seeming both urgent and tedious. They cut the day up into little scraps. And that phrase - sleeping like a baby - some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her, and scream for five hours in her ear. But the smell of her hair, the way she clasped her hand around my fingers, this was like medicine.
MARTIN: There are a lot of books out there about motherhood and parenting. This isn't that book, but it is clearly written by a woman who has a baby and wants to say something true about that experience.
OFFILL: I felt like the conversation about motherhood felt a little narrow to me. The word that would come up, if you talked about the complexities of motherhood, would be ambivalence. And I think ambivalence implies that perhaps you wish that you hadn't had a child. And instead, what I saw more often in the women I knew, especially the women that had a great passion for some kind of work, was that they were just struggling to bridge the person they used to be with the person they were now and that maternal love, which is quite fierce and can be obliterating of what came before it.
MARTIN: Some of the details in the book read so true that it does compel me to ask the inevitable, which is how much of this book is based on your own experience? I mean, there are certainly some facts that are the same. You are married. You have a daughter. You are an author. How much of this comes from you?
OFFILL: Well, there are many autobiographical things in the book. The obvious thing that people gravitate towards is whether or not I'm the wife, and my husband is the husband. And the truth is really much duller; that we haven't had anything so dramatic happen to us, although like any couple, of course, we've had our moments where things seem to wobble.
MARTIN: We should say, this couple - things get dramatic. There is some infidelity, there are some big blowout scenes.
OFFILL: Right. I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality. I can be bolder on the page, as a character. I can gnash my teeth, I can scream and yell, in a way that I'm perhaps too timid to do in real life.
MARTIN: But have you ever wanted to yell in someone's ear for five hours, to simulate the experience of raising a baby?
OFFILL: Absolutely.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Could you read a little bit - this is from a chapter that starts on 112.
OFFILL: Sure. (Reading) What John Berryman(ph) said: Goodbye, sir, and farewell. You're in the clear. These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs. Lately, the wife has been thinking about God, in whom the husband no longer believes. The wife has an idea to meet her ex-boyfriend at the park. Maybe they could talk about God, then make out, then talk about God again. She tells the yoga teacher that she is trying to be honorable. Honorable - such an old-fashioned word, she thinks. Ridiculous, ridiculous. Yes, be honorable, the yoga teacher says. Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip, and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days. Also, she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friend calls it.
MARTIN: Hmm. You also teach writing. And one of the courses that you teach - that you created, actually - is one writing from the perspective of a narrator who is unhinged, to a certain degree. Your first novel focused on a mother who's losing her grip on reality. And the narrator in this book, understandably, becomes a bit unstable, shall we say.
OFFILL: She definitely unhinges as the novel goes on.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: What draws you to this kind of person, this kind of character?
OFFILL: I think that when we're looking at things when we're right in the center of things, as opposed to being a bit unmoored from what's going on around us, we see things through a kind of dulling lens of convention. And there's something about extreme emotional experiences that gives us a heightened clarity, I think, of thought and of feeling. And that's always something that you want in a novel. So that's why I'm drawn to it, and it's very fun to teach. And I find my students write quite well when given that permission slip.
MARTIN: You are writing about these tropes, right? - love and marriage and parenting. I wonder if you were apprehensive at all about taking on these subjects.
OFFILL: I felt incredible trepidation about writing about motherhood and marriage. I was particularly not interested in having a book that had an affair in it because I thought that we've all read that a million times. But at a certain point, I realized that I wanted the book to kind of break apart in the middle - to have a before and an after. And I realized that if you de-familiarize things enough, you really can write about anything. And then I also thought to myself, well, if it was good enough for Tolstoy and Flaubert, who am I to claim that can't be in my book?
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Jenny Offill's new novel is called "Dept. of Speculation." It is on bookshelves this week. Thank you so much for talking with us, Jenny.
OFFILL: Thank you so much.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
As we look forward to the Grammy Awards tonight, we take a moment to consider the art of the mastering engineer. Mastering is the final stage in the music production process, where engineers tweak songs, creating the master recordings that will be used to produce tracks for iTunes, Spotify and CDs. Emily Lazar is one of those engineers. She's worked on thousands of songs and albums by bands like Santana, Foo Fighters and Vampire Weekend. She's also one of the few women mastering engineers. Allyson McCabe has this profile.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ALLYSON MCCABE, BYLINE: In the early years of audio recording, musicians performed live in the studio, and their songs were captured directly onto a master disc.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Singing) Go back where you came last night, get away from my door...
MCCABE: Today the process is a little different.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ENVELOP ME")
SCHOOL IS COOL: (Singing) I guess you'll never know...
EMILY LAZAR: Hey, you know, this mix sounds really good, but I think we should tweak the bottom a little bit and get a richer bass sound. What do you think?
MCCABE: Mastering engineer Emily Lazar is working with the Belgian pop band School is Cool on the final mixing and mastering of its forthcoming album. She's tweaking the vocal for the song, "Envelop Me."
LAZAR: So, when we EQed the vocal, we pick certain frequencies that we want to hear either more or less of. For example, in this song right now in the raw mix, the lower frequencies or the low mids of the drums are kind of clouding up some of the other areas that we'd like to hear a little more of - specifically right now the lead vocal. We would like to have a little bit more presence and intimacy so that when you're listening on your headphones or in your own space you feel like Johannes, the lead singer, is right there singing to you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ENVELOP ME")
COOL: (Singing) I want you to envelop me, envelop me...
MCCABE: Singer Johannes Genard says those kinds of sonic adjustments are more than just sonic adjustments.
JOHANNES GENARD: The mastering can bring to the foreground frequencies that we associate with certain emotions. Like certain frequencies convey more aggression or energy and certain frequencies evoke depth. It's more like a psychological thing than a technical thing, I think.
MCCABE: Genard and Toon van Baelen flew in from Belgium to work with Lazar because Genard says they admired her work on Vampire Weekend's album "Modern Vampires of the City," which is up this year for a Grammy.
GENARD: I really liked the sonic experience of listening to it. So, when the time came to look at people we wanted to work with, I just put down the list of everybody who worked on that record. And we saw that Emily worked on mastering, and mixing as well, and we love the fact that we can just be here while she's actually doing it and thinking of all the tweaks.
MCCABE: Mastering engineers often work alone, polishing several albums at once without artists' involvement. But at Lazar's Greenwich Village studio, The Lodge, that's not the case.
LAZAR: For me, the best approach has to be a dialogue. It's the essential part of what I do.
MCCABE: Lazar points to a collaboration with Lou Reed on the mastering of a best-of collection.
LAZAR: We really had a really wonderful time listening back to a lot of the music. And Lou hadn't initially planned to include the track "New York City Man" on this anthology. And when we were going through the original analog masters, I heard the track come off the tape machine and it was just amazing. And I looked at Lou and I said, Lou, how come this isn't on this? You are the New York City Man. And we both laughed and it actually ended up making its way not only onto the compilation but it became the title track.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NEW YORK CITY MAN")
LOU REED: (Singing) New York City man, blink your eyes and I'll be gone...
MCCABE: The work was even more collaborative with Vampire Weekend. The band sent the first single from its 2008 self-titled debut album to several mastering engineers as a way of determining the best match, as guitarist and keyboard player Rostam Batmanglij explains.
ROSTAM BATMANGLIJ: I think Emily was the only one who sent back multiple versions of the song. She sent back six different versions, and there was one that I thought sounded better than all the rest. And so from there we made a decision to master the whole record with her.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VAMPIRE WEEKEND: (Singing) I see a mansard roof through the trees. I see a salty message written in the eaves. With ground beneath my feet, (unintelligible) written. Now, the tops of buildings, I can see them too...
MCCABE: Vampire Weekend's next two albums were also mastered by Lazar.
BATMANGLIJ: Often, records are mastered within a day, but for us that hasn't been the case. And the past two Vampire Weekend records, "Contra" and "Modern Vampires of the City," have actually been mastered over a multi-month period.
MCCABE: Sometimes they master directly from the laptop.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WEEKEND: (Singing) Got a little soul, the world explodes, no place to be. Gone a little while but who's going to save the little one for me...
BATMANGLIJ: Moving elements in the stereo image makes such a huge difference. Just like if you take the analogy of making a film - someone is in a shot and they're further away from you or they're more to the right or to the left, in the movie, all of those things are going to affect how you perceive their performance. And I think with the way we've worked recently with Emily at The Lodge, we have that control if we want it.
MCCABE: And in the end, it's Emily Lazar's job to be a kind of bridge between musicians and listeners.
LAZAR: I have these three huge windows in my mastering studio that look out over Astor Place. And sometimes when I'm working I look out the window. I see people walking around downtown with their headphones on, and I like to imagine that maybe they'll be listening to the stuff that I'm working on. I get so excited and tickled. It's kind of awesome to have been a part of something that's being broadcast out to the world in that way.
MCCABE: So, the next time you listen to a song, think about the woman who might be behind the curtain. For NPR news, I'm Allyson McCabe.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WEEKEND: (Singing) I'm as in tune with a boom box and Walkman. I was the hearth of a girl that was back there...
MARTIN: NPR's Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson will be live-blogging the Grammys tonight starting at 7:45 Eastern. Join me in following along at npr.org. This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to turn our attention now to ice dancing, a sport that's gotten a lot of flak over the years and is often scoffed by those who think it shouldn't even be an Olympic event. And it's not a sport where the U.S. has necessarily shined. But today, we're going to look at a pair of skaters from Michigan whose athletic power and speed has got a lot of people taking notice and has them poised for a run at a gold medal. Quinn Klinefelter, of member station WDET, has this profile.
(SOUNDBITE OF BACKGROUND MUSIC)
QUINN KLINEFELTER, BYLINE: At the Arctic Edge skating rink, 30 miles northwest of Detroit, the team that's won every major ice dance competition for the past few years is leaving the ice separately. But Meryl Davis and Charlie White are never far apart for long.
CHARLIE WHITE: It's freaky, I mean, how often that we are just reading each other's minds and, like, say the same thing at the exact same time but...
MERYL DAVIS: Yeah it's a little weird. (Laughter) But it makes it easier.
KLINEFELTER: Their simpatico relationship has helped Davis and White become a record-setting force in ice dancing. They've won two world championships, five straight Grand Prix finals and an unprecedented six consecutive U.S. national titles, portraying everything from Bollywood dancing to Scheherazade. It's left even reserved skating commentators grasping for superlatives.
(SOUNDBITE OF ICE SKATING COMPETITION
(AUDIENCE CHEERS, APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: If you're a figure skating fan, you may have been waiting for this moment. If you're just a sports fan, sit back and just appreciate the best in the sport at the moment.
(COMPETITION MUSIC)
KLINEFELTER: The pair's graceful symmetry stems from a long journey. And while they've never been romantically involved, Davis says in a way, they've been childhood sweethearts since a skating coach saw them circling a rink by themselves two decades ago.
CHARLIE WHITE: You know, we were the right age for each other, the right size; and he thought maybe it would be fun to throw us together and see what we looked like. And, you know, we just were a perfect match, as perfect as an 8- and 9-year-old boy and girl could be.
DAVIS: Charlie was a couple ofmonths ahead of me, in terms of the ice dance world. And so when he was partnered up with, you know, someone who hadn't had any ice dance experience, he was a little bit...
CHARLIE WHITE: ...put off.
DAVIS: Irritated. But yeah...
CHARLIE WHITE: I was like, oh, she doesn't know what she's doing.
DAVIS: ...he had to take a couple steps back with me. But he got over it.
CHARLIE WHITE: It only lasted about a week, yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
KLINEFELTER: It took a while for the White and Davis families to follow suit. White's mother, Jacqui White, says was a bit put off when young Charlie decided to enter a competition - and was soundly defeated.
JACQUI WHITE: He came running up to me and said, Mom, look! I won, I won! Does this mean I won? And I said, yes! And I said, let's go. (Laughter) Because I really felt like they were too young to feel like they lost.
KLINEFELTER: She says it also required a massive juggling act to parent four other children while still helping Charlie fulfill his dream.
JACQUI WHITE: Sometimes, I wanted a day off just to go shopping, or go to lunch with a friend. But I couldn't convince Charlie of it. I could just see how important it was to him. I mean, how many people do you know that are the best at what they do?
KLINEFELTER: Many skating experts also view White and Davis as the best, except for the 2012 World Championships and 2010 Olympics, where they lost to the Canadian team of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. Now, the Canadians train with White and Davis at the Arctic Edge rink, under the same skating coach. NBC Sports skating analyst Tracy Wilson, who won an Olympic bronze for ice dancing in 1988, says the two teams show such physical prowess it has helped cement the sport's reputation as a true athletic event.
TRACY WILSON: They're constantly measuring themselves against each other. And I think that's one of the reasons they've been able to - both teams - push the sport so far.
KLINEFELTER: It's already made White and Davis media darlings and marketable commodities, sponsored by half a dozen major companies. Yet, White vows that he and Davis won't be distracted by the glare of the spotlight.
CHARLIE WHITE: We've had a career where we've really lived in the moment. It hasn't mattered in the past how big the moment is. You know, we always kind of have the same approach.
KLINEFELTER: With that, the duo head for more practice en route to the rinks at Sochi.
For NPR News, I'm Quinn Klinefelter in Detroit.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. And, as Mr. Synopsis said, if you're feeling sad and lonely, there is a service I can render. Sharpen your pencil and get ready, puzzling can be so sweet and tender.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Joining me now is Will Shortz. He's, of course, the puzzle editor of the New York Times and Weekend Edition's puzzle-master. Good morning, Will.
WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: So, refresh our memories. What was last week's challenge?
SHORTZ: Yeah, it came from listener Ed Pegg, Jr., who runs the website MathPuzzle.com. I asked you to name a famous person whose first and last names together contain four doubled letters - all four of these being different letters of the alphabet. And I gave the example Buddy Holly, which has double D and double L. And I asked you to think of a famous person with four doubled letters. Well, there's only one really common one I'd say - and the answer is Tennessee Williams, which has two N's, two S's, two E's and two L's. And I should point out that we were looking for double letters, not just repeated letters through the name.
MARTIN: OK. So, we got around 600 submissions this week, and our randomly selected winner is Jim Ryan of Redondo Beach, California. He joins us on the line now. Hey, Jim. Congratulations.
JIM RYAN: Thank you.
MARTIN: Was this a quick answer for you or did it take you a while?
RYAN: No, this one took me a while and I had to stew on it. I was working with multiple letters and kind of assuming if I were going to find the right name at least two of the pairs of letters would be in the last name, so that had me going in the wrong direction. But I kept on it and had it in the back of my mind. And then a day and a half later, Monday evening, I was doing some things unrelated on my computer and I had a reason to do a search on Tennessee. When I saw Tennessee on my computer screen, I just saw three double letters and then Williams came pretty quickly after that.
MARTIN: And what do you do in Redondo Beach, Jim?
RYAN: I'm a self-employed financial consultant. I do analysis of businesses and financial instruments and things like that.
MARTIN: Thus the analytic approach to puzzling.
RYAN: Well, that is. And earlier in my life I was a mechanical engineer, so, I think the...
MARTIN: Doubling down on the analysis.
RYAN: ...analytics is in my life.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: OK. Well, let's see if this comes in handy as we play the puzzle today. You ready to do this, Jim?
RYAN: As ready as I'm going to be.
MARTIN: All right, Will. What's up?
SHORTZ: All right, Jim and Rachel. I'm going to give you some words. For each one, give me a synonym in which the first two letters of your word are the second and third letters of mine. For example, if I said spin, you would say pirouette, because pirouette means spin; pirouette starts with P-I, and those are the second and third letters of spin.
MARTIN: OK. You got it, Jim?
RYAN: Yeah. And I think aren't the examples supposed to be easier than the real problem?
(LAUGHTER)
SHORTZ: Not always. I got you scared. All right. You're going to do fine on this. Number one is though T-H-O-U-G-H.
RYAN: T-H-O...that would be however.
SHORTZ: However is good. Number two is delete.
RYAN: Eliminate.
SHORTZ: That's it. Preacher.
RYAN: Reverend.
SHORTZ: Good. Sort S-O-R-T.
RYAN: Organize.
SHORTZ: OK. I was going for order, but I think either one works. Squelch.
RYAN: Quiet.
SHORTZ: Squelch, quiet. All right. I'll give you that. I was going for quash, but yours works too. How about statuesque.
RYAN: Tall.
SHORTZ: That's it. Minor M-I-N-O-R.
RYAN: Minor M-I-N...does infant work for that?
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Jim's clever.
RYAN: That's a real minor.
MARTIN: Jim is very clever.
SHORTZ: I wasn't thinking age-wise. How about an adjective.
MARTIN: As an adjective.
RYAN: Inconsequential.
SHORTZ: OK. I might for that. I was going for insignificant actually. How about place P-L-A-C-E.
RYAN: Lay.
SHORTZ: Lay, good, simple. Cancel.
RYAN: Cancel - annul.
SHORTZ: That's it. Stingy.
RYAN: Tight.
SHORTZ: Good. Afraid.
RYAN: Afraid - frightened.
SHORTZ: That's it. Habitation.
RYAN: Habitation - A-B...how about abode?
SHORTZ: Abode works. Stomach.
RYAN: T-O...
SHORTZ: Think of it as a...
RYAN: (unintelligible) or something.
SHORTZ: ...think of it as a verb.
RYAN: Oh, oh, oh, you're thinking of a verb again, aren't you? To stomach something would be to tolerate it.
SHORTZ: Tolerate is right. Here's a hyphenated answer: perfect.
RYAN: Without flaw- error-free?
SHORTZ: Error-free is my answer. And here's your last one, also a hyphenated word, and the word is little.
RYAN: That's going to be itsy-bitsy, I think.
SHORTZ: Itsy-bitsy is it.
MARTIN: Itsy-bitsy.
SHORTZ: Nice job.
MARTIN: For playing the puzzle today, Jim, you will get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin, puzzle books and games. You can read all about it at npr.org/puzzle. And before we let you go, Jim, what is your public radio station?
RYAN: It is KPCC.
MARTIN: KPCC in Pasadena, California. Jim Ryan, of Redondo Beach, California, thanks so much for playing the puzzle, Jim.
RYAN: Thanks. It's been a lot of fun.
MARTIN: Great to have you.
OK, Will. What's up for next week?
SHORTZ: Yes, an easy challenge, I think. What word, containing two consecutive S's, becomes its own synonym if you drop those S's? So again: What word, containing two consecutive S's, becomes its own synonym if you drop those S's. What word is it?
MARTIN: When you've got the answer, go to our website, npr.org/puzzle and click on the Submit Your Answer link - just one entry per person, please. And our deadline for entries is Thursday, January 30th at 3 P.M. Eastern Time.
Don't forget a phone number where we can reach you at about that time. Because if you're the winner we'll give you a call and you'll get to play on the air with the puzzle editor of The New York Times -and he is - WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle-master, Will Shortz.
Thanks so much, Will.
SHORTZ: Thanks, Rachel.
(SOUNDBITE OF THEME MUSIC)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A couple weeks ago, we introduced you to a woman named Rachel Garlinghouse. She's a white, adoptive mother of three African-American children.
RACHEL GARLINGHOUSE: They need to know their history as African-Americans. They are not white and we should not pretend that they are white.
MARTIN: Our conversation with her on transracial adoption drew a lot of response. So today, we're following up with another perspective.
Chad Goller-Sojourner is an African-American man. Forty-two years ago, he was adopted by white parents in Tacoma, Washington. He and his siblings are all adopted and none of them are white. Goller-Sojourner says his parents worked hard to expose their kids to other people who looked like them, even sending them for a time to a more diverse school in another neighborhood. But he says there was a limit to what his parents could provide.
CHAD GOLLER-SOJOURNER: One thing that is kind of unique to my situation - or being transracially adopted - is that my source of love and hate came from the same well. So my parents looked just like the people who were calling me a (bleep) or porch monkey and all this other stuff.
MARTIN: And that was hard to process. How did your parents respond when you went to them with those revelations?
GOLLER-SOJOURNER: So what happened for me is, like every six months to a year, something would happen and I would have a major breakdown and call my mother crying and unable to breathe of sorts, and she would arrive at the school. So I always knew that my mother and my parents were in my corner but it was still difficult to process, because I didn't see myself as they saw me.
I mean all my first experiences were white; my first friend, my family, my church, my faith - don't they know what it along to? And, of course, one of the interesting things about all this is I had the experience before have the language, so now I can talk about it in language. But I experienced it first. You know, for instance, shopping. I learned pretty early on that when people knew I was with this white lady that they treated me differently. So...
MARTIN: Your mom.
GOLLER-SOJOURNER: My mom. If I didn't want to be followed or bothered, I would make a connection with my mom. It kind of played out like this. We have very different tastes - mine are high-end, hers aren't. So I would like hold up some outfit and: Hey, Mom, can I get this? And she'd be like, no. She be like, no...
(LAUGHTER)
GOLLER-SOJOURNER: ...which let everybody within earshot know that I was with a white lady. And then suddenly, it was like that privilege came back over me.
MARTIN: Your parents adopted you at a time - in 1972 - the National Association of Black Social Workers declared that transracial adoption, like yours, was tantamount to cultural genocide. And there are still a lot of people out there who feel that the best option for children of a certain race is to be raised by parents who share that race; in particular, for black children to be raised in black families.
What do you think of that?
GOLLER-SOJOURNER: Well, OK. So here's the part that always gets people upset. Part of my story is I was 13 months old. And according to the social workers in my file, I had already been passed over by two or three black families because they considered me too dark and they were worried because, at that point, I was going to be moved to a different foster home for older kids. So, yes, I mean, I agree that perhaps a black home is probably best for a black kid, but, I mean, it wasn't by accident that in 1972 a white couple from Washington state ended up with this black kid from Cleveland. They were not my first visitors. Others had come to visit me before that.
MARTIN: You have had a particular experience, and it sounds like you had a loving relationship with your parents and family and siblings. Would you still recommend transracial adoption today? Do you think it's a good idea?
GOLLER-SOJOURNER: I'm not opposed to it. I think it's tough because, you know, as a parent you want to protect your child but you also have to prepare your child for the world they're entering into. There was some other stuff that they just couldn't prepare, that I had to do on my own. And, you know, they were there for me, you know, in college and when I was going through some issues (unintelligible) and then starting, you know, begin to take this descent into blackness and out of whiteness. It was difficult because I realized all these privileges that I had, I would have to start letting them go.
MARTIN: So, what's the solution? How do you prepare kids?
GOLLER-SOJOURNER: I don't have, like, a checklist, but if I did it would sound something like this: If you don't have any close friends or know people who look like your kid before you adopt a kid, then why are you adopting that kid? So, your child should not be your first black friend, you know. Where are you living - it's interesting, you know, people will cross the country for a job but they won't move two neighborhoods over so that their kids can go to a more diverse school. Somebody's going to have to be uncomfortable. I think it should be the parents. One of the things, I think, that was the hardest for me, is I didn't have any independent relationships with black people, especially adult black people, child to an adult. I was 25 before I saw a black doctor. I think there's a lot of things that people do, certainly you can do so that you can do better than my parents did because they only had certain options.
MARTIN: When you were talking about shedding white privilege, you then used the phrase I started descending into blackness. What does that mean, and what did it mean for you?
GOLLER-SOJOURNER: Basically, you know, I began a journey, and for me it began with a new name - I added Sojourner to my name - and I moved to New York City, where for the first time I found my own reflection pleasing. So, for instance, I didn't have to, like, hey, I'm not the black guy you think I am. I used to say that in different ways. You know, I carried a picture of my family and tucked it behind my driver's license for years. And wherever the license went the picture followed. Sometimes there's whispering, sometimes shouting, you know, I'm not the black man you think I am. And I stopped saying that.
MARTIN: How did your parents respond to that when you changed your name and started to assert a stronger black identity?
GOLLER-SOJOURNER: Yeah, there was no, you know, I was smart enough not to drop the Goller. I mean, you know, hey, mom and dad, I changed my name. Could you cut another check for school? You know? But they were very happy with that. And one thing, I'm part of the first wave, the '60s and '70s, and so my parents had every single book in the library by a black author on black people. And so we were highly educated in that realm. But that only takes you so far. You know, as of today, people need to do more than just read books. You need to introduce your kids at a young age. So, you know, I mean, I learned to fall in love with myself and being black in my mid-20s to late-20s. And although it was a beautiful experience, it shouldn't have taken 25 years to do that.
MARTIN: Chad Goller-Sojourner is a writer and performer based in Seattle. His most recent work is called "Riding in Cars with Black People and Other Newly Dangerous Acts: A Memoir in Vanishing Whiteness." Thank you so much for talking with us, Chad.
GOLLER-SOJOURNER: Thank you for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: You are listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Bartenders are cool, right? At least that's part of the cultural mythology. But you know what some say is not cool? Having to wear gloves when you put a slice of lime in a gin and tonic. But as of January 1st of this year, a new food safety law in California bans culinary workers from touching some types of food with their bare hands - and that includes barkeeps. NPR's Sam Sanders hit the pavement to get reaction.
SAM SANDERS, BYLINE: Cameron Hall didn't even know about the law when I mentioned California code section 113961. He tends bar at Rocco's Tavern, a little spot in downtown Culver City. Once I filled him in, Hall stopped serving drinks just long enough to rant.
CAMERON HALL: Oh, it'd just be a pain. It'd be a nuisance. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to start making my customers wear gloves in opposition.
(LAUGHTER)
SANDERS: Hall says the law is unnecessary as his bar is already always on-guard: ready for an unannounced food inspector to drop in, keeping up with multiple health and safety codes already on the books. This new law would make bartenders like Hall, and restaurant employees, wear gloves any time they deal with food that won't be cooked before someone eats it. So, that lime garnish on your mojito, or the cherry in your Manhattan. Even the ice. Gloves for all of that now. For Hall, it's not just the nuisance of the gloves. It's how they will change the art of bartending. What would be the hardest thing to do with gloves on as a bartender?
HALL: Shake hands.
STATE ASSEMBLYMAN RICHARD PAN: The purpose of the law was not to force everyone to wear gloves as much as to ensure that we have food safety.
SANDERS: California Assemblyman Richard Pan heads the committee that introduced the glove rule. He says the law isn't really as bad as some would think. For starters, Pan says the law came out of ongoing conversations between lawmakers, health officials and restaurants. It was the culmination of lots of dialogue with some of the establishments that would have to abide by the rule. Pan also says regulators are still figuring out how they'll enforce the law. For the first 6 months in fact, there'll be a soft rollout. During that period, no one will be punished for not wearing gloves. They'll just get warnings. Also, restaurants and bars can apply for exemptions to the rule if they adhere to strict training requirements and written guidelines. Pan does admit gloves can't fix everything. Do you personally think that bartenders should wear gloves while bartending?
PAN: I think that we should keep our food clean and safe. But that doesn't always mean wearing gloves, you know. A glove by itself does not magically make everything clean.
SANDERS: And this law, by itself, may not stand. Since it passed, a change.org petition has been launched to exempt bartenders from the glove rule. In just a few days, it got over 5,000 signatures. Sam Sanders, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: This is NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A Chinese court sentenced a leading legal scholar and civil society activist to four years in jail today. Police have arrested around a dozen other members of his group called the New Citizens' movement.
NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from.
ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: The court found 40-year-old Xu Zhiyong guilty of assembling a crowd to disturb public order. This has to do with protests Xu had organized outside the Ministry of Education in 2012, pressing for migrants' equal access to education.
Prosecutors say the protesters obstructed police and made a racket. Xu's lawyer, Zhang Qingfang, says that's not true.
ZHANG QINGFANG: (Foreign language spoken)
KUHN: The protests were perfectly orderly, he says. The police couldn't find a single citizen who said the protests disturbed their lives.
Xu is a soft-spoken legal scholar and activist, who has campaigned for families of children sickened by tainted milk. He's spoken out for citizens caught in extra-legal detention centers. Most recently, he's called for officials to publicize their assets. When I last interviewed Xu in 2010, he explained how he avoids forming any group that might look like an opposition party, and he even tries not to let his opponents lose face.
XU ZHIYONG: (Foreign language spoken)
KUHN: We're already very moderate, very reasonable and constructive, he said. But beyond that, we try to consider how people whose points of view are different from ours see the issues. But in court, Xu read a closing statement that sounded like a political manifesto. In it, Xu calls on Chinese citizens to act like citizens, not like docile subjects. He says his bogus trial shows that authorities are afraid of the free society he's sure will come.
Xu's lawyer Zhang Qingfang says that the government just doesn't tolerate public displays of dissent.
QINGFANG: (Foreign language spoken)
KUHN: This is about street politics, he says. Maybe the police can tolerate some critical points of view. It is when you go beyond mere speech, and take to the streets to express your political opinions, that's something the government just can't accept.
Zhang adds that Xu's sentencing was scheduled before his trial had even begun. He says he'll ask his client whether he wants to appeal.
Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Beijing.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Last month, President Obama called income inequality and economic mobility, quote, "the defining challenge of our time." Since, as we just heard, President Obama is sure to discuss income inequality this coming week, we wanted to take a closer look at the growing income gap and what that means for economic opportunity.
A recent academic report triggered more debate about the issue and NPR's Yuki Noguchi has more.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: There seems to be one point that the right and left seem to agree about. That is that this is the land of equal opportunity more than, as President Obama says, equal outcomes. Still, historically, the country's policies have sought to address both. President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty created early childhood education programs and investments in poorer schools. But it also tried to address the income gap by creating social safety net programs like Medicare and food stamps.
And Sheldon Danziger says in the decades that followed, that approach worked. Wages rose for everyone. The economy bounced back quickly from brief recessions. Both of those things, he says, are no longer true about the U.S. economy today.
SHELDON DANZIGER: What's not going to happen is a return to the golden age when a rising tide lifted all boats.
NOGUCHI: Danziger is president of the Russell Sage Foundation, a progressive think tank. He argues that the yawning gap in the income distribution - between the top earners and those at the bottom - is becoming self-perpetuating. He says the rich get richer from investments in the financial markets and secure better educations for their children. Minimum wage and middle-income earners, meanwhile, cannot keep pace; making it less likely their children will have the opportunities to move up.
DANZIGER: The American dream is less robust than the Canadian dream.
NOGUCHI: Children born in Canada and some European countries do, in fact, have a better shot at working their way out of poverty than American kids. But an academic study published last week found that contrary to popular perception, it has not gotten harder to climb the income ladder in the U.S. in the last two decades.
Scott Winship is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank. He says that study debunks some commonly held misconceptions. Just because a handful of people at the top are making much more money, he says, that does not mean there are greater barriers to climbing the economic rungs.
SCOTT WINSHIP: There's an intuition among a lot of people that income inequality has had a lot of these problematic effects. But when you get into the research that's been done, it's hard to find a reason to worry.
NOGUCHI: Winship says policy should aim to increase access to opportunities to those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. But, he says, narrowing the income gap by taxing the rich more or raising the minimum wage is unlikely to have much of an effect on mobility.
Richard Reeves is policy director for the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, and he agrees the inequality gap is driven largely by those at the very, very top of the income scale making even more. And the discrepancies, while staggering, benefit a relative handful of those outliers. Which raises the question: How much does income inequality matter if we're talking about a relative handful of people?
RICHARD REEVES: How much does that matter? In a way, I think you're asking the central question of much of current political debate.
NOGUCHI: Reeves says: This is where philosophy meets policy. Some say, those who can make money deserve to be richly rewarded.
REEVES: On the other hand, you can say that other things happen when people are doing that much better than the rest of society - they pull away. They might be able to avoid tax by complicated tax schemes. They may ensure their own children do much better, which I think is a problem, by opportunity hoarding. They may - if you have a political system that allows people with money to have disproportionate political influence - end up shaping the very policies that result in greater levels of income inequality.
NOGUCHI: Reeves says the economy around the world is shifting toward one that heavily favors educated knowledge workers. And that will continue to exacerbate the problem.
REEVES: Policy is running harder and faster just to stand still.
NOGUCHI: And that he says is by no means just an American problem.
Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
WILLIAM WILEY: It's a very committed group. It's very high-risk. I don't want to get all emotional, but certainly the courage of these men and women is to be applauded. There's no question about it.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
That is the voice of William Wiley. The men and women he's talking about work for his nonprofit group, the Syrian Commission for Justice and Accountability. They're collecting evidence of atrocities, evidence they hope will be used to prosecute war crimes. Wiley has broad experience in international crime. He worked in Iraq and Rwanda, also Yugoslavia. He believes he has evidence that war crimes have been committed by both sides in Syria. Wiley hopes to build a case that will allow Syria to mend itself when the war is over. And he and his team are collecting the evidence while war is raging on. William Wiley is our Sunday Conversation.
WILEY: There's no international body with jurisdiction over the crimes being perpetrated in Syria at the current time. So, we, if you will, took it upon ourselves to set something up. And the one advantage we have is that we can operate in the midst of the conflict, which a public body couldn't really do for the simple reason that we have much higher level of risk tolerance.
MARTIN: It is worth underscoring that you are collecting evidence not only against the regime but also the opposition. Can you try to give us a sense of how you go about doing this work? How do you collect evidence? Are people you work with inside Syria, are they infiltrating these groups?
WILEY: There's a different methodology for regime offenses as opposed to armed opposition offenses. So, if we speak about regime offenses, the starting point is that we're interested in quite high-level offenders, because criminal justice is a highly symbolic exercise. Criminality is so widespread. So, we're interested in those who are most responsible for the offenses.
MARTIN: And you're looking for documentation, things that can hold up in a court of law?
WILEY: Exactly. We spend perhaps 10 percent of our time trying to look at individual acts of, let's say, murder or torture. And the reason for that is because the individuals who are ultimately going to be of interest to us are invariably several steps removed through chains of command from the crime scenes. So, 90 percent of our work involves rebuilding command control and communication structures of, let's say, an intelligence service or a particular military organization, because you understand how those groups work and then who runs them. And so the key is, in fact, documentation. And we've removed about 300,000 pages from Syria to this point.
MARTIN: You say so much of what you do relies on the documentation. Do you rely on defectors to hand those over to you? How do you get your hands on those documents?
WILEY: One of the things that one has to keep in mind is paper is very heavy or it feels very heavy when you're moving it around a war zone. So, just logistically it's hard to move this stuff. We acquire it generally in large collections, if you will, in the field through alliances with certain military groups on the opposition side. And essentially what'll happen is they'll capture a government facility and then our guys will go in and secure the documentation. We have quite a bit of material still inside Syria. We're getting new material all the time. Our problem is moving it. Acquiring it is generally not a problem.
MARTIN: So, obviously, this is dangerous work.
WILEY: Yeah. We've had some of the men that have been wounded. And one was wounded and captured. We believe he's dead. And we've had some people captured as well both by the regime and others have been captured by radical Islamists.
MARTIN: How do you recruit people to do this?
WILEY: Everyone's a volunteer, of course. And, as you can imagine, there's no advert in the Syria Daily Gleaner or anything. It's all done by word-of-mouth because trust is at a premium in Syria.
MARTIN: What's the end goal here, William? I mean, what's the ideal jurisdiction for you to present this evidence in?
WILEY: That would be a Syrian, probably constituted Syrian court. And it's a Syrian war and ultimately requires a Syrian solution. But criminal justice is not an end in itself. And it's not about revenge or punishment because only a small number of offenders, I think, will ever be prosecuted. It's a highly symbolic exercise. So, what you want to do is create a certain type of narrative and at the same time break damaging social narratives that are false. So, the prevailing narrative on the opposition side is that the Syrian regime is an Alawite structure - Alawites are a subsector of Shia Islam - that the regime is a sectarian structure bent on the destruction of Sunni. And point of fact, the regime is a complex multi-sectarian power political structure. So, when prosecuting regime figures would be folly to only prosecute Alawites because you're going to reinforce a damaging social narrative which is in fact false. There's plenty of Christians and Kurds and Sunni and other groups in the highest reaches of the regime.
MARTIN: I imagine you're closely watching the talks in Geneva right now. And, as you know, some of the options being floated out there include clemency for President Bashar al-Assad. Is that a frustrating option for you, if the evidence that you're collecting at great risk is never used to prosecute these people?
WILEY: It would be very frustrating for perhaps all of our Syrian colleagues. Now, let's say the current president is not prosecuted in the future. And indeed, if no one's prosecuted, the work will not have been for naught, because we're also collecting with the idea that our database can be used to inform a broader truth-seeking, truth-telling process. Most of our listeners will probably remember the Truth in Reconciliation Commission from South Africa. And these sorts of things are very common, and they need to be based on some sort of evidence as well. So, all is not lost if there's no criminal prosecutions. And indeed, as I've indicated, the criminal prosecutions are a very, very small part - high-profile part to be sure - but a small part of the broader transitional justice process to which a society torn apart by conflict needs to pass. So, it would not be a tragedy if there's no trials. But ultimately, I think the Syrians need to take that decision.
MARTIN: William Wiley of the Syrian Commission for Justice and Accountability. Thank you so much for talking with us.
And you're listening to NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Talks between the Syrian government and the opposition have now moved to separate rooms in Geneva. The two sides met face to face this morning but so far have failed to find agreement on a humanitarian cease-fire that would allow humanitarian aid into the city of Homs. U.N. mediator Lakhdar Brahimi said today that he hopes people will be able to leave Homs in the next few days. Women and children are already beginning to depart. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In fact, women and children have not yet begun to leave.]
Russia helped bring Assad's government into these talks. Today, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the situation in Geneva extremely grave, adding that, quote, "positions are polarized, emotions are on the edge." To hear more about Russia's influence over Syria, we reached Vladimir Pozner, a journalist based in Moscow and the author of a book on U.S.-Russian relations. I started by asking him what Russia might have said or done to get the Syrian government to the negotiating table.
VLADIMIR POZNER: Well, we can only guess because obviously, that's not been announced. But it's clear that Russia does have a certain influence on Assad. Russia has a profound interest in preserving whatever influence it still has in that part of the world. Once upon a time, as you will recall, the Soviet Union had a very, very strong influence out there, which gradually ebbed away. And I think that the present leadership, as in Putin, have a real interest in trying to bring Russia back into that part of the world, which is seen as being very important. And Mr. Assad, looking back, understands the importance of having workable relations with Russia.
MARTIN: Does it end there, or are there real tangible points of leverage that Russia can manipulate?
POZNER: You know, that's hard to say. In this particular case, Syria, its leadership, has to make a decision: Which way is it going to go? On the one hand, it has a certain support on the part of Russia that says, you should not use force; you should sit down and negotiate at the table, and we do not demand Mr. Assad resign. On the other side, it's got this uprising where you have a lot of very, very strong Islamist groups who seem to be upheld, to a certain extent, by the West. So when there is that choice between the two - and clearly Mr. Assad prefers the first - then that side does have leverage.
MARTIN: Russia, of course, is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. The United States, Europe and other allies need Russia on board, to a certain degree, in these talks. What's in it for Russia? Do they benefit at all from an unstable Syria?
POZNER: I don't think Russia - or any other country - benefits from an unstable Syria. Clearly not. But if Russia can play a role that would lead to some kind of resolution of this situation, Russia would benefit immensely because it would be seen as a kind of - not a peacemaker, but a country that can play a positive role in these very, very dangerous hot spots.
MARTIN: How much of that has to do with the Sochi Olympics? And do you think that it is legitimately an opportunity for the United States to put political pressure on Russia?
POZNER: You know, that's a very good question. And it's one that in my opinion, has a very, very clear answer. The one thing you don't want to do is to put an ultimatum to the Russian leadership. It will be totally counterproductive. So if you put pressure on, it's got to be on some kind of private channels. If you know who Mr. Putin is, if you have any idea of what this man is like, you have to understand that he will not submit to pressure. We are all human beings, and there is psychology here. You can talk to him; you can explain your viewpoint - I think he's a good listener. But if you say, you know, if you don't do this we're going to do that, it's going to be counterproductive. That's very much my feeling.
MARTIN: Vladimir Pozner is a journalist based in Moscow. Thank you so much for talking with us.
POZNER: Thank you.
MARTIN: And to be clear, U.N. mediator Lakhdar Brahimi says he's been told by the Syrian government women and children will - hopefully - be allowed to start leaving the besieged city of Homs starting tomorrow.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. For 90 years, Olympic officials barred women from competing in the ski jumping event. Over the years, there have been several reasons given for the ban. For example, women were told that the female body wasn't strong enough to take the strain of repeated jumps; even that it might affect their ability to have children. But in a few weeks, women will have their chance to compete for the first time ever at the Sochi Winter Olympics. And the Americans will boast a team that includes the current ski jumping world champ, 19-year-old Sarah Hendrickson. When we caught up with her slope-side in Park City, Utah, I started out by asking her how her recovery from a severe knee injury was going.
SARAH HENDRICKSON: It's been going really well actually. I've been jumping now for two weeks. And, obviously, the knee is still a little bit sore at the end of the day but, I mean, nothing too bad. And, yeah, I'm looking forward to the weeks ahead.
MARTIN: So, let's talk about this sport. For most of us watching, the thought of doing what you do - soaring through the air on a couple of plastic sticks essentially at 60 to 70 miles per hour - I mean, that can make a lot of us break into a cold sweat. It sounds horrifying. Can you walk us through what happens during a jump? I mean, what's going through your head and what are all the little adjustments that you have to make along the way?
HENDRICKSON: Yeah. Well, I have been ski jumping for 12 years now, so I've taken about 10,000 to 12,000 ski jumps on all different size of hills.
MARTIN: Wait. Since you were 7 years old, Sarah?
HENDRICKSON: Yeah, I started when I was 7. Yeah, so now for me it's just a routine and I don't really think about the crazy aspects of it. Just 'cause you start so small and gradually build up and learn the techniques one by one. But, yeah, so you get in that interim position, let go of the bar and you're going about 60 miles an hour, like you said. And then you get into your fly position and fly about a football field in the air with, yeah, just skis on your feet. It's pretty crazy but it is the best feeling in the world.
MARTIN: What are you looking at?
HENDRICKSON: I mean, it kind of changes and you have to adjust your head angle and all that. But once you get into the air you're pulling and pulling for that flat landing, I guess.
MARTIN: When you say you're pulling, what does that mean essentially? You're stretching your body? Or what are you pulling?
HENDRICKSON: Yeah, stretching your body - it's kind of hard to imagine - but you pull with your hips and kind of with your head. It's something that you work on over the years and it's crazy from an outsider's point of view. But it's very technical.
MARTIN: And even though on TV it looks like you're just like a bird flying at such huge heights - you're really only ever 10 to 12 feet off the ground.
HENDRICKSON: Yeah. We're mainly just going really fast. So, a lot of people think we're really high off the ground but we fly with the contour of the hill.
MARTIN: So, this has been a boy's game, a men's world up until now. This is the first time women will get to compete in this sport in the Olympics. That's got to be a cool thing for you.
HENDRICKSON: It's really exciting for sure. Lindsey Van and Jessica Jerome and a lot of other women ski jumpers around the world have fought so hard for this. I was a little bit too young to be involved in the fight, so I'm really thankful for all the hard work that they've put into paying the way for me. And I'm privileged to walk into the opening ceremonies with those two by my side.
MARTIN: Olympic ski jumper Sarah Hendrickson in Park City, Utah getting ready for the Sochi Games. Sarah, thanks so much for talking with us and good luck.
HENDRICKSON: Yeah, no problem. Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It's a heavy burden for such a light movie but it's possible that Anchorman 2 is the movie that will ring in the end of film. The L.A. Times reported last week that Paramount Pictures, the studio that made "Anchorman 2," will move to a completely digital format to distribute its films to theaters. It's a shift with huge implications, not just for cinephiles who are attached to the warmth and quality of 35 millimeter film, but for archivists who rely on film as a medium that will stand the test of time.
Jan-Christopher Horak is the director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. It's one of the largest repositories of moving images in the world, so he's been playing close attention to the move toward digital. He joined us from our bureau at NPR West. Welcome to the program.
JAN-CHRISTOPHER HORAK: Thank you for having me.
MARTIN: So I want to start by talking about the idea of archiving. I can imagine that archiving digitally is a lot easier, right? Making this move to digital, a good idea?
HORAK: Actually, it is not easier. It is more difficult. With 35 millimeter film, which we've had for the last 120 years, we can take a film - a negative or even a print - and we can put it into a vault. And as long as we store it cold and dry enough, we will know it will last for 500 to a thousand years.
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HORAK: With digital there's the issue that the formats keep changing. So the life expectancy of most digital files, these days, is 18 months to two years. And so, when you put away or archive a digital film, you have to migrate it to a new format every five years, maybe outside 10 years, but probably not. And the cost for migrating one film is going to be about $20,000.
MARTIN: And you talk about the risks of digital archiving, that things can just disappear. Can you give us some examples of important films that perhaps are no longer because of this?
