AILSA CHANG, HOST:
School's been out for a while now. And it's time for kids and teachers to think about heading back to class. Over the break, maybe some traveled, ate too much, gave away some gifts. But for a few, winter break meant more time for band practice.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
NO SMALL CHILDREN: (Singing) I can't wait for this to end. Feel the sun heat up my skin.
CHANG: That's the music of No Small Children, three elementary-school teachers in Southern California who are in a punk-rock band. We're joined now by all three members of that group, Nicola Berlinsky on drums.
NICOLA BERLINSKY: Hello.
CHANG: We've got Lisa Pimentel, who's on guitar and vocals...
LISA PIMENTEL: Hi.
CHANG: ...And Joanie Pimentel, her sister, who's a bassist and vocalist.
JOANIE PIMENTEL: Hello.
CHANG: They join us from our studios in Culver City. Welcome, ladies.
J PIMENTEL: Thank you.
L PIMENTEL: Thank you.
BERLINSKY: Thank you.
CHANG: So wait. What grades do you guys all teach?
BERLINSKY: This is Nicola. I teach fourth grade.
L PIMENTEL: I'm Lisa. I teach elementary school music, instrumental and general music.
J PIMENTEL: And this is Joanie. And I also teach instrumental music.
CHANG: And all three of you are at the same school.
J PIMENTEL: Yeah. We are.
(LAUGHTER)
L PIMENTEL: It's easy to have band meetings.
(LAUGHTER)
CHANG: How do three elementary-school teachers come up with the idea of starting a rock band? I heard it all began one day during recess.
L PIMENTEL: Yeah, it's true. Nicola and I were at recess. And everyone's running around. And we were feeling like, you know, we should do something really creative.
CHANG: Wait, wait, wait. I'm still trying to picture this. So you guys are, like, standing around with whistles around your necks, supervising, like, a game of tetherball?
(LAUGHTER)
L PIMENTEL: Pretty much, yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
L PIMENTEL: We didn't have the whistles. The PE teachers have the whistles.
CHANG: (Laughter) OK.
L PIMENTEL: We were standing there, dodging balls as we walked through the playground. And we said, you know what? We should start a band called No Small Children. You know, we were trying to be, like, teacher aggro, teacher anti.
CHANG: (Laughter).
L PIMENTEL: We should - punk-rock band about, you know, no small children. So that's really where it started. But then, as time went on, the name has evolved. And we see it as, like, a place for grownups.
BERLINSKY: The parents do come to our shows. And so the children end up wearing our band T-shirts to school, which is quite something.
CHANG: Wow. You have a whole fan base among your students.
BERLINSKY: It's pretty fun.
J PIMENTEL: We like to start them young.
CHANG: Because a lot of your students know about your double lives, I'm really interested in how your worlds collide. And I'm going to first play a song from your most recent album, "Hold Tight, I'm Flying." It's a song called "Jerk Song."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JERK SONG")
NO SMALL CHILDREN: (Singing) Full of importance, full of entitled. So independent, in a little denial and such a jerk, such a jerk, such a jerk, such a jerk. You'll get your way 'cause you're a jerk - jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk.
L PIMENTEL: No comment. No comment.
(LAUGHTER)
CHANG: So being elementary-school teachers, I'm thinking you might not want your students hearing you call someone a jerk. Is that awkward?
J PIMENTEL: This is Joanie, by the way. We certainly don't encourage name calling.
CHANG: (Laughter).
J PIMENTEL: But, again, this is a space for adults. It's not really for kids. If parents let their children listen to the music, great.
L PIMENTEL: I mean, I think a lot of the music, including "Jerk" - we have a lot of songs that are sort of this anti sort of feeling that - everybody loves to feel that way once in a while. And they're meant to be tongue-in-cheek. And - you know, 'cause everybody wants to say once a while, you're such a jerk, you know?
(LAUGHTER)
L PIMENTEL: And I think the kids mostly get the joke of the name and the songs. And I think they get it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JERK SONG")
NO SMALL CHILDREN: (Singing) Full of importance, full of entitled. So independent, in a little denial...
CHANG: Are you guys, like, the cool teachers at school? Is that even in dispute?
(LAUGHTER)
L PIMENTEL: I'm probably the coolest of the band.
J PIMENTEL: I disagree. I don't want to toot my own horn. But toot, toot. I'm just kidding (laughter). I would say that the kids are really big champions of us. And it's - they do think it's pretty cool. We have heard stories from parents where the kids will be talking about us outside of school to somebody else, either another student or somebody else in their lives. And it is very nice to have their support and love.
CHANG: How do you balance all of this, a full-time teaching job with a rock band?
L PIMENTEL: We attack every single part of this band like a teacher would. You know, there's, like, a lesson plan for - rehearsals for, you know...
(LAUGHTER)
L PIMENTEL: ...The five-year plan - whatever.
CHANG: It's so structured.
L PIMENTEL: Yeah. And, you know - but, you know, being organized about it really, you know, kept us straight. So in the beginning, we said - we had a mantra that said, we're going to just say yes to everything. And although we were really tired 'cause we were doing weekday events and whatnot - but we were so energized. And the energy was making us excited about everything. And it would spill over into the classroom.
And now we don't say yes to everything. We - at some point, we had to start saying no because we had all these wonderful opportunities. So now we mostly play on the weekends. We tour on our breaks. And it's been just wonderful. We're just so methodical about every part of it. I think it helps us keep it all in check and in balance.
CHANG: Has music become this very necessary outlet for you that sort of counterbalances the teacher life?
L PIMENTEL: For me, it's always been necessary.
J PIMENTEL: I'd say that it's much cheaper than therapy. But it's actually gotten to the point - I realized this some time ago - this is Joanie by the way - that it's really not possible for me to feel fulfilled or happy without it taking a really big role in my life. It's not just a hobby. This is a lifestyle and a career.
CHANG: There's a song about gratitude towards music. It's called "Music Thank You." Let's listen to it for a bit.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MUSIC THANK YOU")
NO SMALL CHILDREN: (Singing) Thank you my best friend when I want to pack it in. Thank God you extend your hand when I done belly land. Again, music thank you. Amen, you're my bookends when I couldn't keep it in.
CHANG: Do you guys identify more as teachers in the end or more as rockers, more as musicians?
BERLINSKY: This is Nicola. You know, we always say they're parallel. There's no separation between them. When I wake up, I'm thinking about this band all the time. And then something happens that clicks over on the drive to school. And I'm thinking through every part of the day. And then I'll see Joanie and Lisa at work. And recess becomes a band meeting. But then we start talking about our students and sharing notes about our students and really living the successes of each other's students. And then we're back at band practice again.
(LAUGHTER)
BERLINSKY: And then we're grading papers. And then we're texting each other about band notes and a show that's coming up. So I have to say they are so intertwined.
J PIMENTEL: We spend a lot of time together.
(LAUGHTER)
CHANG: Nicola Berlinsky, Lisa Pimentel, and Joanie Pimentel, teachers by day, rock stars by night in the band No Small Children. Thank you guys so much for joining us.
BERLINSKY: Thank you.
J PIMENTEL: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MUSIC THANK YOU")
NO SMALL CHILDREN: (Singing) Music thank you.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
2016 was definitely a long year. A lot of people were ready for it to be over, and now - thank goodness - it is. We've got a clean slate, so let's start things off right and play so puzzle.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CHANG: Of course, I'm joined by the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle master, Will Shortz How. Are you doing, Will?
WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Excellent, Ailsa. Happy New Year.
CHANG: Happy New Year to you, too. So remind us of last week's challenge.
SHORTZ: Yeah. The challenge came from listener Peter Collins of Ann Arbor, Mich. I said think of three words used in golf, say them out loud one after the other, and they'll sound like a group that was in the news in 2016. What group is it? Well, the answer is Green Party, which is made up of green, par and tee. A number of people did Tea Party. Didn't allow that because that used tea twice. You had to have different golf terms.
CHANG: Well, we got more than 800 puzzle entries with the right answer, and this week's winner is Mollie Carey of Haddam, Conn. Congratulations, Mollie, and Happy New Year to you.
MOLLIE CAREY: Thank you. Happy New Year to you guys, as well.
CHANG: So how did you figure out the answer?
CAREY: Well, my dad and I were sitting there listening, and my dad and I started working on it. And he got party and tee, and I started throwing together words that went with that. And all of a sudden, Green Party came out.
CHANG: Nice - a little family teamwork there. So your dad should be with us today, too, huh?
CAREY: Yes, he is.
CHANG: (Laughter).
CAREY: He's right next to me.
CHANG: Oh, good. All right. So you have a little teammate next to you. All right, Mollie. Are you ready to play the puzzle?
CAREY: I am.
CHANG: OK. Well, let's do this.
SHORTZ: All right, Mollie and Ailsa. Every year around this time, I do a year-end news quiz, usually on names that sprang into the news during the previous 12 months. This year, I didn't find many good ones I wanted to use. And since 2016 broke the mold in so many ways, I decided to break the mold with my quiz.
CHANG: Oh.
SHORTZ: I'm going to read you some notable quotes from the previous 12 months. You tell me who said them. And we'll start easy. Number one - I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.
CAREY: Donald Trump.
CHANG: There you go.
SHORTZ: Donald Trump is right. All right. Here's your next one. Are you prepared to die? If that's OK, then you're a candidate for going. Here it is again. Are you prepared to die? If that's OK, then you're a candidate for going.
CAREY: I'm not sure.
CHANG: Famous entrepreneur.
SHORTZ: Entrepreneur - yes. Your hint is Mars. He has a plan to send humans to Mars.
CAREY: Not share.
SHORTZ: Go ahead, Ailsa.
CHANG: Elon Musk.
SHORTZ: Elon Musk is it. Good job. All right. Here's your next one. I'm not the next Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps. I'm the first blank. And the name that goes in the blank is the person who said this. I'm not the next Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps. I'm the first blank.