HORAK: It does happen but it also happens that just single files disappear. "Toy Story 2," in production, they virtually lost everything. There is quite a funny animated film on the YouTube that you can see about how the only way they saved it was because of the makers had it on their home computer. And they literally, like with an ambulance, rushed to the house, packed this computer in cotton and gingerly brought it back to the studio because those were the only remaining files on over a hundred million dollar production.
MARTIN: Oh, man. Why do studios want to do this? Why are they supporting this move to digital, if it's so risky and expensive?
HORAK: It's expensive when we're talking about archiving. It is for the studios, of course, much cheaper when we're talking about distribution. In the old days, you know, a big film, they would have made five to 7,000 prints and had to ship them out all over the country. Nowadays, they put them on a DCP and, I think, in the very near future they're just going to shoot them up to a satellite and shoot them down into the theaters, so that distribution costs are significantly less.
MARTIN: Sounds like the future is moving towards digital come what may. So how do you try to hedge against the risks that you've outlined?
HORAK: Digital is the future and we are, of course, are not against digital. However, I strongly believe that in order to protect your investments, whether you're in the studio, or protect your artifacts, as in an archive, it is still necessary to at least make a negative on film so they know they have at least one copy that is safe and protected no matter what they do in the digital realm.
MARTIN: Jan-Christopher Horak is the director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. He talked to us from our studios at NPR West in Culver City, California.
Chris, thanks so much for taking the time.
HORAK: My pleasure.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
President Obama will get his chance to speak directly to the American people when he gives his sixth State of the Union address Tuesday night. Expectations for what the president can actually get done this year are low, yet the president will try to rally support for programs aimed at improving income inequality. Here's how the president framed his economic agenda when he spoke to education leaders at a recent conference.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We have to make sure that there are new ladders of opportunity into the middle class. And that those ladders - the rungs on those ladders - are solid and accessible for more people.
MARTIN: To talk about what we can expect to hear along these lines this week, we're joined by NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: So politically speaking, Mara, what does the president want or need out of this year's State of the Union?
LIASSON: Well, the State of the Union address is a really good chance for the president to press the reset button. He had a very difficult year last year. Even in an era of declining television audiences for these kinds of speeches, he still gets to talk to tens of millions of people. And he's going to set an optimistic tone, according to an e-mail that his advisor Dan Pfeiffer sent out.
The president is going to talk about ways to strengthen the middle class, grow the economy, and empower people who hope to join it. So not just to focus on income inequality but a focus on growth and mobility, which are more optimistic themes. He's also going to stress something that he's been talking about lately, which is that he'll work with Congress but he's not going to wait for Congress.
He's going to do things on his own with the pen, his pen and his phone. And I do think he's going to try to play off against those low expectations, in terms of what can be done this year, by saying this is going to be a year of action. And he's going to do as much as he can.
MARTIN: OK, so those are the rhetorical themes we're likely to hear. How do those translate into a legislative agenda?
LIASSON: Well, there's a difference between what the president wants to accomplish and what he hopes to accomplish. He wants to get the minimum wage raised. He wants to extend unemployment insurance. He wants to fund universal pre-K. He wants to pass some kind of immigration bill. Those are very hard. However, even of those things can't pass - they're popular issues, they're things that Democratic candidates can rally around in the upcoming elections - and that brings me to the other goal that the president wants to accomplish this year, which is limiting the damage to Democrats in the midterm election.
MARTIN: Aha. So how do you do that?
LIASSON: It's going to be hard. Six - midterm in a second term, generally the White House party loses seats. It looks like Republicans will pick up some seats in Congress. Districts are drawn there in a way that keeps Republican incumbents safe. In the Senate, the Democrats are defending a lot of seats in red states. It's going to be very hard there. There's a danger of losing their Senate majority.
And the states where the incumbents are running - Democratic incumbents - are hard ones for the president to make a difference; places like West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana. These are places where he couldn't even win a Democratic primary for president. So he will give them unifying themes and he can raise a lot of money, and he can be an optimistic activist president. And that's probably about it.
MARTIN: NPR senior political correspondent Mara Liasson, giving us a preview of the president's State of the Union address this Tuesday. Thanks so much, Mara.
LIASSON: Thank you, Rachel.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
To California now where a polarizing lawsuit goes to trial tomorrow. At issue, whether job protections for public school teachers undermines students' constitutional rights to an adequate education. The students and parents who filed the lawsuit say it could provide a model for challenging teacher protection laws in other states. But to unions and state officials, all the lawsuit does is demonize teachers.
NPR's Eric Westervelt has the story.
ERIC WESTERVELT, BYLINE: The crux of Vergara versus California is whether retaining ineffective teachers violates students' constitutional right to equality of education. The suit aims to overturn California laws the plaintiffs say make it extremely hard if not impossible to fire bad teachers. Twelve-year-old Daniella Martinez is one of the plaintiffs. Her mother Karen says incompetent teachers undermined her daughter's early education.
KAREN MARTINEZ: My daughter cried every day to get her to school. She couldn't read, so she was frustrated. The teachers that she had at that time didn't take the time to help her to learn and to help her figure out basic simple things - pronunciations. I mean being prepared in class to teach your students. That's what you're there for. That's your job.
WESTERVELT: All that the teachers and administrators told us, Martinez says, was get a tutor. Martinez has six other children. Her husband is a trucker. She says we're a lower income family, we couldn't afford a tutor.
The lawsuit argues that five state laws, including teacher tenure after 18 months and a last in, first out layoff policy ignore teacher quality and allow weak teachers to keep teaching. And the lawsuit alleges that these education statutes disproportionately affect minority and low-income students.
Ted Boutrous, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, calls it the dance of the lemons.
TED BOUTROUS: Many of the grossly ineffective teachers with seniority are shunted off to the lower income and minority districts that are often are viewed as less desirable positions. Then when the layoffs come, the more junior teachers are laid off first, which ends up leaving a higher proportion of what we call grossly ineffective teachers. And so it's really a vicious circle.
WESTERVELT: The lawsuit is sponsored by Students Matter, a non-profit founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch. Its backers see the case as a possible model for taking on similar statutes in other states they say protect bad teachers at the expense of kids. So the national unions have their eyes on this case too. Right now, it's being opposed by top state officials and two California teachers unions. They argue the suit will undermine due process and lead to arbitrary dismissals.
Randi Weingarten is president of the American Federation of Teachers. She says the suit makes teachers scapegoats for much bigger problems.
RANDI WEINGARTEN: They decided instead to go after individual teacher rights in the guise of helping children. Instead of working on fighting segregation, on fighting for equity, what this group of lawyers are doing is actually just trying to strip individual teachers' rights away.
MARTINEZ: Or as one education professor once put it: America can't fire its way to Finland, which famously out performs U.S. students on standardized tests.
WESTERVELT: Eric Westervelt, NPR News, San Francisco.
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MARTIN: And you're listening to NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.
In the Ukraine, the streets have erupted into violence again this morning with protesters vowing they will keep up the pressure on the government until it folds. The country's president this morning offered concessions but they were rejected by the opposition. And now, protesters are back in the streets, demanding that the president step aside and hold new elections.
Joining us now from Kiev, the capital city, is NPR's Corey Flintoff. Good morning, Corey.
COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: Can you start by explaining what has happened there politically in the last 24 hours? Sounds like protest leaders haven't ruled out negotiations but they nevertheless are still back on the main square?
FLINTOFF: Exactly, right. But things have been moving fast. Yesterday, President Viktor Yanukovych met with the three top leaders of the opposition. He offered a package of concessions. And he pretty much had to do something because the situation for the government has been deteriorating. The protests are spreading to cities in Western Ukraine, people there have seized control of government buildings. And the protests here in Kiev got much more violent over the past week after the government passed this law that would have banned most public protests.
So, Yanukovych offered the post of prime minister to one of the top protest leaders, Arseniy Yatsenyuk. He also offered to change that anti-protest law and to free the protesters who've been jailed over the past two months.
MARTIN: So those are the concessions that Yanukovych has offered. Why hasn't the opposition accepted those?
FLINTOFF: Well, the protesters have been demanding that Yanukovych step down and call new elections. As far as the concessions go, analysts I've talked to say that a lot of these concessions could potentially create problems for the opposition down the road. One told me that the whole package amounts to a kind of poison pill if the opposition accepts it. The bottom line is that Yanukovych would remain president and he still has control of the parliament.
So the opposition leaders told protesters last night that they're willing to keep talking, but they have a lot more demands that it to be satisfied. And those demands go right back to the dispute that set off these demonstrations back in November. They want to the government to sign a trade agreement that would align Ukraine with the European Union. And they want the government to free all political prisoners, including the president's nemesis, his main rival, the former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
MARTIN: Corey, these protests have been going on for two months at this point. Can you remind us just how violent they've become?
FLINTOFF: Well, I don't want to over emphasize the violence because the fighting that we see on TV, the burning buses and that sort of thing, takes place on a street that's about three blocks away from the main protest, and it involves a matter of several hundred protesters who have been throwing rocks and fighting with police who respond with rubber bullets and teargas and stun grenades and that thing. It's quite dramatic television, but it's really quite far away from the peaceful demonstration that's taking place in the central part of the city.
MARTIN: And I understand you've been out and about this morning talking to protesters. What do they think about this deal? What's the reaction?
FLINTOFF: Well, everyone I talked with this morning was deeply distrustful of the president's offer. Here's a typical response from a 29-year-old woman who gave her name as Aleksandra.
ALEKSANDRA: Oh, it looks like a trap, actually. Because they know that Maidan won't support it, because they only promise something but they never fulfill their promises.
FLINTOFF: When she says Maidan there - Maidan won't support it - she's referring to the protest movement as a whole. She went on to say that whoever takes over the government is going to inherit a financial and political mess, which they might then be blamed for when the elections take place. But that said, a lot of the people I've spoken with over the past few days have sounded fairly optimistic. They really think the opposition is winning but they're prepared for a pretty hard road ahead.
Just to give you the flavor, Rachel, of the protest this morning, this is what we heard as we were passing through the central square, which is known as the Maidan. It's an Orthodox Christian service, held in the freezing cold and thousands of people gathered to listen.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing in foreign language)
CROWD: (Singing in foreign language)
MARTIN: Some of the sounds emanating onto the streets of Kiev this morning.
NPR's Corey Flintoff talking with us from Kiev. Thank thanks so much, Corey.
FLINTOFF: Thank you. My pleasure, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Ten years ago, NASA's rover, optimistically named Opportunity, landed on Mars on what was to be a three-month mission. But Opportunity is still going strong today, still searching the Red Planet, sending data and images back to NASA. To celebrate Opportunity's decade of life, we called Jim Bell. He's an astronomer at Arizona State University. Welcome to the program.
JIM BELL: Great to be here.
MARTIN: So, take us back, Jim. What was Opportunity originally designed to do?
BELL: You know, Opportunity is the twin with Spirit. Both rovers landed on Mars in January of 2004, and both of them were designed to look for evidence of habitable environments in the past.
MARTIN: Spirit is no longer. What happened to that rover?
BELL: You know, they're solar-powered rovers. And Mars has these famous dust storms and a very dusty atmosphere. And over time that dust is settling on the solar panels. And we'd get lucky sometimes. The wind would come along and blow it off. But over time, Spirit's panels got dustier and dustier and dustier. And in 2010, the rover got stuck in some sand and it just wasn't enough power to extract ourselves. And that was the end of the mission.
MARTIN: What are the most significant scientific discoveries or revelations that are credited to Opportunity?
BELL: Right when we landed, we saw these beautiful rocky outcrops in a small crater that we landed in. And we drove Opportunity over to them and we saw evidence of water-formed minerals, you know, spectacular evidence that indeed there was liquid water on the surface of Mars near the surface of Mars long ago or early in the history of the planet, an environment that, you know, if we could have been there looking at it three and a half billion years ago, would have seem very, very Earth-like. And so the presence of liquid water, heat sources like the volcanoes and impact craters that we know were there and the possibility of organic molecules from asteroids and comets, which are impacting the planets all the time. Those are the ingredients you need for habitability.
MARTIN: The rover Opportunity most recently found this rock described by some as looking like a jelly doughnut. Can you talk a little bit about that? What makes discoveries like this that seem inconsequential so fascinating?
BELL: You know, there was a little rock that might have been pinched by the wheels, dislodged - the wheels were spinning and kind of kicked it up and scooted it into an area where a previous picture didn't show any rocks. But what seems to have happened is it was flipped over also. And who knows the last time the bottom of this rock saw the sunlight? Could have been three billion years ago, for all we know. And so the kinds of minerals and the kind of surface atmosphere chemistry that happens on the tops of rocks seems to be different than what happens on the bottom. So, we're trying to figure it out but it's just a fun surprise. And these things happen even 10 years after landing.
MARTIN: Jim Bell, an astronomer at Arizona State University talking about the rover Opportunity. Jim, thanks so much for talking with us.
BELL: Mars rocks. Thanks.
MARTIN: This is NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. And it is time for sports.
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MARTIN: OK. It's still technically football season but we're going to take a little break from all the Super Bowl hoopla to talk baseball. If you can believe it, we're only weeks away from spring training. And if you're a Yankees fan, there's a new pitching ace on the staff you can keep your eye on: Masahiro Tanaka. The Yankees signed him this past week from his Japanese club for a whopping $155 million. That seems like a lot to me. So, to hear what this means for the Bronx Bombers' bottom line and their fans, NPR's Mike Pesca joins us now. Hey, Mike.
MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Hello.
MARTIN: OK. Yankees had already said, I understand, that they weren't going to spend so much money anymore. I mean, they already had the highest payroll in baseball. What happened?
PESCA: Well, they always have the highest payroll in baseball. It's a place they were really comfortable with. But there was some talk coming into maybe last year, you know, maybe we should do it a little differently. There was an incentive. If we get our payroll under a certain number - it was $189 million - then the tax rate that we have to pay, OK, all of the sudden we're talking about laugher curves here. But the tax rate we have to pay would drop from 50 percent to 17 percent. It would be this kind of long-term austerity cost-saving thing.
MARTIN: Ok.
PESCA: And, you know, maybe in the short term we won't have these great teams but, you know, it will really help us overall in terms of our expenditures. Well, they tried that, or at least they semi-embraced that last season. And they actually had positions that were staffed by non-All Stars, even not-very-good players, and the fans revolted. I mean, they revolted to the tune of Yankee Stadium still drawing the most fans in the American League. But still three or four thousand fewer fans a game were coming out, and that made the Yankees do a recalculation.
MARTIN: So, I don't get that at all, because the Yankees are supposed to have this diehard fan base. All of the sudden, the team starts paying less for players to save money and the fans don't go to the games?
PESCA: Well, the fans said, all right. I mean, to be a Yankee fan it means, you know, we're trotting out an All Star at every position. It's clear that this isn't the year that the Yankees are going to win. And it just costs so much to go to the Bronx and pay $18 for a steak sandwich that, you know, unless we have a reasonable expectation of being in the World Series, we are staying away. This is the fascinating thing, I think. So, because the fans stayed away - a few thousand a game - but times whenever their average ticket price is, say, 50 bucks, and times the 50 bucks they'd stay at the stadium, the Yankees figured out actually austerity is a bad deal for us. You know, we got to spend so much because it'll make the - you know, they're like a luxury brand - you know, it'll make the Yankees that much better. And I think the fascinating thing is this: That those Yankee fans are like, oh, we're in second place. We're not going. Would you consider them good fans or bad fans?
MARTIN: Bad fans, bad fans.
PESCA: Wouldn't you? But they wound up really helping the Yankees because they revolted or at least stayed a little bit, they made the Yankees show much better this year. They made the Yankees sign Tanaka. They made the Yankees say, ah.
MARTIN: They just made their team pay more money.
PESCA: That's right. But they now have better players on the field. That's exactly what the fans wanted. In fact, if there are two season ticket holders and one showed up all the time, the other one said, oh, I just bought this year cause I wasn't into the team last year, the guy who just bought this year could turn to the diehard pinstripe dude and say you were really hurting the team last year. It was guys like me who made the team open up the payroll.
MARTIN: OK, Mike, do you have a curveball for us?
PESCA: I do. So, Stan Wawrinka beat Rafael Nadal in the finals of the Australian Open. Nadal was hurt. Wawrinka, even though he was wearing the white top, red shorts matching the flag of Poland, actually, he's not Polish. He's Swiss, though he has a paternal great-great grandfather or something with a Polish surname. I found out a lot of interesting Stan Wawrinka tidbits, looking them up on Vubayu, Vubayu, Vubayu Vikipedia(ph). Here's my favorite one: He has a tattoo. It's a Samuel Beckett quote. It says: Ever tried, ever failed, no matter. Try again, fail again, fail better. And I found out that Daniel Ratcliffe, of Harry Potter fame, considering getting the same tattoo.
MARTIN: As I'm sure you are. NPR's Mike Pesca. Thanks, Mike.
PESCA: Got to match the piercings.
MARTIN: Thanks, Mike
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This month marks the 150th anniversary an event known among the Navajo and Mescalero Apache people as the Long Walk. In 1864, the U.S. Army forced their ancestors to walk more than 400 miles from their traditional lands in northern Arizona to a desolate reservation in eastern New Mexico. Thousands died along the way.
Here's Laurel Morales of KJZZ.
LAUREL MORALES, BYLINE: So many Navajos like musician Clarence Clearwater have moved off the reservation for work.
CLARENCE CLEARWATER: (Singing in foreign language)
MORALES: Clearwater performs on the Grand Canyon Railway, the lone Indian among dozens of cowboys and train robbers entertaining tourists.
CLEARWATER: I always tell people I'm there to temper the cowboys. I'm there to give people the knowledge that there was more of the West than just cowboys.
MORALES: Clearwater retraced his great great-great-grandfather's footsteps 50 years ago for the Long Walk's 100th anniversary. Along the way, he learned this song.
CLEARWATER: (Singing) Shenasha. Shenahsha. Shenahsha.
MORALES: The song translates: I'm going home. It's a long ways, but I'm happy I'm going home.
CLEARWATER: When we were on that Long Walk, that was a song I heard all the way over there and back, and it was very powerful.
MORALES: Clearwater says the stories he heard as he walked are haunting: A Navajo family gave away their baby to a non-native family, so the infant would have a better chance at survival. Many drowned crossing the Rio Grande.
CLEARWATER: Some of the older people were talking about how elders like themselves had just been left out in the desert, you know, left where they fell.
JENNIFER DENETDALE: The consequences of the long walk we still live with today.
MORALES: Jennifer Denetdale is a historian and a University of New Mexico professor. She says severe poverty, addiction, suicide, crime on the reservation all have their roots in the Long Walk.
DENETDALE: So, I think it's really been a struggle to believe in our own ability to create, on the Navajo Nation, institutions and structures that will bring about prosperity and a way to live well.
MORALES: They walked to Fort Sumner, which was essentially a prison camp where Colonel Kit Carson attempted to, quote, "tame the savages." Today, a giant mural there commemorates the Long Walk. On one panel, swirls of red and orange, the desert heat, a long line of families, a child on his mother's back, a fallen elder, his son helping him up. Behind them a soldier on horseback cracks a whip. Navajo artist Shonto Begay painted the mural.
SHONTO BEGAY: I could feel and hear the cries of the people, the trail, the heat, the cold. Just to walk the grounds, a lump in your throat, like something bursting forth. I felt all the anguish of the ancestors.
MORALES: The Navajo culture is intrinsically tied to the earth. Begay says many live or frequently return to the place where their umbilical cords are buried.
BEGAY: When your umbilical cord is buried in the earth, and you know the ground where it is, you know, you feel at home and welcome anywhere in the world.
MORALES: The Long Walk was among many attempts by the federal government to wipe out native culture. Others include sending native children to boarding schools to eradicate their traditions. Begay says he was five years old, out herding sheep when a man driving a flatbed truck gave him candy and hauled him away.
BEGAY: I grew up with a different name, a government name: Wilson. There was a lot of dead presidents and generals. In the early 1980s, I reclaimed my great grandmother's name, Shonto.
MORALES: Shonto: It means light dancing on water. It is also the name of his town, his home where he remains connected today. He wants his children and grandchildren to know their ancestors' suffering and determination meant something.
BEGAY: You know, hey, their forefathers survived. Make something of it. Honor it.
MORALES: For NPR News, I'm Laurel Morales, in Flagstaff.
INSKEEP: That story came to us from our friends at the local news initiative Fronteras: the Changing America Desk. This is NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Another case when less may well be more is the treatment for clubfoot. That's a severe, inward twisting of the feet, which makes it difficult to walk. Just a decade ago, most babies born with clubfoot had major surgery, which could cause a lifetime of chronic pain.
Now, few get surgery, thanks to a simple treatment that is completely noninvasive. Jenny Gold has the story.
JENNY GOLD, BYLINE: Mary Snyder found out her daughter had clubfoot at her 19-week ultrasound. Both of Alice's feet were completely turned in, forming the twisted U-shape typical of clubfoot.
MARY SNYDER: It was terrifying. I mean, even thinking back to it, it was very emotional. We did a lot of testing and everything to make sure she was going to be OK, but you never really know until you seen them when they're born.
GOLD: But looking at the quiet kindergartner who loves soccer and swimming today, you'd never know.
ALICE SNYDER: I'm 6, and my name is Alice Snyder.
GOLD: And that's thanks to Dr. John Herzenberg, an orthopedic surgeon at Sinai Hospital, in Baltimore.
DR. JOHN HERZENBERG: Well, let's roll up your pants and take a look at you walking, please. Her feet are turned out nicely, and she's walking heel-toe. Can you walk on your tippy toes now?
GOLD: Alice has never had to have surgery. Instead, she was given the Ponseti Method - a noninvasive and cheaper alternative. When Alice was just 8 days old, Dr. Herzenberg began applying a series of casts, to slowly turn her feet out in a very particular way. Then, she started wearing a special set of boots connected by a bar, at night.
HERZENBERG: In the past, before I learned about the Ponseti Method, guaranteed, I would've had to - literally - do a surgical operation to take apart and put back together the entire foot.
GOLD: That surgery usually had to be repeated several times, causing a buildup of scar tissue that can lead to arthritis and pain. The Ponseti Method, on the other hand, is pretty much painless, with just a small incision to clip a tendon. And most kids easily adapt to the boots because they start wearing them so early.
The method was developed by Dr. Ignacio Ponseti at the University of Iowa, in the 1950s. He spent his career tirelessly trying to get other doctors to accept it. He died in 2009. Here's Dr. Herzenberg again.
HERZENBERG: People, you know, were just falling over themselves to do fancy, invasive surgery. And this one strange, old guy who speaks softly with a Spanish accent, in Iowa, was getting sort of ignored by the drumbeats of the people who were in favor of surgery.
GOLD: Surgeons are trained to operate, explains Herzenberg, and usually that's the way they make money. The Ponseti Method brings in a lot less for orthopedists. So for about 50 years, the technique mostly stayed in Iowa. But then, something new came along - the Internet.
HERZENBERG: Clubfoot is a real prototype for how the Internet has changed medicine and how parents have been the driving force, in many ways.
GOLD: Jennifer Trevillian was one of those parents. When her daughter was born with clubfoot in 2000, she started researching the condition on her new dial-up connection. There wasn't much. But she did find a few other parents talking about another option on iVillage, and a Yahoo support group called NoSurgery4ClubFoot. A few days later, she was on her way from Michigan to Iowa, to see Dr. Ponseti.
JENNIFER TREVILLIAN: In the amount of time that we would have just been waiting for her to be big enough to tolerate the anesthesia for the reconstructive surgery she was supposed to have, Dr. Ponseti completely corrected her foot.
GOLD: Trevillian joined the small but growing group of parents evangelizing about the Ponseti Method online.
TREVILLIAN: When you find good treatment, you become passionate about helping other families who are in the same situation.
GOLD: Trevillian built a few websites herself, telling her daughter's story; and she stayed active on the fast-growing Yahoo group. Other parents started traveling long distances to find a Ponseti practitioner.
TREVILLIAN: The way that the clubfoot treatment pendulum has swung is really a classic example of supply and demand because once parents found out about it, they demanded it for their kids.
GOLD: And compelled orthopedists to learn how to do it. Today, the nonsurgical method is almost always the treatment of choice for clubfoot, and it's recommended by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. It's important to find an expert at the technique because if it's done wrong, the child could end up needing surgery anyway. But when done correctly, 95 percent of kids born with clubfoot will never need a major surgery.
For NPR News, I'm Jenny Gold.
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For all the people who have looked at the Grand Canyon - the visitors who have peered over the edge, the tourists in helicopters who've flown overhead, the producers who filmed that special three-part "Brady Bunch" episode - nobody knows how old it is. Some scientists say the Grand Canyon is young, in relative terms, just six million years old, while others argue that it dates back to the days of the dinosaurs, much earlier. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports that one group now thinks it has the answer.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: At the south rim of the Grand Canyon, there's a walking path called the Trail of Time. It uses the Grand Canyon's awesome scenery and rocks to try to convey the vastness of geologic time. And it tells tourists that the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon in the last six million years.
KARL KARLSTROM: The trail of time exhibit has what we considered at the time, in 2010, to be the scientific consensus on the age of Grand Canyon, and that's five to six million years old.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Karl Karlstrom is a geologist at the University of New Mexico who worked on the exhibit. He hiked the canyon as a kid and has studied it professionally for 30 years. He says figuring out when a canyon was carved is not easy because rivers carve canyons through erosion.
KARLSTROM: And erosion takes away material and so geologists are left without the rock record, without the physical evidence of the carving. What you are left with is a landscape, a land form.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: In recent years, scientists have started using sophisticated new techniques that can reconstruct the history of erosion by analyzing the chemistry of one of the minerals that make up canyon rocks. And in 2012, one research team concluded that the Grand Canyon was actually cut about 70 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous, which startled experts like Karlstrom.
KARLSTROM: That whole episode - is it old, is it young - caused my group to rethink what we meant by old and young and what is the evidence.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Now, in the journal Nature Geoscience, he and some colleagues describe a new creation story for the Grand Canyon. They say it is neither old nor young; rather, it's both. They think that about six million years ago, a river forging a zigzagging path across the Colorado plateau found part of its way through old canyons that already existed which means that although the Grand Canyon as a whole is relatively young, a couple of sections are more ancient.
KARLSTROM: We're making a major leap from thinking of a canyon that has a simple history, it was all carved at once either at 70 or at five to six, to a more sophisticated understanding of how landscapes actually evolve through time.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Not everyone thinks this will be the last word. Brian Wernicke is a geologist at Caltech who is in the more ancient Grand Canyon camp. He doesn't buy all the arguments in this new paper. But to him, the important thing is that it shows a real shift in people's thinking.
BRIAN WERNICKE: In the mid-2000s there was this monolithic view that oh, yeah, the Grand Canyon is very young and it was cut six million years ago by the Colorado River which was born six million years ago. OK? That's not the discussion right now. We've all learned that it's a lot more complicated than that.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He expects that over the next year, there will be more data and more debate. Karl Karlstrom says, for a scientist, all this is exciting.
It's spectacular. You know, if you're willing to change your mind, based on evidence, it's great fun.
He says now, when he takes river trips through the canyon, he sees it with new eyes. Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: This is NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep.
Today in Your Health, it is sometimes possible to try too hard. And we have two stories in our occasional series Less Is More. Sometimes, less aggressive care or less technology can be better for you. For example, a simple alternative to surgery can help kids with club feet.
But first, NPR's Richard Knox reports on a growing problem for hospitals: alarm fatigue.
RICHARD KNOX, BYLINE: Go into most any hospital these days and you'll hear something like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONITOR ALARMS)
KNOX: To most people it sounds like medical Muzak. But to doctors and nurses, those constant beeps are coded messages.
(SOUNDBITE OF AN ALARM)
JAMES PIEPENBRINK: That's a crisis.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONITOR ALARMS)
PIEPENBRINK: That's a warning.
(SOUNDBITE OF AN ALARM)
PIEPENBRINK: That's an advisory.
(SOUNDBITE OF AN ALARM)
PIEPENBRINK: That's a crisis.
KNOX: James Piepenbrink is chief clinical engineer at Boston Medical Center. We're on 7-North, a cardiac care unit with 24 sick patients wired up to various monitors.
PIEPENBRINK: And each of them may have multiple alarms occurring.
KNOX: Piepenbrink and his colleagues added them up. 7-North was averaging close to 12,000 alarms a day.
Deborah Whalen, a nurse-manager here, says it was producing alarm fatigue.
DEBORAH WHALEN: Alarm fatigue is when there are so many noises on the unit that it actually de-sensitizes the staff, so the staff no longer hear them. If you have multiple, multiple alarms going off with varying frequencies, you just don't hear them.
KNOX: That obviously can be dangerous. Patients can die when an important alarm is missed or an electrode gets unstuck or a monitor's battery goes dead. Boston Medical Center hasn't recorded any patient deaths due to alarm failure.
WHALEN: We were lucky.
KNOX: But national data bases have recorded hundreds of alarm-related deaths in recent years. And the known alarm deaths are just the tip of an iceberg, says Dr. Ana McKee, chief medical officer of a quality control group called The Joint Commission.
DR. ANA MCKEE: It is pervasive in almost any accident that occurs in a hospital. If you look carefully, you will most likely find that there was an alarm as a contributing factor.
KNOX: That's why The Joint Commission has put alarm fatigue at the top of its current list of problems that hospitals are expected to tackle. McKee says technology has gotten out of control.
MCKEE: We have devices that beep when they are working normally. We have devices that beep when they're not working.
KNOX: Boston Medical Center is one of the few hospitals that apparently have conquered alarm fatigue. Its analysis show that the vast majority of alarms are unnecessary. They can simply be switched off. Other low-level alarms were upgraded to crisis mode. And Deborah Whalen says nurses were given authority to change alarm settings to account for individual patients' differences.
WHALEN: Once that happened, many, many, many, many alarms disappeared. And instead of 90,000 alarms a week, we dropped to 10,000 alarms a week.
KNOX: She says it's a clear case of less is more.
WHALEN: I think less is better. If you have more and more and more data, more and more alarms, more and more technology bad data in, bad decisions made.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Doreen you have a call on line one. Doreen, line one.
KNOX: On 7-North, and throughout Boston Medical Center, you can easily hear the difference.
(SOUNDBITE OF AMBIENT HOSPITAL NOISE)
KNOX: That was several seconds without an alarm. Nurse Amanda Gerity says when a crisis alarm does sound, the staff can easily hear and respond.
AMANDA GERITY: It's a lot more manageable.
KNOX: How's your life changed?
GERITY: It's a lot more pleasant being at work. I don't go home and I don't sleep and hear alarms in my dreams anymore.
(LAUGHTER)
INSKEEP: The hospital says patients like it better too. For one thing, when they press the nurse-call button, the nurse is more likely to hear it.
Richard Knox, NPR News, Boston.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Earlier this month, Intel announced it would delay the opening of a massive $5 billion factory in Chandler, Arizona. Then, a few days later, the computer-chip maker made headlines again when it said it would cut more than 5,000 jobs.
From member station KJZZ, Peter O'Dowd has a history of the troubled project.
PETER O'DOWD, BYLINE: As far as factories go, this one was about as ballyhooed as they come. In 2012, President Obama visited Intel's Ocotillo campus in suburban Phoenix the day after his State of the Union address.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Because, honestly, first of all, who wants to miss out on a chance to see the crane? That thing is huge.
O'DOWD: Mr. Obama stood beneath a towering crane at the construction site, a crane so big, it could lift 4,000 tons. The president then boasted that Intel's factory, known as Fab 42, would someday crank out even more high-powered computer chips for laptops and phones.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
OBAMA: The factory that's being built behind me is an example of an America that is within our reach: an America that attracts the next generation of good manufacturing jobs.
(SOUNDBITE OF FACTORY MACHINERY)
O'DOWD: Oh, what a difference two years make. I'm not far from the very spot where the president spoke. That multi-billion dollar factory he was raving about is finished, but there's nothing happening inside it. I asked Intel to join me here, but instead, they sent me a statement that said the new factory space would be set aside for future use. Many of the 1,000 or so jobs the project was supposed to have created have been relocated to other buildings on this sprawling industrial complex.
ANDY NG: When I think about Intel, it's a company in transition.
O'DOWD: Morningstar analyst Andy Ng follows the semiconductor industry. He says Intel hit headwinds when demand for personal computers plummeted in favor of tablets and mobile phones. Indeed, the company's stock has stagnated since the day Mr. Obama made his visit to Arizona.
NG: When you look at what Intel was planning for Chandler, I don't think they figured the PC market and the demand for PC processors would decline so quickly.
O'DOWD: The problem is that 60 percent of Intel's business comes from the processors inside PCs. The company said this month that revenue would be flat in 2014, a big reason for the 5 percent haircut in its global workforce by the end of the year.
NG: Remember, this is a big organization, too, right. So you can't just right the ship overnight.
O'DOWD: And some industry experts believe Intel has recognized its imbalance. Ng says it's transitioning well into the race for smartphones and tablets. He sees potential in the company's push for building cloud storage and server capacity for the crush of new mobile devices popping up around the world. And there's something else.
ROGER KAY: There's one fork in the road for Intel that it is thinking about going down.
O'DOWD: Roger Kay follows the industry with Endpoint Technologies Associates.
KAY: And that is becoming a foundry, or making parts for other companies.
O'DOWD: Kay says Intel has the industry's most advanced manufacturing techniques, and smaller chip designers would pay to fill some of the empty factory space in Arizona. Still, Kay says this potential doesn't completely take the sting out of Intel's recent trouble.
KAY: I imagine that neither Obama, nor Intel would like to be reminded of that day when they proclaimed the factory the greatest thing since sliced bread for the American public. It's true, it's kind of a setback.
O'DOWD: For its part, Intel won't say when it plans to remove the mothballs from Fab 42. But the company does point out that a $300 million research building will open nearby within six months.
For NPR News, I'm Peter O'Dowd, in Phoenix.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Federal Open Market Committee meets this week. That's the group of key officials at the Federal Reserve who together are supposed to make many of the Feds most vital decisions.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This week's meeting is the first of the year and the last to be run by Ben Bernanke. As the Fed chairman departs, the Fed is widely expected to do more than just say goodbye. It's expected to continue scaling back its bond-buying program.
INSKEEP: That program has been a key part of the Central Bank's efforts to spur economic growth since the financial crisis. Maybe the story getting the most attention, though, is that by the end of this week there will be a new leader at the Fed. In five days, Janet Yellen takes over. She is the first woman ever to lead the nation's central bank. So let's look at Ben Bernanke's legacy as he goes away. NPR's John Ydstie has a first draft.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: There's no doubt that during his two terms as Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke faced a challenge unlike any Fed chairman since the Great Depression: a global financial crisis that threatened to become financial Armageddon, followed by a deep recession. Bernanke talked about how he survived it all during an appearance at the Brookings Institution recently.
BEN BERNANKE: I was so absorbed in what was happening and trying to find response to it that I wasn't really in that kind of reflective mode. I mean later on, you know, it's kind of like, you know, if you're in car wreck or something, you're mostly involved in trying to avoid going off the bridge and then later on you say, oh my god, you know, but...
YDSTIE: One of the passengers in that careening car has strong views on how well Bernanke did his job.
HENRY PAULSON: Wow. You know, he's - I think he's going to go down as one of the greatest Fed chairmen of all times.
YDSTIE: That's former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who worked arm-in-arm with Bernanke to keep the financial system from total collapse.
PAULSON: He made tough, courageous, sometimes unpopular decisions, which I think were necessary to avoid economic catastrophe and prevent a second Great Depression.
YDSTIE: And Bernanke's decisions were also extremely creative, says Harvard economist Ken Rogoff.
KEN ROGOFF: I remember waking up the morning that they had turned the investment banks into ordinary banks so they could lend them money and think, Am I living in an alternate universe? This is crazy that places like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which do these fancy operations, we're going to call them banks. But it was a very creative way to try to prevent a complete implosion in the system.
And they did these things with saving the money market fund. They're not supposed to back the money market funds. They did, and it - I think it helped save the system.
YDSTIE: Rogoff, who has studied and written about the aftermath of financial crises, says a hundred years from now economists may still be marveling at what the Bernanke Fed did. There are some critics of Bernanke's decisions during the crisis. Vincent Reinhart, a top staff member at the Fed under both Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, says the popular but in his eyes mistaken version of events is that the global financial system was hit by a perfect storm and the Fed came to the rescue.
VINCENT REINHART: And the vision then we have is Ben Bernanke in the yellow slicker, fighting the elements to keep the ship of the economy afloat. I think that's the wrong metaphor, because policy actions influenced the course of the storm.
YDSTIE: And, Reinhart says, actually made the financial crisis worse. Specifically, Reinhart has argued that Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Paulson and Timothy Geithner, then the president of the New York Fed, made a big mistake when they decided that the government should aid in the rescue of the Wall Street bank Bear Stearns back in March of 2008.
REINHART: Policymakers didn't seem to explore enough alternatives before they arrived at the conclusion that they should lend to an investment bank for the first time in 60 years.
YDSTIE: Reinhart says that set up the panic of September of 2008, when the government failed to rescue another big investment bank, Lehman Brothers. Alan Blinder, a former vice-chairman of the Fed and colleague of Bernanke's at Princeton, thinks he was a terrific chairman, but Blinder doesn't give him a perfect grade.
ALAN BLINDER: Oh, I have to give him an A-minus, and the minus is the Lehman Brothers.
YDSTIE: Bernanke responded to the criticism over the Lehman's collapse in an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" in March of 2009.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "60 MINUTES")
BERNANKE: There were many people who said, Let 'em fail. You know, it's not a problem. The markets will take care of it. And I think I knew better than that. And Lehman proved that you cannot let a large, internationally active firm fail in the middle of a financial crisis. Now, was it a mistake? It wasn't a mistake for the following reason: We didn't have the option, we didn't have the tools.
YDSTIE: The legal tools, that is. Blinder says the legal argument was that the Fed couldn't lend to Lehman to prop it up because the bank didn't have enough solid collateral.
BLINDER: And therefore it was illegal for the Fed to extend credit to Lehman Brothers, as it had six months earlier to Bear Stearns.
YDSTIE: Blinder thinks the Fed could have found a way around the legal obstacles, given the immense stakes. After the financial crisis subsided, the Bernanke Fed also took extraordinary action to try to stimulate growth, including pumping money into the financial system by purchasing $85 billion a month in government bonds and mortgage-backed securities.
The aim was to reduce long-term interest rates. Critics warned it could lead to financial bubbles. And indeed many analysts believe it helped fuel a run-up in the stock market. That, along with the rescue of Wall Street banks, has led to charges that Bernanke's Fed cared more about Wall Street than Main Street and hard hit homeowners. Bernanke rejected that assessment during his recent Brookings appearance.
BERNANKE: There certainly has been pushback. We hope that as the economy improves, and as we tell our story and as more information comes out about, you know, why we did what we did and so on that people will appreciate and understand that what we did was necessary, that it was in the interest of the broader public. It was aimed at helping the average American.
YDSTIE: Telling the Fed's story more successfully and better communicating its policies was a goal for Bernanke when he took over the chairmanship in 2006, even before the financial crisis. He has made great strides at that, including instituting regular news conferences to help explain Fed policy decisions. Here he is at the first every news conference by a Fed chairman in April of 2011.
BERNANKE: I personally have always been a big believer in providing as much information as you can to help the public understand what you're doing, to help the markets understand what you're doing, and to be accountable to the public for what you're doing.
YDSTIE: Former Treasury Secretary Paulson says given the extraordinary circumstances he faced, Bernanke has left a remarkable legacy.
PAULSON: And I think very importantly, he's leaving the Fed with its independence and credibility intact, and that's no small accomplishment given the extraordinary things both he and the Fed were forced to do.
YDSTIE: On Friday, Ben Bernanke will step down from what many view as the second most powerful job in America and become a private citizen again. John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We now know the winners of the 56th annual Grammy Awards.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And also what the winners wore.
INSKEEP: Members of the Recording Academy who vote on the Grammys spread the love.
MONTAGNE: Several acts split the top awards including the French dance music duo Daft Punk.
INSKEEP: And 17-year old New Zealander, Lorde.
MONTAGNE: Along with Seattle hip hop duo, Macklemore together with Ryan Lewis.
INSKEEP: Newcomer Kacey Musgraves took home the two top country Grammys.
MONTAGNE: The Grammy broadcast lasted three hours and 45 minutes, enough time for viewers to send out countless snarky tweets about what they saw - but only enough time to hand out 10 awards.
INSKEEP: Because most awards were handed out before the telecast. NPR's Mandalit del Barco was backstage and reports on the winners you didn't see.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: For artists who are not household names with multimillion dollar record deals, getting a Grammy Award is a really big deal. It was for gospel singer Tye Tribbet.
TYE TRIBBET: Wooo.
BARCO: For some, it was redemption for toiling for years in obscurity. Onstage, award-winning jazz critic Neil Tesser reminded people why album notes are important.
NEIL TESSER: For anybody who's over the age of 35, liner notes have been so important. They've provided insight and commentary and biography.
(APPLAUSE)
BARCO: For jazz artist Maria Schneider, whose collaboration with classical soprano Dawn Upshaw won four Grammies, it was a platform to scold those who don't pay for music.
MARIA SCHNEIDER: Most of us who are coming through here, that you've seen this afternoon, we're funding our own records.
BARCO: Backstage, Schneider said it was her Fans, not record companies, who helped pay for her album online.
Canadian Jennifer Gasoi won Best Children's Album for "Throw a penny in the Wishing well."
JENNIFER GASOI: I think it's going to elevate my career. I think it's going to give me opportunities that I've been hoping for.
BARCO: During the pre-telecast show, homegrown Los Angeles band La Santa Cecilia took the stage to perform.
LA SANTA CECILIA: (Singing in Spanish)
BARCO: The band won for best Latin Rock, Urban or Alternative Album. Backstage, lead singer Marisol Hernandez dedicated their award to 11 million undocumented immigrants living in this country.
MARISOL HERNANDEZ: To all the people that are working behind the scenes, you know, in this country, all the gardeners and domestic workers - which are people like my mother - all the people that are working hard and that are living in the shadows.
BARCO: Hernandez says its independent musicians like herself who can provide a voice for the people you don't see on TV.
Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
The political turmoil in Ukraine is spreading. Protests that began last fall when the country's president refused to sign a trade deal with the European Union - under pressure from its neighbor Russia - have now moved out of the capital.
More disturbing for President Viktor Yanukovych, demonstrations are now occurring in cities normally supportive of his governing party. And they're all calling on Yanukovych to step down.
NPR's Corey Flintoff is on the line with us now from the capital, Kiev. Good morning.
COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: Good morning, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Let's start with how significant these reports of protests in other cities are. Sounds bad for the president.
FLINTOFF: Well, this could be very significant, Renee. Yanukovych's Party of Regions pretty much has dominated the industrial regions in the eastern and southern parts of this country. And up until now, there's been very little anti-government protest.
Now we're hearing that thousands of people have turned out in some big cities in the east and the south. They've tried to seize or block access to some of these regional government buildings, and they've clashed with police. We're hearing that there have been dozens of arrests.
You know, I talked with a number of people from the east and south at this protest camp here in Kiev, and they insist that there's a lot more people in their home towns that oppose Yanukovych, but up to now, they've been afraid to take action.
MONTAGNE: And the president offered what seemed to be pretty dramatic concessions over the weekend. He offered the post of prime minister to one of the main opposition leaders and the job of deputy prime minister to another. The opposition rejected that offer. Why?
FLINTOFF: Well, the opposition leaders say it's a trick, and it's something that would actually put them in a much worse position if they accepted it. Yanukovych would still hold power over the executive branch. His political party still controls the parliament. So they could basically make it impossible for the prime minister to accomplish anything. So I'd say this offer from Yanukovych has refocused the opposition on the original complaints that brought on this protest in the first place.
They're demanding an end to government corruption. They want the government to free political prisoners, and they want Ukraine to be aligned with the European Union, and not with Russia.
MONTAGNE: So, protesters have taken over government buildings. Where is that headed?
FLINTOFF: Well, it happened here in Kiev last night, protesters took over the Justice Ministry building. And Vitaly Klitschko - who is this former heavyweight boxing champion, I mean, he's emerged as one of the protest leaders - went to the ministry and tried to persuade these activists to leave, but they refused.
So, now the Justice Minister - she's a strong supporter of President Yanukovych - says that she'll ask him to impose a state of emergency if the protesters don't leave. And that, of course, would give the government a lot more wide-ranging authority to use force.
MONTAGNE: And, Corey, there have already been very violent protests. I mean, for the first time, last week several protesters were killed. A funeral for one of them drew thousands and thousands of people yesterday. Is there a risk that more extreme groups in the opposition are taking over?
FLINTOFF: Well, radicals and especially ultra-nationalists have been involved in some of the clashes that we've been seeing on TV, but, you know, I think it's clear, too, that the opposition leaders are having a really hard time controlling these people. But, you know, yesterday, at the funeral, I think I saw that the protest still has very solid middle-class support.