CAREY: Was it the gymnast?
SHORTZ: Yes.
CHANG: Yes.
CAREY: Oh, what is her name?
SHORTZ: (Laughter).
CAREY: Oh, Simone.
SHORTZ: Uh-huh. That's it. Last name starts with a B.
CAREY: Simone Bile?
SHORTZ: Biles is it - Simone Biles.
CAREY: Simone Biles.
CHANG: Woo-hoo (ph).
SHORTZ: Good. All right. People are always like, why did you get a monkey? If you could get a monkey, well, you would get a bleeping monkey, too. Monkeys are awesome.
CHANG: Oh, my God.
SHORTZ: And I'll give you a hint. It's a singer - a popular singer.
CHANG: Yeah. Give us another hint, like a song, a genre of music.
SHORTZ: Oh, it's pop music. It's a male singer. Very contemporary. The initials are J.B.
CAREY: Justin Bieber?
CHANG: (Laughter).
SHORTZ: Justin Bieber said that.
CHANG: That's your generation, Mollie. You should be on that.
(LAUGHTER)
CHANG: Well, I don't listen to him, but those were the only initials.
(LAUGHTER)
SHORTZ: There you go. All right. Now name the movie this next one is from. We have hope. Rebellions are built on hope.
CAREY: "Rogue One?"
SHORTZ: "Rogue One" is it. All right. For the last quote, I'm going to tell you who said it. You tell me what he was talking about. And the quote is - we thought the game would be popular, but it obviously struck a nerve. And that was John Hankey the CEO of the company Niantic. What was he talking about?
CAREY: Was it a game from this year?
SHORTZ: Yes.
CHANG: Hey, maybe ask your dad.
SHORTZ: (Laughter).
CAREY: Any ideas? He's stumped.
SHORTZ: It's a game you would play outdoors.
CHANG: You see people walking around with their smartphones.
SHORTZ: Yes, yes.
CAREY: Oh, Pokemon Go.
SHORTZ: Pokemon Go is the answer.
CHANG: Woo-hoo (ph). All right.
CAREY: (Laughter).
CHANG: Great job, Mollie. For playing our puzzle today, you will get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin, as well as puzzle books and games. And you can read all about it at npr.org/puzzle. And what's your member station? How do you listen to us?
CAREY: WNPR out of Hartford.
CHANG: Nice. Mollie Carey of Haddam, Conn., thank you so much for playing the puzzle.
CAREY: Thank you, guys, as well. Happy New Year.
CHANG: Happy New Year to you, too. All right, Will. What is the challenge for next week?
SHORTZ: Yes. Take the four-letter men's names Todd, Omar, Dave and Drew. And if you write them one under the other, they'll form a word square spelling Todd, Omar, Dave and Drew reading down, as well. Can you construct a word square consisting of five five-letter men's names? Any such square using relatively familiar men's names will count. I have an answer that uses four relatively common names and one unfamiliar one. See if you can do better.
CHANG: When you have the answer, go to our website npr.org/puzzle and click on Submit Your Answer. Just one entry per person, please. And our deadline for entries is Thursday, January 5 at 3 p.m. Eastern, so include a phone number where we can reach you at about that time. And if you are 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, Will Shortz. Thank you so much, Will. This month has been so fun with you. Happy New Year.
SHORTZ: Happy New Year, Ailsa. Great to play with you, too.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
When I think of my favorite foods, I can tick off my favorite Chinese dishes, Mexican dishes, Italian dishes. But if you asked me what Native American dish I enjoy most, I'd be stumped. There's a growing number of Native chefs who are trying to change that. They're bringing back indigenous foods from centuries ago, adapting them for the modern palate so people can learn not just about their cuisines, but their cultures.
Hey, Freddie.
FREDDIE BITSOIE: How are you?
CHANG: Ailsa.
You can meet one of those chefs in Washington, D.C., in the kitchen of the National Museum of the American Indian. Freddie Bitsoie found his way to the Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe in August. He just finished up a stint as the chef at an Indian reservation casino in New Mexico.
We met up with Bitsoie on a recent morning in the museum's bustling basement kitchen. This is his first gig as a chef whose work is entirely devoted to preparing and spreading awareness about indigenous American dishes.
BITSOIE: Can you get me a pot?
CHANG: Bitsoie is also this Native American cafe's first Native American chef. He's a member of the Navajo tribe and grew up in Arizona and New Mexico.
BITSOIE: My father spoke fluent Navajo. My mother spoke fluent Navajo.
CHANG: Did you speak fluent Navajo?
BITSOIE: I understand fluent Navajo.
CHANG: You're like me with Mandarin.
(LAUGHTER)
BITSOIE: But back in the '80s when I grew up, being Native wasn't cool. It just wasn't the thing to do. I was lucky enough to live off of the reservation and then on the reservation and then move back off the reservation. I had that ability to see from the inside and see from the outside.
CHANG: That tug of war between native and non-native, insider and outsider - it may explain why Bitsoie loves bridging old and new in his cooking.
All right, so I hear you're going to cook something for us.
BITSOIE: Well, you know, that's part of the job, too.
CHANG: One of his signature dishes is a simple soup that's evolved across regions and across centuries. And then, Bitsoie decided to personalize it.
BITSOIE: Indigenous people, from Nova Scotia down on to Maine, modern-day Massachusetts, had a soup that was only made with three ingredients. It was sunchoke, clam and seawater.
CHANG: Seawater.
BITSOIE: Seawater, yeah.
CHANG: Wow.
BITSOIE: Can you, like, wonder...
CHANG: I can't picture myself gulping seawater down voluntarily.
BITSOIE: But at the same time...
CHANG: (Laughter).
BITSOIE: ...in Italian...
CHANG: Yeah.
BITSOIE: ...Cooking people say when you cook your pasta make sure it's salty like the sea, you know.
CHANG: Are we going to use seawater today in the...
BITSOIE: No.
CHANG: ...The preparation for the soup?
BITSOIE: I don't - you know, when I look out at that ocean I'm like I'm not - I don't even swim in the ocean (laughter).
CHANG: Bitsoie understands that to make some traditional dishes palatable to more people, you have to tweak them.
BITSOIE: I wanted to still have a connection to the tribes who used to eat this dish. But at the same time, this was, you know, made about five, 600 years ago. So my palate is completely different than my grandmother's palate which is even further from my grandmother's grandmother's palate.
CHANG: So to appeal to today's palate, he took the three original ingredients - clam, sunchokes and salt water and added some modern-day soup basics - leeks, onion, garlic, thyme and bay leaf. It's a balancing act, accommodating mainstream tastes while being confident enough to hold fast to Native traditions. In the culinary world, Bitsoie says, that can be difficult.
BITSOIE: I worked for a French chef where when I would cook something native, all he would say is, you did that wrong.
CHANG: You did that wrong.
BITSOIE: You did that wrong. So the biggest example is potatoes. When people think about potatoes, in the French style of cooking, potatoes are - you know, have a bite. We call it al dente in the food world. But with native foods, we saute them, and then we allow them to cook, but we cover them. So the potatoes are not only being cooked from the bottom, they're being steamed at the same time.
So each culture has their own techniques. And with native cuisine, from the beginning of time, we were always told that you're cooking that wrong. You're cooking the wrong. You're cooking that wrong. And see, I didn't know that because I was just growing up with the way my mom cooks. Look, when I got into the food business, I was looking at my mom and I said, mom, you're cooking that wrong. And I became colonized as a chef.
CHANG: But working here at the museum is a whole new chapter for Bitsoie. He can call the shots and figure out how he wants to integrate his own culture with his formal training as a chef.
BITSOIE: But the soup's ready.
CHANG: Oh, yeah. Oh, that looks good.
BITSOIE: Spoon for you.
CHANG: Thank you. All right. I'm digging in.
BITSOIE: All right.
CHANG: Oh - good.
BITSOIE: You were expecting cream and butter and that flavor of clam chowder I'm assuming.
CHANG: I was expecting saltier 'cause I had the whole seawater concept. Like, I was obsessing about that. Like, I wonder where that - but no.
BITSOIE: It's very innocent, you know, and...
CHANG: It's very delicate. I really like it.
BITSOIE: ...And that's what native food is. That's - native food is really delicate and innocent, you know.
CHANG: Bitsoie says what he's trying to do here is create new tastes and give people a new appreciation of one of America's overlooked and perhaps least understood cuisines.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
We're now going to talk about something pretty sensitive. So if you have small children around, you might want to listen to this later. We're going to hear about what happens to sexual relationships after servicemembers return from combat. It takes a lot for a couple to open up about this part of their relationship, so we were so grateful to meet Chuck and Liz Rotenberry and sit down with them at their home in Baltimore.
It's so nice and warm in here (laughter).
LIZ ROTENBERRY: 'Cause you know what? Our heat didn't work at all last night.
CHANG: Oh really?
L. ROTENBERRY: And I woke up this morning...
CHANG: Liz's husband, Chuck, is a former Marine gunnery sergeant who trained military working dogs. He returned from Afghanistan in 2011 and left active duty shortly after.
Much has been said about the physical and psychological injuries of war such as traumatic brain injury or PTSD. But what we talk about less is how these conditions affect sexual intimacy. Now, for Liz and Chuck, sex had never been a problem. They've been married for 14 years, and they're still very much in love. Liz fell for Chuck in high school because he was that guy who could always make her laugh.
CHUCK ROTENBERRY: I'm extremely handsome as well, so that's...
(LAUGHTER)
C. ROTENBERRY: I think that probably had something to do with it.
L. ROTENBERRY: That, too (laughter).
CHANG: But when Chuck returned from Afghanistan, their relationship would soon face its greatest challenge. Baby number four was just two weeks away. So for sure it was a chaotic time, but Liz noticed pretty quickly something was terribly wrong with her husband.