You know, the protest leaders had called for a big political rally in the main square, but they canceled it because of the funeral. And this demonstrator, he was a 25-year-old guy who was shot to death last week. And despite that, the square was filled up with tens of thousands of people, most of them just standing quietly.
And as I walked through that crowd, I was struck, you know, by the large numbers of women there, the large numbers of middle-class, middle-aged people who've been turning out week after week to oppose the government. So I think they still support the protest.
MONTAGNE: This would seem, Corey, like it's not ending any time soon. But what are the next steps, do you think?
FLINTOFF: Well, Yanukovych has called a special session of parliament for tomorrow, and he says it will act on some of these other concessions that he's offered. You know, for instance, he promised to change a recently passed law that would effectively ban most kinds of civic protest. In fact, it would ban most of the tactics that the opposition has been using for the past two months.
The opposition was outraged by the way that law was rammed through parliament, and they're saying they want it repealed, not changed. Yanukovych has also promised to come up with an amnesty for the protesters who've been arrested.
But, you know, now, it seems that if there's a way to resolve this peacefully, it's not going to come in the parliament. It's going to have to come in talks between the president and protest leaders.
MONTAGNE: That's NPR's Corey Flintoff, talking to us from Kiev, Ukraine about protests there. Thanks very much.
FLINTOFF: Thank you, Renee.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Today, a corruption trial begins in one of the great cities of the world. Pick your pronunciation: New Orleans, New Orleans, New Orleans, New Orleans. Former Mayor Ray Nagin faces federal criminal charges there. Prosecutors accuse him of a series of schemes to profit from his position. He's accused of taking more than $200,000 worth of bribes from businessmen who, in turn, won lucrative city contracts.
NPR's Debbie Elliott reports.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Ray Nagin became the face of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina bore down on the city in 2005, and he urged residents to flee.
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MAYOR RAY NAGIN: The storm surge most likely will topple our levee system. So that's why we're ordering a mandatory evacuation.
ELLIOTT: He blasted then-President Bush for not sending federal help sooner. And perhaps most famously, uttered this line in the aftermath of the devastating storm.]
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NAGIN: We, as black people, it's time. It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans.
ELLIOTT: Now, the former two-term mayor is set to square off with federal prosecutors in a criminal case that marks the first time a mayor of New Orleans has been indicted.
STEPHANIE GRACE: Plenty of other public officials have been indicted, but not New Orleans mayors.
ELLIOTT: Stephanie Grace is a newspaper columnist for the New Orleans Advocate. She says it's ironic that when Nagin first ran for office as a political newcomer in 2002, he pledged to take on business as usual.
GRACE: He was a reformer. He really ran against exactly this type of thing: contracting, self-dealing. He talked about taking the "for sale" sign off of City Hall.
ELLIOTT: But Nagin's second term was plagued with allegations of corruption, and frustration over the pace of the Katrina recovery. A number of contractors and one of the mayor's top aides have since either pleaded guilty or been convicted in a series of similar but unrelated bribery schemes.
A year ago, federal prosecutors got their biggest target - indicting Nagin on 21 counts, including conspiracy, bribery and money laundering. Grace says he's accused of being on the receiving end of quite an assortment of kickbacks.
GRACE: Money, travel, trips to Hawaii, trips to New York, granite - free granite.
ELLIOTT: Nagin owns a granite countertop business with his sons. New Orleans lawyer Chick Foret is a former federal prosecutor.
CHICK FORET: This is the classic public corruption quid pro quo case, where it is alleged that the mayor, while he was in office and after he was out of office - he got certain gratuities, and large sums of gratuities, in return for city contracts, many of which were no-bid contracts - professional services contracts, consultants.
ELLIOTT: Ray Nagin, who now lives in Texas, has said little since his indictment. His lawyer, Robert Jenkins, has not returned NPR's calls for comment. But speaking to New Orleans television station WWL after a court hearing last week, Jenkins downplayed the case.
ROBERT JENKINS: It seems like a big trial for you all. But it's just a trial, and a jury's going to make their decision. So it's not as big as people trying to make it seem.
ELLIOTT: Legal observers, including Loyola University Law professor Dane Ciolino, say Nagin has an uphill battle in court, given the number of former friends who are expected to take the witness stand against him.
DANE CIOLINO: He is, in order to prevail, going to have to convince these jurors that not one or two or three, but four, five or six witnesses are all lying in an effort to further their own goals and to lessen their own sentences. That's a tough order for any criminal defendant.
ELLIOTT: Jury selection is to begin today, but court watchers say it's never too late for a plea agreement to avoid trial.
Debbie Elliott, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.
New York City is so huge it seems to absorb any event without getting excited, apparently even the Super Bowl. Hotel managers in New York jacked up prices for the big weekend but failed to get a flood of guests - prices are returning to normal. Still hoping to capitalize on the presence of the Broncos and Seahawks, a New York restaurant is offering special dishes - a Peyton Manning Po'boy, Richard Sherman's Big Mouth Burger and, of course, an Orange Crush cocktail.
It's MORNING EDITION.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Achieving the Olympic dream is not just about hard work, it's about money. It costs a lot. Although a few elite athletes earned millions in endorsements, most competitors must pay their own way. Bill Kerig is a documentary filmmaker. Recently he started RallyMe, a crowd-funding site to help athletes raise the money they need to have a shot at the Winter Games. We reached him at Salt Lake City.
Welcome.
BILL KERIG: Well, thank you, Renee.
MONTAGNE: First, give us a sense. What does it cost to get to the Olympics?
KERIG: The average cost per athlete in the Winter Olympics, they will have spent 85 to $250,000 per year for most of these athletes for a decade.
MONTAGNE: Give us an example. What might one have to shell out a lot of money on?
KERIG: Travel, you're looking at 150 to 200 travel days per year for every one of these athletes. Then, when you come to equipment, you know, you're looking at speed skates: $1900 for the boots, $650 for the blade. You need three or four pair. If you're lucky enough maybe you have a sponsor that picks up the cost of your equipment. But even if all of these expenses are covered, now you've got a really, really taxing full-time job that doesn't pay you anything.
MONTAGNE: You can't have a great career, a high-paying career while you're devoting more or less all of your time to training. So a lot of these athletes do what?
KERIG: One of the elite ski jumpers who is going to the Olympics is a hostess at a restaurant. Lots of other athletes work at Home Depot. And these are $10 hour part-time jobs.
MONTAGNE: Well, when it came to this crowd-funding site, how did you think this up?
KERIG: About four years ago, I was making a film and it was about women ski jumpers and their fight for gender equality in the Winter Olympics. And here we have a world champion standing at a farmers market with a salad bowl on the table, saying, hey, have you heard about women ski jumping - anything you can give would really help. And I had crowdfunded part of the funding for my film. And I'm going, wait a minute, why aren't you using the Internet?
So fast-forward one year, we launch RallyMe. Lindsey Van is the first athlete we had on there, she set out to raise $13,000 and she raised almost $21,000. She was able to kick out her three roommates, quit her part-time job and focus full-time on Sochi. And she's going to the Sochi Olympic Games.
MONTAGNE: Now, when you're talking about Lindsey Van, you are not talking about the other ski champion Lindsey Vonn. Right, let's clarify.
KERIG: The other Lindsey - yeah, the comparison is really great because Lindsey Vonn and Lindsey Van are both world champions. Lindsey Vonn is an alpine ski racer. Lindsey Van is a ski jumper. They're both pioneers in their sport. Lindsey Vonn makes many millions of dollars a year. Lindsey Van works for $10 an hour as an assistant physical therapist at a clinic in Park City, Utah.
MONTAGNE: What is in it for people out there who send in their money? Obviously it's not a direct kind of investment.
KERIG: What the boosters are really getting is they're buying the story. Yeah, maybe you get a hat, maybe you get a signed picture, a Facebook shout-out, but really what you're buying is a story. I can look at that athlete in Sochi and say, I was a part of that - I helped her get there. For me, it's so worth it.
MONTAGNE: Thank you very much for joining us.
KERIG: Well, thank you. This has been excellent.
MONTAGNE: Bill Kerig is the founder of RallyMe. That's a crowd-funding site for athletes including those headed to the Winter Olympic Games.
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MONTAGNE: This is NPR News.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
NPR's business news starts with a pricier Pony Express.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: Can I just mention, there was a big snowstorm in Washington, D.C. the other day. Most of the city shut down. My letter carrier arrived. Thank you. Thank you, sir.
It is going to cost a few more pennies, though, to send a letter through the mail. The cost of a first-class postage stamp is now 49 cents - three cents more than previously, the largest increase in consumer postage prices in more than a decade.
The Postal Service lost $5 billion last year, and in an effort to save money, it tried to end Saturday delivery but that was thwarted by Congress.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Federal Reserve officials are meeting this week to decide whether to continue easing up on economic stimulus measures. The pullback by the Fed so far is being felt around the world, especially in some emerging markets. And the turbulence helped send stock market prices plummeting on Friday.
NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: In recent days, investors who have been especially worried about two things: First, growth is slowing in China, which could hurt economies that export a lot to that country. Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Reserve is slowing its stimulus measures; that is sending interest rates higher and makes it more expensive to borrow.
Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University, said these factors are hurting emerging markets, such as Turkey and Argentina and their currencies have taken a tumble.
ESWAR PRASAD: I think what we're seeing is the wheat being separated from the chaff, that the weaker and more vulnerable emerging markets are the ones that are coming under a lot of pressure.
ZARROLI: Some of these emerging markets are small so the global impact isn't likely to be enormous. But there is a nervousness about where the economy is headed, which was one of the reasons for Friday's big sell-off in the stock market.
for the United States, weaker currency abroad means U.S. exports will become more expensive, so companies that were hoping to sell more products overseas maybe disappointed.
PRASAD: A strong U.S. dollar and a weaker demand for U.S. products abroad could mean that the U.S. economic recovery and the job growth in the U.S. are held back a bit.
ZARROLI: And that threat is looming at a time when the U.S. economy has improved but is still underperforming. So there's a lot at stake were American companies.
Whether the market turmoil continues will depend in part on what the Fed does at its meeting this week, which happens to be the last one for outgoing Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.
With the economy improving, the Fed is expected to continue taking steps that will push interest rates higher. That will help draw in money from overseas but it will further weaken foreign currency such as the Argentine peso, and it will exacerbate the kind of nervousness that helped drive down stock prices on Friday.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
More journalists from a traditional media company are trying a new venture. Writer and blogger Ezra Klein and some of the team behind one of The Washington Post's visible features, Wonkblog, which analyzes policy issues in Washington, are moving on. They're joining Vox Media. That's a digital outfit with sites serving sports fans, foodies and gamers, among others, but little in the way of political coverage until now.
NPR's David Folkenflik reports on the creation of the new site tentatively called Project X, and what it says about our changing media.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Ezra Klein is the motivating force behind Project X. He tells NPR that he - and the rest of his team - intend to drill down on context, history, trends and expertise, everything about and use other than the latest headlines.
EZRA KLEIN: I think there's been a very damaging tendency in journalism to assume that the readers, they don't like what we call the vegetables, spinach, the kind of tough stuff - health care, things like that. What they want is a lighter, is more conflict-driven, is about horse race. You know, we found that's not true.
FOLKENFLIK: Joining Klein will be former Wonkblog colleagues, as well as Matt Yglesias of Slate. They're intending to bulk up beyond Wonkblog's confines of politics and policy to culture, science, sports and beyond.
Jim Bankoff is the chairman and CEO of Vox Media.
JIM BANKOFF, CHAIRMAN, CEO, VOX MEDIA: There's a lot of news out there. We're getting bombarded from all sources. And that puts an even greater need on people and talent who can help explain things.
FOLKENFLIK: Vox may be best known for its network of sports blog called SB Nation or its tech stories on the verge. But recently bought Curbed, which covers real estate and Eater, which covers food. Taken together, Vox's sites have about 65 million monthly unique visitors. The privately-held company makes a slight profit and its financial backers include Allen & Co. and Comcast.
Planet X's Melissa Bell, who used to oversee blog at The Post, said Vox once a natural fit for both financial and technical reasons.
MELISSA BELL: When Ezra and I first started talking about this last summer, it was a company that I brought up pretty regularly. They've been pushing the boundaries already with some of the same questions that we're asking.
FOLKENFLIK: Ken Doctor is a media analyst for Newsonomics. While many newspapers are struggling financially, Doctor says, some new sites have failed to take off too.
KEN DOCTOR: There are new news brands that can work, but they have to fight through the noise. That's the big challenge here when you're going independent and away from a huge traffic site like The Washington Post.
FOLKENFLIK: Yet, it's a Golden age for digital news name brands. Nate Silver sold his "538" blog to ESPN after running it within The New York Times. Andrew Sullivan created his own site relying on subscribers. While Yahoo made a big-ticket hire of The Times' tech writer, David Pogue.
Some critics have attacked The Washington Post for failing to satisfy the 29-year-old Klein's ambition and drive. But Klein told his bosses there that he intended to create a new standalone site apart from The Post. And asked whether the strapped paper's new owner wanted to invest $8 million in his new venture. The Post owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, declined. Now as Jim Bankoff says, it's Vox's chance to execute.
David Folkenflik, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And now for our last word in business: Beardonomics(ph).
We often hear about companies making cuts in the last few days. We're hearing that the trend of not shaving is shaving razors maker's bottom line.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Procter & Gamble says the trend of letting facial hair grow is hurting sales in its razor division. The company even singled out Movember - that's the 10-year-old tradition of men not shaving in November to promote awareness of prostate cancer. My daughters have forbidden me to participate but apparently, many men do.
MONTAGNE: And skipping a daily or even weekly shave is becoming so popular, throughout the rest of the year, hipster mustaches have Procter & Gamble rethinking its hair strategies. It says it's going to focus on other hair grooming products, with a marketing push toward getting into shave all the rest of their body hair - something known as manscaping.
INSKEEP: Too much information.
MONTAGNE: And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
And I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep.
President Obama delivers his State of the Union speech this week, facing a more difficult climate than when he delivered the speech a year ago. When he spoke in 2013, the president had just won reelection, his approval ratings were high, people spoke of Republicans signing on to big initiatives like immigration reform, and the economy was improving. This week, the economy is still improving but little else has worked out as the White House might have planned.
Joining us, as she does most Mondays, is Cokie Roberts. Cokie, good morning.
COKIE ROBERTS, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: So how much does this moment mean to the president?
ROBERTS: Well, of course we always talk about it being a make or break moment, which is a little bit dramatic. But look, it is a moment that he gets to get the attention of the American people. State of the Union messages that don't have the same viewership they once did, but about 10 million people do tune in. And so this is a chance to try and re-convince folks that they can trust them to do the right thing.
An ABC/Washington Post poll yesterday, only 37 percent of the respondents said they had confidence in the president to make the right decisions for the country. Now, that's very low. It's better than either the Democrats in Congress at 27 percent or the Republicans at 19 percent. But he's the decider, as George W. Bush used to say, so it's a rough number for him.
INSKEEP: Well, you mentioned George W. Bush. He's on my mind, because in the first year of President Bush's second term his approval ratings also went far south. It was after Hurricane Katrina but it seemed to be something more than that. It had been a difficult presidency and people just seem to be tired of this particular chief executive in 2005. Is something similar happening to President Obama?
ROBERTS: Yes, I think so. I mean you're seeing it on personal traits as well as policy issues. But those policy issues are a problem, I mean the economy, health care, foreign policy, more people disapprove than approve of those policies. The one exception is his handling of terrorism and that number has also gone to an historic low for his presidency, on people approving of it. And now the Sochi Olympics have brought that issue back front and center, the question of terrorism at the Olympics.
But even before now, when people have disagreed with the president, they have found him empathetic. Not so in this poll. The key question that we ask for any candidate is, does he care about people like you? And when Obama came into office, 72 percent in this poll said yes. Now more say no than yes.
Now, all those numbers are significant because it means it makes it hard to convince people in Congress to go along with you if the American people don't seem to be going along with you, which is part of the reason why the president is taking about executive action - using his pen and his phone and going around the Congress.
INSKEEP: So he's trying to get things done in the White House. But of course there's another round of elections coming up for Congress later this year. Will Democrats have to run away from the president?
ROBERTS: Probably to some degree; it depends on the district they're in. But the Democrats have problems as a party. The Republicans are trusted more on what's by far the most important issue: the economy. And then on a very fundamental question of which party has a better idea of the size and role of the federal government, that's the difference between the parties. The Republicans also are doing better on that question.
So that's a problem for Democrats and it's showing up in this generic question, as we call it: Which party should control the Congress? That's tied right now, whereas the Democrats were up nine points last May.
INSKEEP: There was a time when Republicans thought they had a lot of advantages on social issues. What about now?
ROBERTS: Well, they didn't in the last election and they didn't in the off year Virginia governor's race, where those social issues worked against them. And it's still true that Democrats do better on issues like abortion and gay marriage, though Republicans do on guns. But the fact is that those issues just aren't all that important to most voters. They're down on the list of things.
But the Republicans are trying to keep their candidates from talking about them much. They had a little problem last week, when former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee talked about women's libido and contraceptions in the president's health care plan. Republicans are hoping that their candidates don't say things like that.
INSKEEP: OK. Thanks as always. That's Cokie Roberts on this Monday morning. The State of the Union speech is tomorrow.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
The Internal Revenue Service wants to tighten rules on social welfare groups and it has opened itself up for public comment, giving Americans a chance to sound off. It seems people have a lot to sound off about. The agency has received thousands of comments about the IRS scrutiny of Tea Party groups seeking tax exempt status and the hundreds of millions of dollars raised from unnamed donors and spent on the 2012 elections. NPR's Peter Overby has more.
PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: What the IRS wants to do is make it harder for social welfare groups to get into campaign politics. More than 10,000 public comments have come in and among those viewable online, the vast majority wants the IRS to give up and go away.
ROBIN LUMB: I don't think that the Internal Revenue Service ought to be in the business of circumscribing our free speech rights.
OVERBY: Robin Lumb is a city councilman in Jacksonville, Florida. He's active in the local Republican Party, but for this...
LUMB: We've taken off the partisan hat. We're non-partisan, non-denominational.
OVERBY: Lumb is a founder of the Jacksonville Alliance of Christian Voters.
LUMB: Not exclusively Christians, but those who share a Christian worldview that embraces a traditional understanding of Christian morality and ethics.
OVERBY: He told the IRS that the social welfare groups, known as 501(c)(4) groups under the tax code, don't need more regulation. It's a popular theme in the online comments. One reason for that, the argument is made in four prepared messages to the IRS posted on an anonymous website called Protect C4 Free Speech.com. These messages were used by more than 45 percent of the online comments.
Protect C4 Free Speech is the work of NumbersUSA, a nonprofit group that calls for more restrictive immigration policies.
ROSEMARY JENKS: You know, it didn't seem like it was in any way useful to have affiliations on there.
OVERBY: Rosemary Jenks is NumbersUSA's director of government relations.
JENKS: There's no nefarious intent behind it. This was an attempt to make it easy for anybody with concerns about these regulations to have their voices be heard.
OVERBY: Jenks says the proposed regulations would stifle debate.
JENKS: You know, one would think that it would be in the government's best interest to have an informed citizenry.
OVERBY: Another group that wants to be left alone is the American Motorcycle Association. It sent off a four-page letter to the IRS signed by the association's lawyer, former Colorado Senator Wayne Allard. He says the association sometimes holds fundraisers for members of Congress.
WAYNE ALLARD: We try and treat Democrats and Republicans in a balanced way.
OVERBY: He says the proposed regulations would lump the association in with more political groups.
ALLARD: They somehow need to differentiate our types of organization from - if it's the Tea Party group they're after.
RICK HASEN: If you were looking at this from 30,000 feet, the rational way to approach this would not be through an IRS regulation.
OVERBY: Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, says the issue is too big for one agency to handle. Here's why. The top political 501 (c)(4)s such as Crossroads GPS and Americans For Prosperity on the right, and to a lesser extent Priorities USA on the left, these groups get seven and eight figure contributions, partly because they shield donors from disclosure.
So if the IRS restricts (c)(4)s, the big money is likely to find another vehicle. Hasen says a smarter strategy would be to target the activity of big spending.
HASEN: Then you would make disclosure required for all such large spending, regardless of the form of organization that the group takes.
OVERBY: But that would take an act of Congress. It's true that the Supreme Court embraced disclosure four years ago in the Citizens United decision, but with Republican lawmakers adamantly opposed to disclosure, Congress isn't inclined to follow the court's lead. Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. In the past year, London police have managed to mention clowns 117 times in their reports. Really. There were suspects dressed as clowns, one with clown-like shoes and another with hair like Krusty the Clown. Clowns were victims. One wearing a black and white Pierrott suit was robbed. And then there were the cases where people responded sufficiently fiercely to being called a clown that the police got involved. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
On a Monday it's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne. In Egypt this past weekend, marked the third anniversary of the uprising against dictator Hosni Mubarak, an uprising that brought jubilant scenes to Tahrir Square. This year, the anniversary was marked by violence.
INSKEEP: Thousands of people turned out in support of the military chief who wields enormous power in the government. Other people protested that government and were fired upon by security forces. Dozens of people were killed.
MONTAGNE: That comes just days after Amnesty International said the government commits abuses to crush dissent and there were also more militant attacks, with one group claiming it shot down a helicopter, killing five soldiers. NPR's Leila Fadel sent this report.
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: In central Cairo on Saturday, a small group of protesters regrouped after being dispersed violently by security forces. Most of these demonstrators appeared to be supporters of the ousted president Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood. Slowly they began to march, knowing they would be dispersed again.
A woman calls out to the others to follow her. We are all one hand, she yells, against the military who are killing us.
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UNIDENTIFIED MEN AND WOMEN: (chanting in Arabic)
FADEL: Meanwhile, in downtown Cairo, a few hundred secular and revolutionary youth demonstrated. Many are the same young people that spearheaded the marches in 2011 that led to Hosni Mubarak's ouster. They too chanted against the military, but made clear they are also against the Brotherhood. But it didn't matter. Police drove through and broke up the gathering, shooting and firing teargas. Armed men in plainclothes blocked the path to Tahrir Square. And when the protesters tried to regroup they were met with this...
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FADEL: The message from the military-backed government was clear: you are either with us or against us.
Khaled Dawoud, a spokesman for the liberal Dustour party, stood with the secular revolutionary youth.
KHALED DAWOUD: There is obviously no distinction, no tolerance of any sort of opinion right now except for one single opinion that's repeated by the state in support of a certain particular candidate - that's Defense Minister General al-Sissi - to become president of Egypt.
FADEL: He refers to Egypt's military chief and new icon General Abdel Fattah el Sissi. Dawoud supported the military overthrow on July 3rd. But now he says the machinery of the Mubarak state has reemerged to be the force behind Sissi. As gunfire rang out here, it was a party in Tahrir Square and near the presidential palace. The military tightly controlled security.
People wore gold Sissi masks and carried his pictures as they called for him to run for president. Military helicopters dropped flags from the sky and if you weren't out to support the army you weren't welcome in the square. Outside the presidential palace Amr al-Kayal walked with his two children and his wife Mona. He came out on Saturday for one reason.
AMR AL-KAYAL: To say that the majority of our people are supporting Abdel Fattah al-Sissi to be the president of Egypt.
FADEL: Around him people chanted for the execution of the Brotherhood. They are terrorists, people said. They are setting off bombs in Cairo. The Brotherhood denies that. A militant group based in the Sinai Peninsula, Ansar Beit al Maqdis, claimed responsibility for the bombings over the weekend and for downing an Egyptian military helicopter with a surface-to-air-missile, a frightening escalation.
David Barnett is a research associate at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He studies Ansar Beit al Maqdis and he says there is no evidence to connect the Brotherhood to the group. Egypt's government, he says, is using these attacks to demonize political opponents.
DAVID BARNETT: The government sees this as an easy domestic out because it plays well within the country. The problem is, is it doesn't play well with reality.
FADEL: But critics are being silenced and the major Egyptian press has gotten in line with the government, touting wins against what they call Brotherhood terrorists. Interim president Adly Mansour announced that presidential elections will come before parliamentary elections, a change in the schedule, apparently tailored for a Sissi candidacy. And the majority of Egyptians say they will support Sissi if he runs for president because they believe it will lead to security and stability. And in this political climate, analysts say, the rest of Egypt will have to support him or be deemed a traitor.
Leila Fadel, NPR News, Cairo.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's get some analysis now from Issandr El Amrani. He is a longtime observer of Egyptian politics and is currently the North Africa project director for the International Crisis Group. Welcome back to the program, sir.
ISSANDR EL AMRANI: Glad to be here.
INSKEEP: Americans will know that Egypt has been troubled for years but itself, at least from this distance, the things that substantially worse than the last several days. Does it feel that way where you are?
AMRANI: Absolutely, does feel that way. We're reaching the three-year anniversary of the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and the country is facing massive political tension, campaign of terrorism, a lot of violence by the police, by people blowing up police stations in response. It's a very sad atmosphere compared to the quite uplifting mood of three years ago.
INSKEEP: Is the dream of democracy dead?
AMRANI: Democracy just doesn't seem to be in the cards for the near future. I mean, there may be procedural democracy there will be elections, there has just been a referendum. But the mood in Egypt for now tolerates very little dissent from the line put out by the current government. Obviously an entire, quite important part of Egyptian politics, the Islamist side, is simply barred from competing - the Muslim Brotherhood. But more than that there's very little tolerance for any criticism of the current regime.
INSKEEP: As we were hearing in that report from Leila Fadel, is the government going to have an excuse, if you will, to take that attitude because there have now been these bombings in this group, Ansar Bayt Al Maqdis, claiming credit for them?
AMRANI: The government is absolutely worried when it points to the terrorism campaign conducted by Ansar Bayt Al Maqdis in the Sinai Peninsula, initially, but increasingly in the Nile Valley in a quite a spectacular attack against the Cairo security director a few days ago, that this is a growing problem. And it's not a question of trying to blame the government for what's happening, as some are trying to do. It's a question that this government does not seem to want to dampen the tensions. They are encouraging this type of violence from growing.
INSKEEP: I know you get an opportunity to talk with players on different sides of the divide in Egypt. And I'd like to know if you hear from anyone on any side who sits down with you and says: Look, there is a way out of this and here's the way.
AMRANI: It's very difficult to see the way out of this. After President Morsi was overthrown last July, there was a hope that some kind of mediation/reconciliation talks could take place that would find a middle ground, accept his overthrow but still leave a place for the Muslim Brotherhood to play a role in the countries politics. That seems to now not be a possibility, especially after last December's decision to label the Muslim Brotherhood good as a terrorist organization, even though there's no proven link between the terrorist attacks that the country has seen and the group.
So right now, the Muslim Brotherhood is sticking to its demands, which is reinstating President Morsi, reinstating the 2012 constitution. And the government, on its side, is also being extremely inflexible. And, of course, by designating the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization, has closed doors to any negotiations. So it's hard to see a way out of this anytime soon.
INSKEEP: We've talked as though the problem here is terrorism and the role of Islam in the state. But is the economy part of the trouble here, the troubled economy in Egypt?
AMRANI: The economy is may be the overarching issue that makes the future of Egypt, in the medium term, look quite bleak. Right now, the government has support from Gulf Arab States - $12 billion in the last six months - that keep the economy afloat. If there is no job creation, if people can put food on the table, the talk is either a third revolution of the hungry or just the government that simply cannot address the very deep problems that have been on the table for the last three years and before, because the government is just stuck in defensive mode.
INSKEEP: Issandr El Amrani is the North Africa project director for the International Crisis Group. Thanks very much.
AMRANI: My pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Well, let's move from the pre-telecast to the artists you did see on TV, if you were watching; the winners and nominees who were on stage at the Staples Center for a marathon evening ceremony. NPR television critic Eric Deggans joins us to talk about the big show.
Good morning.
ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: First, let me ask you this. With most of the awards given out actually before the ceremony, the Grammys - unlike the Oscars - are not really an awards show. What would you call it?
DEGGANS: Well, the Grammys are really two or three different kinds of shows mashed together. They do give out some awards, as you said, they gave out 10. But they also have these high-powered musical acts and combinations that perform together; they become essentially a variety show. You know, there's a sense that young people won't necessarily watch an old school variety show, like Ed Sullivan, so it's gussied up in the guise of an award show like the Grammys that bring together all these high-powered acts.
MONTAGNE: And it is hugely popular. I mean people around the world watch it. And CBS re-upped its deal with Recording Academy; a deal reportedly worth more than $20 million a year to carry the show into the next decade, they think it's going to keep happening for the next 10 years?
DEGGANS: Certainly. And what's going on here is the value of live programming. In the age of the DVR, people are recording everything, they're watching it later - they're maybe not even watching it all - and they're skipping over the commercials. So a show that's live, that people want to know the answers to in a moment is very valuable, because then people have to watch all the commercials. And it's also a great promotional platform for CBS. Use all of these CBS stars flown in for no reason.
(LAUGHTER)
DEGGANS: So, you know, Pauley Perrette from "NCIS" the social media correspondent for the Grammys. Just another excuse essentially to mention the CBS show it during the proceedings.
MONTAGNE: OK, so but back - OK, let's get us back to the Grammys. What did you think of what has come to be called Grammy moments, the unlikely pairings like classical pianist Lang Lang performing with Metallica, for instance?
DEGGANS: Sure, well, one of my favorite moments last night involved Daft Punk performing with Pharell Williams, Stevie Wonder and Nile Rogers from Chic. Let's listen to a little bit of it.
DAFT PUNK, PHARRELL WILLIAMS, STEVIE WONDER AND NILE ROGERS: (Singing) Come on, Steve. The present have no ribbons, your gift just keeps on giving...
(APPLAUSE)
DEGGANS: Now, that was the pairing that worked. But there were some that didn't. I imagine some of the young people were scratching their heads when they saw Robin Thicke come out and perform with Chicago. They kind of sounded like the world's greatest wedding band.
(LAUGHTER)
MONTAGNE: Well, all right. Well, you know you are live blogging. You were among the people also live tweeting throughout the show. What was her favorite part of the show? Or I guess you're not going to admit to snarky comments, right?
DEGGANS: I will certainly admit to snarky comments. There were plenty of them on my Twitter feed. But what I really loved was when social message came together with a powerful music performance. And we saw this with Macklemore and Ryan Lewis singing their song "Same Love," at the same time that a wedding was performed on stage. And I think we have a little bit of that, too.
QUEEN LATIFAH: This song is a love song not for some of us, but for all of us. And tonight, we celebrate the commitment to love by some very beautiful couples. Joined by Mary Lambert and New Orleans own Trombone Shorty, here's Macklemore and Ryan Lewis and an uplifting song that says: Whatever God you believe in, we come from the same one; strip away the fear, underneath it's all the same love.
(APPLAUSE)
MONTAGNE: And that, by the way, was Queen Latifah.
DEGGANS: Exactly, Queen Latifah. You got 33 couples getting married. You got Queen Latifah marrying them. Some of them were same-sex couples. And you got Madonna coming in and singing at the end of your ceremony. I mean, five years later, how do you top that? I mean that's an amazing thing to tell your kids.
MONTAGNE: Well, in the few seconds we have left let's talk about Pharell Williams who was pretty funny translating for the non-speaking musicians of Daft Punk. You had some fun tweeting about the hat Williams was wearing. Tell us about the hat.
DEGGANS: Well, Pharell came on with this hat that looked like something Smokey the Bear would wear or something.
(LAUGHTER)
DEGGANS: And it Immediately gained attention from the Twitterverse. Of course, 10 minutes into the - after he appeared on camera, someone created Pharell's hat - the Twitter account. And Neil Patrick Harris tweeted a joke about it. And then by the end of it, Arby's actually tweeted a little joke at Pharell, because the hat looked like the logo for the restaurant chain.
MONTAGNE: OK. Eric Deggans, NPR's TV critic, speaking about the Grammys. And you're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
For generations, this country has honored its Founding Fathers. The historian Joseph J. Ellison, in a memorable book, called them the Founding Brothers. But our image of the women who helped to found this country has been a little bit more obscure, until recently. Cokie Roberts, a longtime NPR contributor is the author of "Founding Mothers: Remembering the Ladies," which has just been turned into an illustrated children's' book.
Cokie reminds us that these women were pretty hard core. Take Martha Washington, for instance, who was not nearly as matronly as you may think.
COKIE ROBERTS, BYLINE: Every single winter of the Revolution, she went to camp with him and he begged her to come to camp, because she was so important. She and the other officers' wives were so important for troop morale. And Martha Washington would come roaring into camp in her carriage and people would cheer her into camp: Lady Washington is here. And then she would sew for the soldiers and cook for the soldiers, and pray with the soldiers and nurse the soldiers. They adored her.
INSKEEP: Now, when they're in winter quarters, of course, that's not when they're campaigning. But when Washington's army would go out and fight the British or move around, weren't their women with it as well?
ROBERTS: Yes, there are women who went to the soldiers as camp followers. These were generally poor women who couldn't afford to stay home because, of course, there were no jobs for women. And they would cook for the soldiers and do some jobs and they got a tiny bit of pay to help out with the Army. And then, of course, there were women who were on the battlefield doing things like watering the cannons, and then the men would get hit and they'd take over the cannon.
INSKEEP: So you have women accompanying men during the Revolutionary War in the Continental Army. But you also write of women who stand in for their husbands. I'm particularly thinking of Benjamin Franklin's wife, Deborah.
ROBERTS: Well, yes. That is so interesting because, of course, as children we all learned that Benjamin Franklin was the first post master general of the United States. What we don't learn is that he wasn't in the United States.
(LAUGHTER)
ROBERTS: He was in England and he was for years and years and years. And Deborah Franklin ran the postal service. She ran the printing shops, which were essentially franchises that went out to the frontier, which was Pittsburgh; and she ran all of his businesses. And he thought she did a grand job of it.
INSKEEP: Wow. Cokie, do these stories suggest that women's roles in this historic period were a little different than we imagine them to be?
ROBERTS: Totally, I think that we think women were sitting around tending to the tatting or pouring tea and it's our view of first ladies too - and it's all wrong. These were very, very politically passionate women. Their letters are full of politics and they were utterly devoted to the patriot cause.
Abigail Adams, at one point, wrote to John Adams: You know, we women are really better patriots than you men are, because we are suffering all of the hardships and making all of the sacrifices for the cause. And if we win, you men will be held in high acclaim and hold office, and we won't even be able to vote. So we're better patriots. And John had sense enough to agree with her.
INSKEEP: Well, of course, he would. Of course, he would. He agreed with her lot in that correspondence.
ROBERTS: Well, except when she told him to remember the ladies; probably the most famous whine of American patriot women.
INSKEEP: What was she referring to?
ROBERTS: They were considering a Declaration of Independence, something that she thought they were way too timid about. She had been militating for a year for them to declare independency from Britain. And when they were finally mulling it, she said: I suppose that we will have to have a new code of laws for our new government, and when you write it, remember the ladies. And she was saying that men would be tyrants if they could.
Of course, at the time, married women could not own property; of course women couldn't vote. Women had no legal or political rights. And so, she was trying to argue for those rights and John just laughed at her.
INSKEEP: Now, as you try to tell their stories, boil down their stories for kids, Cokie Roberts, did you struggle with the complexities of their lives? I'm particularly thinking of the fact that quite a few of the women who would be the Founding Mothers were also slave-owners, just like the men.
ROBERTS: Well, sure. And, of course, slavery has been the issue and the sin that hovered over this great American experiment from the beginning. I do feature Phyllis Wheatley, a slave girl from New England, who became a renowned poet. But I think that in itself is quite interesting because I think that a lot of people have no notion that slavery was in all the colonies at that point. And it took some brave people to eliminate it in the Northern colonies before the country became country.
INSKEEP: What made you want to tell these stories for kids?
ROBERTS: Well, I feel strongly that when you recognize people in history that history is more relevant to you. And our little girls have a hard time recognizing people in the great story of America. And at the National Archives are the closest thing we have to a cathedral of the country. There are these fabulous murals up on the walls above the Constitution, the Declaration and the Bill of Rights. And they're all white men in white wigs with tights, and I don't think they're recognizable to a lot of Americans.
But they weren't the only people who did it. They were incredibly important. I'm not taking anything away from our Founding Fathers, but they didn't do it alone
INSKEEP: Cokie Roberts is heard on this program most Mondays, and is also the author of "Founding Mothers," which is now a children's book. Cokie, thanks very much.
ROBERTS: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: You can get a look at some of the illustrations in that book and read some excerpts, by going to NPR.org.
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
At tonight's State of the Union address, Michigan Democratic Sen. Carl Levin will be sitting, as he has for decades, with his brother, Sandy, who's a Michigan House Democrat. No other siblings have served quite so long together in Congress. But this will be their last State of the Union speech together while both are in office because Sen. Levin retires at the end of the year.
NPR's David Welna sat down with the Levins to hear their tale of brotherly love.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: When Sandy Levin shows up at his younger brother, Carl's, Senate office - a suite of high-ceilinged rooms next to Harry Truman's old Senate digs - Carl protectively steers him toward a cozy alcove at the end of a long meeting room.
SEN. CARL LEVIN: I think we're going to go in here.
REP. SANDY LEVIN: OK, hi.
CARL LEVIN: ...'cause it's too cold in my office.
SANDY LEVIN: Is it?
CARL LEVIN: Yeah.
WELNA: Carl is the 79-year-old brother with the gold-rimmed reading glasses permanently perched at the end of his nose. It's an image Comedy Central's Jon Stewart once described as...
(SOUNDBITE OF "THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART")
JON STEWART: This kindly old shoemaker...
(AUDIENCE LAUGHTER)
WELNA: Sandy, who's 82, sports a halo of snowy white hair. Being in Congress with his brother, he says, has been a good thing.
SANDY LEVIN: People like brothers when they do their own thing together.
WELNA: Which is, adds Carl, what they've always done.
CARL LEVIN: We spent most of our lives together and - including as kids, in the same bedroom together; including law school; and about 30,000 games of squash that we've played together. And both of us will tell you we don't have any idea who won more of those games. We have the same line.
(LAUGHTER)
SANDY LEVIN: We're very competitive, but we're very evenly matched. But also, I think when one is doing quite a bit better than the other, we relent.
WELNA: Call it the opposite of sibling rivalry. Sandy insists being nearly three years older than Carl has meant little.
SANDY LEVIN: There was no such thing as big brother, no matter what he tells you. Except I used to walk down...
(LAUGHTER)
SANDY LEVIN: That was the only exception, when we would go together - no matter where it was, as a joke, I would put his head under my arm, and we'd walk down that way.
CARL LEVIN: It's the reason for my lousy posture, by the way.
(LAUGHTER)
WELNA: Growing up in an intellectual, politically engaged Jewish household in Detroit, the Levins say talk at their dinner table often turned to family heroes: Joe Louis, the first African-American to win the heavyweight boxing title; [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Jack Johnson was the first to earn that accolade.] Detroit Tigers first baseman Hank Greenberg, the first Jewish athlete to garner national fame; Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; and Harry Truman. Carl now calls himself a Midwest progressive. Sandy's politics are almost identical; based on, he says, a concern for the underdog.
SANDY LEVIN: And it really goes back to how we were raised. Everybody counted. Everybody should count and that - we were imbued with that. I mean, that's why Joe Louis was such a hero.
WELNA: Sandy ran for governor of Michigan twice, and lost twice, before Carl captured a Senate seat on his first try, in 1978. When one of Michigan's House seats opened up four years later, Carl encouraged Sandy to run for it. Sandy won. And Carl says his mother went to Washington for the swearing-in.
CARL LEVIN: My mother was asked one day by a reporter, just like you: Mrs. Levin, you - your buttons must be bursting with pride over these two boys of yours who are now in the U.S. Congress. And my mother, a very private person, said: If that's what they want, it's OK with me. That's as close as she could come.
(LAUGHTER)
WELNA: Four years ago, the Levin brothers became a kind of death and taxes duo. For 10 months, Sandy chaired the House Ways and Means Committee while Carl continued as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. While Sandy advocated higher taxes for the wealthy, Carl made his mark as a fierce opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq - right from the start. At Robert Gates' confirmation hearing to be defense secretary eight years ago, he asked a pointed question.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WELNA: Levin's colleagues from both parties say they're sorry he's leaving the Senate. Lindsey Graham is a South Carolina Republican on the armed services panel.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: We haven't always agreed, but he's been terrific. He's put the country ahead of any partisan politics; working with him on detainees, investigating Abu Ghraib - he has just been a rock-solid chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
WELNA: It was last March when Carl Levin announced this would be his final term. Sandy says it came as no surprise.
SANDY LEVIN: We had talked a lot about it before his decision. So it wasn't as if it came out of the blue. We never - I mean, nothing comes out of the blue between the two of us.
WELNA: Still, it wasn't easy for the older Levin.
SANDY LEVIN: I took it rather hard.
WELNA: And yet, you are seeking re-election this year.
SANDY LEVIN: I am. I am.
WELNA: He says he's now more determined than ever to keep up the fight for the things he believes in. Paradoxically, Carl says he feels the same way.
CARL LEVIN: And I could not see myself out campaigning for re-election and raising money, and spending all that time.
WELNA: Time, Carl says, he would rather spend this year finishing his job as a senator. After that, it will be up to Sandy to carry on.
SANDY LEVIN: It's difficult for me to imagine, Carl's not being a partner and my closest friend; and it would be dramatically different.
WELNA: And as usual, his younger brother agrees.
David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning.
On the way into work this morning, I felt a blast of cold air on my face. It was 19 degrees in Washington, unpleasant even for a few minutes. And we're going to hear next about people who spent the whole night outside in temperatures that were even lower.
Every winter, the Department of Housing and Urban Development picks a night in January for a survey of the nation's homeless. One group of particular concern is veterans in shelters or on the street. There can be thousands of them at any one time.
NPR's Quil Lawrence covers veterans for NPR News, and he was out all night with the homeless survey in New York City. Quil, where are you now?
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: I'm an East 33rd Street, in front of Public School 116, where the last of the volunteers have just strolled in and made their reports. There were thousands of volunteers across New York City. A couple hundred came to this school in Manhattan, and they spread out across the city counting the people who they found homeless out on this freezing January night.
INSKEEP: OK. So this is this Point in Time survey that HUD does, trying to figure out how many people are out there at any point in time. So where did you go in Manhattan, on the island of Manhattan, and what did you see?
LAWRENCE: So, I attached myself first to a group that was going down to Madison Square Park. And on a warmer night, there might have been more people out. There were only a few homeless people in that park. We approached them, asked them a few questions. If they wanted to go inside, offered them some services if they did. And then I went to a much busier place for the homeless, especially on a frigid night like this, which was Penn Station. And there were dozens of homeless people. And again, they were just asking simple questions: Hi, can we talk to you? Do you mind telling me if you have a place to stay tonight? Trying to get an idea of how many of these people are chronically homeless.
INSKEEP: Now, Quil, you were looking for veterans. That's what you cover. Did you find any?
LAWRENCE: I only met one tonight. He said he was a veteran. After speaking to him for a little while, he was pretty clearly mentally ill, and it was hard to tell what was fact and what was delusion. But for the purposes of this count, someone says they served in the military, then they'll count them as a veteran. And there are a lot of veterans among the homeless population.
INSKEEP: Does the Department of Veterans Affairs have any kind of reasonable count of how many veterans there are who are homeless in the course of a year, say?
LAWRENCE: That's part of what this count is all about. They figure that there are probably about 150,000 veterans out there who are homeless at any given time. They've said that maybe 12 percent of the homeless population are vets.
INSKEEP: These are veterans from any number of wars, going back, say, to Vietnam, or even earlier? Is that possible?
LAWRENCE: Yes. Predominantly Vietnam among the homeless population. Now, there is a figure of about 48,000 post-9/11 vets - that's Iraq and Afghanistan vets - who were helped out by the VA in some way last year, according to last year's statistics. And that's not to say that they're homeless, but they were either helped out for being homeless, being on the verge of homelessness. These were people that the VA felt that they had to help to keep them from slipping into life on the streets.
INSKEEP: Quil Lawrence, I know it's hard to generalize, but in your experience, what are some of the reasons that veterans become homeless?
LAWRENCE: Well, some of it's coming home to a hard economy, as many in a previous generation did and as many are now. They say that about 1 percent of those who separate from the military then flip into homelessness. There's also a large crossover with mental illness, but also some of the traumas related to combat. So it's a very complicated number, but these are some of the factors that play into it.
INSKEEP: Is the VA able to help homeless vets?
LAWRENCE: They've been showing some pretty impressive results. Since 2010, they started taking an approach called Housing First, where they just try to get people in some sort of shelter before they deal with other issues, like substance abuse or other problems. And they've shown a 24 percent drop in veterans' homelessness. That's all veterans.
Now, there still are thousands, tens of thousands of recently returning vets who are ending up close to the street or getting on the street, and they need help from the VA. And the VA is showing that it's helping a higher and higher number of these young vets.
INSKEEP: Quil, thanks very much.
LAWRENCE: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: Hope you find some place warm. That's NPR's Quil Lawrence, who covers veterans. He's in New York City, and spent the night watching a Point in Time survey of the nation's homeless.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We're also following the upheaval in Ukraine. The confrontation between demonstrators and the government has intensified. Anti-government protests that started in the capital have spread to other cities with protestors taking over some government buildings and clashing with security forces. The government has made some concessions this week, like rescinding a harsh anti-protest law, and talks with the opposition continue. The prime minister, in fact, stepped down today. All of this has been described as a protest against the elected president who rejected a trade deal with the European Union. He was under pressure from Russia. But there may be more going on, here. We spoke earlier with Steven Pifer, a senior analyst at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
STEVEN PIFER: Back in November, when the protests began, the focus was Europe and the desire of protestors to have Ukraine move closer towards the European Union. But since then, it's broadened, and you see now people out on the streets who are having more of a general opposition to Mr. Yanukovych's policies, the corruption. On January 16th, the Ukrainian parliament passed a number of laws, which are clearly anti-democratic, and that's caused a major backlash.
INSKEEP: OK. You mentioned corruption. You mentioned democracy. Let's take them one at a time: What is the problem with corruption in Ukraine?
PIFER: Well, Ukraine has always had problem with corruption, but there's a general perception among the public in Ukraine that in the last four years under President Yanukovych, the problem has become much worse, including corruption by people that are fairly close to the president.
INSKEEP: What is it that people close to the president are at least alleged to be doing?
PIFER: We have very close connections between people in business and people in the government. The concept of conflict of interest is not well-known or well-applied in Ukraine. And you see people, for example, the president's son, who was a dentist, is now becoming a very wealthy businessman from what people suspect are trading on his connections with the government.
INSKEEP: He's not doing dental work and becoming...
PIFER: Not at all doing dental work. He's doing banks and other industries.
INSKEEP: Now, let's remember that President Yanukovych, as much as he has been protested against, was democratically elected. But you did mention Ukraine's parliament changing the rules of Ukraine's democracy. Is it still a democracy?
PIFER: It's moved well away from democracy in the last three to four years under Mr. Yanukovych. And again, a specific trigger for what I think you've seen in the last 10 days were laws that were jammed through the Ukrainian parliament on January 16th. And they basically were intended to criminalize almost everything the demonstrators are doing.
INSKEEP: OK. And what did the new rules do?
PIFER: They criminalize now wearing helmets. They criminalize wearing masks. They now criminalize slander. It's basically designed to apply more severe penalties to everything that the (unintelligible) have been doing for the last two months.
INSKEEP: One other thing, Ambassador Pifer, and this is something that Americans have asked in quite a few countries around the world: Is there anyone the United States can support here, particularly given that some of the opposition leaders used to be running the country and were thrown out of office in an election? People didn't like how they did.
PIFER: No. My sense that the place where the United States should be, and I think the European Union should be, is basically on the side of trying to find a peaceful resolution to this crisis. The Ukraine right now is on the verge of spinning out of control, and the situation could get very ugly, very quickly. I think the United States and Europe have some leverage. They should be pressing the Ukrainian government very hard to negotiate seriously in good faith, and they should also be working with the opposition and encouraging the opposition not to overreach.
American influence here is probably limited, but there are things that the United States could do. Last week, the United States announced the first visa sanctions against government officials connected to use of force. It may be time to broaden that and target visa and financial sanctions against the inner circle around Mr. Yanukovych to make the point that they need to be pushing the president to find a peaceful solution to this crisis, otherwise, they could lose their ability to travel to the West, and they may lose their ability to bank in the West.
INSKEEP: Steven Pifer is a former U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine. Thanks very much.
PIFER: Thank you for having me.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Pete Seeger died last night in New York. He was 94. Seeger was a folk singer, a political activist, an environmentalist, eventually an icon. He was also a major advocate for the five-string banjo. So, to get a proper appreciation of Pete Seeger, it helps to turn to a banjo player, and we have just the man. Here's our longtime, former newscaster Paul Brown.
PAUL BROWN, BYLINE: Pete Seeger was a tireless campaigner for his own vision of a utopia marked by peace and togetherness. His tools were his songs, his voice, his enthusiasm and his musical instruments, as he told NPR in 1971.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IF I HAD A HAMMER")
BROWN: Pete Seeger came by his beliefs honestly. His father, Charles Seeger, was an ethnomusicologist and pioneering folklorist whose left-wing views got him into trouble at the University of California. Charles Seeger introduced his son to some of the most important musicians of the Depression era, including Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BROWN: Seeger and Guthrie became fast friends, although they didn't agree on all things. They crisscrossed the country, performing together.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BROWN: Seeger said that as early as 1941, they found themselves blacklisted.
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BROWN: Seeger was a member of the Communist Party in those early days, though he later said he quit after coming to understand the evils of Joseph Stalin. Following World War II and service entertaining the troops, Seeger teamed up with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman to form the astonishingly successful folk group the Weavers.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOODNIGHT IRENE")
BROWN: Their version of Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" hit the top of the pop charts in 1950. Other hits followed, including "On Top of Old Smokey," "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You" and "Wimoweh." Ronnie Gilbert said that from the start, Seeger's performances were transcendent, whether you were on stage with him or in the audience.
RONNIE GILBERT: You got the sense that he was saying and singing way beyond the moment that he was in, the place that he was in. Alone on a stage in front of thousands of people - literally, thousands of people - everybody got it. Everybody got his passion for music. People absorbed his passion and his ideals.
BROWN: If the Weavers hit an emotional and cultural sweet spot in postwar America, the "red scare" quickly soured it. Seeger refused to answer questions before Congress in 1955 about his political beliefs and associations. He was held in contempt and nearly served a jail sentence before charges were finally dropped in 1962, on a technicality. But the troubles with Congress finished the Weavers as a major touring and recording group. Seeger went out on his own again.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "POOR WAYFARING STRANGER")
: (Singing) I'm just a poor, wayfaring stranger a-traveling through this world of woe. But there's no sickness, toil nor danger, in that bright land to which I go...
BROWN: Shut out of the big gigs, he played coffeehouses, union halls and college campuses to support his family. His wife, Toshi ,managed his affairs and raised their children in the cabin they had built in Beacon, N.Y. He cofounded and wrote for Sing Out, one of the first and most important magazines to grow out of the folk revival. He produced children's songs and books. But his commitment to causes never waned.
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: I say it's in the interest of every human being in the United States of America to get some good senators out of Mississippi, for a change. And you can do it, and you will do it soon. I know.
(AUDIENCE CHEERS, APPLAUSE)
: Now, here's a song that we've recorded; I've already told you about. (Singing) If I had a hammer...
BROWN: Seeger sang and marched nationwide for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. In 1968, he went local but of course, in a big way. Upset at the filth clogging the Hudson River near his home, he spearheaded the building of the Sloop Clearwater, which volunteers sailed up and down the Hudson. Politicians and polluters had to take notice. Seeger, not surprisingly, saw a larger purpose.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
: Bringing these people together, all these people, is the essential thing. And this is what the Clearwater - almost miraculously - has started to do on the Hudson.
BROWN: For all of his social activism, Seeger said more than once that if he'd done nothing more than write his slim book "How to Play the Five String Banjo," his life's work would have been complete.
(SOUNDBITE OF BANJO MUSIC)
BROWN: Seeger's grandson, Tao Rodriguez Seeger, plays banjo and performed with his grandfather. He says the paperback, which is chock full of chords and techniques, is a challenge.
TAO RODRIGUEZ SEEGER: It's not a thick book, but it's thick stuff. He doesn't really explain it too well. It's sort of quick, and it's got a little diagram: Here's how you do it. But it's great. It's an awesome resource. I have a copy.
(SOUNDBITE OF BANJO MUSIC)
BROWN: Not just through his books but through his sheer force of presence, Seeger became a model for younger folk musicians. Singer and songwriter Tom Paxton said he learned invaluable lessons from Seeger about how to reach an audience.
TOM PAXTON: Look them in the eye, make a gesture of inclusion - which he did all the time - and above all, have a chorus. So I learned from Pete, you know, to have something for them to sing.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TURN TURN TURN")
BROWN: Bringing people together, and getting them to sing out, may be one of Pete Seeger's greatest legacies. But when it came to saving the world, Tao Rodriguez Seeger says his grandfather ultimately seemed to question whether the guitar was mightier than the sword.
T.R. SEEGER: Troubled him, troubled him deeply that technology was so advanced, that our emotional state was so inadequate to cope that with a push of a button, in a fit of rage, we could wipe ourselves off the face of the Earth. And he really wanted to fix that, and always felt like he failed.
BROWN: But if Pete Seeger didn't save the world, he certainly did change the lives of millions of people by leading them to sing, to take action, and to at least consider his dream of what society could be.
For NPR News, I'm Paul Brown.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TURN TURN TURN")
: (Singing) To everything turn, turn, turn. There is a season, turn...
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.
The Denver Broncos reached their hotel in Jersey City, New Jersey yesterday. Crowds had to be pushed away from the Super Bowl contenders. One of the autograph seekers targeted John Elway, the former star quarterback who is now a Broncos executive. The Broncos' press director said Elway had to keep moving, had to meet the mayor of Jersey City. And that's when the autograph seeker smiled and said: I'm the mayor of Jersey City.
It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
In tonight's State of the Union speech, President Obama is expected to call for a year of action. One of those proposed actions is likely to be an expansion of preschool programs. That's an issue the president raised in last year's State of the Union address. One question the, and one question still, is whether children really benefit.
NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports.
CLAUDIO SANCHEZ, BYLINE: It's hard to find anybody who thinks preschool is not a good idea. Certainly President Obama believes it can help solve lots of problems.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Every dollar we invest in high-quality early childhood education can save more than $7 later on by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime.
SANCHEZ: That's from the president's 2013 State of the Union address, when he proposed raising taxes on cigarettes to make preschool available to every child in the nation.
OBAMA: Studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, form more stable families of their own. We know this works.
NEAL MCCLUSKEY: So if you take what the president said at face value, you would think this was the ultimate policy intervention that would solve everything.
SANCHEZ: Neal McCluskey doesn't buy it. He's with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Forty states and the District of Columbia currently run preschool programs for 1.1 million primarily low-income 4-year-olds. But McCluskey says the quality of both state and federally funded preschool programs is sorely lacking. Take Head Start for example.
MCCLUSKEY: The research on that has shown there are almost no long lasting benefits.
SANCHEZ: McCluskey says kids in Head Start and most state-run programs fall behind in reading and math by first or second grade. High quality preschool is a good idea says McCluskey. Expanding programs that don't work is a waste of money. It's an argument that Deborah Phillips hears more often than she'd like.
DEBORAH PHILLIPS: It completely baffles me.
SANCHEZ: Phillips is an early childhood education expert at Georgetown University. She says the notion that states are throwing money away because kids' gains in reading, writing and math fade soon after they start school, is like giving up on a long distance runner after he's run only a mile or two. Long term, says Phillips, children do benefit.
PHILLIPS: Every early intervention program, for which we have long term outcomes, finds that despite fade-out, you get very strong long-term benefits, like increased school completion and college attendance, increased employment and earnings.
SANCHEZ: Phillips' groundbreaking study of Tulsa, Oklahoma's preschool program also showed that for every dollar the state spent, it saved $3. Last year, 30 states increased funding for preschool by nearly $364 million, a 7 percent jump over the previous year.
MICHAEL GRIFFITH: States are seeing increases in sales, income tax revenue, and other revenues. And they've been taking that extra money and putting it into early learning programs.
SANCHEZ: Michael Griffith is a finance consultant with the non-partisan Education Commission of the States. He says all eyes are on New York where Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio - both Democrats - are squabbling over a key question.
GRIFFITH: Should we have a tax increase or should we not? Then, even within that, we see a lot of debates in states about, OK, if we are going to do a tax increase, who is going to pay for it? Will it be the wealthy? Will it be the sales tax? Will it be the income tax? So I would say what's happening in New York is sort of a smaller scale of what we're seeing across the whole country.
SANCHEZ: So, a full-blown national debate over preschool actually has less to do with what President Obama will say tonight, and more about what state lawmakers will decide in the coming months.
Claudio Sanchez, NPR News.
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INSKEEP: This is NPR News.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Workers in Rhode Island are now eligible for paid family leave. It is the third state giving time off to care for a new baby, an adopted or foster child or a sick loved one. And a small wave of cities is mandating paid sick leave.
NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports.
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: New York City's new paid sick leave law hasn't even taken effect yet and already Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to expand it.
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: Everybody ready?
CROWD: Yeah.
BLASIO: Well, I just want to say...
LUDDEN: In a speech two weeks ago, de Blasio said his plan would cover far more people, would phase in faster and would do away with a catch - that it's dependent on the economy doing well.
BLASIO: In a troubled economy, people need paid sick leave even more to protect their families.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
LUDDEN: De Blasio says the law would help people like Leonardo Hernando, who's worked at a car wash for eight years.
LEONARDO HERNANDO: (Foreign language spoken)
LUDDEN: I've never missed a single day of work, he says, even if I have a cold or fever. Because if I don't show up, I don't get paid.
SENATOR ANNETTE DUBAS: We like to really talk a lot about family values, but it doesn't seem like our policies match our talk.
LUDDEN: Annette Dubas is a state senator in Nebraska, and says the problem doesn't hurt only the lowest-wage workers. It hit her personally last August when her daughter gave birth to her second set of twins.
DUBAS: She's a teacher, you know, found out that she has to use all of her own vacation days, all of her own personal days and all of her sick days in order to stay home after having a baby.
LUDDEN: This month, Dubas proposed the Paid Family Medical Leave Act. Workers would get up to six weeks off a year, and would fund it themselves with a payroll tax.
The bill hasn't yet gotten a hearing but nationwide business groups have consistently opposed a slew of such bills in recent years. Some states have even passed laws to prevent local governments from passing their own versions of paid leave.
John Kabateck, of the National Federation of Independent Business, says such mandates are a burden in a bad economy.
JOHN KABATECK: It's raising the cost of labor on mom and pops who are already struggling. But this will ultimately hurt the very people it aims to help. Fewer benefits, fewer positions, and people in the unemployment line.
LUDDEN: Studies do find a small share of businesses have cut back workers, hours, or benefits because of paid leave policies. But most companies report little to no impact.
On the other hand, Vicki Shabo of the National Partnership for Women and Families, says paid leave can be a lifesaver for workers. She says more women than ever are breadwinners for their families, even as they remain the primary caregiver.
VICKI SHABO: So when she needs to take time off to take care of a loved one or to care for a new baby, her family simply can't survive if their isn't some job protection or wage replacement coming in, and that's true for men, too.
LUDDEN: More proposals for paid leave are expected soon. In Massachusetts, if lawmakers don't approve a paid sick days bill, it will go to the ballot in November.
Jennifer Ludden, NPR News.
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INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
NPR's business news starts with income inequality.
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INSKEEP: President Obama has dropped a few hints that one of the themes of his State of the Union address tonight will be the growing gap between the rich and the poor. He recently called economic mobility and inequality the defining challenge of our times. So is it?
Harvard researchers have been examining this question, including a co-author of a study, Nathan Hendren.
So, when you looked at social mobility, ability for people to rise from one class to another, what did you find?
NATHAN HENDREN: Right. So we found that if you explore the patterns of nobility over time, there hasn't actually been a whole lot of change in the United States. So the way to think about it is people are climbing up and down the ladder at the same rates as ever before, but because income equality has increased, the difference in outcomes to rich versus poor kids has increased.
INSKEEP: Let's talk a little bit more about this and bring another voice into the conversation. David Wessel is a regular guest on this program. He is director of the Hutchins Center at the Brookings Institution, a contributor to The Wall Street Journal.
David, good morning.
DAVID WESSEL: Good morning.
INSKEEP: Should I be bothered by this finding, that mobility is not getting any worse but still, there's a far greater gap between rich and poor than there used to be?
WESSEL: I think you should. One of the contributions this study has made is to destroy a myth that is widespread in Washington, that it's harder for kids to rise out of poverty into the middle class.
INSKEEP: Mm-hmm.
WESSEL: But the consequences of losing what they call the birth lottery are greater. And they also point out that it was and is harder to rise from poverty to the middle class or from middle class to wealth than it is in other countries.
INSKEEP: Wait a minute. Other countries, you're saying that France, England, Germany, wherever we're talking about, it's easier there to ride from poverty or to rise from the middle class to wealth?
WESSEL: Correct. The notion that America is a special place where any kid can grow up to be president is very important to the American psyche, but when you look at the data, it's harder to rise from the bottom to the middle or from the middle to the top in the U.S. than in other rich countries around the world.
INSKEEP: Nathan Hendren, you say things have not really changed that much in terms of social mobility in the United States. Are we falling behind? Are other countries getting any better at this?
HENDREN: Yeah. I think, you know, just to put some statistics on what David was saying, kids born to the bottom fifth of the income distribution in the United States have about an 8 percent chance of reaching the top fifth when they grow up. If you make comparisons to other countries, that actually ranks about as low as it gets amongst developed countries.
In Denmark, that same statistic is 16 percent. So 16 percent of their kids born in the bottom fifth of the income distribution reach the top fifth.
INSKEEP: I'd like to know this is completely different than the America you grew up thinking you were growing up in, Nathan Hendren, because it's different than what I learned when I was a kid.
HENDREN: Absolutely. You know, I grew up thinking that the United States is a place where people have greater opportunities. And what I interpreted that to mean was that people who were born into poverty had a higher chance of reaching the top regions of the income distribution. And I think what's really surprising throughout this study is the extent to which that's not true when you make comparisons relative to other countries.
INSKEEP: David Wessel, what are Republicans and Democrats saying and thinking about when it comes to inequality and mobility?
WESSEL: Well, there is a substantial amount of agreement. Republicans Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan and Chuck Schumer - Democratic senator - and Barack Obama, all agree that they would like to do things to make social mobility greater, to make it easier for people to climb from the bottom and the middle to the top. They disagree on what to do about it. Oversimplifying only a little, the Republicans think the government ought to step back and people ought to do more for themselves. And the president is likely to emphasize both the responsibility of parents - which is something he talks about quite a bit, but also what the government can do to increase the chances that poor kids can make it to the middle class. Better pre-K, better access to college, removing the barriers to people getting jobs, particularly those who have been out of work for a long time. All those things that the government can do to speed up the escalator of mobility.
INSKEEP: What do you think is beyond the government's control here?
WESSEL: I think that there's evidence that parents matter, and being born to parents who are married, who haven't been to jail, who read to you, who make sure you go to school, who help you avoid getting pregnant as a teenager, who keep you out of jail, those kids are more likely to make it. The government can do things to encourage good parenting, but I think even among liberals there's agreement now that parents have a responsibility to their kids and that some parents are failing in their duty.
INSKEEP: When we talk about things the government can do - and Nathan Hendren -having done this study, what would you recommend?
HENDREN: Well, you know, I think that's the hardest question. I think there's a lot of good evidence out there that suggests the quality of schools matters a lot and areas that have a higher fraction of their kids in public schools tend to have higher rates of upward mobility.
INSKEEP: Meaning that when more students are attracted to the public school system it's a sign the public school system is pretty good and is doing very well for a wide range of students.
HENDREN: Yeah, that's the basic idea. Now, you know, that's not a story for or against, say, a voucher program or other programs that could improve the quality of access to a good education, but I think it suggests, and is consistent with a large range of other studies, that suggest that the quality of the schooling system and the schools that people go to matters a lot for improving upward mobility.
INSKEEP: So are different parts of the country more mobile than other parts?
HENDREN: Absolutely. So if you look across the United States, that 8 percent statistic I was talking about before - the fraction of kids going from the bottom fifth to the top fifth - that varies from about 4 to 5 percent in places like Charlotte and Atlanta, up to about 12 percent in places like Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Dubuque, Iowa. These places are much more mobile. So it varies by a factor of three, the extent to which kids are rising out of poverty across areas.
INSKEEP: David Wessel of the Brookings Institution and The Wall Street Journal, thanks to you.
WESSEL: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: And also, thanks to Nathan Hendren, an assistant professor of economics at Harvard and co-author of a study on social mobility. Thanks to you.
HENDREN: Thanks a lot.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And today's last word in business is a sweet smile.
Yesterday, we brought you the news that Procter and Gamble is losing sales in its razor division because more men are keeping their facial hair. P&G may make up those sales on the toothpaste aisle come next month. That's when the company will stock its new Be Adventurous Crest Toothpaste.
The adventure here is a chocolate-flavored ride in your mouth. Mint Chocolate Trek is the name of the toothpaste. You know, like trekking in the woods or "Star Trek." Only now you're going to boldly brush where you should've been brushing before.
Mint Chocolate Trek is one of three new flavored toothpastes P&G has announced. The other two are Lime Spearmint Zest and Vanilla Mint Spark. P&G says the dessert-flavored toothpastes are as effective on teeth as any toothpaste. And nothing says health like chocolate and vanilla for breakfast. No word if they'll go on from deserts to after-dinner drink flavors.
And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.
When President Obama gives his State of the Union Address tonight, he's likely to hit on some familiar themes: expanding opportunity for all Americans, pushing for immigration changes, and investment in infrastructure. The president is also expected to say that if Congress does not act, he will move forward with his own initiatives through executive action. This comes as Congress gave him very little of what he asked for last year.
NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith has more.
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TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: As President Obama stood before Congress last year, it was the start of a new term. It was a time of some optimism, that maybe the election had changed the dynamics that caused legislative gridlock and brought Congress and the country to the edge of crisis so many times.
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KEITH: Still, Obama seemed to acknowledge that he may have a hard time getting Congress to go along with his ideas, referencing job creation proposals that got marginal support.
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KEITH: It didn't happen. In fact, of the 41 things the president asked Congress to do, Congress actually did just two of them last year. That's according to an analysis from political scientists Donna Hoffman and Allison Howard.
DONNA HOFFMAN: Do you want to know the two things he was successful with for 2013?
KEITH: Howard is an assistant professor at Dominican University of California.
ALLISON HOWARD: OK, so it was the Violence Against Women Act that was renewed. And when he asked that the Congress not default on the nation's debt, they didn't.
KEITH: Congress did follow through on a third item, outside of the researcher's data window, by passing a government funding bill earlier this month. Donna Hoffman, an associate professor at the University of Northern Iowa, says it's not uncommon for presidents to struggle to get Congress to do what they ask, especially in divided government.
HOFFMAN: It is not as if a president in giving one of these speeches will say to the Congress: Please do X and the Congress is just going to fall in line and do that.
KEITH: She says Ronald Reagan had a similarly bad year, where just five percent of his requests were honored - and in his case only partially. Over the course of his presidency, Hoffman says Obama's success rate is not that bad.
HOFFMAN: He's right in the middle.
KEITH: Still, listening back to the 2013 speech, it's striking how many times President Obama proposed something that simply went nowhere. Tax reform...
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KEITH: Upgraded infrastructure...
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KEITH: Help for struggling homeowners...
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KEITH: Universal pre-kindergarten.
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KEITH: Raising the minimum wage, expanded background checks for gun purchases, even cyber security legislation...
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KEITH: And then there's something he's asked for in all four State of the Union addresses: comprehensive immigration reform.
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KEITH: President Obama will ask for that one again tonight and may even signal he's open to compromise. As Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution sees it, the pressure to notch more accomplishments is on, because a narrative is beginning to form about the Obama presidency.
ELAINE KAMARCK: And I think the storyline that's developing on this presidency, for better or for worse, is that this presidency has a hard time getting things done.
KEITH: The White House takes exception with that characterization. The administration points to 14 areas of progress since the last state of the union, many achieved through executive action rather than legislation. So can we expect the president to ask for fewer things from Congress tonight? Probably not.
JAY CARNEY: He'll certainly aim high. Presidents aught to aim high.
KEITH: White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.
CARNEY: I don't think any president has ever gone before Congress and said I hope to do this, this, this, and this with you (unintelligible) at the end of the year discover that his list was too short, that everything got done.
KEITH: But Carney says Obama will make it clear he won't be waiting around for Congress to act.
Tamara Keith, NPR News, the White House.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Here's another item likely to be part of tonight's State of the Union address: helping the long term unemployed. The president is expected to announce that some of America's firms have signed a pledge not to discriminate against the long term unemployed when they're hiring. This week, the president plans to meet with many of the CEOs of those companies. NPR's Zoe Chace from our Planet Money team reports on the surprising experiment that, in part, lead to this meeting.
ZOE CHACE, BYLINE: A year after the financial crisis, September 2009, employers started posting jobs again. Rand Ghayad is an economist and he noticed that companies were hiring again, but he found something puzzling.
RAND GHAYAD: If you go on any job search website you'll find, like, hundreds of thousands of job vacancies, but at the same time unemployment continued to be above 9 percent at that time.
CHACE: Why weren't all these unemployed people getting hired by these companies who had open positions? Ghayad had a hunch and decided to run an experiment. He printed up a bunch of fake resumes...
GHAYAD: And I sent them to 600 job openings, real job openings around the United States.
CHACE: Some resumes had relevant job experience but showed that the applicant had been out of work for more than six months. Other resumes were without relevant job experience, but for people who'd been out of work for just a few weeks or months. Ghayad recorded who got called back for an interview.
GHAYAD: And it turns out that applicants with an unemployment duration of six months or more barely get any interviews, so it becomes nearly impossible for somebody who's long term unemployed to get an interview for a job.
CHACE: This bias against people who have been out of work for more than six months, it's very obvious to those people who have been out of work for more than six months.
ANITA WILLIAMS: After four years, it's looking like no - and it will only get worse because each year that I'm unemployed, not only am I unemployed longer, I'm also older, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44...
CHACE: Anita Williams has been looking for work for four years since she lost her software installation job in Colorado and she says her resume used to be in chronological order, showing her most recent date of employment. And...
WILLIAMS: No calls. No calls. No one's interested.
CHACE: So Anita Williams changed her resume, got called back, but that wasn't enough. She realized she had to be careful in these phone interviews not to date herself and accidently confess that she was over 40.
WILLIAMS: No Duran Duran, no Depeche Mode, no Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston...
CHACE: Whatever you do, don't mention stamps, she says, or balk at weird abbreviations.
WILLIAMS: So you'll be at an interview and someone will say FWIW.
CHACE: FWIW is something people say?
WILLIAMS: And that means for what it's worth.
CHACE: Wow.
WILLIAMS: It's little cues like that that will help.
CHACE: The pledge that's coming from the White House this week to encourage companies not to overlook the long term unemployed, it's coming a little late for Anita Williams. Three hundred applications later, she's got a new plan.
WILLIAMS: One of the things I'm looking at now, because I am in Colorado, is moving into the marijuana industry, because that's an area where, one, I can go in as an entrepreneur, and obviously it's going to be growing.
CHACE: Indeed. That's not a government fix to the problem exactly, but it could lower the unemployment rate a little bit. Ghayad, the economist who did the experiment, he will be at the White House on Friday when the CEOs announce their pledge not to overlook the long term unemployed. Zoe Chace, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Presidential advisor John Podesta is on the line. He is a former advisor to President Clinton. He formerly joined President Obama's White House staff a few weeks ago, just in time for the State of the Union speech tonight. Mr. Podesta, welcome back to the program.
JOHN PODESTA: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: Our colleague Tamara Keith had the numbers just a little while ago. Last year the president asked Congress for 41 things and he got two of them. And of course it's the same Congress. Do you have any reason to think he'll do better in 2014?
PODESTA: Well, I think that he's going to put some things on the table before the Congress that are big things that the Congress can do. Probably topping that list is immigration reform, and there's some appetite for that with the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. He'll call on them to raise the minimum wage.
But I think he's also going to lay out a number on concrete practical proposals to speed up the recovery that he can control. He's calling 100 CEOs of top companies from around the country to the White House on Friday to have them pledge to give the long term unemployed a fair shot at a new job and a new chance to support their families.
So those are the kinds of things he can do without going back to Congress and I think he intends to spend the year making progress and doing those kinds of things.
INSKEEP: We're seeing news reports this morning that the president will issue an executive order to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour for federal contract workers, which we're told is something he can do without Congressional approval. Is he going to do that?
PODESTA: He will do that. Of course he will call on the Congress to raise the minimum wage for everyone in the country. It hasn't been raised since 2009, at levels that we haven't seen since Harry Truman. He'll also work with mayors and governors who are trying to raise the minimum wages in their states and cities.
But if we all do our job, I think that Congress can get around to raising the minimum wage for every American worker and it's long overdue and it's the fair thing to do.
INSKEEP: So a lot of focus here on executive action without Congress. But I was reading this fascinating report in the New Yorker magazine by David Remnick, the editor of that publication, who followed the president around, as you know, and records a couple of instances in which hecklers demanded executive orders. There was even a case in which the president said that's not how it works, we've got this Constitution. He didn't really want to do executive orders. Aren't there very real limits, John Podesta, to what the president can do?
PODESTA: What they were asking him to do was essentially bypass the entire Congressional process on comprehensive immigration reform, and I think the president thought that was a bridge too far. But I think he has stopped the deportation of so-called Dream Act kids, kids who came here - were brought here as minors and who are, you know, in school or serving in the military.
And I think that there's a - if he believes and the Justice Department believes he has the authority to make progress to strengthen the middle class, give people opportunity in this country, he will take it.
INSKEEP: But he doesn't like to do this, does he?
PODESTA: I think he's warmed up to it, and I think you'll see that across a wide range of topics, including retirement security, moving forward on his climate change and energy transformation agenda. There's a lot that he has the authority to do that's vested in him under the laws of the United States and his constitutional powers, and I think that he's looking forward to a year of action and I think he's looking forward to tonight as a breakthrough year where he can lay out some of these practical concrete ideas that will get people on more stable economic footing and see their wages going up for the first time in a long time.
INSKEEP: I want to ask about the war in Afghanistan, Mr. Podesta. I assume the president will say something about it. We'll recall here that President Karzai of Afghanistan still has not signed a security deal that would allow U.S. troops to stay in Afghanistan past the end of this year. And you were on this program in December and you said at that time that if President Karzai didn't sign by the new year, which is now past, the United States should plan for the possibility of withdrawing and in fact that it would be difficult to reverse field at this point. Do you still think it would be hard to reverse field at this point?
PODESTA: You know, obviously the clock is ticking here, and without BSA I think there's not real chance that the United States is going to keep any forces in Afghanistan and I think that, you know, opens up the question of what the relationship will be over the long term. But the president will speak to that question tonight. If the Afghan government wants to fulfill its commitment that it negotiated to sign the bilateral security agreement, then the president will describe what the United States will do in return and he'll talk about that this evening.
INSKEEP: Mr. Podesta, we noted a Gallup poll that showed the president's relatively low approval rating and broke it down state by state. And of course it's one survey. Surveys are different. But Gallup, we noted, had five states in which Democrats are defending a seat in the United State Senate in this year's election, five states where Democrats are defending seats and the president's approval rating is below 35 percent.
West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana, Alaska, Arkansas. What can the president do for Democrats when his approval rating is below 35 percent in some key places?
PODESTA: Well, look, I think the first thing he can do is to make sure that he's successful in this year and that the economy's successful, that we get more growth, that we see wages going up, and I think that will change the terms of his job approval. You know, we came off a very difficult last few months in the last year with the Republicans shutting down the government in the budget standoff, almost defaulting, and then the failed rollout of the healthcare website. So you know, that - he took his knocks on his job approval, but I think the way to reverse that is to get to work, do the things that he will discuss in the State of the Union this evening. So I think he's just got to do his job, really.
INSKEEP: That's new White House advisor John Podesta, who spoke with us a little bit earlier today on this day of President Obama's State of the Union address.
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We're also following other stories, including this. Mexico's attorney general says federal troops have captured one of the leaders of a ruthless drug cartel in the western state of Michoacan. It's the first arrest of a high-ranking leader in the Knights Templar. NPR's Carrie Kahn reports.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: National Public Safety System spokesman Monte Alejandro Rubido announced the arrest last night in a live televised press conference.
MONTE ALEJANDRO RUBIDO: (Spanish spoken)
KAHN: Rubido says federal forces arrested Dionicio Loya Plancarte without firing a single shot. He added that the cartel kingpin was found hiding in a closet. Loya Plancarte is said to be one of the top five leaders of the Knights Templar cartel. He was presumed injured in a shootout with federal forces last March but showed up in this video two months later.
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KAHN: Plancarte, also known as El Tio, The Uncle, challenges the civilian armed defense groups operating in Michoacan to a duel. Dozens of so-called self-defense groups have sprouted up in the state in the past year to defend themselves against the cartel. The ongoing standoff has been an embarrassment to President Enrique Pena Nieto, who sent in thousands of troops this month to restore order. Yesterday, the federal government made moves to legalize the civilian defense groups, ordering them to register their arms and work under the control of local authorities. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Mexico City.
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Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. The Denver Broncos are a two and a half point favorite to win the Super Bowl, but you didn't need to know that in order to gamble. The Seattle Times reports that one-third of Super Bowl gambling now consists of gimmick bets. You can bet on the number of times Peyton Manning says Omaha. Or on whether Renee Fleming makes a mistake in the "National Anthem," or even the color of Gatorade that is dumped on the winning coach after the game.
Ten to one says green. It's MORNING EDITION.
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All that took was a two year delay. House and Senate negotiators last night reached a compromise on the Farm Bill. That legislation deals with agriculture, of course, and also governs the federal food stamp program, from which billions will be cut. Derek Wallbank of Bloomberg News has been covering this story. He's on the line. Welcome to the program.
DAVID WALLBANK: Thank you very much for having me.
INSKEEP: So what took Congress so long?
WALLBANK: Oh, you know, it's interesting. This is the sort of fight where you have a big partisan divide over the issue of the domestic safety net for food stamp funding. Republicans wanted to see big changes to that program, including divorcing it from the Farm Bill entirely, while Democrats really did not want to see any cuts at all, particularly after you had a rollback of benefits last year.
But you also had on the commodity side, a lot of farm groups trying to protect and preserve subsidies even as we were eliminating direct payments to farmers.
INSKEEP: OK. So two things to talk about there. First the food stamps. I understand this bill cuts $8 billion in food stamp spending over a decade. Sounds like a lot although it is a one percent cut in the overall program. How is that going to affect the average person or the average family depending on food stamps to help pay the bills?
WALLBANK: It depends. The way that it does it is it changes rules for something that's called the light/heat program. Basically, it gives you a little bit of extra benefit if you get assistance for home heating aid.
INSKEEP: Mm-hmm.
WALLBANK: It's only in certain states and what it does is it changes the amount of money that the state has to give you. And in a very complicated way, if you qualify for this you're going to get a reduction in benefits. Somewhere around 800,000 people should be affected by this - not everybody, but the people who are will definitely notice it.
INSKEEP: Now, at the same time that the food stamp program is being cut you're saying that there was a fight over agriculture subsidies including for big agriculture businesses. Who were the winners and losers?
WALLBANK: Well, I think most of the people who have a stake in the Farm Bill are pretty happy with it. We saw a flood of commodity groups coming out after the deal was announced to say yes, we're for it. Let's go. The Farm Bureau was quick to come out. The Soy Bean Association was quick to come out. And really, at the end of the day this is about getting rid of those direct payments that were checks cut to farmers in one of the great symbols of things the government probably ought not do.
Everyone realized that was politically untenable, we couldn't do that anymore, that there wasn't the support to continue it. And so really, at the end of the day you came up with a program that people who grow peanuts to people who grow wheat pretty much like. And those big farm groups that were worried about losing direct checks, they seem to have come out OK.
INSKEEP: What's the new system?
WALLBANK: Well, the new system is more of an insurance-based safety net. There are some target prices set up in there, but mainly it's an insurance-based system that's designed to, in bad years, help farmers get through them. And it's a much more complex safety net. It's harder to describe than just checks that are going out.
And that's honestly part of the complication. That's part of why it took so long, is because it's very hard to design a program that works for people growing peanuts in Georgia just as well as it works for people growing corn in Minnesota.
INSKEEP: Is the United States still going to be subsidizing people who grow those goods in years when they need it?
WALLBANK: They are absolutely going to be subsidizing those in years when they need it. There is a concern among some that it will be over-subsidizing when they don't need it. And to the extent of how generous or not, it kind of depends who you talk to.
INSKEEP: Derek Wallbank of Bloomberg News. Thanks very much.
WALLBANK: You're very welcome.
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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep. The new education standards called Common Core are rolling out in 45 states and the District of Columbia, and they're getting plenty of feedback. Supporters say Common Core standards will hold American students to much higher expectations, that's the idea.
But there is a backlash to Common Core. Conservatives and liberals alike are increasingly voicing similar concerns. NPR's Eric Westervelt reports.
ERIC WESTERVELT, BYLINE: The mainstream business wing of the Republican Party strongly backs the Common Core, arguing that raising standards is vital to creating the next-generation American workforce. But in an echo of the rifts in the GOP nationally, the Tea Party branch of the GOP has been the most vocal passionate critic of the new standards.
Conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck has led the push. On his show "The Blaze," he often charges that Common Core will undermine student individuality, teacher autonomy, and mark a dangerous takeover of local control by federal bureaucrats pushing a leftist agenda.
GLENN BECK: This is a progressive bonanza, and if it's allowed to be in our schools in any form and become the Common Core of America's next generation, it will destroy America and the system of freedom as we know it.
WESTERVELT: But while some conservative activists have long slammed the standards, a new development is underway. A small but growing number of liberal reformists actually agree with them on some of the key criticisms. Although they're loathe to admit it, both sides dovetail in worrying that the standards take a one-size-fits-all approach, create a de facto national curriculum, and put too much emphasis on standardized tests.
STAN KARP: It's fundamentally flawed because it was fundamentally undemocratic in the way that it was defined, rolled out, financed.
WESTERVELT: That's Stan Karp. He taught high school English for 30 years in Patterson, New Jersey. He's now with Education Law Center and the liberal reform group Rethinking Schools. He sees Common Core as the ideological stepchild of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind: Another high-stakes testing program, he says, imposed from Washington with big help from wealthy foundations and little help from teachers, parents and local communities.
KARP: This is a set of standards that does not reflect the experience of many groups of students served by public education, does not reflect the concerns that many parents have for what they want to see in their education, and that really doubles down on a testing-and-punish regime.
WESTERVELT: Both of these segments of the left and right say Common Core represents an end-run around federal prohibition about adopting a national curriculum. And both argue that the new standards were not really state-driven. They say the Obama administration all but forced them into it by requiring states to adopt new standards to be eligible for billions in federal grant money.
Anthony Cody taught for nearly 20 years at a high-poverty middle school in Oakland, California. He's co-founder of the liberal reform group Network for Public Education. He sees growing common-ground opposition to Common Core.
ANTHONY CODY: From the conservative side, there is an understanding of the dangers of standardization. And there is, from sort of a Libertarian perspective, there's suspicion of government control of what students learn that really resonates with me as a teacher that wants some autonomy. I don't want to be so tied to filling their heads with this predetermined list of things.
WESTERVELT: Advocates of the Common Core reject the notion they'll create a national curriculum. They point out teachers can pick their own materials as long as students know what the Core ask them to know by the end of the school year. The new standards, they argue, will do a lot to promote critical thinking and collaborative problem-solving while raising the bar on what every student should know.
DANE LINN: I would encourage your listeners to take a hard look at the standards before they start believing some of the critics.
WESTERVELT: That's Dane Linn, vice president for education and workforce at the Business Roundtable. With the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the roundtable is rolling out a new national ad campaign to support the Common Core. Linn worked on the standards when he directed the education policy arm of the National Governors Association. He says the idea they're a stalking horse for federal intrusion into local education is ludicrous.
LINN: I was at that first meeting in Chicago with the state's governor's offices, state superintendents of schools, members of state boards of education. It was a state decision. Clearly, some of those critics of the standards have chosen to base their arguments on fallacies about both the development of the standards and the intention of the standards.
WESTERVELT: Meantime, many public school teachers feel caught in the middle as they work to train up on and implement the new standards. Megan Franke is an education professor at UCLA.
MEGAN FRANKE: I guess my worry - my big, big worry is that we're not going to support people. And then we're going to say: See, the Common Core doesn't work.
WESTERVELT: All of this means all is not right in Common Core land. At the very least, the standards have a serious image problem. Tea Party conservatives, calling it ObamaCore, are planning a big march on Washington this summer to oppose the new standards. But the growing number of liberal critics of Common Core aren't likely to join hands with them and march. They fundamentally disagree on how to reform public education and are alienated by the marchers' other calls to abolish teacher tenure and the Federal Education Department.
Eric Westervelt, NPR News, San Francisco.
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OK, the Grammy Awards are behind us. The Oscars are around the corner. And now, we have another award that also gets a lot of attention this time of year, from people who love kids' books.
The American Library Association has announced this year's Caldecott and Newbery Award winners. NPR's Lynn Neary reports.
LYNN NEARY, BYLINE: Kate DiCamillo should be used to accolades by now. She was nominated last year for a National Book Award, and the Library of Congress named her the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. She won a Newbery Medal for her earlier book, "The Tale of Despereaux" as well as an honorable mention for "Because of Winn Dixie."
Even so, DiCamillo insists she was not expecting the early morning call she got, telling her she had just won her second Newbery for "Flora and Ulysses," the story of girl and a super hero squirrel.
KATE DICAMILLO: They called, and I thought that I had dreamed the whole thing. And I thought, what am I supposed to do now? And I just came downstairs and wrote, you know. And that's what I want to keep on doing - (Laughter) - is writing.
NEARY: DiCamillo says she never set out to write kids' books. But she got a job in a book warehouse in the children's department, and started reading some of the books.
DICAMILLO: And I entered into that job, I think, with a lot of what, you know - serious adult readers, like a bias that they have, that oh, children's books, you know, that's the duckies and bunnies. But I fell in love with what you could do with a children's book. And I found where I am supposed to be. A lot of times people say to me: Oh, when are you going to write an adult book? And it's just like, this is it. I've found what I'm what I'm supposed to do.
NEARY: The Newbery is given for the most outstanding contribution to children's literature The Caldecott honors the best illustrated picture book. This year's winner is "Locomotive," by Brian Floca.
Marion Rutsch, chair of the Caldecott committee, says the book is part historical fiction, part family story, and succeeds on several levels.
MARION RUTSCH: The book has got huge, double-page spreads of the train crossing the country, beautiful landscapes of the West at that point. It's got dizzying shots looking down on the engine, or as it crosses a train trestle. And then it's got little, small vignettes on other pages of eating in the dining car; the little boy who needs to use the facilities, and what it was like. (Laughter) There are a lot of little, small details that will have great appeal for the children.
NEARY: The American Library Association gives out a number of other awards for kids' media, including the Coretta Scott King Awards, which this year went to Rita Williams-Garcia, for "P.S. Be Eleven"; and Bryan Collier, for "Knock, Knock: My Dad's Dream for Me."
Kate Patton, head of the King jury, says the King awards are celebrating their 45th anniversary this year.
KATE PATTON: Had we not had this award, there is a lot of wonderful art and literature that would not have been recognized. And I think it's important that we have a wide spectrum of things that are recognized as award-winning.
NEARY: Patton says she hope kids of color will be able to identify with the characters in these books. And that the prize will also help lead other kids to books they otherwise might not have known about.
Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.
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INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
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Hey, this week we're reporting on the drilling boom in North Dakota, which is transforming just about everything it touches. The state sits atop one of the world's largest oil deposits. The industry employs some 60,000 workers there, and every day people flock to the Williston Basin, as it's known, looking for work. The boom is also causing growing pains. Long time residents hardly recognize their own home towns. NPR's Kirk Siegler has the first story in our series on the Great Plains oil rush.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Jennifer Brown is watching the snowy plains of northern Montana pass by outside the frosty windows of the Amtrak empire builder. On a Sunday at dusk, this eastbound train is jam-packed. People are heading to their jobs in North Dakota towns like Minot, Williston and Watford City. Brown is moving there from Idaho to join her husband, who's been working in the oil fields since the summer.
JENNIFER BROWN: I haven't seen him in two months.
SIEGLER: Are you kidding?
BROWN: No. It's been really hard.
SIEGLER: The Browns ran a logging truck business in northern Idaho, but work was hard to come by. And out here they've heard you can make a hundred grand or more just starting out in the oil fields. Jennifer Brown says they had no other choice.
BROWN: So we've been financially living paycheck to paycheck. We've been married for 20 years, living paycheck to paycheck in that area. So we're going to try something different and basically start all over.