L. ROTENBERRY: I couldn't find him. I wouldn't be able to find him in the house. He wouldn't be outside, and I'd find him in a separate bedroom just crying. And he couldn't understand why. He would sleep for days. He would have a hoodie on and be just tucked away in the bed, and he wouldn't be able to get out of bed. He would have migraines that were so debilitating that it kept him in the bed, and I kept saying to my mom something's wrong.
CHANG: When Chuck was in Afghanistan, an IED exploded three feet behind him. Shrapnel lodged into his neck and back. It would take three years for someone at the VA to lay out the long-term consequences of that blast.
L. ROTENBERRY: He has severe post-traumatic stress with a traumatic brain injury, and you are now his caregiver. And I didn't - it didn't hit me until then. It's definitely - those three years were the toughest times for us.
CHANG: So this is delicate, but I want to talk about sex. Was sex even something you guys were thinking about with all this other stuff going on?
C. ROTENBERRY: You know, I have a beautiful wife, and I'm a very fortunate person. So, you know, I definitely married up (laughter). And being a dude - yeah, dude - that's what I would normally think about all the time, but, no, I didn't think about it. I wanted to be with Liz. I wanted to be near her. And at times, I didn't want to be anywhere near anybody. When the desire was there, it was unique. It was rare as opposed to the way it was before, and a lot of times with, you know, the mountains of medication I was on, you know, in my head, it - all systems go. But that message didn't go anywhere else besides that. So it was difficult, you know, to not only be in the mood or, you know, have the desire, but, you know, to perform as well.
CHANG: How much medication were you on at this point?
C. ROTENBERRY: At that point within that three years, probably about 15 or 16 different ones.
CHANG: A day?
C. ROTENBERRY: Oh, yeah. A couple of times a day. It was quite a bit.
CHANG: What changed in your sex life from what you could observe, Liz, when Chuck came back? What was different?
L. ROTENBERRY: Well, I knew that emotionally he wasn't doing well. So I didn't want to have expectations for him because I didn't know what was happening, and I don't want to add any further stress. But even just being intimate with me in other ways was tough. You know, the thought of him reaching out to give me a hug wasn't existent. It was almost like I had to give him the hug. I now had to step in and show him love, and that's a tough understanding because usually the man, you know - the man is the one to initiate any kind of extra affection, especially from my husband. I mean, he's very affectionate for a man. He's always telling me how much he loves me, and he always wants to touch me in some way, you know, if it's just passing me and, you know give - bumping into me on purpose or nudging me a little or something. But, you know, we didn't have that.
CHANG: How long would the two of you go without having sex?
C. ROTENBERRY: It was probably months.
L. ROTENBERRY: Months, yeah.
C. ROTENBERRY: Yeah, sometimes it was months. It started off as being, you know, pretty embarrassing, pretty emasculating. You know, it's like, oh, really? This, too, doesn't work, you know? You know, you blame it on, oh, it's just your medication or you're tired or whatever initially. And you don't realize it's, you know, stress or, you know, my brain just doesn't work like it used to or, you know, do the same things. As much as I tried to say it, it was hard for Liz to believe. You know, it's not you, it's me kind of thing but it really - it's not even me. You know, it's not you. Certainly, it's me, but I'm not even me.
CHANG: Now, Liz and Chuck had never really talked about sex in any serious way before, so they kept avoiding the conversation until this year. That's when Chuck finally asked his primary care provider for help.
C. ROTENBERRY: She saw that I, you know - it was something that I had mentioned multiple times and said, well, you know, we can try, you know, Viagra. So I guess the way the VA works, it's four doses a month.
CHANG: Just four?
C. ROTENBERRY: Yeah, right? I was like dang that's like once a week.
L. ROTENBERRY: So (laughter)...
C. ROTENBERRY: It used to be like that wouldn't get us through today. You know what I mean?
CHANG: (Laughter).
C. ROTENBERRY: So...
CHANG: But it took Chuck three or four visits to work up the nerve to ask for just those four doses. He says it can be especially hard for a Marine to admit he's having problems with sex because it contradicts a self image so many Marines have.
C. ROTENBERRY: You know, as a Marine, you can do anything. You believe you can do anything. You've been trained to do nearly anything. You're physically fit. You're mentally sound. You know, those are just the basics, you know, about being a Marine that it's - everything is easy. You know, and we...
L. ROTENBERRY: We've had good friends - very close other Marine friends - ask him, hey, is everything working OK for you guys? And he'll be like, oh, yeah. It's great. You know, like two times a day, every day, you know. And then they just kind of joke about it, but they're - I think I - now I'm looking back on it, I feel like there was, you know, they were trying to reach out to each other to say is it just me or, you know, are you having the same problems, too?
C. ROTENBERRY: I've started to notice that, you know, talking with other people that when they bring it up, it's to see if like Liz said am I the only one? You got this going on, too? So I do take it serious and offer as much as I can.
CHANG: What would you tell a Marine who kind of - who's going through the same thing that you were going through with your wife? What is your advice?
C. ROTENBERRY: You got to talk about it. You've got to be able to honestly evaluate yourself. Marines always jokingly, you know, hand out straws. You got to suck it up. You got to do what you need to do to get it done. Right? This is a different mission. You know, the mission accomplishment is number one in the Marine Corps so don't let your pride ruin, you know, what you've worked so hard for.
CHANG: Thank you guys both so much.
L. ROTENBERRY: Yeah, no, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.
CHANG: That was Chuck and Liz Rotenberry in their home in Baltimore.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
In Istanbul, people woke up to news that the new year began with another deadly attack on civilians. Officials say a gunman entered a nightclub and killed at least 39 people, including some 16 foreign nationals. Sixty-nine people were injured, some critically. A manhunt is now underway for the shooter, and NPR's Peter Kenyon is in Istanbul to give us an update. Hello, Peter.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: What can you tell us about the attack?
KENYON: Well, it happened in the early hours of this morning - New Year's Day. The nightclub was called Reina. It's an expensive, exclusive kind of place on the Bosporus Strait. Witnesses say there were several hundred people inside when the shooting began. Turkey's interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, says the preliminary assessment is that there was just one gunman. Here's a bit of what he said through an interpreter.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SULEYMAN SOYLU: (Through interpreter) The evaluation of the security forces - the information we received from the police forces - showed that there's only attacker and not multiple attackers. Walked in with a gun and then inside changed the clothes and tried to walk out with different clothes. The attacker - the terrorist killer - we're still trying to catch the perpetrator.
KENYON: Now, there's a lot we still don't know. There's an unconfirmed account, for instance, that the attacker wore a Santa Claus costume. The interior minister did not confirm that. He just said there was a change of clothes involved before he left. We are getting some information about the victims now. The Turkish cabinet minister tells the state-run news agency that the foreign fatalities include people from Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Lebanon and Libya. And the Israeli foreign ministry says a young Arab-Israeli woman is among the dead.
CHANG: What kind of precautions did security forces take for New Year's Eve there?
KENYON: Well, security was quite heavy. Turkish media say thousands of police were - tens of thousands of police were deployed just in Istanbul last night. In fact, there was a policeman at this nightclub at the entrance. He's believed to have been the first casualty of the attacker. Just down the road is the soccer stadium where there was a terrible bombing last month that killed dozens of people. Most of them were police. Turkish media are saying this policeman killed in front of the Reina nightclub survived that attack only to perish in this one.
CHANG: Are the authorities blaming any particular group for the attack?
KENYON: No. There's been no claim of responsibility. There was a presidential statement that mentioned developments in the region, which could be a reference to Syria or Iraq. There was a call recently on an Islamist website for lone wolf attacks against soft targets, just like clubs or theaters. The Turkish interior minister in his comments did name a few groups that might have been behind it, including Islamic State, including Kurdish militants - groups like the PKK TAK, as they're known. But again at this point, we really don't know, A, the motive of the attack or, B, if the killer is linked to any group.
CHANG: And what has been the reaction that you've heard to this attack so far?
KENYON: Well, international condemnations and condolences are pouring in. President Obama was among the early ones sending condolences. Several European leaders followed suit. Turks - they're mainly in shock, as you can imagine. I mean, 2016 was a terrible year here for terrorism. The stadium bombing I mentioned...
CHANG: Yeah.
KENYON: There was also the Russian ambassador gunned down in Ankara last month.
CHANG: That's right.
KENYON: Last summer, 45 people killed at Istanbul's main airport. In January, a suicide bombing in the city's historic district and a series of attacks against the military and police here. And the government survived a military coup, which brought on a state of emergency that I would say now looks very likely to be extended later this month.
CHANG: NPR's Peter Kenyon in Istanbul - thank you so much, Peter.
KENYON: You're welcome, Ailsa.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
It was a good year for Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. As 2016 drew to a close, the candidate who heaped praise on Russia's leader won the U.S. presidential election, and Putin proved to be a major player in the Middle East. From Moscow, NPR's Lucian Kim joins me now to talk about the man in the Kremlin. Good morning, Lucian.
LUCIAN KIM, BYLINE: Good morning.
CHANG: Well, first, did President Putin make any headlines in his New Year's remarks this year? He spoke to the nation at midnight, right?
KIM: Yes, he did, and he didn't really make any big headlines. This a customary speech. Traditionally, Russian leaders deliver their greetings, then the Kremlin chimes ring, and the new year begins. This year, Putin told Russians to believe in themselves and their country. He told them to respect and care for their families and their work colleagues. And while it's true that Russians smile less than Americans at least in public...
CHANG: (Laughter).
KIM: ...Putin was stone-faced and looked quite severe, even as he was saying these very warm words.
CHANG: Well, of course, for us, the big story last year was our presidential election. The Obama administration says Russia hacked Democratic Party emails to undermine Hillary Clinton's campaign. Do ordinary Russians see Trump's victory as a win for Russia and for Putin?