SIEGLER: Start all over in this remote corner of Northwestern North Dakota. Just a few years ago that would've been laughable. A hundred grand in wages out here? Believe it. And more and more people like Jennifer Brown are moving here every day. This frozen frontier now boasts the nation's lowest unemployment rate. Help wanted signs are everywhere - in the oil fields, the hotels and restaurants that support them, in construction, hospitals, you name it.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Unintelligible) station stop, Williston, North Dakota, will be coming up in about 10 to 12 minutes.
SIEGLER: At the heart of it all is the rough-and-tumble boomtown of Williston. The first thing you see leaving the Amtrak station are two strip clubs, Heartbreakers and Whispers, that cater to the wave of men coming into town from the oil fields, their pockets stuffed with cash. Oil workers with the smell of diesel still fresh on their Carhartt overalls also pack watering holes further up the street, downing Buds and burgers after work.
Every gas station here has a special on 5-Hour Energy. The local Wal-Mart can't keep its shelves fully stocked. Forty miles to the south, in the once-sleepy farming hamlet of Watford City, a line of trucks clogs snowy Main Street. New hotels, grocery stores and man camps - that's oil-field slang for cheap temp housing - sprout up on the prairie overnight. The 2010 census counted 1,500 people here; today there are an estimated 10,000. A fivefold increase in just over three years.
ALICIA DEEDEE: The example I always give people of how it's changed, my little sister and I used to be able to walk all over town. Our parents didn't worry. And I have a daughter of my own, and my husband and I won't let her outside by herself anymore.
SIEGLER: From behind the cash register at Larson's Drug, Alicia Deedee says a lot of these changes are bittersweet. While she welcomes the money, she doesn't like all the trucks and the big city traffic and the crime that's come with the boom.
DEEDEE: At the same time I'm thankful, you know, we have good jobs and we have jobs. A lot of people in the country don't.
SIEGLER: The boom brings money to local coffers while straining infrastructure. Town leaders say they only have enough water to sustain about 7,000 people. Good luck finding a one-bedroom apartment for less than 1,500 a month. And then there's the crime.
JESSE WELLEN: Hi. I apologize for being so late...
SIEGLER: Watford City's police chief Jesse Wellen offers me a seat in his cramped 28 by 28 foot station. His force has also grown fivefold. There are now 10 officers sharing these four desks, but they're usually out on patrol or calls.
WELLEN: Our domestic violence calls have definitely increased; alcohol-related calls have drastically increased as well. We seem to go to quite a few assaults.
SIEGLER: Wellen says they responded to an unprecedented 18 domestic violence calls in December alone, and his officers are arresting about one person a day now for drunk driving. These are stats nobody in a town of 10,000 people can be proud of.
WELLEN: It's basically call to call, I mean instead of kind of a proactive, going out there and trying to get stuff, you're jumping from call to call all the time, crashes and, you know, bar fights.
SIEGLER: Chief Wellen, who's 28 and new here, got some help from the state lately and will be able to hire four more officers. Watford City has seen oil booms before, most recently in the 1980s. That boom ended in a bust, and those memories are still fresh for some people here. Still, you get the sense that this boom may be different.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Ready?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: We're ready to rock and roll.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Okay. Here we go...
SIEGLER: Steve Holen is counting on that, because he has to plan for it. He's the superintendent of the local school district.
STEVE HOLEN: We know we are probably in about the second or third inning of a nine-inning game here. Our demographic studies say they'll expect about 1,600 kids by 2017, '18.
SIEGLER: Holen is watching a line of kindergartners bundling up in their snow pants, face masks and hats, as school is about to let out. Since 2010, enrollment here has more than doubled to 1,000 kids.
HOLEN: And even just today is a good example. We probably picked up another 15 kids today after the post-Christmas little push.
SIEGLER: Holen plans to ask voters to approve a property tax hike to pay for building a new high school, but he knows that won't be an easy sell.
HOLEN: Some of our community members do believe that the industry, the state, somebody else should be paying for this. It shouldn't be me. And so getting a bond passed in that environment can be a real challenge.
SIEGLER: And even if the school bond passes, there's another challenge weighing heavily on Holen's mind. His district has lately had to get into the real estate business. So far it's bought about 20 housing units, but they need a lot more. After all, how do you recruit teachers to come all the way out here to this boomtown when there's no place to live? Kirk Siegler, NPR News.
INSKEEP: The oil rush series continues tonight on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED with a report on the tensions between oil production and the state's largest industry, agriculture.
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When people hear the words bubonic plague, they usually think of the Black Death, the epidemic that hit Europe in the 14th century. You learn about this in school. But the first recorded plague pandemic actually happened 800 years earlier, during the days of the Roman Empire.
NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports that scientists have now recovered the entire genetic code of the bacteria responsible for that ancient pandemic.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: This plague struck in the year 541, when the Roman emperor was named Justinian, so it's usually called the Justinian Plague. He actually got sick himself, but recovered. He was one of the lucky ones.
DAVID WAGNER: Some of the estimates are that up to 50 million people died.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: David Wagner is an expert on microbial genetics at Northern Arizona University. He says the plague swept through Europe, North Africa and parts of Asia.
And it's thought that the Justinian plague actually led partially to the downfall of the Roman Empire.
Contemporary accounts of this plague made scientists suspect it was caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, the same kind of microbe that later caused Europe's Black Death. The bacteria gets spread by fleas. After someone gets infected from a flea bite, the bacteria travel to the nearest lymph node and start multiplying.
WAGNER: And so you get this mass swelling in that lymph node, which is known as a buboe. That's where the term bubonic plague comes from.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The Justinian plague has been hard to study scientifically, since it happened around 1,500 years ago. But recently new housing developments being built outside of Munich led to some old farmland being dug up and people uncovered a burial site with graves that dated as far back as the Justinian Plague.
WAGNER: They found some that had multiple individuals buried together, which is oftentimes indicative of an infectious disease. And so in this particular case we examined material from two different victims. One of those victims was buried together with another adult and a child, so it's presumed that they all may have died of plague at the same time.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: All that was left was skeletons - with teeth. Inside the teeth was the dental pulp that still contained traces of blood. And the blood contains the remains of plague bacteria. Wagner and an international team of collaborators managed to extract enough DNA to reconstruct the ancient pathogen's entire genetic code.
In the journal Lancet Infectious Disease, the team says it looks like this strain of bacteria jumped from rodents into humans and then died out. The later emergence of the Black Death seems to have been caused by a separate event. The DNA also suggests that like the Black Death, the original source of the plague was China.
PAUL KEIM: So the ecological reservoir for plague, the historical reservoir, is in China and it's this emergence, this pattern over and over again, with people moving commodities, rats, and fleas around the world, that we're able to document.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Paul Keim worked on the study at Northern Arizona University. He says overall this ancient strain is not that different from modern ones that still circulate in places like Arizona.
KEIM: The biology of the pathogen no doubt could cause another pandemic if it weren't for the changes in human culture and medicine.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He says these days antibiotics quickly stop plague outbreaks in their tracks.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
According to Commentator Frank Deford, on Sunday most eyes will be on East Rutherford because Americans' devotion to football just keeps getting stronger.
FRANK DEFORD: We're fascinated by lists and ratings, top tens, especially by anything that makes a big jump, like, say, shooting up from Number seven to Number three. However, we sometimes overlook it when whatever is number one just gets to be a more solid number one. There's never any one-plus in the ratings.
Such is the case with football, which now simply overwhelms all other sports in America, growing not just merely super but superior, from high school right on up to this Sunday's quasi-religious festival which celebrates our adoration of the sport as much as the sport itself.
There're multiple reasons to account for this increased devotion to football. But curiously, I don't see a balancing diminution in interest in other sports. Baseball, for example, may no longer be the national pastime, but it's doing quite well, thank you. Sports fandom is not necessarily a zero-sum game. It's just that football popularity grows and grows, fungus-like, and for sure, more. Starting next year, when the colleges have a real football playoff, a whiff of January Madness, the interest in football is bound to rise to even higher heights.
Its gospel, of course, that football is both the perfect game to bet on and to be rendered on a television set. And the improvement in TV quality is surely another reason the sport continues to grow its appeal. But I think there's also something of a counterintuitive aspect at play here, as well. For whereas all we hear is about how rapidly things move today, how the news cycle never ends, how it's a turnover, throw-away world, the fact that football teams only play once a week, sort of slows everything down.
We don't much anticipate games in other sports. They're just too many of them, one right after another. Ah, ah, but football. Football still has foreplay. But wait, you say, football has suffered such terrible publicity with all the revelations about the players sustaining brain damage. However, I rather suspect that the emphasis on football violence has only made it more popular.
So much of the attraction of the game has been the charm of danger, the licensed brutality. Since we appreciate better now how much of their health and their future that our football players truly are risking, it provides us with an even greater vicarious thrill. No, we're probably too ashamed to admit that that seduces us, but now that we understand that football is not just a game but a reality show about the reality of life for the participants, it makes this annual culminating Sunday service even more of an American spectacular. And appropriately this year, even the Statue of Liberty itself will just be a neighborhood visual in the shadow of the pigskin.
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MONTAGNE: The comments of Frank Deford can be heard every Wednesday, right here on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
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And I'm Steve Inskeep.
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With just a week to go before the winter Olympics begin in Sochi, there's a lot of anxiety about safety and the threat of terrorism in Russia. The U.S. State Department has issued a travel advisory for those heading to the games. And some American athletes have been urging their own family members to stay home. As North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann reports, concern over safety is only the latest complication for families debating whether to make the trip to Russia.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: On a frigid afternoon, Jack Burke is coaching young skiers in a field in Saranac Lake, New York. His son Tim, who shoots and skis as part of the U.S. biathlon team, got his start training here. Now, Tim is off to Sochi to compete. But Jack - his whole family - they're staying home, missing the games for the first time since Tim's first Olympics in 2006.
JACK BURKE: The uncertainty certainly did weigh into it. And the cost - the cost was substantial. And cost seemed to be changing weekly.
MANN: For a lot athlete families, the Winter Olympics are a kind of pilgrimage. They've made the trip to Salt Lake, Turin and Vancouver. But this year with Sochi it's different - more costly, more nerve-wracking. Ed Mazdzer's son Chris is a luge racer, riding one of those super-fast sleds. Because Chris is a serious medal contender, Ed and his family are going to Russia, but the decision wasn't easy.
ED MAZDZER: It's $18,000 for four of us in our family.
MANN: That's kind of a big nut. Is that twice as expensive as Vancouver? Is it...
MAZDZER: Probably four times.
MANN: Marty Lawthers, Chris Mazdzer's mom, says the family had to borrow against their life insurance policy to pay for the trip. Along with the cost of travel and hotels, she says, came the expense and headache of dealing with the Russian bureaucracy.
MARTY LAWTHERS: I think the whole visa process was crazy. Just crazy. There are so many fingers in the pie in this particular event.
MANN: Even families who've paid thousands of dollars say they've had their reservations changed or canceled over and over.
HELEN DEMONG: As recently as three weeks ago, we got an email from the organizers saying they were moving us again.
MANN: Helen Demong is the mom of Olympic gold medalist Bill Demong, whose sport - Nordic combined - combines long distance ski jumping and cross-country skiing. She says their hotel rooms, reserved and paid for months in advance, keep evaporating.
DEMONG: That particular hotel was run by Russian businessman and he had double-booked it and he had no rooms set aside for us.
MANN: It's hard to say how many American families are opting out because of these hurdles. Jack Burke, who is staying home, says he thinks a lot of Olympic fans are also turned off by the impression that Sochi is remote from the rest of Russia and just isn't a known to Americans as a must-see destination.
BURKE: We felt that if we went to Russia, it would strictly be watching events and experiencing the local culture and getting around would probably be limited.
MANN: Everyone interviewed for this story - those going to Sochi and those watching from home on TV - said worries about security and terrorism are constantly in the backs of their minds, especially after Vancouver four years ago, which felt almost like a home-town Winter Olympics, Helen Demong says these games will be nerve-wracking.
DEMONG: Absolutely we'll be more cautious. But we're going to be surrounded by families and friends and I'm sure we are going to raise a glass of Russian vodka and we are going to celebrate.
MANN: Demong points out that there were similar fears about security before the Salt Lake Winter Games, which followed just five months after the 9/11 terror attacks. Those games went off without a hitch and Demong is hoping Sochi will turn out the same. For NPR News I'm Brian Mann in Saranac Lake, New York.
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Archeologists who are excavating a site in Rome say they've uncovered what may be the oldest-known temple from antiquity. Along the way, they've also discovered how much the early Romans intervened to shape their urban environment. And as NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports, the dig has been particularly challenging, because the temple is below the water table.
SYLVIA POGGIOLI, BYLINE: We're at the foot Capitoline Hill in the center of Rome, next to the Medieval Saint Omobono Church. Today, the Tiber River is about a hundred yards away. But when the city was being created, around the 7th century BC, it flowed right here, where a bend in the river provided a natural harbor for merchant ships.
NIC TERRENATO: And here, they decide to build a temple.
POGGIOLI: Nic Terrenato teaches classical archaeology at the University of Michigan and is co-director of the Saint Omobono excavation project.
TERRENATO: At this point, Rome is trading already as far afield as Cyprus, Lebanon, Egypt. And so they build this temple, which is going to be one of the first things the traders see when they pull into the harbor of Rome.
POGGIOLI: The temple, whose foundations are below the waterline, was probably dedicated to the goddess Fortuna. The archaeological team discovered large quantities of votive offerings, such as miniature versions of drinking vessels, left not by locals, but by foreign traders. Terrenato says in antiquity, temples built on harbors had the function of fostering mutual trust between locals and traders.
TERRENATO: It's like a free trade zone, and the goddess is supposed to guarantee the fairness of the trade.
POGGIOLI: The discovery of the existence of the archaic temple came after years of fundraising in Italy and in the U.S., and it required sophisticated technological know-how. Last summer, an ambitious joint project of the University of Michigan and Rome archaeology officials finally got under way.
ALBERT AMMERMAN: This is like totally mission impossible.
POGGIOLI: Archaeologist Albert Ammerman has excavated numerous sites in Rome. The team used heavy machinery to drill a rectangular hole 15 feet deep. A crane lowered large sheets of metal to keep back the soggy soil. Terrenato says the archaeologists had to fight claustrophobia to be able to spend as much as eight hours a day at the bottom of that trench.
TERRENATO: You're in a very deep hole, and although you know that, in theory, the sheeting is going to hold everything up, you know, there is, like, a primal part of your brain that tells you to get out of there. Because, you know, if the walls come closing in, there's not going to be any way out for you.
POGGIOLI: The foundations of the Temple of Fortuna were visible for only three days. For security reasons, the team could not leave the trench open, and it had to be filled up again.
But digging through the city's many layers, archaeologists have learned a lot. Early Rome - a city of high hills and deep valleys prone to flooding - soon became one large landfill, as the founders chopped off hilltops and dumped them into lowlands to try to make the city flatter and drier.
And as the city grew layer by layer, and more temples were built, archeologists Ammerman says the Romans encroached on their river, diverting the original waterway.
AMMERMAN: This is actually not totally natural. It's the humans are actually changing the river to the way it is here. They had the ability to realize that to make their city go, they have to transform the landscape.
POGGIOLI: As they figured how to cope with their surroundings, the early Romans developed sophisticated engineering and administrative skills, and a collective ability to deal with their challenging environment. It's discoveries like these, Ammerman says, that debunk the idealized image of ancient Rome as a place that never changed, the immutable and eternal city. Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Rome.
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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
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And I'm Renee Montagne.
This morning we've been hearing highlights of President Obama's State of the Union Address. Over the next few minutes we want to dig into the specifics. We gathered in our studio a group of NPR correspondents to put into context some of what the president said last night. We'll start with an announcement that was expected, involving raising the minimum wage for a few Americans.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
MONTAGNE: Tamara Keith covers the White House for NPR. And Tamara, first off, how many people is the president talking about here?
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: We don't know. That's the honest answer. We don't know how many. House Speaker John Boehner suggested that it would be somewhere close to zero. And the reason we don't know, and the reason why it could be a low number - other estimates put it at more like a couple hundred thousand - is that this applies only to new federal contracts. Not current contracts, not current employees of these contractors.
But if a new contract is negotiated, it would apply to those employees. And we don't know really how many of those are outstanding or when these contracts might be negotiated, which is why there are a lot of details to fill in here.
MONTAGNE: Well, the president talked about other ways in which the minimum wage has been raised around the country that didn't involve Congress. But as he himself put it, Congress needs to get on board if millions are to be reached.
KEITH: That would be true. Some states have raised their minimum wages. He also pointed to employers who have decided to pay their employees more than the minimum wage, even though they don't have to. So he's trying a lot of different options, also try to put a little pressure on Congress to raise the minimum wage as well - but that seems like it's not going to happen anytime soon.
House Republicans are just absolutely not interested in raising the minimum wage, in part because they believe that it hurts businesses and by extension low-wage employees.
MONTAGNE: Let's turn now to look at another area where, to make a difference, Congress and the president have to come together.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
MONTAGNE: Immigration reform, it's been a tough one. And this year the president framed his call for immigration reform in economic terms.
Joining us is NPR congressional correspondent David Welna, and what about that?
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: Well, Renee, you know, he said that having some kind of immigration overhaul could lead to a trillion dollars in both economic growth and deficit reduction over the next 20 years. That works out to be about a billion dollars a week. But I think the real point was that doing this would benefit everybody and not just immigrants, there's something in it for all of us.
MONTAGNE: And in fact, there does seem to be momentum building for some sort of reform.
WELNA: There does in the House. It wasn't unclear that anything was going to happen as late as late last year. But suddenly it seems that House speaker John Boehner has a new resolve to get something done this election year. And in fact House Republicans are going off to a three-day retreat today, where they will be presented with a plan that even mentions the possibility of legal status for millions of people who are here without authorization. And it would go so far as to grant citizenship for the children who were brought illegally by their parents.
Now, this goes a lot farther than Republicans have gone in the past. It's a very divisive issue for their party. And there are some Republicans who are saying don't do it, it could screw things up for the election. But I think President Obama was trying to tread lightly with this and let the Republicans do it on their own and not squeeze the bar too tightly lest it slip out.
MONTAGNE: Well, in fact this goes to the overall theme of the president's speech, which was opportunity, and to that end Mr. Obama talked about the opportunity for a good education in what might be called his trademark program.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
MONTAGNE: NPR's national security editor Bruce Auster is here in the studio. And Bruce, combat operations will be over by 2014, the end of the year, but the president also said a small force could remain behind to train and advise Afghan forces and pursue al-Qaida, so the war's not quite over.
BRUCE AUSTER, BYLINE: That's right. The end of the year means that the 37,000 troops who are there now, that number comes way down, and so the combat mission ends. But the question that remains is how many stay behind. And if the United States and Afghanistan sign a security agreement, and there's a big if there about whether that happens, then the question becomes how many troops stay.
The Pentagon wants 10,000 troops to remain because they want to do two missions. They want to do a counterterrorism mission and they want to be able to train Afghan forces. That's the number they say they need. There are people in the White House who want a smaller number. And this raises, again, the question, the tension between security and politics. Politically, people just want this over.
But to get out properly and not leave the place in chaos may require keeping troops behind.
MONTAGNE: And beyond Afghanistan, the president repeated his hopes to end what he calls the state of permanent war that we've been in since 9/11.
AUSTER: That's right. It's a theme he's raised before. It's the idea that the war on terror has gone all these years, how does it ever end and does it ever end? The legacies of the war on terror are things like Guantanamo, the surveillance program we've heard a lot about in the news, the drone policy. The question is, if the war ever ends, how do those specific policies change? And with things like Guantanamo, we've learned over the years how hard it is to close that place.
Each of these policies poses challenges in terms of how the president winds it down.
MONTAGNE: That's national security editor Bruce Auster. We were also joined by education correspondent Claudio Sanchez, David Welna, our congressional correspondent and White House correspondent Tamara Keith. Thanks to all of you for joining us.
KEITH: Thank you.
WELNA: Thank you.
: You're welcome.
MONTAGNE: And they were breaking down some of what we heard from President Obama last night in his fifth State of the Union speech before Congress. We have more reaction to the president's address elsewhere in the program.
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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep.
President Obama delivered his State of the Union speech with enthusiasm last night. Facing a Congress that has often frustrated him, as well as sagging poll numbers, the president offered a list of proposals Congress could pass, and a series of plans he could enact alone if they don't.
The president addressed major issues, like inequality, education and energy, yet also put forward the kind of small-bore proposals he used to disparage.
Here's NPR's national political correspondent, Mara Liasson.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: The president who walked into the House chamber last night was in a tough spot. The country is in a sour mood about the economy, about Washington and about his own leadership. So he tried something new for the traditional one-word evaluation of the nation's well-being.
(SOUNDBITE OF STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS)
LIASSON: And the Mr. Obama rejected the widespread expectation that nothing much can get done in Washington, declaring that he believes 2014 can be a breakthrough year for America.
(SOUNDBITE OF STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS)
LIASSON: The shrinking middle class and the widening gap between the rich and the poor is the president's big theme this year. He's called income inequality the defining challenge of our time. But last night, he gave that phrase a new twist.
(SOUNDBITE OF STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS)
LIASSON: There were no new calls to tax the rich. Mr. Obama's emphasis was on growth and upward mobility, not redistribution. That's an approach with more potential to get bipartisan support.
And instead of trying to cure Washington's bitter partisan divisions, or continue the mostly futile effort to convince Republicans to pass his agenda, the president had a new strategy, borne of necessity: He will work around Congress and use the authority of his own office.
(SOUNDBITE OF STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS)
LIASSON: The president wants Congress to raise the minimum wage, fund universal pre-K and expand the earned income tax credit. But he also laid out a list of initiatives that he planned to enact on his own, using his executive powers, including a new government-backed private retirement savings plan and a raise in the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour for new federal contract workers.
(SOUNDBITE OF STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS)
LIASSON: The new federal contract minimum wage will only affect several hundred thousand people. It's an example of how much smaller the president's ambitions are this year, compared to his earlier, more sweeping proposals on health care, financial regulation, gun control or climate change. But there is one area where the White House is optimistic about making progress with Congress.
(SOUNDBITE OF STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS)
LIASSON: The president was careful not to antagonize Republicans on this issue, perhaps hoping to preserve the possibility that House Republicans might actually pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul this year.
On the other hand, there was no olive branch about Obamacare, and no mea culpa about its disastrous debut. Instead, the president delivered a vigorous defense of the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans plan to make the centerpiece of their 2014 campaigns.
Let's not have another 40-something votes to repeal a law that's already helping Americans, he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS)
LIASSON: The speech was heavily focused on domestic policy, but Mr. Obama did hail the coming end of the war in Afghanistan. And he defended his diplomatic overture to Iran, repeating his pledge to veto any bill Congress sent him to increase sanctions on Iran while the talks about Iran's nuclear weapons program are underway. Mara Liasson, NPR News, Washington.
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Let's hear now how some lawmakers responded to President Obama's address. As NPR's Ailsa Chang reports, many congressional members were struck most by the president's repeated threat to use his executive authority to get some things done.
AILSA CHANG, BYLINE: President Obama promised a year of action last night, one propelled by his willingness to go it alone and take steps without waiting for Congress to go along. After watching gun control legislation collapse in the Senate last spring, a comprehensive immigration reform package languish in the House for months and a government shutdown in October, the president now seems to be saying, enough. I don't need Congress's permission for everything. And to that, Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas says he's not surprised.
SENATOR TED CRUZ: He continued his pattern - that I think is one of the most disturbing patterns of the Obama administration - of side-stepping Congress and acting unilaterally. There is a pattern of lawlessness in this administration.
CHANG: A lawlessness, Cruz pointed out, already exemplified by the president's decision to defer the deportation of many younger illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. by their parents and the president's refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. Last night, Obama announced an executive order to raise the minimum wage to over $10 an hour for future federal contract workers. And Republican Tom Cole of Oklahoma said the problem with executive orders like that is that they're limited in scope.
REPRESENTATIVE TOM COLE: The problem is they don't outlast their presidency. So, if you want to go to write on the sand in the beach, that's great, but the tide will come in. So, if you want to do something, sit down with the other side and make real concrete legislation, and you can do things that are lasting and significant.
CHANG: But honestly, could the presidency lasting in significant legislation, raising the federal wage, something he's strongly pushing for?
COLE: I think it's likely not to happen, partly because, you know, states are able to go ahead and act on their own. And so the country is very diverse. What makes sense in a state with 9 percent unemployment maybe doesn't make sense in a state with 5.5.
CHANG: As for extending benefits for the long-term unemployed, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle seem to agree some extension is needed. House Speaker John Boehner has said for weeks he'd consider one, as long as there was a way to pay for it. But Democrat Chris Van Hollen of Maryland says it's not going to be that easy with House Republicans.
REPRESENTATIVE CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: He said let's use some of the savings from cutting agriculture subsidies - which is part of the farm bill - and let's direct those savings to pay for an extension of emergency unemployment insurance - very clear. They said we wouldn't even get to vote on that idea.
CHANG: There was also no shortage of pushback last night on laws already on the books. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington used her Republican response to the president's speech to go after the Affordable Care Act, her party's favorite campaign issue this year.
REPRESENTATIVE CATHY MCMORRIS RODGERS: We've all talked to too many people who've received cancellation notices they didn't expect, or who can no longer see the doctors they always have. No, we shouldn't go back to things - the way things were. But this law is not working.
CHANG: Still, there remains a modest hope 2014 could bring moments of bipartisan accord. House Republicans are heading into their annual retreat this week, expecting to discuss what changes in immigration law they're willing to support. Ailsa Chang, NPR News, the Capitol.
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Surprise: People across the South are digging out this morning. Weather forecasters knew there would be snow, but missed their calculations on where and how much, which is how Principal Ken Jarnagin ended up sheltering about 800 students for the night at Spain Park High School in Hoover, Alabama.
KEN JARNAGIN: We decided to put all the males in the gyms. So we asked the coaches to roll out wrestling mats. And we spread the girls all throughout the academic wing.
INSKEEP: Where they had carpets on the floors. Now, some stranded drivers would have been happy with a gym mat or a carpet after sleeping in their cars. And NPR's own Russell Lewis spent the night at the offices of WBHM in Birmingham, Alabama. Russell, glad you found someplace warm
RUSSELL LEWIS, BYLINE: Yes, I got about 90 minutes of sleep myself.
INSKEEP: OK, fantastic. But explain something to us, if you can, because people across the country understand it doesn't snow that often in the South, but it snows. So, how did this storm cause so much paralysis?
LEWIS: Well, we should say, I mean, it snows in Birmingham once or twice a year. It's really not that unusual. But here's what meteorologists say: They admitted yesterday they made a huge forecasting error. It was supposed to be just a dusting, and not the two inches of snow, and certainly not the ice that showed up. It caught people off guard. The streets weren't treated. The storm was really only supposed to affect the coast. In fact, the state actually prepositioned trucks down there. Businesses closed. Schools released early. Roads were jammed, and it was just total ice gridlock.
INSKEEP: OK, you're helping to explain this: Alabama has equipment to deal with snowstorms, but it was in the wrong place, which means they can't respond quickly. So what happened next?
LEWIS: Well, the problems, they really just cascaded. The interstates, they turned into skating rinks. And people actually just got out of their cars, and they started walking. The temperature was in the teens. It was windy. Some people trudged through the ice and the snow for miles to get home. Look, there were accidents everywhere. At one point yesterday, there were 140 simultaneous crashes. The crews were working. The cars just - they just didn't have anywhere to go. And literally, for hours, people were in their cars, and they just sat and they idled where they were. We caught up with a few people who had actually pulled off the interstate to gas up, and we talked to Lainey Goodwin(ph). She had driven about a mile in seven hours.
LAINEY GOODWIN: You never know what the weather's going to do. And you need to be more prepared. I'll be more prepared for something like this.
LEWIS: I also talked to Grace Chandler. She had planned to camp out at that gas station last night, because she'd spent so long driving, and she was tired that she just hadn't gotten very far.
GRACE CHANDLER: I'd never been stranded away from home all night. This is my first event alone. It's kind of scary for me.
LEWIS: And within hours, a Facebook help group popped up, and motorists were on there, saying: I'm stuck at exit 244. Does anyone have gas? There was another person who said: I'm a diabetic, and I'm running out of insulin. Can anybody help me? Strangers offered motorists a place to spend the night, and thousands joined this Birmingham page to pitch in. And over in Atlanta, tens of thousands did the same for a similar Facebook page there.
INSKEEP: You know, I'm still thinking about the woman who told you that next time, I'll be more prepared for something like this. I'm not even sure how you would prepare for the possibility that you might suddenly be living in your car for hours or days on end.
LEWIS: Well, absolutely. And it's really a scary point. Emergency planners always say, you know, always be prepared for any eventuality. And this is the kind of thing that they're talking about, is that there had been discussion about, you know, there will be snow. You just need to be careful. But no one was expecting this.
INSKEEP: So, what's the biggest concern now, Russell?
LEWIS: Well, it's not expected to get above freezing today, which really means another day of difficult driving. There are still many abandoned cars and trucks all over the place. Early this morning, crews sent out buses, which were actually following the sand trucks on the interstate. And these buses were actually stopping to pick up drivers who spent the night in their cars, and were taking those drivers over to shelters. And, of course, we should say, this storm is not done. It's been snowing in the Carolinas and Virginia and points north. It's just a mess.
INSKEEP: How's the road outside WBHM now, Russell?
LEWIS: It is still icy and still snowy, and it is very, very dangerous.
INSKEEP: OK. Well, pour yourself a cup of coffee. Get a nap if you can, Russell, all right? And we'll check in with you by and by, and see how the weather's going.
LEWIS: Sounds good. I'll do my best.
INSKEEP: OK. That's NPR's Russell Lewis in Birmingham, Alabama, digging out after a sudden surprise snow storm.
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And after nearly two years of debate, lawmakers have reached a bipartisan agreement on a massive new farm bill. The House is expected to vote on the legislation today. The bill proposes nearly a trillion dollars in spending over the next 10 years, and would reduce spending by about $23 billion over that same time. As Jeremy Bernfeld of member station KCUR reports, it charged significant policy changes for the nation's farmers.
JEREMY BERNFELD, BYLINE: When you think of farm subsidies, think about the allowance you got from your parents for doing chores. That's kind of what the government does, paying a flat fee, regardless of how much a farmer planted or how well the crops did. They're called direct payments, but they're largely going away.
ART BARNABY: Under the direct payment, I just got it. I got the allowance. I didn't have to do anything for it.
BERNFELD: That's Art Barnaby, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University. Instead of direct payments to farmers, Washington will now bulk up their crop insurance program. That's kind of like if your parents say they'll quit giving you allowance, but will guarantee that you'll make enough in tips at your job at the diner.
BARNABY: Under the I'll-make-up-the-difference, it's an insurance policy, and you're paying premiums for it.
BERNFELD: That's not to say the government is ripping away support from farmers. Their crop insurance program will continue to be heavily subsidized by taxpayers. Direct payments cost the government about $5 billion a year. In recent years, the average government payment for crop insurance is about $6 billion. Paying farmers just for owning farm land, that's out. Crop insurance, which was already popular among farmers, is in. But how much farmers get depends largely on the weather. Payments are high in times of drought or unseasonable cold.
BARNABY: If we have good weather over the next five years, the government will spend less on farm programs than they have historically.
BERNFELD: But if we don't, the bill will likely run considerably higher. Farmers, on the whole, like their crop insurance and they also like the farm bill. But some in the meat industry, not so much. Meat industry groups wanted Congress to strip out rules for Country of Origin Labeling, known as COOL. Under the rules which stay, meatpackers have to label where animals were born, raised and slaughtered.
SCOTT GEORGE: They basically slapped the face of the livestock industries in this country.
BERNFELD: Scott George is a rancher in Cody, Wyoming and president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. It opposes this farm bill, in part because of the COOL rules. They say it's a bookkeeping nightmare, and having to separate animals based on where they were born is next to impossible.
GEORGE: The implementation of these new standards is going to cost the industry in excess of $100 million. Those $100 million are going to come right out of the hands, or out of the pockets of the producers sitting right here on the farms and ranches.
CHAD HART: They feel very strongly that this is having a negative impact on their industry, and therefore, yeah, they're going to speak out about that.
BERNFELD: That's Chad Hart, a longtime farm bill watcher at Iowa State University. There's lots of money in the farm bill, and because so much of the spending depends on enrollment in programs like food stamps and even in the weather, it's hard to know whether the farm bill will save taxpayers money or not.
HART: From a taxpayer perspective, the key is: What does it average out to be over time?
BERNFELD: And from a farmer's perspective, the vagaries of weather, pests, crop prices and market forces are all elements they balance every day. So, a farm bill that embraces that is one that most farmers can live with. For NPR News, I'm Jeremy Bernfeld.
MONTAGNE: And that story comes to us from Harvest Public Media, a reporting project focusing on agriculture and food production issues.
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Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
Congressman Michael Grimm explains he was annoyed. He went on live TV to comment on the State of the Union speech. At the end, the reporters started to ask about a problem with one of Grimm's campaign contributors. Grimm stormed off. The camera was still on when he returned and said: I'll break you in half. Later, Grimm called the reporter disrespectful. Then again, I'd never heard of his campaign trouble until he so dramatically declined to address it.
You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
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President Obama used the State of the Union speech to talk up the state of the domestic fuel industry.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
INSKEEP: Natural gas production has been expanding but the natural gas infrastructure has not always kept up with demand. Sometimes there are not enough pipelines to get the gas to customers, and that's noticeable as this winter's cold weather has boosted demand to an all-time high.
NPR's Jeff Brady reports that prices going way up in some parts of the country.
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: Natural gas prices have been relatively low in recent years, and that's encouraged a lot of homeowners and businesses to switch to gas. With drilling booms in places like Pennsylvania and Texas boosting the country's supply, there's plenty of gas to go around. The problem is building the pipelines and other infrastructure needed to deliver it. This has led to some extreme cases where natural gas prices have been bid way up. Last week in New York, one desperate buyer was willing to pay about 25 times the typical price for gas.
Jack Weixel is an analyst at BENTEK Energy.
JACK WEIXEL: You don't have gas storage east of the Hudson River, so you are very dependent on what pipelines can deliver. And when demand outstrips what's available on the pipe, then you have price spikes.
BRADY: Weixel says more pipelines into the region would solve the problem, but cold-weather demand spikes like this happen only a few times in a year. He says it doesn't make sense to build a pipeline that costs millions or even billions of dollars for something that happens so rarely. So on those occasions, prices are bid way up by those who absolutely must have gas. Weixel says sometimes that's going to be a local utility that's required to keep the heat on.
WEIXEL: You cannot freeze grandma at any cost. You do that and you're in big trouble.
(LAUGHTER)
BRADY: That does not mean your local gas bill is going way up next month. Weixel says most utilities have long-term contracts and other ways to protect customers from volatile prices. The futures market is a better measure of how much prices went up this winter for most of us. They're about a third higher than last year.
Around the country, utilities are asking people to conserve electricity during this cold snap. And in Ohio, regulators have asked people to conserve natural gas. Matt Schilling is a spokesman for the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.
Matt Schilling is a spokesman for the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.
MATT SCHILLING: This warning this week is really just a precautionary measure. We really don't have expectations of there to be any large scale issues. But it's just being proactive.
BRADY: Schilling says coal plants that generate electricity have switched to natural gas in recent years. Like in the Northeast, the problem is not supply so much as getting the gas to where it's needed, when it's needed. During the cold spell in early January, one utility had problems that left a few thousand customers without gas for more than a day. State regulators are asking customers to conserve to make sure that doesn't happen again.
Schilling says the commission hopes residents will turn down their thermostats a few degrees and not use gas appliances during peak hours.
SCHILLING: Which is generally early in the morning, like 7:00 to 9:00 a.m., and then again in the mid-day from about 4:00 to 9:00 p.m., when demand for electricity is at its highest.
BRADY: And regulators say if you need extra incentive, conserving energy now will mean a lower bill next month.
Jeff Brady, NPR News.
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A heart-rending moment came towards the end of President Obama's State of the Union Address last night, when he spoke of an Army Ranger who was grievously wounded in Afghanistan. Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg was on his 10th combat tour when he was hit by a massive roadside bomb. He spent months in a coma and endured many surgeries, but was able to be in the audience between his father and First Lady Michele Obama for the president's speech.
There are about 37,000 American troops in Afghanistan now. Obama restated his plan to end all combat operations at the end of 2014
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Together with our allies, we will complete our mission there by the end of this year and America's longest war will finally be over.
MONTAGNE: The president said he wants to keep a small contingent of forces in Afghanistan to train Afghan troops and pursue al-Qaida. Except that President Hamid Karzai has refused to agree to a plan that would allow the U.S. and its allies to do that. And the president, in the past, has said that without a deal he would be forced to withdraw all troops, a zero option.
NPR's Sean Carberry is in Kabul and we reached him for reaction there. Sean, President Obama devoted only a couple paragraphs to Afghanistan in his address. Was there much for Afghans to react to?
SEAN CARBERRY, BYLINE: People were quite happy with a couple of things he said. One is that he said the U.S. will support a unified Afghanistan. They're also particularly reassured by the fact that he didn't talk about the zero option. And that went over well with people like political analysts and parliamentarian Khalid Pashtoon.
KHALID PASHTOON: Before the speech, we were extremely worried. We were worried about the zero option. But since this morning, in Afghanistan, when we heard the speech, I'm pretty optimistic.
CARBERRY: So he says he's glad Obama didn't make any threats to pull out all troops. Though there was one word that stood out in that section and that was the word could; essentially saying that even if the deal is signed it's not a guarantee the U.S. forces will stay. And that is raising an eyebrow or two considering most people here do believe the Afghan forces need continued training and support from U.S. and NATO troops.
MONTAGNE: Yeah, let's - remind us about the security agreement the U.S. and Afghanistan negotiated last fall. And then, President Karzai said he had additional conditions that the U.S. must meet and wouldn't sign it. Where does it all stand now?
CARBERRY: It's still a stalemate. Karzai wants the U.S. to support free and fair presidential elections in April and to pledge not to interfere. He wants the U.S. to stop conducting military operations on Afghan homes. And he wants U.S. to start the peace process with the Taliban.
The U.S. had set a series of deadlines for the agreement to be signed, but they've come and gone, which seems to be emboldening Karzai to keep pushing.
MONTAGNE: Right, there is an election April. Karzai is not running. Can it wait for the next Afghan president?
CARBERRY: Well, U.S. officials say they can wait for maybe many months from now. The problem is that NATO countries are waiting for the U.S. to sign a security agreement before they make any commitments about what's going to happen after 2015. And they say they're going to need more time to plan and get approval from their home countries.
The longer the deal remains unsigned, uncertainty grows here. And that's having a huge impact on the economy - investment is slowing, and the Taliban are using this time to rebuild and are conducting a number of violent attacks in the last few weeks.
MONTAGNE: Sean, you very much.
CARBERRY: You're welcome, Renee.
MONTAGNE: That's NPR's Sean Carberry, speaking to us from Kabul.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
NPR's business news starts with a strong finish.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: Ford Motor Company closed the books on 2013 with higher than expected profits. The Detroit automaker's net earnings for the year surpassed $7 billion.
But as Michigan Radio's Tracy Samilton reports, Ford is warning that 2014 will be more challenging.
TRACY SAMILTON, BYLINE: Last year was one of Ford's most profitable ever. The Detroit car company's market share grew in the U.S. and China. Its balance sheet improved. And the Focus was the best-selling car in the world.
Great. But 2013's already in the rear view mirror. Ford says 2014 profits will be down and a major reason is new product launches. Ford will sell fewer of its highly profitable F-150 trucks, because a new one's on the way.
That will require the company to shut down its Dearborn and Kansas City truck plants for weeks this summer to retool.
Alex Gutierrez is an analyst with Kelly Blue Book.
ALEX GUTIERREZ: They've got a new Mustang coming, they've got the F-series, there's a Lincoln MKC crossover, so a lot of new product coming this way, which is a good thing for Ford, but if you're just looking solely at profit, might hit them quite a bit.
SAMILTON: Jesse Toprak of Cars.com says Ford will still have a great year - as long as it keeps a laser focus on quality. The company's popular new Escape was plagued by multiple recalls. Toprak says Ford seems determined to avert similar problems this year.
JESSE TOPRAK: Things are rocking and rolling, it's just a matter of keeping that momentum going and keeping the passion going within the company.
SAMILTON: Ford's blue collar workers could be rocking and rolling, too. They'll each get a record profit-sharing check of about $8,800.
For NPR News, I'm Tracy Samilton.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
As we start this next story, let's remember that college football is big business - TV contracts, million-dollar coaching salaries, game-day revenues and more. Everybody profits except the players, who may get treated like royalty and get all sorts of benefits on campus but technically, are not supposed to be paid. So are they students, or are they employees risking their health and the service of a big business?
Football players at Northwestern University believe it's the latter, and they have voted to form a collegiate players' union, a move the NCAA is fighting. Here's NPR's David Schaper.
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DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: A Saturday night in October, a stadium full of screaming fans, and the college football nation watching on ESPN.
ANNOUNCER: Fires, middle; Touchdown, Northwestern. Kain Colter.
SCHAPER: Kain Colter set records as Northwestern's quarterback and served two years as team captain, often leading on the field by example.
ANNOUNCER: Colter in trouble, scoots out of trouble for a moment; still on his feet. Colter - oh my! That'll be the best run of the year...
SCHAPER: No longer scrambling and fighting for yardage on the college gridiron, Colter's new struggle will take place in front of the National Labor Relations Board, in what looks to be a bruising legal battle with the NCAA over the rights of student-athletes.
KAIN COLTER: Student-athletes don't have a voice. They don't have a seat at the table. The current model resembles a dictatorship, with the NCAA - places these rules and regulations on these students without their input, or without the negotiation.
SCHAPER: So backed by the United Steel Workers, Colter and his teammates petitioned the NLRB office in Chicago Tuesday, to recognize a new employee union - the College Athletes Players Association.
At a news conference downtown Chicago, Colter told reporters nearly 100 percent of Northwestern's players voted in favor of the union. He and the others argue they're not just students who play sports, but employees who work more 40 hours a week for the university; training, practicing, and playing games that bring in millions of dollars of revenue to the school.
COLTER: We are not taking these measures out of any mistreatment from Northwestern. However, we recognize that we need to eliminate unjust NCAA rules that create physical, academic and financial hardships for college athletes across the nation.
SCHAPER: From huge television contracts to merchandising, football and men's basketball bring in billions to the NCAA and its member schools. Coaches and athletic directors earn multimillion-dollar salaries, yet Colter says many of the players struggle to afford basic living expenses not covered by their scholarships.
Only 50 percent of players graduate, and he says some will have crippling injuries as well as painful medical bills long after their college playing days are over.
Former UCLA football player Ramogi Huma is a longtime players' advocate who will serve as president of the College Athletes Players Association.
RAMOGI HUMA: If you get hurt in school colors, you know, just because someone labels you an amateur doesn't mean you shouldn't be taken care of for that particular injury when there's a multibillion-dollar industry that's produced off the player's talent.
SCHAPER: The NCAA issued a statement from its chief legal officer, saying quote, "This union-backed attempt to turn student-athletes into employees undermines the purpose of college: an education." The statement goes on to say that "student athletes are not employees. We are confident the National Labor Relations Board will find in our favor, as there is no right to organize student-athletes."
Statements from both Northwestern and the Big Ten conference in which the school plays support that position, but they applaud the players' initiative. And so, too, do many observers of college sports.
LESTER MUNSON: I think it's a bold move. I think it shows great fortitude.
SCHAPER: Lester Munson is a senior writer and legal analyst for ESPN.
MUNSON: Under the current state of American law, they have no chance of winning.
SCHAPER: But Munson says by pushing for a student-athlete union, rather than waiting for the NCAA to reform big-money college athletics itself, the players are taking a significant step forward.
MUNSON: There are going to be big, big changes. The face of college sports five years from now will be radically different from what we see today.
SCHAPER: Munson says those changes could come through legislation in Congress or pending lawsuits against the NCAA, or in a hearing on the union petition before the NLRB in Chicago. No word yet on when that hearing might be.
David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And our last word in business is: the $6 million heist.
Frank Almond of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra had just finished a performance Monday night with his Stradivarius violin from 1715, when the violin was stolen from him.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's one of several hundred instruments still in existence built by the celebrated Italian strings maker, Antonio Stradivari. But Frank Almond no longer has his. The concertmaster was in the parking lot after the concert when he was tasered before the thieves took off with the violin in a minivan.
INSKEEP: Interpol is now on the case of this $6 million theft. But police say there's a high chance that the violin is already on its way out of the country.
And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
MONTAGNE: And I'm Renee Montagne.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Here's another instance where life imitates art. The old TV drama "The West Wing" presented a fantasy version of the White House and it included an episode where the administration put on an event that staffers could not quite believe.
(SOUNDBITE TV SHOW, "THE WEST WING")
MONTAGNE: That was the TV show, but now he staff of the real White House is holding a real-world Big Block of Cheese Day.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Which raises a vital question: Just what is Big Block of Cheese Day? Well, let's have fictional White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry played by the late John Spencer explain the history.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE WEST WING")
MONTAGNE: Those hungry citizens were allowed to mingle with White House staff and have their voices heard directly, a sort of open house, just a cheesy one. That was a hard sell for Leo, the TV character.
(SOUNDBITE FROM TV SERIES "THE WEST WING")
INSKEEP: Now, in the show they all come around and eventually bring out the big cheese, and this year too "West Wing" cast members are even helping the White House promote their Big Block of Cheese Day, which is a virtual event. Staffers are making themselves available on social media. So just keep track. Andrew Jackson, big cheese, that's true.
"The West Wing," that's fiction. The current Big Block of Cheese Day, that is real, but virtual, on social media. This is NPR News.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. Snow and ice sweeping through the South caused an epic traffic jam yesterday around Atlanta. One couple stuck on the freeway found themselves in a different kind of jam. Their unborn baby wouldn't wait to get to the hospital. So the father and a local police officer helped deliver the baby girl right there in the middle of afternoon rush hour. Mother and baby ultimately made it to the hospital, and yes, they are doing fine. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Some other news now. One if the longest-term inmates of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp has had a parole hearing yesterday. He's a man from Yemen, allegedly a former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden. Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald was among the reporters allowed to see a portion of parole hearing on a video screen.
CAROL ROSENBERG: We saw Abdul Malik Wahab al Rahabi, a man who arrived on the day that Guantanamo Prison opened, sitting at a table while his advocates made an argument that he should be allowed to someday go home.
INSKEEP: Now, just to make this clear, this is happening at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, but you were watching from just outside Washington, what, by video conference?
ROSENBERG: Yes. It was a 40 second delay video Skype feed of this hearing in which he and his advocates were speaking to a quasi-parole board here in the D.C. area, also by video feed, making an argument that he should be allowed to go home, see his 13 year old daughter, study, teach, and set up a business called the Milk and Honey Farming Cooperative with some other detainees who want to get out of Guantanamo.
INSKEEP: There are a variety of different kinds of detainees still at Guantanamo, which President Obama wanted to close years ago. There's talk of putting some of them on trial. Some of them are being released or already have been released. What category is this guy in?
ROSENBERG: He's an indefinite detainee. The administration says there's no evidence that he actually committed a crime so they could put him on trial but they have, until now so far, considered him too dangerous to let go.
INSKEEP: So were you witnessing what is supposed to be the process for these dozens of prisoners who fall in this category between being released and being tried? They're supposed to get some kind of parole hearing to determine their status?
ROSENBERG: Exactly. Remember, this came after a hunger strike last year that continues still inside the prison camp. And the president, President Obama, wanted this process started to give the detainees down there - there's 155 of them - a process by which they could imagine someday they might get out.
INSKEEP: Now, you were allowed a glimpse, at least, into the beginning of this parole hearing. How open has the administration been about what is happening with these prisoners?
ROSENBERG: Well, this comes against the backdrop of declining transparency down at the prison. They used to tell us, daily, how many people were on hunger strike. Earlier kind of status hearings we got to see in person in the same room as the detainee. This is a tiny little glimpse inside, and what we saw was a man dressed in white, like a compliant prisoner, swiveling in an office chair arguing that he's safe enough to go home now.
INSKEEP: OK. So we've got a guy who was on hunger strike, at least according to his lawyers, now seems to be compliant and reasonably well fed and he's going through this process. We don't know how it's going to end. Do you sense that the Obama administration then knows what it is going to do in the end, with everybody who's currently at Guantanamo, this facility that the president wants to close?
ROSENBERG: Absolutely not. This is part of the process of winnowing down. Remember, at the height of it or across the Guantanamo experiment, the Bush administration brought in 779 prisoners. We're down to the last 155. Six are on trial for their lives - they're death penalty proceedings. And the rest of them are held in a variety of categories from indefinite detainee to eligible for transfer, to could be let go with conditions.
ROSENBERG: And this proceeding that we saw yesterday is a continuation of the sorting. And it allows us to look inside and see a man, rather than a prisoner on his knees in an orange jumpsuit.
We, the media, asked to see him speak. We wanted to hear his argument. And the Pentagon found that too risky and let us watch a 19-minute slice in which we heard a pre-scripted opening argument in what should have been a daylong hearing.
INSKEEP: Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, thanks very much.
ROSENBERG: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Super Bowl is just four days away in New York.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Actually, New Jersey.
INSKEEP: The teams have arrived at their New York hotels.
MONTAGNE: In New Jersey.
INSKEEP: The game itself will be played at New York's MetLife Stadium.
MONTAGNE: In New Jersey.
INSKEEP: Local towns have been hoping for an economic boost from hosting the big game. But as NPR's Joel Rose reports, some officials in New Jersey complain that tourism dollars seem to be flowing instead to New York City.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Today, the NFL is taking over a 13-block stretch here around Times Square and turning it into a Super Bowl theme park. You can have your picture taken with the Vince Lombardi trophy or try kicking an extra point. But you have to do that here in Manhattan. You might not even know that the big game will be played on the other side of the Hudson River. And officials in New Jersey say that's exactly the problem.]
MAYOR JIM CASSELLA: I understand that the game is here because of New York City. What I didn't expect was the State of New Jersey to be ignored like it was.
ROSE: Jim Cassella is the mayor of East Rutherford, the town on the edge of the New Jersey meadowlands where MetLife Stadium is located. So when someone mistakenly refers to the Super Bowl being played in New York say, like famous sportscaster Terry Bradshaw, Cassella cringes.
CASSELLA: When they're talking about it, you don't know that New Jersey exists. And that's the part I worry about. When it comes to how it benefits the small businesses, the hotels, the restaurants, if you keep saying New York, people are going to think, well, that's where I have to be in New York City.
ROSE: Cassella says it doesn't help that the NFL's official program for the game shows the New York City Skyline, with a tiny sliver of New Jersey just barely visible in the background. But the Garden State will be on the hook for the added costs of security for the big game and if necessary, for snow removal. The NFL doesn't help with any of that.
Victor Matheson teaches economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
VICTOR MATHESON: Yeah, New Jersey is definitely getting a raw deal here. They're going to be incurring a lot expenses associated with hosting the game, in terms of security and transportation. But, you know, none of the high rollers who are coming in for the Super Bowl are going to be staying in New Jersey. They're all staying in Manhattan.
ROSE: The NFL has held promotional events in New Jersey too, including the annual circus of hype known as Media Day. Both teams are staying at hotels in Jersey City. And the game will be filling lots of other hotel rooms, too, at rates that are double or even triple what they would normally be in the middle of winter.
Jim Kirkos is president of the Meadowlands Regional Chamber of Commerce.
JIM KIRKOS: Listen, I'm a Jersey guy. So does it hurt my ego once in a while when a sportscaster will diss New Jersey and just talk about New York? Sure. But at the end of the day, I know we are getting some of that impact. So I try to look past it as much as I can.
ROSE: The NFL claims the Super Bowl pumps somewhere between 500 and $600 million into the region's economy. But many economists, including Victor Matheson, dispute that.
MATHESON: These numbers are almost certainly wrong. So economists who have gone back and actually looked at cities that have hosted the Super Bowl, we come up with numbers somewhere in the vicinity of 30 to $120 million. Not something that New Jersey and New York should turn down, but it's a fraction of the number that's being claimed.
ROSE: Still, the NFL usually plays the game in a warm-weather city, where hotel rooms are already at a premium. So maybe this cold-weather Super Bowl will have a bigger economic impact than most.
JIM WARD: It's going to be a boost Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. I think it's going to be big for days leading up to it.
ROSE: Jim Ward is a manager and bartender at Blarney Station, a pub just a few miles from MetLife Stadium.
WARD: We're setting up a big tent outside and have a beer garden, lots of food, extra staff, live music - it's going to be the place to be.
ROSE: One of the people you may find enjoying pre-game festivities at Blarney Station is the Mayor of East Rutherford, Jim Cassella. As of now, he does not have a ticket to the game.
Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning.
Republican Congressman Dave Schweikert of Arizona joins us next. He's one of the lawmakers who listened to President Obama's State of the Union speech last night. Congressman, welcome back to our studios.
REPRESENTATIVE DAVE SCHWEIKERT: No, always happy to be here, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK. So, higher minimum wage, universal preschool, job training, cutting red tape: Those were some of the things the president called for. What did you think?
SCHWEIKERT: Actually, I left the speech somewhat surprised, because in many ways, it sounded like a retread of the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that. And I kept waiting for: When's the big moment? You know, when's the great initiative? When's the moment of passion? And I don't think the president ever sort of hit that crescendo.
INSKEEP: Has he chosen some issues that can put your party on the defensive? There's an election coming up.
SCHWEIKERT: Oh, of course. But sometimes, it's more than just the issue. It's sort of the underlying mechanics. And this was a genuine conversation I had going down the elevator last night with one of my liberal friends, and saying - the discussion - OK. I thought we were going to hear income inequality, the stagnation of salaries and economic growth. And the solution to that from the president was minimum wage.
It just - it seemed to be small ball, where we sort of told over the last couple of weeks that we were going to get something grand, and didn't even get close.
INSKEEP: Is it smarter for both sides to be playing small ball at this point, given that you don't agree on very much that's large?
SCHWEIKERT: It's - it probably is, but remember, much of the great frustration in Congress - and this actually is both on the right and left - is we hear these eloquent, well-delivered speeches, and then there's no follow-up. You know, it's not the Bill Clinton world, or even the George Bush world, where here's my policy, and dammit, I'm going to come visit you. I'm going to call you. I'm going to invite you to lunch. We're going to have breakfast. I'm going to come visit your district.
Where's the follow-through? You know, we're heading into year six, and yet you have members - particularly even in the Democrat Party - who say they've had almost no interaction with this president to move forward on policy.
INSKEEP: Well, let me ask about a policy that's of great interest to your state, because you're from Arizona, Congressman Schweikert. The president says he wants immigration reform. A number of Republicans also want immigration reform. The question is the details, what it involves. And the Republicans are heading off, as I understand it, on a retreat, where immigration reform is going to be discussed. Do you think that, given what you know, that it's likely that some deal can be reached this year on that issue?
SCHWEIKERT: Well, it's always complicated. And for those who specialize in this issue, it's vastly complicated. There's an, actually, underlying difference. We know the current immigration law has real problems. You know, the reason you have 11, 12 million undocumented in the country is something's wrong with the mechanics of the current law. But the underlying debate: What should the law look like in the future? You know, what we do today may be with us for another 25 years. Should it be what, you know, Great Britain and Canada and Australia and New Zealand, others have done, where it's sort of - it's a point base. It's a talent-based immigration system.
Or do you stay with what we have today, which is more of a familial, a family, a chain migration system? And those are very different things, and actually have very different impacts on the economy.
INSKEEP: In order to get a bill that maybe tackles some of those concerns, do you think substantial numbers of Republicans are willing to accept some kind of pathway to citizenship, which is what Democrats are demanding?
SCHWEIKERT: I'm not sure my party is, because there's this great discomfort of do you reward bad behavior, when you literally have millions of people of all walks and ethnicities and all genders, you know, around the world who followed the rules and waited? Do you screw up the incentive system and end up of with that sort of law of unintended consequences?
INSKEEP: So, that's a no, I think you're saying.
SCHWEIKERT: It's - almost every model we look at, if you sort of leap to handing out citizenship, you actually, in some ways, incentive more of very behavior you were trying to end.
INSKEEP: We've got just about 34 seconds left, Congressman Schweikert, but I want to ask about one other thing: The president, in one of the few times he directly took on Congress, or Republicans in Congress, was he said: We don't need 40 more votes on Obamacare, on the health care law. I know you guys disagree with me. Make your proposals, if you like. But it's a fact, and it's helping people. Is he right, that's it's time to move from voting against Obamacare all the time?
SCHWEIKERT: No, I must tell you, part of that, I think, was disingenuous, because many of those votes were incremental adjustments, changes, reprioritization, changing the dates. And this president actually just went and did many of those same things we proposed through executive action.
INSKEEP: But is he right, that it's time to make specific proposals, rather than voting against Obamacare?
SCHWEIKERT: But the point is we have made specific proposals. Even - let's go back to a more uncomfortable time.
INSKEEP: Just about 15 seconds. Go ahead.
SCHWEIKERT: The shutdown. Ultimately, that was about giving individuals the same prioritization that big business had already been given.
INSKEEP: OK. Congressman Dave Schweikert of Arizona, thanks very much.
SCHWEIKERT: Always enjoy this.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning.
Congresswoman Marcia Fudge of Ohio is with us next. She is the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and one of the lawmakers who was listening to President Obama's State of the Union speech last night. She's a Democrat. She's on the line. Welcome to the program.
REP. MARCIA FUDGE: Thank you. Happy to be here.
INSKEEP: Thank you. I'm glad you joined us. Does it bother you that the president named big issues - income inequality, equal opportunity - but did not necessarily offer big answers last night?
FUDGE: Well, it didn't bother me because I think he did have some answers. He talked about how he is going to personally ensure that a large portion of federal employees do have a higher wage. He is going to make sure that any federal contractor pays their employees at least $10.10 an hour. You would not be surprised, I don't think, because you know a little bit about government, how many employees that is.
He also talked about rewriting the tax code. He talked about things that we need to do right away - in the wars and close Guantanamo. I think that there were some concrete things that he said in the speech that maybe were overlooked because of all of the big things about opportunity for all, et cetera. But I think that he was very clear on some issues, and those are some of the ones that I thought he expressed very well.
INSKEEP: Although you mentioned the minimum wage. Of course that's something that he can do on his own authority when it comes to federal contractors, but of course raising the minimum wage across the country would be far more difficult at this point.
FUDGE: No question about it, because that would then require that Congress make that decision. And to this point I haven't seen the willingness on the Republican side, the majority, at least in the House, to raise the minimum wage.
INSKEEP: Did you hear a proposal that the president mentioned last night that as you looked around at your colleagues on the other side of the aisle in the House of Representatives and in the Senate as well, that you thought, well, actually, there could be movement on this issue in 2014?
FUDGE: Well, I think immigration - I believe that there will be some movement on immigration. I do believe that we all will ultimately be on the same page as it relates to foreign diplomacy. He talked about that last night, and I thought he was very, very strong; very, very clear.
INSKEEP: When it came to things like Iran, saying that he would veto an additional sanctions bill if it got to him?
FUDGE: Absolutely. About, you know, what we've done in Syria. I think that he was really stating what our foreign policy is going to be going forward. And he made no bones about the fact that he wanted to let diplomacy work. And I'm real pleased with that. So I think that - as well he talked about education. There are some things that we know we must do for all people to have a quality education.
The Education Department is working on things. He talked about Race To The Top - which some people are not so enamored with, but it's a start. And he talked about how every child at the age of 4 should have pre-K. So I think that there are some things that people in this country will feel good about.
INSKEEP: I'm glad you mentioned education, Congresswoman Fudge, because that was one of the items that the president mentioned in the early part of the speech; really, the first 30, 35 minutes of the speech. And as I listen to that early section - where he talked about raising the minimum wage, universal preschool, job training, education - I thought I was hearing things that you could argue about the policy merits, and many of them may not actually pass Congress this year, but they sounded like things that Democrats might very much like to run on in this fall's elections. Is that correct?
FUDGE: Absolutely. I mean, who can argue with the fact that if we're going to pay for job training, then we train people for jobs that exist today? Who can argue with the fact that a person who works 40 hours a week should make a living wage? No one who works, goes to school, does all the things right, should live in poverty. Who can argue with that?
INSKEEP: I guess the argument against it is that that's government intervention, which many conservatives are skeptical of. And it doesn't always work.
FUDGE: Well, I mean what's more government intervention - someone telling you who you can sleep with, someone telling you that you can't have an abortion, someone telling you that women's reproductive rights are to be determined by men? What is more intrusive?
INSKEEP: Let me ask one other thing, Congresswoman Fudge, if I might. President Obama's approval rating, as you know, is not what he would like it to be. It's in the low 40s nationally in many surveys. And in fact we noted that in some of the key states where some of the key elections are going to take place, especially for the Senate this fall, his approval rating is below 35 percent. How are Democrats going to handle that.
FUDGE: Well, I'm certainly hopeful that, after this speech and after he does some of the things that he talked about last night, that that approval rating will be significantly higher by the time we get to the midterms.
INSKEEP: Marcia Fudge is chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Thanks very much.
FUDGE: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning. This week, NPR News is taking a close look at the North Dakota oil rush. The oil boom is also producing a lot of natural gas, but there's a problem with that. North Dakota does not have the pipelines that are necessary to transport all that gas to market. There's also no place to store it. So in many cases drillers are just having to burn it. NPR's Jeff Brady reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF FLAMES)
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: I'm in Western North Dakota just south of Watford City. And that sound you hear in the background, that is a huge flame - bright orange, about 15 to 20 feet high. You see flames like this all over the region. And they burn all day and all night.
MARCUS STEWART: People are estimating it's about a million dollars a day, just being thrown into the air.
BRADY: Marcus Stewart is an analyst with Bentek Energy, where he tracks the amount of gas burned off - or flared - in North Dakota. His latest figures show drillers are burning about 27 percent of the gas they produce. Stewart says while that percentage has been declining, the overall amount of wasted gas is still rising as more oil wells are drilled.
STEWART: I mean it's significant just because we don't really see anything like that anywhere else in the country.
BRADY: Part of the problem is the industry's focus. As drillers arrive to tap the riches of the Bakken Shale formation under Western North Dakota, they were looking for oil, not natural gas. Now that they found gas, it's taking time and money to build the pipelines and processing plants to use it. Meanwhile, infrastructure for the oil rush needs to be built too.
Oil prices are relatively high while natural gas prices are really low. Ron Ness with the North Dakota Petroleum Council says it's commodity prices that determine where companies invest first.
RON NESS: Where would your emphasis be if you've got a barrel of oil that's worth $95 and you've got an MCF of gas, because that's usually kind of the ratio, that's worth $4.25? Which infrastructure would you build first?
BRADY: Ness says $6 billion has been spent on new plants and equipment so far but it's not enough to keep up. Oil industry critics suggest a solution: slow down the drilling boom until that infrastructure is in place. Don Morrison heads the Dakota Resource Council.
DON MORRISON: The flaring problem wouldn't have been a problem had we had a state government who was going to make sure that oil was developed in a way that didn't impact the people who live here and the land and the water.
BRADY: Drilling in North Dakota is regulated by the state's Industrial Commission, made of up Republican Governor Jack Dalrymple, the attorney general and the agriculture commissioner. Critics say Dalrymple is too cozy with the oil industry, but even the governor thinks burning more than a quarter of the natural gas is a problem here.
GOVERNOR JACK DALRYMPLE: That's more flaring than we would like and we are working very, very hard to get the percentage of flaring down.
BRADY: An industry task force released a plan this week designed to reduce flaring to 10 percent within six years. Now another interest group is weighing in -royalty owners. These are the people who own the rights to the underground oil and gas. When gas is wasted, they lose money. Some of them have filed class action lawsuits against oil companies.
NPR contacted four of those companies but all declined interview requests. Sarah Vogel is one of those plaintiffs and also is a former agriculture commissioner in North Dakota. Vogel owns a farm on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.
SARAH VOGEL: It is fabulously beautiful and windswept. And we just got electricity last year and running water.
(LAUGHTER)
BRADY: Vogel says the oil rush has changed her experience.
VOGEL: It used to be extraordinarily quiet. And it used to be extraordinarily dark at night. We'd just see the stars. Now at night we see flares.
BRADY: Attorney Derrick Braaten is representing Vogel.
DERRICK BRAATEN: Essentially the lawsuit is requesting that the royalty owners be paid their royalties on the gas that has been flared.
BRADY: Braaten says that could amount to tens of millions of dollars in gas that is now just being wasted amid North Dakota's rush for oil instead. Jeff Brady, NPR News.
INSKEEP: Our oil rush series continues on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED tonight with a story on the demands the oil boom puts on fragile infrastructure.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The movie "Brokeback Mountain" was a landmark, a major motion picture that was a love story about two men. Two young cowboys, Ennis and Jack, fall in love during a summer in the 1960s while tending sheep in isolation on a Wyoming mountain.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
They spend the rest of the film and their lives grappling with the love that they have to keep secret. Out of that story came one of most famous lines in cinema history.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN")
HEATH LEDGER: (As Ennis) You are too much for me. I wish I knew how to quit you.
MONTAGNE: The movie was based on a short story by the writer Annie Proulx, and it's now been turned into an opera.
(SOUNDBITE OF OPERA)
MONTAGNE: This score was written by the Pulitizer Prize-winning composer Charles Wuorinen. Annie Proulx herself wrote the words that are sung, the libretto. "Brokeback Mountain," the opera, premiered this week in Madrid. We reached Proulx and Wuorinen backstage to talk about this artistic transformation of a forbidden love that ends in the brutal death of one of the lovers, and it really does seem very operatic. It seems like the stuff of opera.
CHARLES WUORINEN: Well, that's why I wanted to write an opera about it because you're exactly right. It is operatic and you've said it perfectly correctly. It's a contemporary version of a universal human problem. Two people who are in love, who can't make it work, and who end badly. And when one comes to the question of opera, opera, you know, is a treacherous medium because it is very easy for it to proceed by a kind of mixture of pomposity and silliness.
But because it is so elaborate, it offers the possibility of amplification. The mere fact of the medium itself make a kind of enlargement of the statements almost automatic.
MONTAGNE: As you will hear in a clip from the opera, it's the morning after Jack has pulled a drunken Ennis into his tent in a snowstorm for an intimate encounter. Ennis is disgusted with himself. Jack isn't sorry.
(SOUNDBITE OF OPERA)
MONTAGNE: Annie Proulx, the short story that you wrote in the '90s, to many of us seems so perfect that it didn't need to go anywhere else. When you chose to take on writing the libretto, what did you find the most intriguing to be able to do?
ANNIE PROULX: Oh, just doing it, because I'd never written a libretto before and I thought it could have been a novel if one had enlarged on it, but it was kept very, very tight to express the inarticulate nature of the two main protagonists. So the opera, the libretto, gave a chance for depth and for the characters to grow.
MONTAGNE: And for some of the characters more than others. You added two characters that were quite minimal in the short story. For instance, Alma, Ennis's wife.
PROULX: Yeah. Alma is important because the ranch woman, long suffering, who does all of the chores, who never gets to inherit the property that she so improved, is a neglected figure. So Alma has to speak for all those thousands of ranch women who never had a voice.
WUORINEN: It might be worth mentioning before we go on talking about purely literary matters that when you contemplate an evening on stage with two men doing a great deal of the singing, you have to confront the possibility of getting tired of hearing that. So there is a direct practical, theatrical, and musical reason for wanting more women in the picture.
There is a scene for Alma in a wedding dress shop where she is picking out the gown she'll wear in her wedding to Ennis.
(SOUNDBITE OF OPERA)
WUORINEN: That gives me a chance to have a complete change of sonority in the score, with female voices that have not been present before.
MONTAGNE: And of course the music itself carries its own deeper meaning.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WUORINEN: In the case of this opening, what you've got is a low sub-contra C, one of the lowest notes available to any instrument, which stands, in a symbolic way, for the mountain, which itself, of course, is the venue for freedom when the two characters have their initial encounter, but also is deadly, and C-natural, this low one especially, is therefore the note of death.
MONTAGNE: Wow.
PROULX: Yes. This ain't no little thing.
MONTAGNE: Charles Wuorinen, what was for you some of the most gratifying parts of working with this material?
WUORINEN: Overall, the development of Ennis's character or capacity to express himself and to accept himself. Ennis is a character who is almost totally inarticulate at the beginning. This is reflected in the vocal treatment that I give him. He deals first in grunts and shouts, basically. Then, as he gets older and a little bit more mature with all these things, he sings more and more.
When he finally gets to elaborate singing, it's at the very end of the piece when Jack is dead and he has lost everything. And the tragedy of it, of course, is that he has achieved this very painfully, only after it is too late.
MONTAGNE: And there he has a full-throated aria. Just reading it, it's: I'm choked up with love, love too late.
WUORINEN: Yes. And I have to say that I was deeply affected by that last page of the libretto.
MONTAGNE: But the libretto does offer a very different ending than the original short story, where Ennis's final words are stoic: If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it.
PROULX: Well, he falls back into his place in rural Wyoming society. There are many, many things in that life that if you can't fix them, you have to stand them. You can't fix the wind, you have to stand it. You can't fix a blinding storm, you have to stand it. And so it's an acceptance of his loveless fate. You just have to stand it.
MONTAGNE: When it's an aria in an opera, do we need more? I mean do we need a larger piece of him?
PROULX: Yes. We do need more. We need to know what has happened, why he has changed. We need for him to tell what has happened to him. Because at the end of the opera he isn't saying if you can't fix it, you've got to stand it. He isn't saying that. He's saying something quite different.
MONTAGNE: And what he couldn't say in the short story, Ennis is able to sing passionately on stage: It was only you in my life and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear. We've been talking with composer Charles Wuorinen and librettist Annie Proulx about "Brokeback Mountain," the opera. It premiers in Madrid this week.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Scientists are reporting what may be a big advance in stem cell research. Researchers believe they found a quicker, easier and less controversial way to make stem cells. NPR's Rob Stein reports the news is stirring excitement, surprise and questions in the scientific world.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: Human embryos contain cells that have the ability to become almost any kind of tissue in the body. They're called stem cells, and the great hope is that someday, they could be used to cure lots of diseases. Charles Vacanti of the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston says that includes Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes.
CHARLES VACANTI: There are many, many diseases that you could potentially cure if you put in the proper cells in the proper location and they function normally.
STEIN: But human embryos have to be destroyed to get these cells, which makes them extremely controversial. So, scientists have been trying to find other ways to make stem cells, and they've been able to do that. They've tinkered with the genes of mature cells and got them to morph back into embryo-like cells. But those cells may have their own problems.
VACANTI: People have suggested that you are more prone to have - develop cancer. Is that true? Possibly.
STEIN: But Vacanti and his colleagues had another idea: Maybe they could make stem cells by mimicking what happens when the body naturally repairs itself.
VACANTI: You know, if you're walking down the street and you fall down and bruise your leg, you know, if you're punched in the eye - wherever you're injured - is that the mature cells are actually reverting back to a stem cell to now repair the injured tissue.
STEIN: So, Vacanti teamed up with some Japanese researchers to see if they could make mature cells turn back into stem cells in the laboratory. The scientists took cells from newborn mice and subjected them to the same kinds of stresses that occur in the body during an injury. For example, they exposed the cells to increased levels of acidity.
VACANTI: We found that if we injured them, almost to the point of dying, but not quite to the point of dying, the cells would revert back to a stem cell state.
STEIN: A stem cell state very much like embryonic stem cells. Then they showed they could use these cells to create virtually every kind of tissue in the body. They went even further. They used these cells to create complete mouse embryos.
VACANTI: It demonstrates that you have the ability to make perfect embryonic stem cells that can then turn into a perfect copy of your own cells.
STEIN: Other scientists were blown away by the research, which was described in two papers in this week's issue of the journal Nature.
GEORGE DALEY: Wow. Yeah.
STEIN: That's George Daley, a leading stem cell scientist at Harvard who was not involved in the research.
DALEY: I mean, I cannot remember reading a paper and feeling so amazed and perplexed at the same time. I mean, it's truly a startling result.
STEIN: It's perplexing, because it raises fundamental questions about how cells really work. Scientists had no idea that our bodies could turn back the clock on cells on their own.
DALEY: This is going to open up whole new ways of thinking about cellular alchemy.
STEIN: And it's startling because it seems to offer a way to make stem cells that's really easy and really fast.
DALEY: The potential is limitless.
STEIN: But Daley and others caution that there's still lots more research that needs to be done to confirm the findings and answer some big questions. Austin Smith is at the University of Cambridge.
AUSTIN SMITH: So, we need to know if this works with adult cells, and then we need to know if it works in human cells, if you're thinking it could be important for some medical purpose.
STEIN: Vacanti says he's already started experiments to see if this works with human cells the way it does with mice, and that he's already got some early results that look very promising. Rob Stein, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Olympic athletes often begin their sports as small children. They sacrifice holidays and family life for training and competition. Elite athletes can also sacrifice academics. The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, the sports' governing body, is trying to prevent that with its own high school.
As we report on Olympic athletes seeking to gain a competitive edge, NPR's Ted Robbins reports on an effort to keep them from giving up too much.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: For Mac Bohonnon, 107:54, he takes second place.
(APPLAUSE)
TED ROBBINS, BYLINE: That was freestyle aerial skier Mac Bohonnon's first time placing at a recent competition in Quebec. It helped him qualify for the Olympics in Sochi. When he's not doing triple twisting double back flips, he's doing Advanced Placement classes at Team Academy in Park City, Utah.
MAC BOHONNON: I'm just starting one of the last units in my AP Literature course. This unit's a study of poetry.
ROBBINS: It's tough to be a normal high school senior with constant training and competition. Luckily, Mac Bohonnon is not going to a normal high school.
He is one of 36 students at this invitation-only high school, located on the third floor of U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association headquarters - just above the training facilities. Dan Kemp is the school's headmaster and head cheerleader.
DAN KEMP: How was the training? Was the snow good, or hard or sugary. What was it like?
ROBBINS: Kemp says ski and snowboard athletes will drop out of high school because it's just too hard to juggle it with sports. Team Academy, he says, allows athletes to live a more balanced life.
KEMP: That whole person is more than just how fast you can ski down the hill. How fast you can twist and turn your body in a half-pipe. So we needed academic services.
ROBBINS: There are other high school ski academies. This is the only one run by the sports' governing body. Team Academy has some normal classes but it's mostly self-paced, with a lot of one-on-one and online sessions. It also takes the place of home schooling, a common way athletes try to keep up.
Fifteen-year-old Alpine skier, Storm Klomhaus used to be home-schooled in Boulder, Colorado.
STORM KLOMHAUS: Yep, all alone at home, sitting at a countertop, with my parents trying to teach me Algebra One.
(LAUGHTER)
ROBBINS: Here she has companions, awesome companions.
KLOMHAUS: I'm going to school with so many athletes that are going to compete in Sochi. It's just so cool.
ROBBINS: It's still tough living away from her family. It's also expensive -$15,000 yearly tuition. But Dan Kemp says most of the students get some form of financial aid. He also says most of the students at Team Academy have 3.75 GPAs or better. The real advantage to being in the same building as coaches and trainers though, is that everyone can sync schedules.
KEMP: We slow the pace when students have intense travel, intense competition. We don't want students standing in the starting gate worrying about trigonometry. We want students standing in gate, worrying about gates.
ROBBINS: Let's be real: academics are important here but not as important as winning on the slopes. Bill Marolt is the CEO of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association.
BILL MAROLT: A hundred percent, that's what we're about. Don't want to make any mistake about that.
(LAUGHTER)
MAROLT: But that's not bad. I mean, you know, what's our culture? What's the culture in our country? It's about winning.
ROBBINS: When that winning is over, at least these athletes will have a fundamental education.
Ted Robbins, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF THEME MUSIC)
INSKEEP: Giving you an edge every morning, it's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
(SOUNDBITE OF THEME MUSIC)
INSKEEP: You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Here's some promising research about space: It concerns the asteroid belt, that ring of rubble that circles the sun. Astronomers used to believe it was a trash pit of sorts, filled with rocks from the making of the solar system. Now, a study published in the journal Nature shows that the asteroid belt is more than that. The belt holds clues to a time when our solar system was young and reckless. Here's NPR's Geoff Brumfiel.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: The asteroid belt lies between Mars and Jupiter. For a long time, astronomers thought it was left over from the primordial cloud of dust and rock that went into making our planets.
FRANCESCA DEMEO: So, I think, originally, we thought of the asteroid belt as something that was there and formed in place, that the asteroids formed where we see them today.
BRUMFIEL: Francesca DeMeo is at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. That simple view of the belt was based on observations of just a few asteroids in the 1980s. Astronomers have seen a lot more asteroids since.
DEMEO: There's been some really large surveys over the past decade or so that have, you know, expanded our understanding from a couple thousand asteroids to hundreds of thousands of asteroids.
BRUMFIEL: And when DeMeo and her coauthor Benoit Carry looked at all these new asteroids, they found something surprising. Many of the rocks looked like they'd come from somewhere outside the asteroid belt.
DEMEO: What we see today in the asteroid belt is sort of this melting pot of asteroids that formed in all different locations throughout the solar system, and are now sitting in the asteroid belt today, sort of leaving us with the clues of what happened since that time.
RICHARD BINZEL: This is a new view of the asteroid belt that changes what we thought for about the last 30 to 40 years.
BRUMFIEL: Richard Binzel is an astronomer at MIT. This new view raises a big, new question. If the asteroid belt wasn't there from the beginning, what made it come together? The answer, it turns out, might be planets. New theories suggest that early on, our planets weren't in pretty orbits. They were flying through a cloud of asteroids. And as they moved, they shook up these rocks, like flakes in a snow globe.
BINZEL: They're scattering the asteroids. They're flinging them off left, right, up, down, sideways. Some leave the solar system. Some go crashing into the sun.
BRUMFIEL: And some ended up making the asteroid belt we see today. Astronomers think there were some pretty big planetary swerves. Mars might have veered very near Earth. And the solar system's largest planet, Jupiter, may have swooped to near where Mars is today.
BINZEL: Jupiter sort of ruled the roost, or was the big bully of the neighborhood. And as Jupiter migrated, it would push and pull and tug everything else along with it.
BRUMFIEL: In fact, Jupiter may have had a big impact - literally - here on Earth. Jupiter's swing into the inner solar system flung a lot of asteroids towards us. Our planet got battered. Francesca DeMeo says the effect of this bombardment could have been profound.
DEMEO: It could have actually caused some of the asteroids to hit Earth, but deliver water at the same time. So that could be the reason we have our oceans on Earth, and that the Earth can support life. But it also can cause destruction, where if you have too many asteroids raining when life has already formed, then, you know, then it's a destructive force.
BRUMFIEL: Questions like whether asteroids brought life to Earth, or extinguished it, can't yet be answered. But this new asteroid survey seems to confirm that giving birth to a solar system is more chaotic and dangerous than anyone thought. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
If you watch the Sochi Winter Olympics, you will be able to spot Hubertus Von Hohenlohe. He's the skier racing down the Russian slopes in a distinctive suit. It's form-fitting like his skiing competitors, but a good deal fancier than some. In fact, the suit is decorated as if it were a Mariachi outfit, with artwork suggesting ruffles and a cut-away coat. He's part of Mexico's Olympic team, a descendent of German nobility whose ancestors came to North America.
NPR's Carrie Kahn tells us more.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Hohenlohe says he loves Mexico and Mariachi music.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARIACHI MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing in Spanish)
KAHN: And as Mexico's sole athlete going to Sochi, the national Olympic Committee loves him too. They gave him a proper send off yesterday - full of pomp, ceremony and lots of trumpets; but in way, more solemn beat than the self proclaimed Mariachi prince usually enjoys.
(SOUNDBITE OF NATIONAL ANTHEM OF MEXICO)
KAHN: Hohenlohe was born in Mexico. He spent his first four years here before his parents moved him to Europe. He learned to ski in Austria, which he says saved him from the tedium of boarding school. But he says he never forgot his homeland, and came back in the 1980s to launch the Mexican Ski Federation. Membership, as you probably guessed, is quite low in this mainly temperate country; add on the high cost of the sport and it's no surprise Hohenlohe is soloing it in Sochi.
HUBERTUS VON HOHENLOHE: Lonely. Lonely. It's going to be lonely out there.
KAHN: A photographer, documentarian and one of the oldest, at 55, to be competing in the Winter Olympics, Hohenlohe says he doesn't expect to win any medals. He only qualified for one race. But he does hope people will notice his flare for fashion.
HOHENLOHE: It's a big stage and you need to wear something special on stage. I mean I could also come with just T-shirt and jeans.
KAHN: His skin tight suit is anything but. It sports a drawing of a black bolero jacket, complete with a ruffley(ph) white tuxedo shirt, a bright red tie and thick matching cummerbund.
ALEX JORIO: And also the trousers are very skinny.
KAHN: Italian designer Alex Jorio, of Kappa sports apparel, says this isn't the first ski suit he's made for Hohenlohe. In the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Jorio made him a custom Mexican desperado suit, complete with bandolier.
JORIO: He's an artist and he pretend to push us in a difficult way.
(LAUGHTER)
KAHN: For his part, Hohenlohe enjoys pushing the envelope. He says he wants to have fun. After all, being an Olympian isn't as exciting as it looks.
HOHENLOHE: Training enough, you know, in the gym and sweating and running and, you know, sleeping in bad hotels in Slovenia and eating fast food in Norway, is not that glamorous. At least the suit should be glamorous.
KAHN: And fitting for, as he likes to call himself, the Mariachi Olympic Prince.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARIACHI MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing in Spanish)
KAHN: Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Mexico City.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARIACHI MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing in Spanish)
INSKEEP: Hard to top that but let's try.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
On a Thursday, it's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
There was a time when drought in the American West could poverty or even death. People have far more resources today. So the severe drought in the American West is not an immediate matter of life or death.
It is, however, a reality that alters daily life, from ski slopes in the Pacific Northwest, to lawns in Las Vegas. The longer the drought persists, the more it forces people to adapt, steadily redefining what it means to live in the states we're about to visit: California, Nevada and Oregon.
We begin with NPR's Tom Goldman.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Up on Mount Ashland, in Southern Oregon, here's what drought sounds like...
(SOUNDBITE OF UNLOCKING OF DOOR)
GOLDMAN: Kim Clark unlocks the entrance to the bar in the Mount Ashland Ski lodge, a bar, he says, that would be rocking on a normal late-January, Friday afternoon like this one. Clark is the ski area's general manager. He's leading me on a you-can-hear-a-pin-drop tour of the facility, through another locked door, outside, onto a deserted, sun-splashed deck. It's about 100 feet from one of the mountain's four chairlifts.
KIM CLARK: Normally, we'd be looking at about six feet of snow out there and lots of happy, smiling faces. Right now, we're looking at the lift not running and dirt.
GOLDMAN: In its 50 years of operation, the Mount Ashland Ski Area has opened, on average, December 10th. Now it's getting perilously close to its record for latest opening, February 17th, back in the 1970s. Snow depth on the mountain has hovered between zero and two inches. Clark says they need to have three feet.
The culprit - wreaking havoc not just on Mount Ashland, but other Oregon ski resorts and the drought-stricken state in general - is a ridge of high pressure that's been parked since late September, blocking rain and snowstorms. A meteorologist dubbed it the ridiculously resilient ridge. Kim Clark has his own name.
CLARK: Great ridiculously resilient ridge, or GRRR.
GOLDMAN: Clark jokes, but it hurts. Mount Ashland, a community-owned nonprofit, has lost a million dollars in income. A paid staff of nearly 130 is down to five, working part-time.
The drought's impact on ski resorts, like Mt. Ashland, is only part of the hit on recreation and the businesses that serve: snowmobilers, cross-country skiers, snow-shoers - all no-shows, as well.
CAROLYN HILL: What's heartbreaking to me is hearing from a supplier up in the mountains who has two months to make all their money for the year.
GOLDMAN: Carolyn Hill is CEO of Travel Southern Oregon.
HILL: Some of that time's already passed, and it's not coming back.
GOLDMAN: Of course, when it comes to drought, what happens in the mountains doesn't stay in the mountains. Snowpack fills rivers and reservoirs below, which already are hurting. A state climatologist says throughout Oregon, stream flows are 10 percent of normal.
But this week, a glimmer of hope: The rains have come. In Southern Oregon, happy reports of flooding on the roads. And up on Mount Ashland, Kim Clark is hearing there could be as much as 10 inches of snow - could be. At this point, he says, he'll take anything and everything.
Tom Goldman, NPR News.
NATHAN ROTT, BYLINE: Hey, Nathan Rott, here. Let's jump in a truck, and I'll explain as we go.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRIVING ON ROAD)
ROTT: We're driving on a dirt road about an hour and a half west of Fresno, in California's Central Valley. Joe Del Bosque is in the driver's seat.
JOE DEL BOSQUE: So, my ranch is kind of spread out.
ROTT: Del Bosque is a farmer. He grows cantaloupe, asparagus, almonds and cherries - just a handful of the 230 different types of crops that are grown in the Central Valley. In total, a third of the country's entire produce is grown here.
That is, when there's enough water.
BOSQUE: This land over here on our left is not going to be planted.
ROTT: According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, about 62 percent of California is under extreme drought conditions. That means many farmers in the Central Valley - like Del Bosque - are having to cut back.
BOSQUE: This is where we had organic melons last year. This year, we're not going to plant it, because we don't have enough water. So there will be about 40 acres lost here.
ROTT: So, 40 acres - how much money can you make off an acre?
BOSQUE: That probably returns 8 to $10,000 an acre.
ROTT: So, if you do the math, taking that lowball figure, this empty field is a loss of...
BOSQUE: Yeah, 320,000.
ROTT: That's $320,000.
BOSQUE: Yeah. That's high-valued stuff.
ROTT: Del Bosque says most of that money is spent on operations, like growing expenses...
BOSQUE: Labor...
ROTT: Shipping and transportation.
BOSQUE: It comes back to us, and it goes out through the community.
ROTT: And Del Bosque says that's the key: A third of Fresno and neighboring Kings County's farmland is expected to sit fallow, or not be planted this year because of drought. That's 312 square miles. And it's not just farmers who are going to be affected.
(SOUNDBITE OF SIZZLING FOOD)
ROTT: Maria Vasquez is cooking up some breakfast sausage at a small cafe in nearby San Joaquin. It's a small, no-stoplight town of about 4,000 people, about halfway between Del Bosque's farm in Fresno.
MARIA VAZQUEZ: (Spanish spoken)
ROTT: When there's no water, there's no anything, Vazquez says. It affects the whole town. She's been running this restaurant for six years, and she says the only thing that brings customers in is the surrounding agriculture.
MAYOR DHALIWAL AMARPREET: Everything screeches to a halt once a drought hits or the agriculture is impacted negatively.
ROTT: Dhaliwal Amarpreet is the mayor of San Joaquin.
AMARPREET: Folks in my community, you know, they're not rich people, but they're very proud and resolute.
ROTT: And during the last drought, in 2009?
AMARPREET: They had to stand in full lines at the time, just because there was no work.
ROTT: And he says this drought is worse. One water expert from UC Davis estimated that if the drought persists, anywhere from 10 to 20,000 farmworkers could be out of work. And that's not including the packagers, the shippers, the machine shop workers or the Maria Vazquezes of the Central Valley. Nathan Rott, NPR News.
TED ROBBINS, BYLINE: I'm Ted Robbins, in the driest big city in America: Las Vegas, Nevada. In a normal year, they only get about four inches of rain here, although you wouldn't know it from all the fountains and lakes along the Strip.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER SPLASHING)
ROBBINS: This is the picture of Las Vegas visitors see. But it's not the problem. The entire Las Vegas Strip uses only 6 percent of the city's water. And since it generates 75 percent of the area's economy, the dancing fountains aren't going away, even in a drought. The biggest water waster in Las Vegas is residential grass: lawns put in long ago by housing developers.
MATT BAROUDI: We had no choice when we bought the house. It came with grass in the front, as did every house in this neighborhood.
ROBBINS: Matt Baroudi is a transplanted Londoner who runs a landscaping business in Las Vegas. Like many transplanted Las Vegans, he had to adjust to his new desert environment. He now replaces lawns with rock and drought-tolerant plants. The Southern Nevada Water Authority actually pays homeowners $1.50 a square foot to convert their lawns.
BAROUDI: I try to persuade people to, you know, go xeriscape, to save the water, because I see the lake all the time, and I see it going down.
ROBBINS: The lake is Lake Mead, on the Colorado River. It's where Las Vegas gets 90 percent of its water, and it's at a historic low level. In order to save water in the city, the water authority has a number of rules, from once-a-week watering, to fines for wasting water, to restrictions on new construction. But critic Rob Mrowka of the Center for Biological Diversity says it's not enough. He'd like to see water rates raised to discourage overuse.
ROB MROWKA: We have some of the cheapest water anywhere in the United States, and yet we're in the driest desert in the country.
ROBBINS: They also have an advanced water distribution system. All indoor water in Las Vegas, from showers to washing machines is recycled.
JOHN ENTSMINGER: If it hits a drain, it's treated, discharged back into Lake Mead, and we can then take out the exact same quantity of water to use again.
ROBBINS: The water authority's new general manager, John Entsminger, says Las Vegas has reduced its water consumption by one-third, even as the population has grown over the last 15 years. But given the historic drought - possibly a new normal - he says it may not be enough.