KIM: Well, it's hard to know what Russians really think. The national TV channels are all controlled by the government. And they've been giving very positive coverage for Trump, a little bit like "Fox News," in fact. The respected Levada Center, a polling agency, did a poll back in November right after the elections. They found that 60 percent of Russians think Trump is better for Russia, a mere 5 percent would have preferred Clinton, and 36 percent admitted that they didn't know.
CHANG: This past week, you could say Putin played Mr. Magnanimous when President Obama slapped sanctions on Russia because of the hacking. The U.S. expelled dozens of Russians, but Putin did not reciprocate. Why not?
KIM: Because that was expected of him, and Putin is known to do things unexpectedly to throw other people off balance. So, you know, his decision not to reciprocate made Obama look vindictive. And it also gave Trump an opening to better relations when he takes office.
CHANG: Then there's the Middle East. Russian forces bombed Syrian rebels and civilians relentlessly to support the Syrian president. Has this whole venture in Syria won Putin support at home? Or are Russians more concerned about, say, their pocketbooks at a time when oil revenues are low?
KIM: Well, a recent poll by that same Levada agency found that 81 percent of Russians knew little or nothing about Syria.
CHANG: Wow.
KIM: That's happening in another world for most Russians. They have other concerns - as you mentioned, their pocketbooks. But for Putin, this is extremely important. It's a way to muscle his way back onto the world stage. Very recently, Putin forged a - an alliance of convenience, I think you could call it, with Iran and Turkey and has initiated a cease-fire and maybe even peace talks later in this new year. And so the result of those talks is actually less important. What's important is that when Trump comes into power, Russia will not only have a seat at the table, but it will actually be sitting at the head of the table.
CHANG: NPR's Moscow bureau chief, Lucian Kim - Happy New Year, Lucian.
KIM: Happy New Year.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
This week, the Obama administration announced sanctions against Russia after saying it was confident the Russian government interfered in last year's presidential election. The president expanded an executive order from 2015 adding new powers to retaliate against those who disrupt U.S. elections.
Michael Sulmeyer directs the Cyber Security Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and he joins us from our studios in Washington to talk about this. Thanks for coming in.
MICHAEL SULMEYER: It's a pleasure to be here.
CHANG: Will anything the Obama administration announced last week be an effective deterrent against future cyber attacks?
SULMEYER: The main question about deterrence is deterring who from doing what? And so in this case, it's pretty clear the who, but the from doing what is a little muddled. We've seen the hacking into our election, but we're not going to have election for a little while. We've seen them harassing our diplomats in Moscow, so I think the hope here is by expelling 35 undercover intelligence agents, we deter them from more harassing. And we also see them conducting a broader range of aggressive cyberspace activities against the United States. And here the hope is that publishing this 13-page technical report with a lot of the details and specifics of the Russian operation - by exposing it, we say you're blown. Knock it off in the future.
CHANG: Do you think the U.S. went far enough in this case against Russia?
SULMEYER: It's hard to say. I think the administration's been pretty clear that they were going to undertake some public actions and that they were going to undertake some actions that wouldn't necessarily be so public.
CHANG: Right.
SULMEYER: For public actions, yeah, this is pretty dramatic. I think the question will be does the United States respond to Russian aggression in cyberspace with similar aggression in cyberspace as well and that may be done quietly.
CHANG: Are there legal parameters for what the U.S. government can do or cannot do when it comes to responding to cyber warfare?
SULMEYER: There are not formal rules in as much as we are not in a declared state of war. The question of does the law of war apply in cyberspace? Yes, and a vast majority of the international community agrees. But I think the activity that the United States is likely to see going forward are activities that fall short of warfare. But it's more subtle. It's about holding our critical infrastructure at risk so that on a rainy day in the future, Russia might be able to threaten us or blackmail a future president with that kind of access. How do you respond to that - tampering, hacking, gaining unauthorized access to computers but not breaking anything, maybe not even changing any data? It's hard to call that warfare, but it's certainly not acceptable.
CHANG: What is cyber warfare then?
SULMEYER: Well, it's a concept that sells very well for books - got to have a catchy title - but I tend to think of it as a situation where two or more states are already in war and that war extends not just on land and not just in the air, but also on the internet. But here, we're not - that's not the situation that we're at right now. And it's a very, very difficult problem for policymakers who try to balance between avoiding gross and dramatic escalation. But at the same time, you have to be serious. You have to demonstrate resolve. That's a tough balance to strike.
CHANG: Michael Sulmeyer leads the Cyber Security Project at Harvard University. Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
SULMEYER: It was a real pleasure. Happy New Year and s novym godom to our Russian speakers.
CHANG: (Laughter) Happy New Year to you, too.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Here's something you may not know. What do you think is the number one killer of women in the U.S.? Cancer? No. It's heart disease. In fact, every year, more women die from heart attacks than men do. But it seems when it comes to talking about the risk, the focus has always been on men, including the focus of most clinical research.
Dr. Marianne Legato is trying to fix that. She's a cardiologist who started the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine. And she joins us now from New York. Welcome.
MARIANNE LEGATO: How are you?
CHANG: Very good. Thanks for being with us. So why the disparity? Why does there seem to be more of a concern when it comes to men at risk of heart disease than women?
LEGATO: Well, in the first place, women get a pass, if you will, from coronary disease in general until after their menopause. And the disease attacks men with the first symptoms apparent, in general, even at the age of 35. So the early onset and the severity of heart disease in men is really 20 years sooner. And so that may have tipped the scales.
The other interesting response is the fact that women concentrated on breast health and pelvic health, often only going to the gynecologist. The other misconception is that heart, coronary disease attacks only older post-menopausal women. And that's not correct. It is now apparent that young women do have heart attacks. It can happen in their 30s and 40s. And in fact, when it does strike this much younger population, the disease is quickly fatal, as opposed to the older women.
CHANG: So how do women typically show signs of a heart attack?
LEGATO: Fifteen percent of women do not have the classic chest pain that men experience. They have shortness of breath, perhaps back pain. They think they may have indigestion. They sweat profusely and are nauseated.
CHANG: So tell me a little bit about what was happening to female patients with heart conditions who later came to see you. What was happening to them before they got to you?
LEGATO: Well, historically, when we began our work, women were told that they were hysterical, emotionally disturbed, they were having panic attacks.
And I will never forget going to a meeting of women in the Midwest. And a woman stood up at the microphone and said that she was the wife of a physician who had been sent to see a cardiologist because of recurrent attacks of chest pain and shortness of breath. And she was told, literally, her husband should take her away and give her what she was most in need of, and her chest pain would go away. She had a heart attack one month after that pronouncement by a presumably well-educated cardiologist.
CHANG: Wow. How does the lack of clinical research about women and heart disease play a role in all of this?
LEGATO: In general, women were excluded from clinical investigation because they were perceived as more unstable than men from an endocrine point of view and that their estrogen and progesterone fluctuated during the month. The second concern was that their reproductive ability would be harmed by any clinical intervention. And the third is that a fetus conceived during the course of a clinical trial would be born malformed. For all of those reasons, we began to study women in meaningful numbers only - I would say - relatively recently in biomedical investigation.
CHANG: So what advice do you have for women? I mean, in my own life, I don't think I have any women friends who regularly see a cardiologist. Do you think that...
LEGATO: I do have...
CHANG: ...There are steps we should take?
LEGATO: Yes. Every woman should not restrict her medical care only to the gynecologist, but should seek out a primary care doctor or internist who will evaluate her as a whole person and regularly check her health. The second thing to remember is that women deny their illnesses and soldier on. And the average wait before they come to an emergency room or call their physician when they are having symptoms they think might be a heart attack is four hours longer than men wait. So I think the index of suspicion should be high that women do suffer from heart disease, that it is their chief cause of death and not always at an older age.
CHANG: Dr. Marianne Legato is director of the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine. Thank you for joining us.
LEGATO: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Just a day after Carrie Fisher died unexpectedly, her mother, Debbie Reynolds, passed away. There have been many remembrances of both Hollywood stars. But today, we're going to focus on a different side of Carrie Fisher, not on the actress, comedian or producer, which she's best remembered as. Instead, we'll talk about Carrie Fisher the novelist. WEEKEND EDITION books editor Barrie Hardymon is with us. Hey, Barrie.
BARRIE HARDYMON, BYLINE: Hi.
CHANG: So the movie "Postcards From The Edge," that was actually based on her first novel?
HARDYMON: Yes, yes, it's a roman a clef. It's - has scenes from her life. And it's this real skewering of Hollywood elites. There's this wonderful moment where she's so clearly aware, at that time, of gender roles in Hollywood, where one character describes herself as too old to be in the Brat Pack and too young for her own exercise tape, which is this very '80s way of saying it, right?
CHANG: (Laughter).
HARDYMON: But anyway, it's very very funny. It's the skewering of Hollywood and rehab culture. But it doesn't focus as much on the relationship with her mother. The main character Suzanne Vale also does have this famous mother. But it isn't until the time that Carrie Fisher, who wrote the screenplay for the movie, adapts it - and beautifully so - into the movie that she really focuses on the central relationship of the film, which is between Suzanne Vale and her mother.
And what's wonderful about that central relationship is that the end of the movie ends up being the sort of truce with her mother as opposed to being defined by a relationship with a man. And in the novel, it's not that way. So there's this kind of growing from the novel to the screenplay of the movie. But you still have this wonderful, brittle, funny, mordent main character who also appears in her other novels.
CHANG: How are those other novels different - the ones that she wrote after that?
HARDYMON: So the one that I adore is actually her second novel. It's called "Surrender The Pink." And it's about this woman named Dinah Kaufman who is a soap opera writer. And she tends to blur the borders between her life and the soap opera that she's also a writer on. She has this marriage to an award-winning playwright whose name is Rudy Gendler, who may have some - you know, we know that Carrie Fisher was married to Paul Simon. You know, she'd - this idea of being in a relationship with a famous man. But what's great is, unlike the ending of the novel "Postcards On The Edge," Dinah after sort of making this sad and hilarious, I mean, truly mistake-ridden attempt to conform to Rudy's expectations of her, she gets him out of her life. She actually literally, in the soap opera, writes Rudy out of her life. It's this...
CHANG: (Laughter).
HARDYMON: ...Real - so for me, you know, I picked up this book when I was 19 years old at a - at an airport bookstore. I saw this woman who was so much like me, but funnier and more, you know, maybe more interesting and had this...
CHANG: (Laughter).
HARDYMON: ...Wonderful life with these incredible friends around her. And I saw that it was OK to make these terrible mistakes, that you could still be highly successful and highly competent. And that at the end of the day, you didn't need the man. You only needed the relationships with your friends.
CHANG: Were all of Carrie Fisher's novels somewhat autobiographical?
HARDYMON: Yeah, I mean, there is - they all have some element of things that are from her life. And what's great about that and which meant so much to me and still does is that these highly intelligent, very funny women who are taking care of themselves, you know, that's what she grew up with because Debbie Reynolds, you know, herself was this amazing woman who worked so hard, kept this career going her whole life.
CHANG: Yeah.
HARDYMON: I mean, you can YouTube her up to the, like, the last 10 years, like...
CHANG: Yeah, that's right.
HARDYMON: ...Just killing it onstage, had horrible relationships, these awful marriages, lost all her money, got it back again and raised this amazing daughter. So, you know, I think it's kind of wonderful. You have to imagine - right? - that if there's, like, an afterlife that Fisher and Reynolds are still, you know, upstaging each other there. And Reynolds is, like, performing cabaret and Fisher is writing the zinger that comes right after.
CHANG: I love that thought. Barrie Hardymon is WEEKEND EDITION's books editor. Thank you, Barrie.
HARDYMON: Thank you, Ailsa.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE")
MERYL STREEP: (As Suzanne Vale, singing) Pull back them dark and dusty drapes. Let in some light. Tell the bell boy come and...
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
After 37 years in the host chair, Public Radio treasure Diane Rehm has stepped away from the microphone at WAMU here in Washington, D.C. The station has now hired journalist Joshua Johnson to launch a new program 1A beginning tomorrow. Johnson has been hailed as a breakout public media star. No pressure there. He's the former host of Truth Be Told, a show about race, culture and identity in America from KQED in San Francisco where he was also the Morning Edition host for several years. Joshua Johnson joins us from his new East Coast home. Welcome to the neighborhood, Joshua.
JOSHUA JOHNSON, BYLINE: Thank you, Ailsa. It's good to be here.
CHANG: So this is a big change - right? - moving across the country from San Francisco to Washington. I mean, I did a similar thing myself with a stop along the way in New York City. It's quite a contrast.
JOHNSON: It's a huge contrast. San Francisco is very, very hard to give up. I have certainly left my heart there. That's for sure, but it's slowly working its way East. And, honestly, this opportunity is worth moving for, so it's all going to balance out.
CHANG: Your show's name 1A - that's a reference to the First Amendment, right?
JOHNSON: Yes. It's a reference to the First Amendment. This group of five freedoms that are really kind of the rules of the road for democracy. You know, the idea that we lay out the federal government's barriers in terms of affecting free speech, freedom of the press, free expression of religion, the right to assemble and the right to petition the government for change is basically the day to day ground rules for how democracy works in the United States.
And one of the things that we're very concerned with - both Diane and I are very concerned about is that our ability to connect, that our basic day to day interaction to connect on the things that matter is breaking down, that we have more ways to communicate than ever but less of an ability to connect and engage meaningfully and respectfully. So that's a lot of what's underpinning the show.
CHANG: I was curious at what point in your life did you know you wanted to become a radio host?
JOHNSON: Well, my mom got me into public radio. She - I've always wanted to create and host a show since I was like 5 years old. It's been...
CHANG: Wow.
JOHNSON: So this is literally the achievement of my one lifelong dream.
CHANG: That's amazing.
JOHNSON: But when I think about it, really, I wouldn't be in public radio necessarily without her. My first public radio station was WRTI, the station that's licensed to Temple University in Philadelphia. I was in a summer program at the university's medical school for minority students who were interested in careers and research, and mom was working in the program. So we both went. We lived on campus, and we went up to the medical school and went back and forth. And one day she was listening to WRTI which played news and jazz. And NPR News and jazz stations tend to have a larger black listenership, so she listened for the jazz and then around 4 p.m., she heard this guy named (imitating Robert Siegel) Robert Siegel on All Things Considered and...
CHANG: (Laughter) That's a great impersonation.
JOHNSON: Don't tell him I did it. And he...
CHANG: I won't.
JOHNSON: And it just kind of fired her imagination, so she brought Robert Siegel to me. And then she brought Terry Gross to me, and she brought Bob Edwards to me, and, like, it just began to open my mind to this idea of journalism being something other than what I saw on TV.
CHANG: Joshua Johnson, his new public radio program 1A launches tomorrow. Joshua, we look forward to hearing you and Happy New Year.
JOHNSON: Happy New Year to you, too, Ailsa. Thank you.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
One of the most tragic moments in civil rights history unfolds through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl in Linda Williams Jackson's new young adult novel. Jackson weaves together two stories, a historical one about the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till and a fictional one about Rose Lee Carter, a sharecropper's granddaughter struggling to make sense of life under Jim Crow laws in the 1950s. Linda Williams Jackson joins me now to talk about her new book "Midnight Without A Moon." Thank you so much for being with us.
LINDA WILLIAMS JACKSON: Thank you for inviting me.
CHANG: So why did you choose to center this story on the murder of Emmett Till? Why did you want to revisit that particular piece of history?
JACKSON: Initially, I wanted to write a story about my own family's life in the Mississippi Delta. And some years ago, maybe about 10 or 11 years ago, my mother mentioned Emmett Till. And she was in her 70s then. She had never mentioned Emmett Till before. And she actually didn't even say his name. I think there might've been something on the news about him, but for the first time, it just really struck me that, wow, this happened right here. And my mom was just a young woman then, and I wanted to explore for myself what it might have felt like for them to have this happen so close to home.
CHANG: So where do the two stories of Emmett Till and Rose Lee Carter intersect in this book?
JACKSON: Papa, who is the grandfather of Rose Lee Carter in the book, is a sharecropper in a fictional town called Stillwater, Miss., which is located in Leflore County which is also the location of Money, Miss., where Mose Wright, the great uncle of Emmett Till was a tenant farmer. So to combine the two stories, I had Papa being an old friend of Mose Wright.
CHANG: So how does Rose react to the murder of a boy who's about her same age in a nearby community? How does she process that?
JACKSON: She thinks about her own brother so - and the killing of Emmett Till - her emotions run high because this could have been my brother or this could have been my best friend, Hallelujah Jenkins, especially seeing that Emmett Till is accused of whistling at a white woman and her best friend, Hallelujah Jenkins, is kind of girl crazy. So, you know, Rose is thinking this could have been Hallelujah.
CHANG: So you had mentioned that your mom had not ever talked about Emmett Till until way later in life. Did your family back then ever want to play a role in the Civil Rights movement?
JACKSON: I doubt it. And that was another reason why I wanted to write the book. I wanted to explore why they weren't concerned. I grew up knowing nothing about the NAACP or I've heard of Martin Luther King, didn't know a whole lot about him. And, frankly, I was kind of embarrassed as an adult when I realized how little I knew about the Civil Rights movement. That's why I have Rose curious to learn about the NAACP and the upcoming Civil Rights movement because I didn't have that opportunity.
CHANG: And what's interesting is you have her surrounded by characters who don't want to rock the boat. For example, Ma Pearl - she doesn't want Rose to learn about the NAACP because she didn't want her relatives to be demanding for progress and change. What was Ma Pearl supposed to represent in this story?
JACKSON: She's supposed to represent those people who fear the upcoming Civil Rights movement, those African-Americans who were like my family who were afraid of things changing. I remember just probably about 15 years ago visiting my aunt in Memphis - there was my mom, my aunt and another aunt. And they were talking about how much the white people loved Papa, who was my grandfather, how they, you know, didn't want him buried at the church cemetery. They didn't think that was good enough.
And it got me into thinking why did they love him? Did they love him because he was such a good man or did they love him because he was so complacent and because he stayed in his place and because he didn't make trouble? I don't know the answer to that, but it was something that I wanted to explore as well. So Ma Pearl would represent that group of people who were afraid to see change because if - change meant a fight, and they didn't want that fight.
CHANG: Part of the backdrop in this book is what's known as the Great Migration North. Many African-Americans wanted to flee to the North in search of better jobs, a better life. Rose herself is tempted. She wants a brighter future. Explain how come Rose is so incredibly conflicted about this decision whether to go up North or remain in Mississippi.
JACKSON: She doesn't want to leave Papa. She doesn't want to leave her brother Fred Lee because he's already been abandoned enough. There's a sequel coming out in 2018, and you will find that there is some fear also in roles of starting new. The sequel explains a little bit more why she chooses to stay.
CHANG: Well, I can't wait for the sequel.
JACKSON: Thank you.
CHANG: Linda Williams Jackson - her book is called "Midnight Without A Moon."
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
In just 19 days, Donald Trump will take the oath of office and become the 45th president of the United States. And though new leadership always brings change, the outgoing and incoming presidents have been especially at odds in recent days. As hacking accusations mount, President Obama has taken steps to punish Russia while the president-elect has continued to praise Russian leader Vladimir Putin. NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson joins us now. Hey, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Happy New Year.
CHANG: Happy New Year to you, too. So where do things stand in this pretty extraordinary diplomatic moment between the U.S. and Russia now?