ENTSMINGER: We need to be prepared to get by with less, moving into the future.
ROBBINS: Or import more water. In the coming decades, Las Vegas could pursue a controversial pipeline to bring water nearly 300 miles from rural eastern Nevada. Ted Robbins, NPR News, Las Vegas.
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Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep. It once was lost and now, is found - the world's first Porsche. The car company says Ferdinand Porsche's horse and carriage business was going badly in the 1890s, so he switched to motorized vehicles.
His first car drove through Vienna, but was later left in a warehouse. Now, it's rediscovered after 112 years, with a top speed of 22. Too bad it wasn't a 22-year-old Porsche that goes 112.
You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
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Attorney General Eric Holder says he will decide by Friday whether to seek the death penalty against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He's the surviving brother accused in the Boston marathon bombing. You'll recall that bombing killed and maimed people near the finish line of the race. Police later shut down much of the metropolitan area during a manhunt, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is the brother they found hiding in a boat.
NPR's Tovia Smith reports on the debate over what should happen to him now.
TOVIA SMITH, BYLINE: As many see it, this is exactly the kind of case the death penalty is meant for.
MICHAEL SULLIVAN: You would look at this as, you'll fall into the category of the worst of the worst, and it would appear to me that it would not be a close call.
SMITH: Former U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan says the heinous nature of Tsarnaev's alleged crimes far outweigh any mitigating factors
SULLIVAN: You know, considering obviously the randomness with regard to the killings, the number innocent victims, the planning that went in place, the maiming of so many other people, then yes, this would be the worst of the worst.
SMITH: Another former U.S. attorney, Don Stern, who personally opposes the death penalty, agrees it'll probably be sought in this case, despite arguments against it from Tsarnaev's defense team.
DON STERN: Such as his youth, such as the extent to which they will no doubt claim he was under the influence his older brother, that he should be spared the death penalty.
SMITH: Bombing victims have also had a chance to weigh in on the death penalty. Liz Norden, whose two sons both lost a leg in the attack, says Tsarnaev should face execution for what he and his brother allegedly did.
LIZ NORDEN: You know, their intentions were to go out to maim and severely hurt and kill people that day, which is what took place. So I think that all options should be on the table for the jury to decide.
SMITH: But some other victims say executing Tsarnaev would do nothing to lessen their pain. Sydney Corcoran was injured, and her mom lost both legs in the attack. They declined to comment for this report, saying they want to focus on their recovery, not the defendant. But in an interview with NPR last April, shortly after the attack, Corcoran said she'd rather see Tsarnaev get life in prison than the death penalty.
SYDNEY CORCORAN: I am angry, but I wouldn't wish this upon them, either. I think, like, it's just too barbaric. And I would just want him to just live out his life and have to live with the fact that he did this.
SMITH: According to a recent poll, about a third of Boston residents support the death penalty for Tsarnaev. A national poll last spring showed twice the support. Massachusetts bans capital punishment for state crimes. And federal prosecutors have sought it against only two defendants here in recent decades. One was spared, and the other's being retried.
Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, a death penalty opponent, says executing Tsarnaev could actually do more harm than good.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: It would make him into a martyr. It would have people marching and parading to save his life. And in the end, for somebody like him, life in prison in obscurity may be worse than a quick, painless death and martyrdom.
SMITH: If prosecutors do pursue the death penalty, 12 jurors would have to be unanimous. And Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes the death penalty, says defense attorneys would face a tough decision on whether to try to move the trial away from the city that sees itself as a victim.
RICHARD DIETER: You may want to get out of that atmosphere. On the other hand, in Boston, the conditions might be more favorable than numerous other places. So you'd have to think twice.
SMITH: And, Dieter notes, even if prosecutors do go for the death penalty against Tsarnaev, things often change before trial and defendants often end up pleading guilty in exchange for life in prison.
Tovia Smith, NPR News, Boston.
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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep, with Renee Montagne.
Ukraine's parliament tried last night to defuse the country's protests. The parliament offered amnesty for demonstrators who are in jail, but only if the demonstrators who are still free agree to leave buildings they're occupying. Opposition leaders said no. They want unconditional amnesty for those arrested. More important, they want the resignation of President Viktor Yanukovych. His government is accused of using both arrests and brutality.
NPR's Corey Flintoff reports.
COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: Tetyana Chornovil is a journalist and opposition activist who makes a specialty of investigating top Ukrainian officials and the sources of their wealth. She'd just completed one of those stories last month when a group of thugs, riding in a Porsche SUV, forced her car off the road, dragged her out, beat her senseless, and left her in a ditch to freeze. She survived, and photographs of her swollen and battered face went viral on the Ukrainian Internet.
TETYANA CHORNOVIL: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: These days, she is campaigning against what she says is the government's brutal effort to suppress dissent, using police and goons in civilian clothes.
She's a slender woman who looks younger than her 34 years. The only visible remnant of her beating a month ago is a splint taped across the bridge of her nose.
CHORNOVIL: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: She introduces a man whose injuries are fresh, a ragged head wound stitched up on a shaved section of his scalp and two swollen black eyes. She describes how they ran into a squad of pro-government thugs in a town outside Kiev.
OLEG SOBCHENKO: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: Oleg Sobchenko says he was beaten by the thugs, who then turned him over to the Berkut, the feared Ukrainian riot police, who tortured him. He says he wound up in a local hospital, but that his friends spirited him away as soon as possible, so as to keep the police from catching him again.
Kiev's hospitals have turned out to be dangerous places, says Inna Sovsun. She heads an ad-hoc group that helps monitor the fate of protesters who need medical care.
INNA SOVSUN: Our volunteers, who stay in the hospitals, they need to make sure that people who are taken to the hospitals, that they are not kept by the police before they receive proper health care.
FLINTOFF: She says police have arrested badly injured protesters and dragged them out of hospitals, over the objections of the doctors who were treating them. Sovsun cites a more sinister case, where thugs kidnapped two activists from a local hospital.
SOVSUN: They were taken away by unknown people, still unidentified. And Igor was found 24 hours after that, somewhere outside of Kiev. Another person, Yuri Verbizki, was found dead.
FLINTOFF: Igor Luzenko is recovering from his injuries. Yuri Verbizki, a 50-year-old seismologist, was found with his hands taped behind his back and his body showing signs of torture. Doctors determined that he died from exposure, left to freeze to death.
Sovsun says her volunteers try to make sure that patients don't disappear. Sometimes, she says, they alert injured people to stay away when there are police in the building. But that can mean that Ukraine's opposition activists aren't getting medical treatment because they're afraid a hospital visit might trigger unwelcome visit from the police.
Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Kiev.
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The effort to restore peace in South Sudan included the person we'll hear from next. She's a White House official just returned from peace talks. The problem here involves a feud between the two top politicians in South Sudan. An estimated 10,000 people have died in vicious fighting that broke out six weeks ago. The carnage is all the more shocking, given that the country celebrated its independence in 2011. The United States played a big role in the creation of South Sudan, and has just helped to broker a ceasefire.
The officials at those talks included Gayle Smith, who sits on the White House National Security Council. She joined Renee Montagne in our studios.
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What was hopeful about that country when it became a country? I mean, would there have been reason to maybe try and hold off even longer, and try and get some of these institutions in place, the leadership, ways in which the country would not be so shaky when it was set up as its own nation?
GAYLE SMITH: I think the right of the people of South Sudan to choose their own future was the right thing. That's what they agreed. At the time of independence, it was a very fragile state. It remains so today. And there's been considerable effort by the international community to help build institutions that South Sudan has never had throughout its history, even when it was part of Sudan itself.
MONTAGNE: So, in that effort, over time, the U.S. has poured in billions of dollars into South Sudan. Where did that money go?
SMITH: The bulk of that money, over the past years, has gone to humanitarian assistance. As a result of war and acute poverty, South Sudan and Sudan have had very, very, very high levels of need for relief assistance. So that's been the primary source of our investment.
MONTAGNE: And the U.S. is prepared to continue pouring in more money to make this work?
SMITH: Well, I think we're prepared to invest in a couple of ways. First and foremost, we will, with other donors, continue to meet humanitarian needs in South Sudan. Second, is there are a number of programs that we run in for example, health and public health, that we think continue to be a wise investment.
MONTAGNE: You just got back, and while you are there, there was a cease-fire - what appear to be quite a shaky cease-fire. It is going to be able to get the two sides to another round of talks that will lead, at some point, to peace there or - and even better - to peace based on good governance?
SMITH: Well, the intention, following the signing of the cessation of hostilities agreement, is first that that be monitored so that when there are allegations of violations, there's an independent way to determine whether they have, in fact, occurred and they can be addressed if they have.
The next round will be on political negotiations. The political negotiations will also need to take into account processes that were ongoing. On, for example, the completion of a constitution for South Sudan.
MONTAGNE: And what would be the key thing that would make that work?
SMITH: One is inclusion. It will be important that voices of citizens groups, of religious leaders, the church having been a very strong institution throughout South Sudan's history, young people, women and people from various parts of the country will need to be included, including different ethnic and tribal groups. The second is that it be a very transparent process so that people can both participate, but understand what their rights are and what kind of bright can be enshrined in a constitution, will also be necessary.
I think third will be the involvement of the region and the international community in that process and that dialogue, to ensure to the extent that that we can, that again, that it is both inclusive and transparent.
MONTAGNE: You know, I'm wondering about the leadership in South Sudan, because these leaders emerged effectively from the years of rebellion against Sudan and the north, but also at different points in time, they fought each other. Is it really, going to be for some time to come, these people who will have a very hard time working together?
SMITH: Generally speaking, the political leadership emerges from people who have fought, and that militarism does not translate well into politics. I think it's going to be critical that this not be a negotiation just between a small handful people at the top. This has got to be a negotiation that is broader than that that creates pathways for other people to come into government, including those who may not have been fighters during the struggle for independence.
MONTAGNE: Well, thank you very much for joining us.
SMITH: Thank you, Renee.
INSKEEP: Gayle Smith is a special assistant to President Obama and serves as a senior director on the National Security Council.
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INSKEEP: We're glad you're with us on this Thursday morning. On your local public radio station, you can continue following this program throughout the day. We're on social media. You can find us on Facebook, we're on Tumblr - we're everywhere, really - and we're also on Twitter, where you can follow us @morningedition and @nprinskeep as well as @nprgreene.
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INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
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NPR's business news includes halted gun sales in California.
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INSKEEP: Two of the nation's largest gun manufacturers have announced they will stop selling semiautomatic handguns in California. This is because of a dispute over a new identification law. NPR's Kirk Siegler reports.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: California's new micro stamping law affects all new or redesigned semiautomatic handguns sold here. It requires they be equipped with laser technology that imprints a handgun's make, model and serial number onto shell casings when a bullet is fired. The idea is that police at a crime scene would have another tool to link a gun to a shooting.
Mike Feuer first wrote the bill that passed the California legislature back in 2007. He's now the city attorney for Los Angeles.
MIKE FEUER: It'll enable law enforcement to crack down on gun crime, and to put behind bars gun criminals who otherwise would never be effectively prosecuted because there would never be a lead in those cases.
SIEGLER: But gun manufacturers have long questioned the technology. They argue that if it worked, more law enforcement agencies would use it. They don't - and they're exempt from the micro stamping law. Recently, Smith and Wesson and Sturm Ruger put even more weight behind that argument. They're stopping selling semiautomatic handguns in California markets altogether, rather than comply with the new law.
DAVE KOPEL: This is a slow-motion handgun ban.
SIEGLER: Dave Kopel is a policy analyst at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, and law professor at the University of Denver. He says micro stamping would work if criminals actually registered their guns. In reality, he says, most don't. And Kopel sees micro stamping as an excuse to gather data about all gun owners, not just criminals.
KOPEL: In a way, it's sort of a parallel to the NSA. You can either selectively wiretap the suspected bad guys, or you could try to get everybody's email and read everything.
FEUER: Well, it's baloney.
SIEGLER: LA city attorney Mike Feuer says the flap over gun rights and micro stamping is being overblown. He says it's about curbing gun violence in cities like his.
FEUER: No gun owner who has that gun for self-defense has any reason to object to micro stamping. All micro stamping does is provide law enforcement with leads in gun crime.
SIEGLER: That's now an argument before the courts. Two lawsuits have been filed seeking to overturn the micro stamping law; one in federal court and another, most recently, in state court. The suits will be closely watched, as will the fallout from the gun manufacturers' decision to stop selling certain handguns in California. At least three other states with gun laws closely aligned with California's are considering similar legislation.
Kirk Siegler, NPR News.
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Delaware's gambling industry is struggling. Revenues at the state's three casinos have steadily declined in recent years, as competition from neighboring states grows. A state task force is set to make recommendations to lawmakers this week to save the troubled casino industry from layoffs - or worse. NPR's Allison Keyes reports.
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ALLISON KEYES, BYLINE: Earlier this week, Lisa Vespucci was bopping across the floor between rows of flashing, beeping slot machines and a table surrounded with black-jack players. She drove to Dover Downs Hotel and Casino from Maryland.
LISA VESPUCCI: It's about an hour and a half from my house.
KEYES: Vespucci says Dover Downs - which has a race track and NASCAR racing - has more amenities than some of the Maryland casinos she's been to.
VESPUCCI: This one's a lot larger.
KEYES: But she admits she spends a lot more time at the Hollywood Casino in Perryville, Md., just five minutes from her house.
VESPUCCI: Nobody likes to go as much as I do so...
(LAUGHTER)
ED SUTER: We're so small - this state - we really rely on people traveling here.
KEYES: Ed Suter is president and CEO of Dover Downs Hotel and Casino, and says two-thirds of its customers come from out of state. Casinos in Pennsylvania - and particularly Maryland - have knocked Dover Downs' revenue down between 35 and 40 percent over the past few years. Suter points a finger at Maryland Live Casino, which opened in 2012 - 20 minutes from Baltimore.
SUTER: For us, a lot of our customers live in close proximity to that facility. So those customers have to decide, are they going to get in their car and drive a couple hours to come here, or are they going to go 15 to 20 minutes away to Maryland Live? You can't blame them.
KEYES: Suter says that's why he's hoping to see the Lottery and Gaming Study Commission decide to recommend that Delaware reduce the state's tax rate on slot machines. It raised them in 2009 to balance the budget.
SUTER: The tax rate used to be 36 percent of gross revenue and slots; now, it's 43 and a half. Several members of this commission are recommending that it go back.
ALAN LEVIN: We have to look and make sure that they survive; and not only survive but thrive.
KEYES: Alan Levin is director of Maryland's Economic Development Office, and a member of the commission looking at ways to help the casino industry. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Levin is director of Delaware's Economic Development Office.] Levin says he's heard many scenarios for changing the formula, ranging from changing the revenue-sharing in a way that could cost the state 50 million a year, to something more modest that would mean a $10 million loss for the state. He says any solution should be one that allows both the casinos and the state to make a fair return on their investments.
SUTER: It's an industry that is important enough to the state that we have to address their concerns and their issues.
KEYES: In 2010, Delaware's general fund got 238.6 million in casino revenues. By 2013, it was down to 192 million. And the lottery revenue category, which also includes casino money, is the state's fifth largest revenue source.
Frank Fantini, editor and publisher of Fantini's Gaming Report, says things look pretty bad for Delaware's casinos.
FRANK FANTINI: You can take a look at Dover Downs as an example. It's a stock that once sold at 12-, 13-, $15 a share and now, it's down to the to a 2- to $3 area.
KEYES: Fantini is also CEO of a Dover-based investment research firm. He agrees with other casino business experts that the facilities may need to cut expenses to cope with their losses.
FANTINI: I can see where they would further cut back business operations, if they have to. There's already been some suggestion that table games simply aren't profitable enough; and they might have to cut those back, in some places.
KEYES: Alan Levin, at Delaware's Economic Development Office, says a larger issue to consider down the road is whether the model of a casino and racetrack can survive the competition, or whether smaller venues are the answer.
The Lottery and Gaming Study Commission is expected to offer recommendations to the General Assembly this week. After that, lawmakers and the governor will decide what will be done.
Allison Keyes, NPR News.
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Our last word in business is: a friendly wager.
Museums in Denver and Seattle bet art in the name of football. If Seattle wins the Super Bowl, the Denver Art Museum hands over a Frederic Remington bronze of a cowboy on a bucking bronco.
If Denver wins, the Seattle Art Museum gives up a six-paneled Japanese screen from 1902. Now the winner only gets to keep the other museum's artwork temporarily. But maybe museums can make a regular practice of doing this, permanently. You know, the director of the Louvre could walk around saying things like, the Mona Lisa is smiling because she knows it'll be the Broncos by three.
That's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
A passage in President Obama's State of the Union speech promoted job training. He'll promote it again today when visiting a General Electric plant outside Milwaukee. The president is trying to follow up on his address, which is also why he promoted retirement savings while visiting Pittsburgh yesterday.
NPR's Scott Horsley was there.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: President Obama toured the hot and cold-rolled steel-making operation in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, part of U.S. Steel's vast Mon Valley Works, which turns out tons of steel used in cars, construction, and appliances.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: You just don't come to the steel city without coming to U.S. Steel.
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HORSLEY: Obama was greeted at the plant by both the CEO of U.S. Steel and the president of the United Steelworkers Union. He noted that the unionized employees here enjoy good benefits, including retirement savings, but added many other workers in America are not so fortunate.
OBAMA: Most workers don't have a pension in America. Just half work for an employer that offers any kind of retirement plan. Social Security check is critical. But oftentimes that monthly check, that's not enough.
HORSLEY: So yesterday Obama signed a presidential memorandum calling for the creation of a new kind of retirement savings account called a MyRA. It's a sort of entry-level IRA, designed to get workers who aren't in the habit of saving used to the idea of setting money aside on a regular basis. The plan is also designed to encourage employers to offer the stripped-down savings plan through ease of administration.
Money is deducted from workers' paychecks, much like a 401(k) contribution. But instead of a wide array of investment choices, the savings go only into government bonds. That's pretty conservative, with an interest rate based on U.S. Treasury bills. But the president says savers' money would be completely safe.
OBAMA: These account balances will never go down in value. They're backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. And it's affordable. So you can open an account with as little as $25. You can contribute as little as $5 at a time.
HORSLEY: Workers who change jobs can take their savings with them and withdraw their money with no tax penalty. No one is going to get rich off a MyRA account. The most you can sock away is $15,000, after which the money can be rolled into a private IRA.
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told reporters traveling on Air Force One yesterday, this government-sponsored piggy bank is designed to make the introduction to saving both easy and routine.
SECRETARY JACK LEW: And what we've learned is, that when people start saving, they get into the habit of saving. And they ultimately save more and for longer. And if you can graduate from this kind of program to being in the habit of savings, people over a career will be much more secure at the point when they reach retirement.
HORSLEY: Like other executive actions the president is taking this week, the MyRA accounts don't go as far as Obama would like. For years he's been urging Congress to make retirement investing automatic, so all workers would be enrolled in a savings plan unless they deliberately opted out. Congress hasn't acted on that, so for now the president is left with a program that's strictly voluntary for employers.
As Obama told workers at the steel mill yesterday, he'll take what he can get.
OBAMA: Wherever I can take steps to expand opportunity for more families, regardless of what Congress does, that's what I'm going to do.
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HORSLEY: Aides say the president will keep pressing lawmakers for more far-reaching action on retirement savings. In the meantime, the first MyRA accounts should be available by the end of the year.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Pittsburgh.
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President Obama's State of the Union speech acknowledged the obvious about Afghanistan. The U.S. wants to keep troops in the country after this year but says it won't do that unless President Hamid Karzai signs a new security agreement, so Americans made themselves dependent on Karzai, who has repeatedly put off signing as he prepares to leave office. This week, President Obama said only that the U.S. could still keep troops there if someone signs.
A man who knows all the players in this drama is Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the country under President Bush.
ZALMAY KHALILZAD: I think the administration has decided not to go for the so-called zero option, which was to use Karzai's refusal to sign the agreement now and say: We wanted to stay but Karzai has refused, so we're coming home. That would have been the popular thing to do. But that would have been, I think, dangerous, certainly for Afghanistan because - and they need U.S. military support and, most importantly, financial support. And besides, it would have also had negative effects on our ability to conduct counter-terror operations against the remaining al-Qaida elements in Pakistan.
So I think it would've been important for us to stay but it's vital for Afghanistan.
INSKEEP: The Obama administration had signaled that if Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai did not sign a security agreement that let's U.S. troops stay beyond 2014, in 2013 that it'd be too late. They said you've got to sign this in 2013 or we've got to start withdrawing. Apparently that deadline wasn't real. So what really is the deadline?
KHALILZAD: I think that has been a problematic approach, to put it diplomatically, because we have set deadlines and then those deadlines have passed and that had emboldened Karzai and has led him to believe that Afghanistan is the single most important piece of territory for the United States in the world and no matter what he does, we will accommodate his concern.
I've told him when I've seen him in recent times, look, don't overplay your hand.
INSKEEP: But he did blow past this deadline. He seems to have gotten away with it, so what really is the deadline by which the United States needs to have some kind of agreement in place in order to keep its troops there?
KHALILZAD: What is needed, what is appropriate in my view, is to have a posture that the United is willing to sign it with the current government or wait two months. There is an election coming and there will be a new president of Afghanistan. All the major candidates have said they will sign the agreement because the agreement is very popular.
INSKEEP: Americans have been very frustrated by the outgoing president, Hamid Karzai. We've heard a couple of times in recent weeks from John Podesta, a newly appointed advisor to the president. This is Mr. Podesta, late last year, just before he joined the White House staff, talking about the president of Afghanistan.
JOHN PODESTA: Karzai's really gone from maddeningly unpredictable to dangerously erratic.
INSKEEP: So that was John Podesta a few weeks ago. Let's listen to him this week.
PODESTA: President Karzai, I think, has done everything he possibly could in the last couple of weeks and months to make the partnership between the United States and Afghanistan more difficult.
INSKEEP: Sounds like he's poisoned relations with the administration. But you know Hamid Karzai well. Is there a more sympathetic view that you can take of him?
KHALILZAD: Yes, there is. He was a great partner at the beginning, but a number of things have brought about changes in Karzai's behavior, and I think it largely has to do with Pakistan. Karzai, from the very beginning, has been despondent about the situation with Pakistan, which is regarded an ally of the United States, has been a sanctuary for the Taliban.
Now he's become conspiracy theorist where he thinks we are in collusion with Pakistan to allow this to justify our presence, put at risk...
INSKEEP: His conspiracy theory is that the U.S. is behind the Taliban, essentially.
KHALILZAD: And otherwise why would the U.S. not use its enormous leverage, as he sees it...
INSKEEP: To clean up Pakistan.
KHALILZAD: ...and tell Pakistan this will not do, this has to stop.
INSKEEP: You've given reasons why it would be a bad idea to leave Afghanistan. People ask about staying. Can you really work with a government that's this corrupt? Can you really make lasting changes in Afghanistan and get your money's worth, so to speak, for the treasure as well as blood that you're spending.
KHALILZAD: A lot has already been achieved. Look at the number of kids going to school, including girls. Look at the infrastructure. Life expectancy has gone up. No doubt we've made some mistakes. Afghan corruption, there have been some resources wasted, but it would be a mistake to believe, in my judgment, that we have not achieved anything in Afghanistan. We have achieved a lot.
INSKEEP: Ambassador Khalilzad, thanks very much for coming by.
KHALILZAD: Oh, it's great to be with you.
INSKEEP: Former U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad spoke with NPR yesterday, and we're learning today more about Afghan corruption. A U.S. inspector general has revealed the findings of auditors who say not one of Afghanistan's 16 government ministries can reliably keep U.S. aid from being wasted or stolen. This is NPR News.
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Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. President Obama faces a big choice about immigration: whether to deport Justin Bieber. The Canadian pop star was arrested for drunk driving. A petition at the White House website calls to revoke his green card; it calls Bieber a terrible influence on our nation's youth.
"Nations" is missing the apostrophe, and Bieber doesn't actually have a green card. But never mind. The petition gained over 100,000 signatures, which means the White House must answer it.
It's MORNING EDITION.
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This Sunday's Super Bowl features the number one defense, the Seattle Seahawks, against the number one offense, the Denver Broncos and Peyton Manning. That is a surprisingly rare matchup, number one defense against number one offense. It's only happened a few times in all the Super Bowls to date. But of course that means there is a defense and an offense in the game that are not number one. NPR's Mike Pesca looks at what having greatness in one phase of the game does to the rest of the team.
MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: This year the Denver defense was OK. They gave up slightly fewer yards than most NFL defenses but were in the bottom third in points allowed. That all went about as noticed as the curtains in a cat house because Peyton Manning and the Broncos' offense was the greatest in NFL history, and as such all the defense had to do was not implode.
This reminds Randy Moss of 2007, when, as a Patriot, he was a key part of what was at the time the greatest offense in NFL history. But he says things got dicey for the Patriots' defense when the offense lacked its usual pyrotechnics.
RANDY MOSS: Those guys, they wasn't used to being on that field. We didn't punt the ball a lot, and then when it was time for them to really hunker down and make plays, you know, they struggled with it just a tad.
PESCA: Those Patriots lost in the Super Bowl, by the way. Moss says the Denver D isn't that bad, but they do benefit from the gifts the offense bestows, not just big leads, but field position. Hall of Famer Howie Long says pass rushers specifically benefit by playing on a team with a good offense because they know their opponents will be passing most of the time.
HOWIE LONG: I always said to myself, if I had an offense that could score 30 points a game, I've got to get 10-plus sacks a year.
PESCA: During Long's tenure, the Raiders had better-than-average offenses in three non-strike shortened seasons. Those were the only three seasons Long had 10 or more sacks. But a good offense, the thinking goes, doesn't really help a team's defense that much. But a great defense like the Seahawks have will shape the very nature of the offense.
Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson could put up dazzling numbers. But since his defense is so good, he's asked to play more conservatively, acknowledges Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll.
PETE CARROLL: Our defense is very, very steady and very opportunistic. And on the other side of the ball as well, we love that we are a running football team. The aggressive nature. The style of our play really complements our special teams and our defense. So there's a really good fit.
PESCA: Seattle's defensive line coach, Travis Jones, emphasizes the importance of turnovers.
TRAVIS JONES: We believe in protecting the ball.
PESCA: Wait. Stop. Every team believes in protecting the ball. It is better for an offense not to fumble, Lombardi probably never had to note. But Jones' message goes further. It contains passion.
JONES: It's all about the ball. So when we got it, keep it. When we don't have it, get it from them.
PESCA: It also has the virtue of being accurate. Seattle only turned the ball over 19 times this season, second fewest in the NFC. But they took it away 39 times, the best in football. Other teams might urge their receivers to make a play; Jones says the message in Seattle is more like first do no harm.
JONES: All of our offensive guys, skill guys, understand that when they have the ball in their hand, that they're holding the hopes and dreams of everyone on the team.
PESCA: Seattle's receiving corps has been denigrated based on their paltry receiving yards, but their pass catchers have some of the surest hands in the NFL, dropping balls at roughly half the rate, not total number, half the rate of Denver's highly praised pass catchers. Which is to say there is some evidence that the Seahawks' offense can deliver in a big way if called upon.
Though Denver's defense has already performed surprisingly well this post-season. All of this is a long way of saying that Super Bowl 48 may just come down to special teams. Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Some other news now. New rules may be coming for the largely unregulated world of virtual currencies. Maybe you've heard of bitcoin, which is the biggest one. It has many boosters, despite being associated with some spectacular crimes. Now New York State, which is the home of Wall Street, often takes a leading role in regulating financial activity, could become the first state in the nation to write comprehensive regulations for virtual currencies.
From member station WNYC, Ilya Marritz reports.
ILYA MARRITZ, BYLINE: As if to illustrate the need for more oversight of virtual currencies federal prosecutors, on Monday, announced the arrests of two men, accused of using bitcoin to help their clients buy and sell over a million dollars worth of illegal drugs. Richard Zabel, deputy U.S. attorney in New York, says bitcoin is fuelling a new wave of crime. Not long ago, arms dealers and drug traffickers preferred payment in cash. But moving briefcases full of bills is risky, and today...
RICHARD ZABEL: By contrast, large amounts of bitcoins can be transferred anonymously and safely to someone located anyone in the world, with just the click of a computer key.
MARRITZ: Zabel spoke in Lower Manhattan, at a two-day hearing that also included the Winklevoss twins. You might know them from the movie "The Social Network." Years after suing Facebook's founder, they became big bitcoin investors.
Here's Tyler Winklevoss.
TYLER WINKLEVOSS: Bitcoin, its freedom, it's very American.
MARRITZ: It's also sort of hard to get a grip on. You can't put a bitcoin between your teeth or fold a bit bill into origami. Unlike regular money, it has no physical form. It's computer code. Over the last year, the value of a single bitcoin has fluctuated wildly, from as little as 13 bucks to over a thousand dollars. Speculators and criminals seem to like virtual currencies. But at least a few mainstream businesses are interested too.
JONATHAN JOHNSON: Thank you for having us here. My name is Jonathan Johnson. I'm the executive vice chairman of Overstock.com.
MARRITZ: On January 9th, Overstock started accepting bitcoin as a form of payment. Since then, customers have used bitcoin to buy about $600,000 worth of goods. It's a small sum for a big retailer, but Johnson says there's a lot to like about bitcoin. Credit card payments usually take a few days. With bitcoin, Overstock gets paid right away. Even better, Johnson says, there's no middleman - like a credit card company - taking a cut.
Not long ago, Johnson was back home in Utah, getting a haircut and mentioned this fact to his barber. She was impressed.
JOHNSON: And she said I would love to have something that didn't have interchange fee, where I wasn't giving three percent of every haircut to the credit card company. So I think both large and small businesses have a real incentive.
MARRITZ: The hearing room in Manhattan was filled with guys in suits, mainly younger - a lot of financial types. But bitcoin supporters want to broaden the currency's appeal. I meet James Barcia at the Bitcoin Center NYC, also in Lower Manhattan.
(SOUNDBITE OF A CROWD)
JAMES BARCIA: We are about 100 feet from the New York Stock Exchange. We're the city's only bricks and mortar organization dedicated to, basically, evangelism in favor of bitcoin and its peers - other electronic currencies.
MARRITZ: You can take a class here, called Bitcoin 101, or buy a T-shirt with the Bitcoin logo - it has the double bars of the dollar sign, but with a B instead of an S. As we speak, about a dozen people are watching a LiveStream of the hearing, projected onto a wall. People here say they welcome regulation, but not too much, please.
Ben Lawsky, New York's top financial regulator, says he wants to bring bitcoin commerce out of the shadows by issuing a bit-license.
BEN LAWSKY: Our hope is to do something in 2014. I mean, frankly, if we want innovation to happen, and we want to also root out money laundering, and we want to get that balance right, we also want to give businesses certainty.
MARRITZ: If New York gets the balance right, Lawsky says it could become a center for legitimate bitcoin commerce.
For NPR News, I'm Ilya Marritz in New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
It's Friday, and it's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. We travel next to an economic magnet. New oil fields are transforming North Dakota.
GREENE: The state has become the second largest oil producing state in the nation. The industry is changing America's energy picture and changing the North Dakota landscape as tiny towns burst in population.
INSKEEP: What may be surprising is the way the boom is affecting distant states. The oil money is so attractive that some people who do not move to the oil fields commute there, hundreds of miles. NPR's Kirk Siegler continues our reports on the Great Plains Oil Rush.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Think your commute is bad? Try 580 miles. One way.
RORY RICHARDSON: Hi, Kirk, how are you doing?
SIEGLER: Good. Door to door, that's how far Rory Richardson travels between his home in western Montana and his job in the oil fields near Williston, North Dakota. Today he's getting off a plane his company now charters to shuttle workers back and forth between here and the Northwest. Clutching a duffel bag and a cooler full of food, Richardson walks out of the one-room Williston Airport and into the biting North Dakota winter.
RORY RICHARDSON: Right now it's no fun coming over to North Dakota.
SIEGLER: But this is Richardson's new life.
RORY RICHARDSON: Probably three-quarters of the people that I know and talk to are kind of the same way, you know, got their family back at home and commute back and forth.
SIEGLER: Including at least twenty of the guys he used to work with at the Montana paper mill, before it abruptly shut down four years ago. Richardson decided to go back to school get his business degree. That took two years. He spent another year looking for work. He would either never hear back or they'd call and tell him he was over-qualified.
RORY RICHARDSON: There's very little jobs and there all kind of that minimum wage type stuff, you know, eight, 10 dollar an hour jobs. You can't really make it on that, especially one person working.
SIEGLER: And with a wife and two year old son to support, he says his family ran out of options.
RORY RICHARDSON: I tried to avoid coming over here, best I could. I didn't want to move to North Dakota, I didn't want to come over here working, so to speak, but it's one of the only spots where it's really booming and there is opportunity over here.
SIEGLER: Rory Richardson found work here in western North Dakota last summer as a cement operator, putting casings on new oil wells. He has a bed in a man camp on the outskirts of Williston. But with so much drilling going on, it's rare that he even goes back there at night. He works 18 hours straight usually, and sleeps when he can in the back of a giant Kenmore rig that he drives from one drill site to the next.
RORY RICHARDSON: It's pretty tough, you know, trying to adjust living in a truck, working on the job site on location, 24 hours a day, for three, four days at a time before you make it back to camp.
SIEGLER: His typical shift is two weeks on straight, then a week off. It's really more like five days off after you count the two travel days back and forth, including a three-hour drive to the airport where the chartered plane leaves from. He feels lucky that he can usually fly.
RORY RICHARDSON: I had to drive back here a couple weeks ago, and it took me almost 18 hours. They had the interstate shut down out of Livingston.
SIEGLER: The Richardsons are neighbors of my parents near Missoula, Montana, next to the Idaho state line. And what's interesting is that three of the four families right around them are in this exact position. One or both of the spouses commutes back and forth to the Bakken oil fields.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOGS BARKING)
RORY RICHARDSON: Hi, dogs. Hi.
SIEGLER: The Richardson's hunting dogs are the first thing to greet you in their muddy driveway in the rain. Rory's wife, Jennifer, is inside their modular home with the couple's two-year-old son, Colton.
JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Can you say hi? Colton.
SIEGLER: Colton is lying on the living room floor watching cartoons.
COLTON: Hello, Mommy.
SIEGLER: The wall opposite the TV is crowded with Montana wildlife that Rory shot and had stuffed. There's a Christmas tree in another corner by the window. It's just the two of them here alone over the holidays.
JENNIFER RICHARDSON: I'm basically a single parent. I have no help. I'm it. I'm the only person that does all the disciplining, the raising, everything, all the caretaking. He comes home once a month, for a week. It's not - it's not easy, that's for sure.
SIEGLER: And when Rory comes home, Jennifer says he's wiped out.
JENNIFER RICHARDSON: He comes home and he wants to spend time with his family. He wants to hunt, and he wants to, you know, do fun things. But yet the dishwasher needs to be fixed, and he needs to put a new transmission in my car.
SIEGLER: Jennifer Richardson says this long distance commuting arrangement is far from ideal. But life is better now than it has been these past four years. She remembers when Rory and more than 400 others were laid off, just like that, when the last of the three timber mills in this area closed.
JENNIFER RICHARDSON: It was crazy 'cause he got off work at like 6:00 in the morning. He jumped in his truck to go out cat hunting with a friend and they were driving around and next thing you know on the radio it says Smurfit Stone was closing their doors. Didn't even tell them at work that he was no longer having a job or nothing. They just fired him right there in his truck, on the radio.
SIEGLER: Jenn says emphatically that moving to Williston is not an option. She grew up there. Her family moved there during the last oil boom in the 1980s. And she doesn't like the idea of raising her son Colton there now, with all the crime and other social problems that have come with this latest drilling rush.
JENNIFER RICHARDSON: That's not your T-Rex.
SIEGLER: Besides, their home, on three pristine Montana acres, their horse, their dogs, their lives are here.
JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Yeah, and when his dad's home, it's all about dad. I tell you, Colton doesn't even want me around. He tells me to go work. He goes, Mommy, you work.
RORY RICHARDSON: He's excited every time. He'll jump up and down and come running and give you a big hug and holler, Daddy, Daddy.
SIEGLER: Back in his truck in North Dakota, Rory says being gone so much is taking its toll on his family, even just six months in.
RORY RICHARDSON: Do you try to find a lower paying job back at home or do you move your family over here? And how long is this oil boom going to last? You know, it's a big commitment to come over here and resettle to have something happen in four or five years.
SIEGLER: For now, Rory's just hoping he can switch schedules to get two weeks off at a time. The money he's making here is good. Still, after you factor in what it costs to travel back and forth, the extra housing and food, it's basically the same pay as he made back at the Montana Mill. It's a sobering truth of this economy, and one of the only options for a guy like him now is to travel 600 miles one way just to find a comparable job. Kirk Siegler, NPR News.
INSKEEP: Our reports on the oil rush continue today on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
There's been some encouraging news lately about changing eating habits in the United States. According to the USDA, Americans are consuming slightly fewer calories each day and eating a little more healthy stuff.
Some big food companies are on top of this trend as you may be able to tell. This Super Bowl Sunday you may notice that television ads for healthier fare, such as yogurt, nuts and whole grain cereal, are right up there with ads for chips and beer. Now in fairness, healthy food has always been advertised at the Super Bowl. It's Bud Light, Bud Light.
But this is going somewhere new. NPR's Allison Aubrey reports, the interesting thing is how these healthier products are being pitched.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: On Sunday, Cereal giant General Mills will be spending millions of dollars to advertise a low-salt, low-sugar O-shaped oat. Yup, Cheerios. They've been around for generations. But forget the Saturday cartoon era, to sell them today, it's a whole new ballgame.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
AUBREY: So here's the scene. A little girl and her dad are counting Cheerios at the breakfast table.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERIO AD)
AUBREY: Then, comes the fourth Cheerio...
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION AD)
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
AUBREY: What the ad is pitching is the value of family time, being together. There's no talk of nutrition or taste. The ad is trying to say, hey, connect our brand, Cheerios, with the experience of sharing breakfast together.
General Mills has even joined efforts with a nonprofit group that is promoting the same message.
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION AD)
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
AUBREY: Ad makers call this kind of campaign value-driven marketing. Companies are trying to build broader messages and emotional ties to their products. After all, no one wants to be told that Cheerios are good for you.
Here's marketing and advertising consultant Bob McKinnon.
BOB MCKINNON: So I think that companies have found that when they're talking about marketing health is that talking about the health aspect is not as important a motivation for buying something as appealing to us on a very sort of direct human level.
AUBREY: Using emotion - or in the case of Dannon yogurt, which has also snapped up Super Bowl air time using good-old sex appeal.
Again, the scene is a breakfast table. There's an attractive woman and a good-looking guy who's got a dab of yogurt on his lip. The camera moves in.
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION AD)
AUBREY: She leans in to kiss it off.
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION AD)
AUBREY: It's flirtatious, and it gets steamier.
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION AD)
AUBREY: Ad man Bob McKinnon chuckles at the play on words.
(LAUGHTER)
MCKINNON: Yeah. Well, who knew so many yogurt eaters watching the Super Bowl, right?
AUBREY: Or future yogurt eaters, more like it. Dannon says they hope to sell more millennials on their brand. McKinnon says we associate the Super Bowl with beer and soda and chip ads, but...
MCKINNON: There's a move in a different direction this year, where we'll be seeing as many yogurt ads as Coke ads. It's just really fascinating.
AUBREY: McKinnon says other companies are hoping to win consumers over to healthier products using star power. Take for instance nuts. Wonderful Pistachios are new to the Super Bowl. And the brand has turned to funny man Stephen Colbert to create a buzz on Sunday night.
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION AD)
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
AUBREY: No need to talk about the protein or fiber.
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION AD)
AUBREY: Wonderful Pistachios hopes Colbert will make their nuts cool.
Allison Aubrey, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Okay. You might think that we're well into 2014, but to many people we have just begun the Year of the Horse.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Lunar New Year is celebrated across China, not to mention many homes in the United States. For Ying Compestine, the author of cookbooks and children's books, the Chinese New Year is part of life.
GREENE: And the rotating symbols for each year mean a lot.
YING COMPESTINE: The Year of the Horse is meant for those people that are determined and want to reach their goal, they will get rewarded for their hard work and they should go for it.
GREENE: We reached Compestine at her home in Northern California, where she was cleaning and decorating, both of which are rituals of the New Year.
COMPESTINE: I always have firecrackers hanging from the ceiling to scare away the evil spirits, red tablecloth, double (unintelligible) and some Chinese calligraphy for the good, happy year, and the red, of course, represent good luck. I even have a red door.
INSKEEP: Compestine came to America in the 1980s after growing up in China. New Years in her youth were austere. Children traditionally get haircuts and new clothes for the New Year, hoping evil spirits won't recognize them, but sometimes her family could not afford that.
COMPESTINE: I remember my mother would cook on the coal stove, would have to go out to wait in a long line to buy the coal and, you know, one stove, that would take days to prepare all these dishes. And my favorite dish is dumplings. You know, when I was growing up in China, oil is rationed, so we always, every year, instead of the deep fried or pan fried dumplings, in my home we always have steamed dumplings, which is, even today, still my favorite.
GREENE: And she offers her own take on the traditional dumpling in her most recent cookbook, "Cooking With An Asian Accent" and the recipe is at NPR.org.
INSKEEP: This New Year's weekend, Compestine is serving symbolic dishes, ribs for strength.
GREENE: Fish for prosperity.
INSKEEP: Long noodles for a long life.
GREENE: And sticky sweet rice cakes. The round shape evokes the family circle and the circle of friendship.
COMPESTINE: Now, after this, I'm really excited to the kitchen to start cooking.
INSKEEP: But before she went to the kitchen, Ying Compestine said one more thing to our producers. She'd heard that my family includes a daughter adopted from China, so she sent us a message.
COMPESTINE: (Speaking foreign language) - so what I just said in Chinese is wish you a happy Chinese New Year. I hope you and your family will have a chance to celebrate Chinese New Year with me someday, together.
INSKEEP: Oh, thank you. I'd love that. I'd love that, especially if you're cooking. That's cookbook and children's book author Ying Compestine. Happy New Year.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
At the end of this year, the president will lose a vital ally in the House. He's a member of the Watergate Class of 1974. After Republican President Richard Nixon resigned in that year, a huge number of Democrats won election to the House.
Some soon lost their seats again. Others went on to flashy careers. And then there's Henry Waxman. The California Democratic stayed and stayed. And for better or worse, Waxman put his name on one of the longest legislative legacies ever assembled. Now, he's retiring at the end the year. As NPR's Julie Rovner reports, he's a politician who earned the description lawmaker.
JULIE ROVNER, BYLINE: Most people have never heard of Henry Waxman. He was never a fixture on the Sunday talk shows or Washington's social scene. Rather, during his 40 years in the House, he focused on passing legislation, lots of legislation. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Orphan Drug Act, nutrition labels, food safety, and the Affordable Care Act -- Waxman played a major role in all of them. Tom Mann, of the Brookings Institution, says Waxman will ultimately be remembered right up there with those who commanded much more of the spotlight.
TOM MANN: You probably have to go to the other chamber and talk about Ted Kennedy because Waxman is really one of the Ted Kennedys of the Congress. Remember, they're both liberals, but both had an uncanny ability to work with other members, when need be - on both sides of the aisle - to get things done.
ROVNER: Indeed, Waxman has never apologized for his liberalism. Here's how he described his philosophy in an interview yesterday.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: We need government. We appreciate it when there's an emergency. We need government when we want clean air and clean water, and food that's not going to kill us, and drugs that will save us and help us.
ROVNER: But what's made Waxman so effective over the years has been that willingness to work across the aisle. One of his frequent partners has been Utah conservative Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch. They first teamed up on major legislation in the early 1980s, on a bill that paved the way for the sale of generic copies of prescription drugs.
SEN. ORRIN HATCH: It really is on its way to saving trillions of dollars for consumers. It's already saved about a trillion and a half dollars.
ROVNER: Hatch, who worked with Waxman on the Ryan White AIDS law, the Children's Health Insurance Program and other bills, also opposed him on many issues. But he says he appreciated having Waxman as an adversary as much as an ally.
HATCH: Oh, he's a formidable opponent because Henry is always prepared. He's very, very bright. But Henry was not only bright; he was articulate. He understood the legislative process. He's one of the best liberal congresspeople that I've known in my whole 37 years in the United States Senate.
ROVNER: And while Waxman made it a point to work across the aisle, he also made it a point to bring along the liberals who will carry on when he's gone, said Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Brown began his legislative career in the House, under Waxman's tutelage.
SEN. SHERROD BROWN: He was a teacher. He was a mentor. He encouraged me. He patiently explained complicated things to me.