LIASSON: It is extraordinary. And I guess the idea of one president at a time has gone out the window because, as you said, President Obama has ordered a set of retaliations against Russia for the hacking. He said all Americans should be alarmed by the cyberattack. But one important American, the president-elect, is not only not alarmed. He's continuing to side with Putin and not President Obama. Trump has praised Putin for not retaliating in kind. Putin has said he's waiting for Trump to take office, where he is presumably expecting better treatment. Trump tweeted, great move on delay. I always knew Putin was very smart.
CHANG: Well, where's the rest of the Republican Party on all of this? What kind of schisms are we seeing?
LIASSON: Big schisms - most Republicans take the cyberattacks seriously. Mitch McConnell has said pointedly, Vladimir Putin is not our friend. Some Republicans want tougher sanctions on Russia than the ones President Obama has enacted. John McCain is going to hold hearings on this on Thursday.
CHANG: And Congress isn't the only place where he's causing rifts, right? How has Trump's response been rippling through the intelligence community?
LIASSON: We are told that morale at the CIA is very low because of Trump's dismissals of their work. Just last night at his Mar-a-Lago Club, where guests paid to attend his New Year's Eve party, he spoke to the press. And he again criticized the intelligence community for being wrong about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, suggesting they might be wrong about the Russian hacking, too.
His open affection for Putin has members of the intelligence community really puzzled and disturbed. They're asking, why is he so dismissive of Russia's dangerous behavior? Why does he consistently take the Russian line? And this seems to be more than just saying, I want a better relationship with Russia, which, of course, all incoming American presidents have said. This is something different.
And a lot of questions are being asked. Is this just a sincere admiration for a authoritarian strongman? Does he have business dealings with Russian oligarchs? Does Putin have some leverage over him? Are there hidden communications with Putin's representatives? You know, Russian diplomats said they were in touch with the Trump campaign all throughout the election. And we simply don't know the answers to these questions.
CHANG: And then there's Trump's New Year's tweet from yesterday, which read, Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don't know what to do. Love - exclamation point. So what does that tell us about the tone he might strike in his inaugural address and in the beginning of his administration?
LIASSON: You know, he's been implored by all sides to strike a unifying tone, to build on that victory speech he gave on election night. But he's not doing that. When he reads from a teleprompter like on election night, he does talk about bringing the country together. But when he's left to his own devices with his Twitter account in his own words, he still sounds thin-skinned and vindictive like a sore winner. So I think the bottom line here is, as we start a new year, there are no signs of a new Trump - at least not yet.
CHANG: NPR's Mara Liasson. Thanks so much, Mara.
LIASSON: Thank you.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
A new law that promises sweeping changes to the Food and Drug Administration was one of the few bipartisan accomplishments for Congress last year. The 21st Century Cures Act will increase funding for the NIH and change the way drugs and medical devices are regulated. Supporters say the FDA will receive a much-needed overhaul and be able to get medicines to patients sooner. Here's testimony from a mother who lost her two sons from a rare form of muscular dystrophy.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Because Duchenne is 100 percent fatal at a young age, many patients and families are willing to accept higher levels of risk in return for the prospect of potential benefit. Business-as-usual clinical trial designs simply do not hit the mark when working with these populations. Our community needs therapy. And we need them fast.
CHANG: But the Cures Act also has many critics who worry that the new law weakens the FDA and makes patients vulnerable. One of them is Dr. Jerry Avorn. He's a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
JERRY AVORN: It was urged through Congress with the idea that, somehow, Americans are being denied needed drugs because FDA is so slow and has these impossibly high standards. And, actually, the FDA is among the fastest regulatory bodies in the world for drugs. It can turn around an application in as little as six months, which is probably as fast as you want it to go for a treatment that needs to be evaluated very carefully. And it does not have impossibly high standards. It has demanded that companies show that their drugs actually improve patients' clinical status, which seems like a very reasonable request.
CHANG: How does the Cures Act change the way the FDA regulates new medicines and devices?
AVORN: The core of the bill that is the most worrisome is the idea that it authorizes FDA to look into lower standards for approving drugs based on laboratory test changes or other so-called surrogate markers rather than making companies demonstrate that a drug actually helps patients with real clinical outcomes.
CHANG: There were many patient groups who just didn't agree with that. Some patients are denied medications that could've saved their lives. But because of certain inefficiencies in the regulatory process, they couldn't get those medications. What do you tell those patients?
AVORN: It's a little bit of a nuanced argument. But to say, if there was a patient who, you know, was trying to get a treatment for condition X, and it wasn't approved until November, and they had died the preceding August, of course, that's a tragedy. But we also need, when we're thinking about ideal policy, to take into account - if we did have all those drugs available much quicker with much less evidence, how many people would end up not getting a treatment that was helping them or might even have side effects that no one saw coming and got sick from that?
And so it's not as if it's always a better thing to approve drugs quicker and with less standards because we are going to inflict illness on people or deny them needed treatments, like if there's a new cancer drug. And the old cancer drug works pretty darn good. But people flock to the new cancer drug. And then it turns out, as we saw specifically with Avastin for metastatic breast cancer, which the FDA initially approved based on a surrogate measure - and then it turned out that they had to take away that indication when a real study that was done more carefully showed that it did not help women with advanced breast cancer.
All the women who sort of got access to Avastin for that during that intervening period then were not using other treatments that would've helped them because they're all flocking to Avastin, which, when we did the research right, turns out wasn't helping them and was causing side effects and was very expensive.
CHANG: Certainly, everyone can agree that we don't want to carelessly approve drugs that are unsafe or ineffective. But is there room for improvement?
AVORN: Yes. The FDA, since before the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, has been underfunded in the federal budget. They just have not had enough staff to be able to review these very complicated proposals accurately and efficiently. So I think a best - the best solution would be to - not one that we're likely to see in the next couple of years - would be to make sure that Congress funds the FDA adequately so that it cannot be chronically short-staffed and can have enough people to really review these products expeditiously. We are usually the fastest in the world and tend to say yes most of the time. So it's hard to see what the problem there is that this is a proposed solution to.
CHANG: Dr. Jerry Avorn is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Thank you for joining us.
AVORN: You're very welcome.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
There are few bigger New Year's Eves parties than the one on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil has had a very tough year economically, but a huge crowd gathered on the famous sands last night, hoping for better luck this year. NPR's Philip Reeves was there.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: The sky's very dark, except for the occasional big flash of lightning, but the beach is lit up by these huge spotlights. And there are lots of people milling around, people sitting in deckchairs next to big hampers of food and drink. On the ground just in front of me, there's a young couple wrapped in each other's arms, and they appear to be asleep. A lot of little kids running around in the sand, playing in the sand. There are lots of people dressed in white.
(SOUNDBITE OF OCEAN WAVES CRASHING)
REEVES: A young woman clad in a long white dress with flowers in her hair has just rather gingerly walked up to the water's edge. And she has a hand a big white flower, and she throws it into the waves. This is an offering to the goddess of the oceans, part of a New Year's tradition that brings together African religious culture with Brazil's Roman Catholicism and other religions here. And lots of people have been doing that this evening - wearing white, tossing flowers into the seas - in the hope that this will bring good fortune in the year to come.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
REEVES: The fireworks have begun, which means it is now 2017 in Rio de Janeiro on Copacabana Beach. They say they've reduced the number of fireworks this year and the duration of this show because of an economic crisis here, but it looks pretty incredible to me.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
REEVES: There's another tradition here. The new year has just dawned, and a whole load of people, me included, have walked into the sea up to about our ankles. And every time a wave comes in, they jump up once. And then another wave comes, and they jump up again. And every time they jump up, they make a wish, and they do that seven times.
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Speaking Brazilian Portuguese).
REEVES: What is your name please?
BLENDA BORGES: Blenda - Blenda Borges.
REEVES: You just went in the water there, and I saw you jumping up and down seven times. Do you mind if I ask you - I know it's a secret, but what generally did you wish for?
BORGES: Money, peace, love, hope - everything that I think - that is good.
REEVES: Philip Reeves, NPR News, Copacabana Beach.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
In 2015, restaurateur Danny Meyer sets the table for an experiment he decided to eliminate tips and instead raise menu prices at his restaurants. It was a way to bridge the gap in earnings between servers and kitchen staff. It's been about a year since he started this new policy. And we wanted to see how it's going so far. Danny Meyer is CEO of the Union Square Hospitality Group, which is behind high-end restaurants in New York City like Gramercy Tavern and The Modern. He joins us from New York City. Welcome, Danny.
DANNY MEYER: Thank you so much, Ailsa.
CHANG: How did your staff react to these new policies, particularly your servers? Were any of them confused or upset about this?
MEYER: All of our staff members listened very, very carefully when I shared the thing that was non-negotiable for me, which was this. If we're going to be a restaurant organization that believes and says we believe that our guests will never have a better time dining with us, we cannot responsibly preside over an economy that only takes care of tipped employees and does not take care of kitchen employees. And then I asked our staff members - kitchen and dining room - to help me and help our senior leadership team do the math to create a system that would be a winning system for everybody. And people trusted us.
CHANG: But what's the incentive to be the best possible server they can be if you get rid of tips?
MEYER: Well, that incentive has to come from someone internally. I have never, ever subscribed to the notion that it motivates somebody to be friendly to me who otherwise would not have been friendly to me simply because they believe that, in two hours, I'm going to pull more money out of my pocket.
CHANG: Really? That seems like a reality of the restaurant business.
MEYER: I think that's the reality that the tipping system has tried to create. But if you've ever had bad service in a restaurant, then I would argue that the tipping system did not prevent bad service.
CHANG: Well, what about complaints about higher menu prices? Are there customers who are confused about why those prices seem way higher than they used to be?
MEYER: Well, what we decided to do with our program, which we call hospitality included, is that we would give you one price on the menu. So if your chicken costs $28 on the menu, that's the cost. That's going to cover the linen, the flowers, the cook, the reservationist, the server, the wine director, the rent. There's not an additional line on your bill for gratuity. And so it is a jolt when you first see it. But we've not, to my knowledge, lost any guests. As a matter of fact, what we've gotten over this past year is an overwhelmingly strong thumbs-up chorus from our guests.
CHANG: I was going to ask you, have profits been affected at all?
MEYER: Well we've seen an initial dip in every restaurant. And then as our managers learn to operate under a new economy, they tend to come back up. So a great example is The Modern, where we started this. It's a very, very different math if you're a chef and you're used to working towards a certain food-cost percentage. And all of a sudden, that math changes dramatically.
Or, for example, taxes - we're actually paying more taxes right now because tips are not something that you have to include in your sales tax. So in the early stages, this is a very, very challenging thing. And any restaurant that was considering undertaking this, I would say, overcommunicate. Be patient. But it's completely worth it. And I wouldn't go back.
CHANG: Danny Meyer, CEO of the Union Square Hospitality Group, thanks for joining us.
MEYER: Well, It was my pleasure. And thank you.
TIM WATTERS: (Imitating Bill Clinton) My name is Bill Clinton. I was the 42nd president of the United States, and I am married to my lovely wife and fantastic woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for 41 years now.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The voice you just heard is not actually President Bill Clinton. It's Tim Watters. In 1992, Watters was a real estate agent living in Tampa, Fla., when Bill Clinton ran for president.
WATTERS: People started staring at me at the supermarket and restaurants and whatnot. And I knew that I looked just like Bill Clinton.
CHANG: Family and friends mailed Watters newspaper clippings of Clinton. Even Watters' 2-year-old son got confused.
WATTERS: Unsolicited, he just pointed to the picture of Bill Clinton and said da-da (ph).
CHANG: That's when Watters decided he might be able to make a living impersonating the president.
WATTERS: Right after Inauguration Day, I was on the "Maury Povich Show." I was on "The Geraldo Show." I got some local television here in Tampa, and the money started rolling in.
CHANG: A lot of money - in his best year, Tim Watters says he grossed over a million dollars impersonating Bill Clinton. But as time went on, he realized people were getting tired of hearing the same old material. So in 2016, he decided to take on a new role, Donald Trump.
WATTERS: (Imitating Donald Trump) You know, folks, I'm going to make America great again. Honestly, I'm going to make America great again.
CHANG: He says the transition wasn't that hard.
WATTERS: It's funny. When you put a wig on and do a little orange makeup, it does wonders for you.
CHANG: That was Tim Watters, professional Donald Trump impersonator.
WATTERS: (Imitating Donald Trump) Folks, I want to thank you for your support in my landslide victory as the 45th president of the United States. So have a very Happy New Year. And come January 20, I am going to make America great again, guaranteed. That I can tell you.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Dylann Roof will be back in federal court this week. He's the 22-year-old South Carolina man convicted of killing nine people in a racially motivated church shooting in Charleston in 2015. Now the same jurors who convicted him will decide whether he should be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison. Tomorrow, the judge in the case will rule on whether Roof is competent to represent himself. South Carolina Public Radio's Alexandra Olgin reports.
ALEXANDRA OLGIN, BYLINE: Melvin Graham flipped through a stack of laminated awards in honor of his sister.
MELVIN GRAHAM: This is the Cynthia Graham Hurd Endowed Fellowship at University of South Carolina. This is for a librarian.
OLGIN: Hurd was one of the nine killed by Roof during the bible study at the Emanuel AME Church in June 2015. The 54-year-old was a librarian. The den in Graham's house is a shrine to his sister. There are photos of Cynthia and several honors and awards displayed.
GRAHAM: The library naming was the highlight if I had to pick one because there's something that can't be taken away from her. That's something that's there in the public.
OLGIN: Graham was in the courtroom during the trial and will be there during sentencing. He said it was surreal to sit there in court and hear details about his sister's death. He believes Roof should be executed.
GRAHAM: The death penalty should be used in extreme circumstances where there's absolutely no doubt. This is the case where there's no doubt. This is the extreme.
OLGIN: The federal government rarely executes criminals. Since 1976, it has only killed three people, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. To Graham, the harshness of the punishment would be symbolic.
GRAHAM: If he doesn't get the death penalty, this sends a message to every racist in the country. Come to South Carolina, and you can kill with impunity and not have to suffer the consequences. The worst thing that can happen to you is you spend the rest of your life in prison.
OLGIN: Which is what Roof would get if the 12 jurors can't unanimously agree to sentence him to death. Chris Adams has represented several capital defendants in federal trials. Since roof has decided to represent himself during sentencing, his attorneys are now on standby, which Adam says allows them to do very little.
CHRIS ADAMS: They're really being relegated to the role of passing yellow stickies and taking notes.
OLGIN: Roof said he doesn't plan to present any mental health evidence or call any witnesses during the sentencing phase of his trial. Adam says that's unfair to the jurors.
ADAMS: The adversarial system only works if there are adversaries advocating on their side. The system breaks down when you only have one side doing its job. And so the jurors are really going to be the ones who are cheated in this process.
OLGIN: Prosecutors say they plan to call more than 30 witnesses. Not all relatives of the nine people killed in the church fellowship hall believe in the death penalty. The Reverend Sharon Risher is one of them. She lost her mother, Ethel Lance, in the massacre. She doesn't support capital punishment for religious reasons, but she says, thankfully, it's not her choice.
SHARON RISHER: That's not my decision. So I can feel whatever I want to feel because that's not on me. And whatever the judicial system decide to do with him, I pray that he gets the sentence that he should get, whether that be death or to spend the rest of his life in jail.
OLGIN: Regardless of what the federal jury decides, Roof faces a state trial for murder later this month. South Carolina prosecutors have said they intend to seek the death penalty. For NPR News, I'm Alexandra Olgin in Charleston, S.C.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Time for sports.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN CAMERON SONG, "THE COMPETITIORS")
CHANG: If you were prepping for your New Year's Eve party yesterday and didn't get a chance to watch the college football semifinals, have no fear. Alabama beat Washington in the Peach Bowl, and Clemson crushed Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl. So to talk about what happened, we're joined, as always, by Mike Pesca. He's the host of The Gist podcast at Slate. Hey, Mike.
MIKE PESCA: Hello. It's a sad thing if you missed those games. Well, not at any point after the first quarter.
CHANG: (Laughter).
PESCA: Then they both became kind of de rigueur.
CHANG: Well, all right. Clemson's going to the championship, and it beat Ohio State in a shut-out. It's been a while since that happened to Ohio State. Tell us about that.
PESCA: Yeah, it's the first time Ohio State's coach Urban Meyer had ever been shut out in his coaching career. Now, I think - I still think we could say he's one of the - if not the sharpest minds in football. So I think this meant that going into the game, these two on paper - evenly matched teams, one-loss teams from power conferences - many people were saying, you know, I want to put my chips with Urban Meyer. He'll outsmart Clemson.
But what we saw was not just physical domination on the part of Clemson. That became clear. Clemson's defense just overwhelmed the Ohio State offensive line. But they played so much smarter in little, subtle ways that you could tell early in the game that they kind of knew every play that Ohio State was going to throw at them just by the shift of a back or the way an offensive lineman would step on the second step from a play, and they'd sniff out these plays and just, you know, crush Ohio State's offense. So it was a really convincing win.
CHANG: And let's not forget the Crimson Tide beat the Huskies. Give us a recap on that one.
PESCA: I shan't forget that. Now...
CHANG: (Laughter).
PESCA: ...This was the big game that Washington started off with a touchdown first play - first drive of the game. So you say to yourself, oh, maybe this can be a game. But what happened there was that Alabama's defense is so good. And, again, I want to talk not just about the physical domination, but the mental domination.
CHANG: Yeah.
PESCA: There was a successful screen pass, and you can see Alabama just processing this, the players, the coaches. And they basically didn't give up another screen pass all game, and their defense has scored 15 touchdowns, their defense - better than some teams' offenses. Their defense has scored 15 touchdowns. So Alabama's offense is good, but their defense probably the best unit on either side of the ball in football.
CHANG: So what will happen in the championship, you think?
PESCA: OK. So the two teams played last year, and it was a close game. It was decided by five points. And in that game, Nick Saban, the coach Alabama, who's usually by-the-book guy threw out this crazy onside kick. And he even smiled when it was successful. And it's rare to see a Nick Saban smile. It's like seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker in the wild. But, you know, one year later, the Clemson quarterback, Deshaun Watson, is - has returned. So you say to yourself, maybe that experience will get them over the hump.
I should note, though, that Deshaun Watson this year wasn't as good as last year. I have no idea. I thought that Alabama would win, but I thought that Ohio State would give Clemson a straw, a better game. And I think this could be another high-scoring game. Well, we'll see Alabama get outside its comfort zone and have to put up some points on offense.
CHANG: OK. In the 35 seconds we have left, I want to talk about this whole bowl game system.
PESCA: Yeah.
CHANG: What do you think? Is it falling apart? Doing OK?
PESCA: I - the major - the playoffs seem good, and they've been entertaining and the right two teams are playing for the championship. But overall, the bowl games are antiquated and they just exist to make the people who run the bowls money and the networks that air them. This year, we saw some players sitting out to save their bodies for the NFL, and that's a new trend that I would watch because these amateurs are making millions of dollars for networks and their conferences, and a couple of them are saying I'm not putting my health on the line before I actually draw a paycheck from the NFL.
CHANG: Mike Pesca - he's the host of The Gist podcast at Slate. Thanks, Mike.
PESCA: You're welcome.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
If you've just returned home from holiday travel, isn't it about time to start planning your next vacation? Will 2017 be the year of cheap flights or the perfect driving vacation? To answer these questions and tell us how to take advantage of the travel trends of 2017, we're joined by Pauline Frommer, editorial director at frommers.com. Hey, Pauline.
PAULINE FROMMER: Hey. Nice to be here. Thank you so much.