ROVNER: The list of Waxman's legislative accomplishments on the website of the House Energy and Commerce Committee - where he's been a leader since the 1970s - includes more than 25 major laws. And that doesn't count the dozens of budget amendments he used to nearly single-handedly expand the Medicaid program during the 1980s and early 1990s. But Waxman says that even at a relatively young 74, he feels Congress has reached a point where he can no longer get much done.
WAXMAN: It's very difficult when the party that's in control is dominated by a group of extremists from the Tea Party that think along the lines of compromise being a dirty word, and working with the other party - the Democrats - as complicity with the enemy.
ROVNER: Advocates off the Hill are already wondering what Congress will be like for their issues in a post-Waxman era. Ron Pollack heads the group Families USA, and has worked closed with Waxman since the early 1980s.
RON POLLACK: He's just a formidable foe for those people on the other side. And he's really a personal archive of policy and the history of health care. So it will be an enormous loss to see Henry leave the Congress.
ROVNER: As for Waxman himself, he hasn't decided what he'll do when he finishes his term. He says he loves both California and Washington, and would like to find something that will let him continue to split his time between the two.
WAXMAN: But not have to go back and forth every week.
ROVNER: Which he's now been doing for four decades. Julie Rovner, NPR News, Washington.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Each Friday, we get a glimpse into the lives of everyday people through StoryCorps. Jeff Lasater sat down for an interview with his friend Drew Cartwright in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Jeff wanted to talk about his teenage son, Jeremiah, who took his own life five years ago.
At 14 years old, Jeremiah towered over his classmates. And he struggled with a learning disability. Despite his size, Jeremiah was a gentle giant - and was an easy target for bullying.
DREW CARTWRIGHT: Can you tell me a little bit about Jeremiah?
JEFF LASATER: Jeremiah was a kid that was 6-6, 320 pounds. He had a tough time growing up, sometimes; I mean, being awkward the way he was, and he was kind of left out a lot of ways. Really enjoyed photography, football - and if he thought a friend was in trouble, he walked 20 miles to find that friend, you know? I'm very proud that he was my son.
CARTWRIGHT: He was a special needs young man...
LASATER: Mm-hmm.
CARTWRIGHT: ... and he was being tormented by...
LASATER: Severely. He was actually being bullied since middle school. And I constantly went to the school to tell them what was going on and really, nothing was done. Me and my wife, we talked about pulling him out, and Jeremiah didn't want to do that. So he went to high school and within a month in high school, he decided that was it.
Oct. 20th, I called him on the phone, asked him if he did his chores. He said, yeah, I did; said, I love you, Dad. And that's the last time I heard from him. Two sheriffs showed up on my doorstep, and pretty much informed me that Jeremiah killed himself with a gun in the bathroom.
CARTWRIGHT: He took his life during the lunch hour, if I recall.
LASATER: Correct. That day, his glasses were destroyed; he was de-pantsed; food thrown on him, called a bunch of names. Just enough that he couldn't take it anymore. You know, I went into that bathroom where he committed suicide and what really shocked me was, this is the last thing that my son saw - was a crapper. He must have been really distraught.
The grief never goes away. The guilt, you'll always have. I was Jeremiah's parent. I was supposed to be his protector, so I'm the one that's responsible for that action. You know, people say, well, time heals everything. Not when it comes to this.
GREENE: That was Jeff Lasater, speaking with his friend Drew Cartwright; remembering Jeff's son Jeremiah, who took his own life after being bullied in school. Since Jeremiah's death, Jeff has devoted himself to preventing the bullying of special needs kids. This conversation, like all StoryCorps recordings, is archived at the Library of Congress.
And you can hear more about Jeff and Jeremiah on the StoryCorps podcast. You can find it at NPR.org.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene, good morning. We have been hearing that the chemical crisis in West Virginia's water is pretty much over. State officials say they can no longer detect any of the industrial chemical that spilled, called MCHM, in most areas. So they say based on federal guidelines, the water is safe for people to drink and use.
But NPR's Daniel Zwerdling reports that other public health specialists say they don't trust those assurances.
DANIEL ZWERDLING, BYLINE: One of those specialists is the top doctor who runs the largest public health department in West Virginia. Rahul Gupta is director of the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department. He's in charge of protecting 250,000 people whose water was affected by the spill. And I asked him...
Do you feel confident that federal health officials know what levels of these chemicals are safe or not?
DR. RAHUL GUPTA: I think there's no way to know what the safe levels of the chemicals are at this point.
ZWERDLING: In fact, Gupta says his own family doesn't trust the water supply - no matter what federal and state officials say. His wife is a physician, like he is. They have two teenage sons, and Gupta says the water in their home still has that chemical smell of licorice.
GUPTA: They have decided not to drink the water at this time. I have personally tried to drink the water. The smell just keeps me - prevents me from drinking the water, unfortunately.
ZWERDLING: I've been talking with public health specialists in government, in universities, in public interest groups. And they say, here we are more than three weeks since the chemicals poured into the drinking water and still there are more troubling questions than answers about whether the spill might affect public health. Not to mention the fact that no one knows for sure how much chemicals really spilled, and exactly which chemicals spilled.
The company first said it was 5,000 gallons of MCHM. Then they said, no, more like 7500 gallons. Now they're saying, well, probably more like 10,000 gallons. Plus, it turns out another chemical leaked, too, called PPH.
RICHARD DENISON: It feels a bit like a Keystone Cops episode, where one crazy thing is followed by another.
ZWERDLING: Richard Denison is a toxicologist at the Environmental Defense Fund. He's served on advisory boards for the federal government and for the chemicals industry. And Denison says Consider this: Just one day after the spill, officials at the National Centers for Disease Control proclaimed that the water was safe. Well, they didn't exactly call the water safe.
Vikas Kapil is the CDC's chief medical officer in charge of environmental health. He said at one part per million of MCHM...
VIKAS KAPIL: We believe that at exposures below that level, we would not expect any adverse health affects.
ZWERDLING: So Denison and other health specialists asked the CDC: How'd you come up with that number, one part per million? The CDC took days to answer but they finally said: We based it on a rat study done back in 1990 at Eastman Kodak.
DENISON: I was really shocked.
ZWERDLING: Because Denison says that study does not suggest that one part per million is safe. And when Lynn Goldman heard the news, she was also dismayed.
LYNN GOLDMAN: That study wouldn't have been enough to come up with a definitive number that would say one part per million, that's a safe number.
ZWERDLING: Goldman is dean of Public Health at George Washington University. She used to run the toxic chemicals division at EPA. Goldman says Eastman's study was a good step toward trying to understand how MCHM affects people. But she says Eastman's study is seriously limited. The study looked only at how MCHM might affect adults; in this case, by testing it on grown rats.
The researchers didn't consider how the chemical might affect fetuses or newborns. And Goldman says history shows that lots of chemicals don't hurt adults but they wreak havoc on the young.
So today, if you were living in West Virginia, would you use the water?
GOLDMAN: I think if I could still smell or taste the substance in the water, I wouldn't use the water.
ZWERDLING: The CDC's website does say, quote, "Few studies on this specialized chemical exist," unquote. The CDC's Kapil puts it like this.
KAPIL: There are many circumstances in which we would, of course, would like to have more information about human toxicologic evaluations, additional animal studies, and we simply don't have that kind of data available.
ZWERDLING: The CDC website adds: If you have any concerns, please consult your doctor.
Daniel Zwerdling, NPR News.
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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
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And I'm David Greene. Good morning. President Obama meets with a group of high-powered corporate executives at the White House today. He plans to encourage the CEOs to offer a second chance to job applicants, even if they've been out of work for six months or even more.
Opening doors for the long-term unemployed is one idea the president talked about in his State of the Union address. He's been calling attention to some of the other ideas with a four-state road trip that wrapped up last night in Nashville.
Here's NPR's Scott Horsley.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: The president's road trip comes amidst encouraging signs that the economic state of the union is improving. A report from the Commerce Department yesterday showed the economy grew by 3.2 percent in the final quarter of last year.
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HORSLEY: But Obama knows many Americans still feel gloomy about their own economic well-being, so even as he shined a spotlight on successful businesses and workers this week, the president took pains to acknowledge those who aren't sharing the same opportunities.
At a Maryland Costco, for example, he cheered the retailer for paying wages that average more than $20 an hour, but also nodded to workers earning the minimum of just $7.25.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
HORSLEY: At a U.S. steel mill outside Pittsburgh, the president praised that company for its good union benefits.
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HORSLEY: It made for a somewhat mixed message throughout the trip. Behind every ray of sunshine was an economic cloud.
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HORSLEY: The president's prescription, which he outlined at every stop this week, is more and better-paying jobs. And he told employees at a Wisconsin engine factory yesterday part of the way to get there is making sure workers have the skills employers are looking for.
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HORSLEY: Instead, Obama says the government needs to do a better job of tailoring its training programs so graduates have the skills employers need.
The engine factory hired more than 60 new workers last year, some of whom came through a job-training program that included classroom time at a local technical college and experience on the factory floor.
Duane Nichols, who's a veteran millwright at the plant, says it's good to see the company investing in a workforce for the future.
DUANE NICHOLS: They've opened up a lot of apprenticeships in here. So, I mean, that's a great thing, and it's a great place to learn. And there's a lot of opportunity here.
HORSLEY: Wisconsin's unemployment rate is well below the national average. That drew engine plant worker Terry Sexton there from Kentucky last summer.
TERRY SEXTON: Good job up here. Nice people.
HORSLEY: Filling factory jobs might take more than new skills, though. It also takes a new attitude. Obama notes at many parents discourage their children from pursuing work in skilled trades because they think a college degree is the only path into the middle class. The president joked that a lot of tradespeople make more money than graduates with art history degrees.
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HORSLEY: The scaled-down nature of the president's agenda was evident last night at the final stop on the road trip: a Nashville high school. Obama was here to celebrate the school's educational gains, but he also met privately with the family of a 15-year-old student who was shot to death on the night of the State of the Union address.
Obama offered prayers for the victim's family, and urged students at the school to be there for one another. But gun safety - the issue on which the president invested so much political capital last year - was never mentioned.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Nashville.
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Taliban militants have been expanding their operations in Pakistan. They're better known for attacks in the rural mountains, but they're also active in the cities of that populous country.
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They even have a spreading footprint in Pakistan's economic capital, Karachi. It's one of the largest cities in the world, with a busy seaport and glass towers under construction near the beach, and crowded neighborhoods spreading for miles inland.
GREENE: But in that city, Taliban militants have been targeting law enforcement. Last year, more than 180 policemen were killed in the city. This year, the rate's even higher. NPR's Philip Reeves has the story of a cop who tried to fight back.
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PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: Karachi is a city with many freshly dug graves. The grave of Chaudhry Aslam Khan stands out among them. His grave lies beneath a blanket of yellow marigolds and crimson rose petals.
UNIDENTIFIED MOURNER: (Foreign language spoken)
REEVES: A youth rocks back and forth in a plastic chair, singing verses from the Koran. He's been here all day, mourning beneath a blazing sun. Superintendent Aslam was Karachi's top counterterrorism police officer. The fact that he had one of the world's most dangerous jobs didn't seem to worry him.
AHMED CHINOY: Basically, he was a very straightforward man, very courageous, not afraid of anything - going straight after the criminals, the terrorists, whether it's at the cost of his life or whether the cost of the lives of his men that were with him.
REEVES: Ahmed Chinoy heads a committee that liaises between Karachi's more than 18 million citizens and law enforcement. He knew Aslam well.
CHINOY: He was trying to show the terrorists that he's there to face them. And I think he was one of the biggest fear that the militancies had.
REEVES: Superintendent Aslam waged war on the Taliban as if it was personal. He often appeared on TV. He tended to be blunt.
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REEVES: Chaudhry Aslam will fight the terrorists to the last drop of his blood, he says. He's waving a pistol at the camera. With his grizzled beard and bearlike frame, Aslam cut an imposing figure. He was like a crime fighter from the movies, says Muhammad Badar Alam, editor of the Herald magazine.
MUHAMMAD BADAR ALAM: He cultivated that kind of an image of a reckless, brave, courageous kind of a man who cannot care less about all the formalities.
REEVES: Aslam's enemies made at least seven attempts to kill him. They demolished the front of his house with a bomb. They attacked his office. They shot at him, wounding him in the leg. Aslam's luck finally ran out a few weeks back. A Taliban suicide bomber blew up his car as his convoy was sweeping through town on a freeway.
Violent deaths are so common in Pakistan that they tend to receive scant attention. Aslam's funeral was covered live on national TV.
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REEVES: Thousands came to pay their respects in person, including the city's top brass. Aslam also had plenty of critics. Gunning down suspects and blaming it on a shootout, is common among South Asia's law enforcement agencies. Human rights activists say this illegal practice tends to fuel insurgencies. Officials usually privately argue that there's no option in societies where crime's rampant and the judiciary is frightened, corrupt and dysfunctional. Zohra Yusuf, chair of Pakistan's Human Rights Commission, says Aslam's courage and commitment are not in doubt.
ZOHRA YUSUF: But one must also recall that, you know, he had a reputation for being involved in many extrajudicial killings and, you know, the so-called police encounters. So he had this sort of very rough and tough personality.
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REEVES: Downtown Karachi is remarkably vibrant, considering all the bloodshed here. Somehow, this giant metropolis carries on, generating around two-thirds of Pakistan's national income. Yet on the city streets so far this year, one cop, on average, has been killed every day. Imagine that in an American city. Zohra Yusuf thinks the police are out of their depth.
YUSUF: They are scared. They know that in many areas of Karachi, they are outnumbered. They are outgunned. You know, they often go to places where they end up being held hostage.
REEVES: Criminal gangs and rival ethnic and political militias have slaughtering each other in Karachi for many years. The number of Taliban militants in the mix surged a few years back, when Pakistan's army rolled into the mountains of the northwest to try to dislodge the militants from their havens there. Large numbers of Pashtuns fled the fighting and moved to Karachi. With them came many militants. Pockets of Karachi are now entirely controlled by the Taliban, says Samina Ahmed of the International Crisis Group.
SAMINA AHMED: They're running their own courts. They're running rackets - everything from extortion to drug trafficking.
REEVES: The last few weeks has brought an onslaught of Taliban attacks in Pakistan. The government is offering to negotiate peace, but it's under considerable pressure to send in the army, this time into North Waziristan, the militants' biggest mountain stronghold. Samina Ahmed says winning this war isn't as simple as that.
AHMED: Violence in Karachi - Pakistan's economic hub and largest city - is an indicator on how important it is to emphasize that threat in the urban centers in the heartland, not just in the tribal borderlands. There's way too much attention focused on the problems of the borderland.
REEVES: The people of Karachi are waiting to hear who will replace the legendary Superintendent Aslam. Ahmed Chinoy, of the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee, says it won't be easy, but there are dedicated cops who will carry on the fight. And in the end, they'll win.
CHINOY: No one can fight the state. The state is always bigger and stronger.
REEVES: Others are not so sure. In the superintendent's huge home, his grieving relatives proudly show visitors photos of Aslam winning a national award for heroism. Imran is a brother-in-law.
IMRAN: They must be jumping in the air right now - Talibans - with happiness, because nobody else is going to do - like, take action against them. Now, they have open hand to do anything.
REEVES: Imran is deeply worried. He asks NPR to withhold his full name. He says Aslam's wife and four kids are living in constant danger. But there is one person in Karachi eager to face down the militants. When he's finished studying, Aslam's 16-year-old son, Iqrash, says he'll pick up where his father left off.
IQRASH: I'll take the risk. I'll go and police, and I'll do it - what he did. I like to fight and - like my father did. I want to save people's lives, and make peace in our country.
REEVES: Does Pakistan need another fearless, swashbuckling cop? Human rights activist Zohra Yusuf has her doubts.
YUSUF: I don't think we need heroes so much as we need leadership with vision, with planning, clear-cut policies; rather than heroes.
REEVES: Philip Reeves, NPR News, Islamabad.
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Good morning, I'm David Greene.
Lawmakers are betting local cuisine on the Super Bowl. If Denver wins, the losers from Washington State will send apples, wine and smoked salmon from the great Northwest. If Seattle wins, Colorado will send beers, steak and whiskey. Colorado Congressman Cory Gardner said he'll also throw in Rocky Mountain oysters. I had to look those up. They're not oysters. They are part of a calf, specifically, a male calf. Another name for them, Montana Tender Groins - deep fried bits of-what make a bull a bull.
It's MORNING EDITION.
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This is the first day of the Lunar New Year and in China, where they have the Chinese New Year, people are ringing in the Year of the Horse a little differently than they have in the past. Especially in the eastern part of the country, air pollution is so bad that many Chinese are toning down their annual fireworks for the sake of their lungs.
NPR's Frank Langfitt has the story from Shanghai.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Shen Bingling used to celebrate New Year's by wheeling a luggage cart full of fireworks on to a street and joining the neighbors in igniting a frenzy of pyrotechnics. Chunks of burned paper would rain down, and the air would fill with clouds that smelled of sulfur. It sounded a lot like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF FIREWORKS AND ROCKETS)
LANGFITT: Shen, who works as a doorman in a downtown apartment building, says he wouldn't dream of doing something like that today.
SHEN BINGLING: (Through translator) According to our Chinese people's tradition, to have good fortune you should set off fireworks. But for the sake of the air now, you shouldn't.
LANGFITT: In December, Shanghai was hit with record-breaking, toxic smog. And that appears to have dramatically changed minds here. According to a survey by the Shanghai Bureau of Statistics, more than 85 percent of citizens say they won't buy fireworks during this holiday.
For Julia Liu, a teacher in the city's financial district, the memories of last year's smog are fresh and awful.
JULIA LIU: (Through translator) Every morning, when I got out of bed and went outside, I'd see that the air was gray and yellow. It put me in a bad mood. My throat was pretty dry. There's probably no direct health effect now, but I worry that 10 or 20 years from now, it might have an impact.
LANGFITT: Liu is 34, and she grew up lighting fireworks in China's frigid northeast. This year, she cut her family's fireworks budget.
LIU: (Through translator) I think if everyone can reduce the amount of fireworks they set off, that can have really benefit our air quality. But I can't completely give up fireworks because I have a child. So if he doesn't set off fireworks, he'll feel very disappointed.
LANGFITT: Chinese light off fireworks this time of year to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck. Even with pollution rising to hazardous levels yesterday, some people felt compelled by custom or nostalgia.
Li Mei, a retired cigarette factory worker who wore a plaid surgical mask, pulled up to a sidewalk stand in a red scooter and bought a strand of firecrackers. She hadn't bought any since her dad died three years ago.
LI MEI: (Through translator) Every year, my heart was very sad. I really missed him. This year, my heart is much better. So I'm going to buy fireworks and light them off.
LANGFITT: Sales were slow at some fireworks stalls yesterday. But by early afternoon, Zhang Pengfei had sold more than $6,000 worth from the folding tables in front of his tea house. His best-seller: a string of 5,000 firecrackers for about $35.
ZHANG PENGFEI: (Through translator) This is a tradition that is passed down for 5,000 years. It's emphatically not something you can just change in one or two years. Actually, I sell fireworks myself but I don't often light them off because it really has an impact on the environment.
LANGFITT: The government acknowledges that solving China's air pollution problem will take a long time. Even though Zhang did well this season, he's not optimistic about sales in the years to come. I think in the future, this business is not going to go well, he tells me, because more and more people won't be willing to light fireworks.
Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Shanghai.
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Here's an update on a story we've been following in a violent part of Mexico. We've told you drug gangs dominate the Mexican state of Michoacan. We've also said local residents have formed their own armed vigilante groups to attack the drug cartel. These independent groups threaten to overshadow the authority of the government itself, and now the government has tried a new way to deal with them.
Instead of trying to beat the militias, the government wants to co-opt them. We're going to talk about this with NPR's Carrie Kahn who has visited Michoacan. She is in Mexico City right now.
And Carrie, what's the government doing?
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Well, they signed a pact with vigilante groups - that was earlier this week - where they said, this is what we're going to do, we're going to try and legalize you; that the vigilante groups now have to register their members with the federal forces. They also have to register their arms - that was a big thing. And that if they wanted to, they could join local municipal police forces. But all of this is very tentative. There's a lot of details that have not been hashed out yet, so it's early in the plan, they'll have to see how it works.
INSKEEP: Carrie, this really sounds like the kind thing that you hear about at different phases of the war in Afghanistan - or even a few years ago in Iraq, where you have local warlords - you'd probably call them - who have their own armed groups and the government tries to get them to work on the side of the government.
KAHN: Well, a lot of these towns in Michoacan have been under siege by the Knights Templar drug cartel, who not only run drugs, but also terrifying - extortion and kidnapping rings. People told me about the cartel demanding payments, setting prices for their crops, telling them who they had to sell to. And, you know, state and local police were doing nothing, and they've long been accused of collaborating with the cartels. So, the people are fed up. They took up arms to protect themselves.
You know, but I have to say that there's also accusations that some of the vigilante groups may not all be homegrown and are backed by rival cartels. The vigilante groups vehemently deny that. And they are very suspicious of the federal forces. One leader told me: Look, we're willing to give the feds the benefit of the doubt for now, but we're not going to give up our arms until we see results.
For the federal government's part, they could no longer let these armed groups run around illegally patrolling. This is their attempt to legalize the vigilantes who will be registered and supervised by federal authorities. And also, if any of the allegations are true that they have backing from rival cartels, then hopefully, they will be vetted by the federal forces.
INSKEEP: But this is a dangerous move, isn't it? Because the government is saying, we can't just let these militias run around and so their answer is to effectively let the militias run around, but say they have permission.
KAHN: Yeah. And actually this week, there's pictures in the newspaper of armed vigilante groups moving into two new towns in Michoacan. The leader that I just spoke to also told me that on Wednesday, they helped the federal police in a shootout in one of these small towns, bring six more alleged cartel members into custody. So they're still working in collaboration. The vigilantes are still armed, but it is a difficult predicament for the federal government.
The citizens really trust the vigilante groups way more than they trust the federal police or the army in these towns.
INSKEEP: Oh, so even though, as you reported in recent days, the federal police and the army were sent in, they just are not capable, or they just can't gather evidence and intelligence from the local populace.
KAHN: Michoacan is a very rural state, especially in this part where the vigilantes are working in. And so the federal government, and they've even told reporters this openly, that they do not have the intelligence to find all these cartel members. They need the local residents to help them.
INSKEEP: Is the government just wishing this problem away?
KAHN: I think that in a very cynical perspective that a lot of people have said that this is just the PRI government, the government that is in power right now and was in power for 71 years prior to their being re-elected. Now, this is just their same old politics, that they co-opt their opponents rather than actually solve problems.
I posed that to one of the leaders of the vigilante groups, and I said what do you think about this? And he said: Look, if they don't give us any results quickly, we will break the pact. That's all there is to it. So we'll have to see whether this is a sincere move on the part of the federal government and what will come of it.
INSKEEP: NPR's Carrie Kahn in Mexico City. Carrie, thanks.
KAHN: You're welcome.
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INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.
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NPR's business news starts with a new record for Toyota.
Talking about a lot of cars here. The Japanese automaker produced slightly more than 10 million cars in 2013. The record-breaking output was due largely to high demand from car dealers and showrooms in the United States and in China.
Now, those are cars produced. When it comes to cars sold, no automaker has hit the 10 million mark in a year, though Toyota came close last year, selling 9.9 million of their cars worldwide.
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OK, maybe you don't like football and you need a distraction on Sunday. There are food commercials - as we just heard about, or just the food. Maybe you just want to change the channel and watch Puppy Bowl. That's today's last word in business. It's Animal Planet's version of the Super Bowl and its marking its 10-year anniversary.
NPR's Lauren Migaki is directing our program this morning. She also reports and has this preview of this year's big game, which has the traditional kitten halftime show and penguin cheerleaders.
(SOUNDBITE OF WHISTLE AND DOGS BARKING)
LAUREN MIGAKI, BYLINE: There's only one human in the Puppy Bowl, ref Dan Schachner.
DAN SCHACHNER: Its puppies, 12 to 15 at a time, on a field - on a miniaturized field - playing football. And essentially that means every puppy kind of has to drag a chew toy into end zone and that scores a touchdown.
MIGAKI: The players can be penalized for paws interference or excessive cuteness, or a delay of game penalty for when nature calls on the field - which happens a lot.
Executive producer Melinda Toporoff says it all started as a one-off in the Animal Planet programming department.
MELINDA TOPOROFF: You know, what the heck are we going to put up against Super Bowl? And someone said, well, how about just a bunch of puppies on a field. And I don't think anyone at the time realized what a pile of gold they were stepping into.
MIGAKI: Nowadays, the Puppy Bowl requires several days of footage and a crew of 75, plus 66 puppies to film a game that play will over and over on Super Bowl Sunday.
TOPOROFF: And often I will have a player on my lap in the control room.
MIGAKI: The draw is in watching cute animals act like humans, says Bob Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University.
BOB THOMPSON: We've always loved to see pigs talk in movies and we've loved paintings of dogs playing poker, so I suppose dogs playing football was one of the inevitable results of an advanced civilization.
MIGAKI: More than 12 million viewers tuned in over the course of the 12 hour broadcast last year.
THOMPSON: To put it in perspective, when "Mad Men" was young and getting all of those Emmy's and on the cover of magazines and so forth, "Mad Men" was lucky to get two million.
MIGAKI: This year, other networks are hoping to cash in. The Hallmark Channel is hosting "The Kitten Bowl" while Nat Geo Wild has "The Fish Bowl." It's exactly what it sounds like.
Again, ref Dan Schachner.
SCHACHNER: Gives new meaning to the term copycat.
MIGAKI: But the Puppy Bowl has some extra star power this Sunday - The Obama dogs, Sunny and Bo, will kick off festivities with a little help from their human first lady.
Lauren Migaki, NPR News.
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GREENE: And that is the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
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And I'm Steve Inskeep.
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Now, let's turn to a thought experiment. Imagine you're riding one of those glass elevators that takes you to the top of a skyscraper. You go higher and higher. The view gets better. The cars on the ground, the people down there look puny, like ants. Researchers say if you imagine this, it can make you feel unaccountably better about yourself. It briefly raises your self-esteem. But researchers also say this feeling can be bad for you. NPR social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam is here to explain why. Hi, Shankar.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK, so what's going on in that thought experiment?
VEDANTAM: Well, I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, Steve, but apparently feeling great can have a down side, and the down side turns out to be performance - the amount of effort you're willing to expend when you're presented with a challenge.
So a group of researchers ran this interesting experiment. Max Ostinelli, at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; and his colleagues David Luna and Torsten Ringberg; they asked people to imagine elevating, in some way - elevating on an elevator or taking off in a plane, going up in a balloon. And when people imagined soaring into the sky, they experienced this small boost in self-esteem. They felt good.
But then, the researchers gave the volunteers a series of challenges. They asked them to solve math problems or puzzles or questions from the SAT or GMAT. And they found that the people who had had their self-esteem boosted did worse on these problems. I spoke to Max Ostinelli, and asked him what was going on. Here's what he said.
MAX OSTINELLI: When we boost self-esteem in this way, people are motivated to maintain their self-esteem. So they say, well, I'll withdraw from the task.
INSKEEP: Withdraw from the task - meaning that they don't even try anymore to succeed?
VEDANTAM: That's exactly right. They had less perseverance when it came to difficult challenges. And what this work suggests is that this kind of self-esteem is very fragile. When you get a boost like this, you subconsciously start to get defensive. You withdraw from a challenge because you're afraid that if you take on an actual challenge, this fragile bubble of self-esteem can pop.
INSKEEP: Did they also ask people to imagine going down in that elevator?
VEDANTAM: They did, Steve. And what they found was exactly the opposite. People now worked harder. In fact, the performance gap between the group that had had their self-esteem artificially diminished and artificially boosted, the performance gap was a whopping 20 to 30 percent. Here's Ostinelli again.
OSTINELLI: Once self-esteem is threatened, then people are motivated to recover it. It looks like they're working harder to prove themselves.
VEDANTAM: So what Ostinelli is finding, Steve, is that when people feel like their self-esteem has been damaged or threatened in this kind of way, they have this motivation to try and say, let me try and get back to where I was. And they end up working harder, as a result, to try and get back to where they were before.
And there's this very interesting, real-world application of the results. Ostinelli asked his volunteers to try and compare a bunch of cellphone plans. The plans all varied in terms of price and quality and convenience, and so forth. And again, what he found was that the volunteers who had had their self-esteem artificially boosted, they ended up being worse consumers whereas the volunteers who had had their self-esteem artificially suppressed, they put in much more effort; they ended up finding the best deals.
INSKEEP: Obviously, this is of interest if you're a parent, and you're thinking about the self-esteem of your kids - and the performance of your kids, by the way. It's interesting if you're an employer, and you're thinking about your employees. So what are the implications here? If I want people to do better, I should walk around telling them I don't really like their performance very much?
VEDANTAM: (Laughter) You know, we've had these self-esteem wars going back several decades, Steve. You know, 50 or 60 years ago, people thought you should actually be mildly critical of those around you, to get the best out of them. And perhaps the last 20 years we've gone to the other extreme, where we've over-praised people, to some extent.
Now, there is a kind of self-esteem that is actually much more resilient, and that's the kind of self-esteem that's obtained by actually accomplishing something really difficult. And I think what we really want to do is to focus on that kind of self-esteem. How do you get people to feel good about themselves, justifiably?
INSKEEP: Challenge people, and then be honest about what they do when they're challenged.
VEDANTAM: Exactly. And match praise and criticism to meet the facts, and not sort of over-praise or be overly critical.
INSKEEP: Shankar, this interview has been really - uh, OK.
VEDANTAM: (Laughter) Thanks, Steve. I'll try and do better next time.
INSKEEP: That's NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam. As always, you can follow him on Twitter @HiddenBrain. You can follow this program @MorningEdition and @NPRInskeep.
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Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded Lakemaid Beer. The Wisconsin brewery wants to do what Amazon promoted on "60 Minutes" - delivery by drone. Lakemaid had a more specific plan: send beer to the shacks of ice fishermen. They showed the delivery in a video but the FAA banned their testing, saying it breaks four or five regulations.
Lakemaid replies its deliveries are not to a crowded neighborhood but to a frozen lake. What could go wrong? It's MORNING EDITION.
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Scientists may have filled in a gap in one the fundamental theories of physics. We've always been told that magnets have two poles, north and south. But theory suggests there should be something called a magnetic monopole, a magnet that has either a north pole or a south pole but not both of them. So far no one has found this elusive magnetic monopole.
As part of his project, Joe's Big Idea, NPR's Joe Palca brings us the story of scientists at Amherst College in Massachusetts. They have created a synthetic magnetic monopole. Not the real thing, but close.
JOE PALCA, BYLINE: The search for the true magnetic monopole has been remarkably unsuccessful. David Hall is a physicist at Amherst College. He says certainly the straightforward searches haven't worked. For example, let's say you have a magnet in the shape of a needle.
DAVID HALL: It has a north pole and a south pole. And if it's a compass needle, the north pole points to the north pole of the planet, and the south pole points towards the south pole of the planet. Hence they get their names.
PALCA: So logic might suggest that if you chop the needle in half, there'd be just one pole in each piece. But no.
HALL: Once again you have a north pole and a south pole. These things appear to come in pairs all the time.
PALCA: Hall says you can keep chopping the remainder in smaller and smaller pieces all the way down to a single atom.
HALL: There's still a north pole and a south pole associated with this atom.
PALCA: In a single atom.
HALL: In a single atom.
PALCA: Now, there's a reason this is puzzling and that's because of something called the electromagnetic theory. That theory shows how electricity and magnetism are inextricably linked. Electricity has positive charge and negative charge just like magnetism has a north pole and south pole. But if you look at single atoms, they're made up of two distinct entities - protons that hold the positive charge and electrons that hold the negative charge.
So why, when you get down to the atomic level, why can't you find separate entities for magnetism?
HALL: Where are the north poles, where are the individual isolated north and south poles? You would think just by comparison to the electric charges, say, of the electron and the proton, that you ought to be able to do that.
PALCA: The theory suggests magnetic monopoles might be there; they even ought to be there. So physicists have kept looking.
HALL: And that may tell us more about humans than anything else, but it would be really nice if we could fill in that part of the theory with north and south individual isolated magnetic monopoles.
PALCA: Hall says he didn't have a brilliant idea about how to find a naturally-occurring magnetic monopole, but he read a theoretical paper by colleagues in Finland that suggested you could create a synthetic magnet monopole in the lab, so he thought, let's try that. What they did is extremely technical in nature.
Too technical for radio, you might say, but here goes: It involves cooling a collection of rubidium atoms down to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, and then manipulating the resulting Bose-Einstein condensate in a way that allows the creation of a synthetic magnetic field into which the researchers introduce their synthetic magnetic monopole. Clear?
Well, if you really need more than that, I suggest you look up the paper in the current issue of the journal Nature. The point is, according to David Hall, they got their synthetic magnetic monopole to exhibit the main features that theory predicts for the real one - an experimental tour de force.
HALL: The insights that one might get from our experiment might tell us how that thing might behave, but it won't necessarily tell us where we're going to find it. It tells us to keep looking though.
PALCA: And if human nature is anything to go by, I'm guessing physicists will do just that. Joe Palca, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene. We have an intensely personal look now at the Syrian city of Homs. It's in the news. Negotiators are trying to arrange delivery of humanitarian aid.
INSKEEP: Residents have suffered years of house to house combat. Entire neighborhoods are wrecked on this battlefield of Syria's civil war.
GREENE: That ruined city looks different in the memory of Orwa Nyrabia.
ORWA NYRABIA: Homs, my hometown, is like, you know, everybody asks where does the rainbow start. Where do the jokes?
(LAUGHTER)
NYRABIA: You know, where is the spring of jokes? And the spring of jokes is Homs. It's just that.
GREENE: When he grew up there it was a vibrant city, swept by the winds of the Mediterranean.
INSKEEP: And in its streets, Orwa Nyrabia began producing a documentary film called "Return to Homs."
NYRABIA: You know, when we started making the film, it was all very peaceful and we didn't - none of us had in our imagination the idea that this might turn into a war.
GREENE: That was 2011, when his cameras captured Homs amid the optimism of the Arab Spring.
NYRABIA: All kinds of demonstrations were all made of songs, dancing. Everybody was just revolting in the most pleasant way. And it was so fun.
INSKEEP: Pleasant. Fun. Orwa Nyrabia talks of protestors who were accused of carrying weapons. In response, they mockingly marched around pointing okra or cucumbers like guns. Only later did they realize cucumbers were not enough.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)
INSKEEP: The camera in this film comes to focus on two young protestors. One is a soccer player named Basset. The other is an activist named Osama. Both wanted peaceful change.
NYRABIA: They believed in that. Basset used to defend and sing for pacifism, but then after the death of two of his brothers and many of his family and the destruction of his family's home, after many painful experiences, he ended up choosing to carry arms.
INSKEEP: The movie follows the rebels through narrow streets, crowded rooms and claustrophobic tunnels. And this distant city in the news becomes overwhelmingly present onscreen. You see Basset leading other protestors in singing.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
NYRABIA: He addresses the soldiers of the Syrian army, telling them that they should not be killing their own people and that it's not their job to be following orders blindly and that they should have hearts.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
NYRABIA: And that unfortunately didn't work. But the song became quite important and everybody in other cities started to sing it in demonstrations and so on.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
NYRABIA: Then later on, it became a little more like songs about courage and fighting.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
NYRABIA: Combat kind of songs like what he was living.
INSKEEP: Basset's appearance changes during the film. The way that he physically looks different, it's almost as if he's aging before our eyes, even though not really that much time has passed.
NYRABIA: No. In the beginning of the film he's 19 years old. In the end of the film he is less than 22. So he is very young. He saw so much, too much, I feel. Many Syrians have really lived, I don't know, 10 years in the past two years. It's bewildering. But there's also the question of nutrition, what kind of food is he finding. And so you can see that he starts off with a very fit body.
I mean he's obviously an athlete, he's very strong. Then gradually he's getting much thinner. But he has the heart and then the spirit. You will see in the film that he's always very sad. Something happens, he's on the verge of a serious depression. Next morning he wakes up and there's a new energy. He's singing and laughing gain. And this has been happening for a long time. Now he is still under siege with many others.
INSKEEP: There's an amazing scene that maybe illustrates what it's like to be in this besieged area and there are rebels in two different blown up buildings, separated by some street or open area, and one man is shouting to the guy in the other building, Do you have some tobacco? And he shouts back: Maybe hashish.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "RETURN TO HOMS")
INSKEEP: But it appears to me that they can't cross to each other, right? You'd be shot if you went out on the street.
NYRABIA: This is a wide street where the guys are stuck on the other side and want to cross but they cannot because it's really very well observed by regime observers with night vision, with day vision, with all kinds of vision. So they could not. And that's why they dig a tunnel under the street to get back. So they joke about hashish and they joke about tobacco because they don't have anything, basically.
INSKEEP: I know there were several people who were involved in putting together this documentary. You were involved at the beginning, right?
NYRABIA: I'm always involved as the producer of the film, but I was involved in the first half of the shooting as the cinematographer. I did the camerawork. And then when it started to be really almost impossible to get to Basset and Ossama and the guys, a wonderful activist who works in the film who also appears in the film, Katan(ph), became our main cinematographer. He was never - he never studied film. He's never - he's not professional, but I believe he did a job that is amazing, outstanding, because he was there with the guys, with Basset. So the camera doesn't have any distance anymore. It's just a part of the event.
INSKEEP: There's a shot that I'm sure I'll remember for a long, long time about an hour and five minutes in. And it's rebels trying to cross one of these open areas where the Syrian government can fire at them. And they run across one after another after another and finally one of them is hit. And it looks as if he's been hit by a linebacker on a football field. He tumbles over. Was this the cameraman you trained?
NYRABIA: The guy hit with a bullet was Katan's cousin. So you can see in the film that his camera for the first time is stumbling in his hands by falling from his hands. And he's shouting that's my cousin. That's my cousin.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "RETURN TO HOMS")
NYRABIA: It's an understatement to say that such kind of cinematography work is brave. It's much more than that. And it's led by an amazing amount of faith in the importance of film, in the importance of passing this image or this vision to the rest of the world.
INSKEEP: What do you think about when you read the news of the peace negotiations going on now?
NYRABIA: I think I'm very hopeful. I'm just waiting to see what will happen. We're also scared of minor, small giveaways will be given. Just like, for example, getting a few food parcels into the siege. Or saying we can get only the sick women out. These kind of partial solutions will lead into them staying in the same situation but will allow the world, the international community and the media to celebrate some progress.
But to them it's not progress. It's just only a partial giveaway.
INSKEEP: As we are talking there is debate over United Nations' effort to get aid into Homs. And you are warning that even if that finally succeeds that we might draw the wrong message from that.
NYRABIA: Definitely it's a necessity to get aid into Homs, but on the other hand, this is not a solution. This is a kind of bluff at the expense of these people. So this is what's feared of in Homs.
INSKEEP: You have a scene in which Basset, one of the main characters, is pointing from a destroyed building - from high in a destroyed building across the street and saying that's the house where I grew up in and it's just a completely wrecked street. This is a city where you grew up and after you left, there you are viewing one more passive film, one more passive video of part of the city destroyed and then another part of the city destroyed. How did that affect you going through all that video?
NYRABIA: It's very difficult. I was there also. I witnessed - I personally witnessed a lot of the destruction. It's always painful but, at the same time, young men like Basset and women like others there in Homs still working, still with a beautiful spirit, they give you the answer to that question. You feel inspired and you feel ashamed if you fall into depression.
You feel that you cannot look at these guys, look how beautiful they are, how energetic and just how high their spirit is, you just believe that we can do better tomorrow morning and we can keep on pushing.
INSKEEP: Orwa Nyrabia, thank you very much.
NYRABIA: It's a great pleasure. Thank you.
INSKEEP: He's the producer of the documentary "Return to Homs." It just won the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Listeners to this program may recall NPR's portrait of Homs from a few months ago. You can hear that story again coming up on NPR's WEEKEND EDITION Sunday. This is NPR News.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
When we talk about a triple threat, we're often talking about a versatile athlete. Think about a basketball player who can score, defend and rebound. In show biz, B.J. Novak may be that triple threat. He can do standup, act and write - successfully, in all cases. He got his start doing standup comedy. That led to a job on the hit comedy series "The Office," where he had a regular part and was one of the writers.
And now, he's put his writing talent to work on one more thing. Literally - that's the name of his book of stories, "One More Thing," an appropriate title for someone so multifaceted. And NPR's Lynn Neary says the book is funny. She can also tell Novak used his acting instincts to create the book.
LYNN NEARY, BYLINE: B.J. Novak's face is probably familiar to anyone who's been to the movies in recent years. He's had a series of small parts in big films like Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds." But Novak is probably best known as the weasely, young temp at the dysfunctional paper company where "The Office" is set. He's the kind of guy who will do anything to get out of going to lunch with his boss.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE OFFICE")
NEARY: Although Novak divided his time between writing and acting on "The Office" he says he always fell in most easily with the writers, forming a fast friendship with fellow writer-performer Mindy Kaling. And during the show's long run, he would jot down his thoughts in notebooks. Later, when he looked them over, Novak realized he had the beginning of a book.
: You know, when I went through all these notebooks that I had kept over eight years of "The Office," I had so many ideas. And this became the form for them, sort of a scattered - purposefully scattered book of different tones and feelings and ideas.
NEARY: It's hard to characterize the stories in "One More Thing." Some are fully realized short stories like "Kelloggs," about a young boy's journey to redeem a prize-winning coupon he found in a cereal box, only to discover his true identity in the process. And there are moments of eloquence here and there. But Novak's bread and butter is humor, which shines through in stories like this one, about a man who invents the calendar.
: (Reading) Jan. 2nd. I'm still so excited about this calendar thing. It just makes so much sense. One thousand days a year divided into 25 months, 40 days a month. Why didn't anyone think of this before? Jan. 3rd. Getting so many compliments on the calendar. One guy came up to me today and said he's going to organize his whole life around it. Literally, someone said that.
NEARY: The book also includes brief vignettes that seem like scraps of ideas drawn whole cloth from Novak's notebook. Some of these stories are a paragraph or two; some, just a couple of sentences.
: Well, I wanted to be true to all these different ideas I had had, and I was excited to break the form. I think sometimes people, these days, on Twitter or their phones on text messages, they're used to reading content that is purposefully articulated in an extremely short burst, and you would never want to expand a perfect text message.
So I felt well, if you have an idea that is short - like this piece "Kindness Among Cakes," which is two lines long - I thought oh, that is an interesting idea; why is carrot cake - why does it have such good icing, but it's such a bad cake? (Reading) "Kindness Among Cakes." Child: Why does carrot cake have the best icing? Mother: Because it needs the best icing.
NEARY: If some of Novak's stories have a hint of standup comedy in them, it may be because Novak would rent a theater from time to time, and try them out in front of an audience. He says he wanted to make sure the book would work as entertainment.
: I would read the stories out loud with a pen in my hand, and I would try to entertain people. And some of them fell flat, and they're not in the book. And some of them got really full attention and laughter except for one part, which I would go home and revise. But it was very fun and visceral for me to really make sure this was an entertaining and not self-indulgent book, to test it by standing in front of a hundred people, alone on a stage.
NEARY: Performing is obviously a big part of Novak's life and personality. Most recently, he appeared in "Saving Mr. Banks" as one member of the team that came up with the music and lyrics for the movie "Mary Poppins."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM "SAVING MR. BANKS")
NEARY: Novak says he loves to act, but if he had to choose between writing or acting, it would be no contest.
: You know, anytime someone calls and says they want to put you in a movie, it's very exciting. I think no matter who you are - I've got to think that it's just exciting. There's just some - it's like an almost mythological thing, to be in movies. And - no. So if someone called and said we want you to be the star of this, I'm listening. (Laughter) I am.
NEARY: If you were to look at the range of things you can do and you're looking ahead, I mean, do you aspire more towards getting the lead role, or writing the great screenplay, or doing the great standup act?
: Writing. Writing the great thing. I realized a while ago that I never once had a fantasy of a role I wanted to play. I never once woke up in the middle of the night thinking: I should play a cowboy who lost his wife and needs to - you know, it's never - that fantasy has never come to me.
What always comes to me is: I should write a movie about, or I should write a TV show about or - that's what wakes me up with a smile on my face in the middle of the night, is always something that I want to write and then test, and then see if other people love it the way I do in that moment.
And I want to see it. I don't know if that's selfish or if that's the exact level of performer that's in my DNA, or if everyone feels that. But I always want to see that. It makes me write as hard as I can.
NEARY: Novak probably won't have to choose. As long as there's a theater or a club nearby, he can always try out new standup material. And as long as the acting offers keep coming in, he can keep performing. With a notebook back in his trailer, he's sure to have lots of material for the next collection of stories.
Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)