CHANG: Thanks for being with us. Well, let's start with air travel. Are there any big trends or changes to expect this year? And the crucial question - are airfares going to go up or down?
FROMMER: Well, that depends on how you define an airfare. A lot of the airlines right now are spending millions of dollars to change their back-end systems so that they can better give you a menu of options when you book travel 'cause they want to be able to charge you for every little thing.
CHANG: Yeah.
FROMMER: So whereas airfares, especially international ones, are definitely going down, air add-ons are going up. For example, United and Delta now have something called basic economy fares. These are fares where, on United, you will be charged extra if you try to put anything in the overhead compartment.
CHANG: Really?
FROMMER: Yes. These are ugly, ugly fares. You don't ever get to choose a seat. So you're pretty much going to get the middle seat. If you have to change your date, you don't get to pay extra. You just lose the entire cost of the ticket. So these are basic economy fares. And, sadly, they only cost about $25 less on average than regular fares. And that's how much it costs for you to check a bag. And most of these fares won't allow you to bring a bag into a cabin. So you can do the math. It's a little tricky what the airlines are pulling on us for 2017.
CHANG: What about where we stay when we're on vacation? How will that change this year? Like, will we see a growth in Airbnb-style-type companies?
FROMMER: We are seeing an explosion in nontraditional lodgings like Airbnb. Airbnb has more beds than all of the major hotel chains combined. What's changing is the hosts used to be a retiree or a teacher or somebody who needed to make extra money. And it was a side business. Now 40 percent of the hosts do this for a living.
CHANG: Wow.
FROMMER: So Airbnb is getting a lot less quirky.
CHANG: Are hotels getting into apartment rentals to compete with Airbnb?
FROMMER: They are. And I think this is going to be the big change that we see in 2017, 2018. A company called Room Mate - they're are hotel company. And they have started a company called Be Mate, where you stay in an apartment near the hotel. And you get all the services that the hotel offers.
You get to use the pool and the fitness room. You get daily maid service. But you don't have to stay in the hotel. You stay in an apartment. You have your own kitchen. You have much more space. But you have all of the efficiencies - you can pick up your key any time - of staying at a hotel.
CHANG: And for those of us who are fantasizing about where our next trip is going to be, like me, where are the best destinations for the budget traveler in 2017?
FROMMER: Well, the dollar is whooping...
CHANG: (Laughter).
FROMMER: ...Pretty much every other world currency. So if you've ever wanted to go to Europe, now's the time to go. We note that travel to Paris is down 30 percent.
CHANG: Wow.
FROMMER: It's just a golden time to go to France or to most anywhere else in Europe that's on the euro - but the same for Canada. And this year is Canada's 150th anniversary. So there's going to be all kinds of special events. Montreal is going crazy because it's also their 375th anniversary. And they're the home of Cirque du Soleil. So they are going to have the wackiest, most creative festivals.
CHANG: (Laughter).
FROMMER: And all of the national parks in Canada are free in 2017.
CHANG: Pauline Frommer of frommers.com and Frommer's Guidebooks, thank you so much for being with us. And Happy New Year.
FROMMER: Happy New Year.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Turkish authorities are still searching for the gunmen who stormed in Istanbul nightclub early this morning. At least 39 people were killed. Mustafa Akyol is a journalist and author and joins us now from Istanbul. Welcome.
MUSTAFA AKYOL: Thanks so much, Ailsa. It's really a horrible day, of course, for the new year's first day in Istanbul. We are shocked by this attack, and we wonder who was behind this. And the common view is that this is probably an ISIS attack, although the group didn't claim it yet.
CHANG: Well, before we talk about that, I do want to also talk about what a terrible year it has been in Turkey, at least over the past year, with several terrorist attacks. Can you remind us what the past year has been like in the country?
AKYOL: It was a horrible year. I mean, I had defined 2014 and '15 as horrible years for Turkey, but now I would love to have them back, actually. Two thousand sixteen was a disastrous year. We had a bloody coup attempt. It was averted. That was nice, but almost 300 people were killed. Then a very brutal crackdown began after that, and, you know, thousands of people found themselves in jail with, I think, exaggerated charges, in my view - at least some of them.
Then terror attacks, both the PKK, which is a Kurdish separatist group, with a left-wing secular ideology, and the ISIS. They both organized major attacks inside Turkey. The PKK typically hit security forces - police and military - whereas ISIS hit soft targets, like innocent people on the streets. So this last one seems like an ISIS for attack. And it's really, really a very tough year. It was. And now...
CHANG: Let me...
AKYOL: ...Beginning the new year with this - it's really horrible.
CHANG: Let me also ask you - Turkey has been trying to get a cease-fire in Syria and is taking on refugees. Do you see a relationship between that conflict and the violence in Turkey over the past year?
AKYOL: There is a relation because one reason ISIS is targeting Turkey is Turkey's advances against ISIS inside Syria. Turkey actually has made their attack against ISIS inside Syria with Russia. That's, I think, one reason. Plus that he's trying to fight the Kurdish rebels in Syria, which also comes back to Turkey as retaliation by Kurdish militants. So in a sense, the Syrian civil war is deeply affecting Turkey in really bad ways.
CHANG: Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, released a statement saying that this attack was an effort to destroy Turkey's morale. Is it working? What do you think?
AKYOL: To some extent - I mean, people are worried about the future. And what we need at this time is not more conspiracy theories, not a more authoritarian government, but really national unity based on understanding and tolerance and reconciliation. We're not there, though, unfortunately, yet.
CHANG: Thank you. Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish journalist and author of the forthcoming book "The Islamic Jesus."
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Today in Your Health, the future of the Affordable Care Act. On Wednesday, President Obama will meet with congressional Democrats about how to protect the health care reform plan that bears his name. Republican leaders have said they'll repeal Obamacare as soon as they take the reins in Washington. My co-host David Greene spoke with NPR health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak about the longstanding tension over this legislation.
ALISON KODJAK, BYLINE: In 2010, the Democrats kind of ran through this law without any Republican support. It was huge, it was complicated, thousands of pages long and ever since, Republicans have been pretty mad about how it passed. And they've refused to help fix it, and, instead, they've just promised over and over again to repeal. And in fact, the House has already voted more than 60 times to do just that over the years.
DAVID GREENE, BYLINE: And now they have - they'll have a Republican president, both houses in Republican control. Looks like it can happen. What exactly does it mean to repeal?
KODJAK: Well, they can't really repeal it outright because the Democrats in the Senate can filibuster that and block it, but Democrats can't filibuster anything that has to do with the budget. So what the Republicans probably will do is eliminate the financial parts of the law, the tax and budget items.
But that means they'll eliminate the penalty for people who don't buy health insurance, and they'll eliminate the subsidies that help people pay for insurance under the law. That's really the core of the Affordable Care Act. So what's not clear is how quickly they're going to cut off the money. They're trying to come up with a replacement plan, and so they may delay that for months or even years.
GREENE: So lack of clarity, delays could mean a lot of people left in limbo, I imagine.
KODJAK: Millions. Right now, the estimate's about 20 million people get their insurance through Obamacare one way or another. You've got about 10 million people who buy plans through the exchanges that have been set up by the federal and state governments and then there are millions more who have insurance because of the expansion of Medicaid under the law. About 31 states and D.C. have expanded Medicaid to people who have a little bit more money just over the poverty line. And a lot of that is in the Affordable Care Act and could be reversed as well.
GREENE: Democrats have made the charge that people could be cut off if Republicans act very boldly and very quickly. Is that possible? Could Republicans literally cut people off who would get insurance under this?
KODJAK: Well, I don't think that they want to. They have said over and over again - Republican leaders - that they have no intention of just throwing people off their insurance policies. But there's a lot that they have to consider. Before the Affordable Care Act, people with existing medical conditions - they often couldn't get any insurance or they were very much priced out of the market. And there are also a whole group of people who had lifetime limits like a million dollars. And when you have a severe illness, you can reach that limit. So there's this whole slew of people who did not have insurance, and they're pretty happy with Obamacare, that they can get coverage now. But then there are other people like Will Denecke. I talked to him last October just before he was going to start shopping for insurance for this year, and he was pretty mad because his costs were rising.
WILL DENECKE: Incredibly, we got a notice from our health care company, Moda, which has had financial problems saying that my premium was going up to $930.
KODJAK: So Denecke's self-employed and unlike most people on Obamacare, he makes too much money to qualify for government subsidies. So before the ACA, he paid about $340 a month for insurance, but that's all changed.
DENECKE: I've had health insurance my whole life, but it's just offensive, you know, in principle to think about spending a thousand dollars a month for health care insurance. I just don't make enough to, you know - to pay that kind of percent of my income on health insurance.
KODJAK: But on the other side of the equation, you have people like Leigh Kvetko. She lives in Texas, and she takes about 10 medications every day because she's had two organ transplants. And after Obamacare passed, she was able to quit her job at a big company, start her own business because she could finally get her own insurance.
LEIGH KVETKO: This particular plan - the fact that they cannot discriminate against me because of how I was born was a lifesaver, literally.
GREENE: OK. So Alison Kodjak, that voice right there is someone who really relied on this law because she had preexisting conditions, she could make a big change, start her own company and she would still get insurance. She wouldn't lose it.
KODJAK: Exactly. And that's who the law was really directed at in the first place, people like her.
GREENE: OK. So some of the things you've talked about - Congress could come in, they could defund a lot of parts of this law, the president - you know, President Trump once he comes in will probably sign that. What happens next?
KODJAK: Well, if they vote to defund, all the money could go away to implement and support the law. But some elements stay in place, including the requirement that insurance companies cover people who have ongoing medical conditions, people like Leigh Kvetko. And Trump has said over and over again that he wants to keep that provision because it's very popular. Here he is with Lesley Stahl on "60 Minutes" just after the election.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "60 MINUTES")
LESLEY STAHL: When you replace it, are you going to make sure that people with pre-conditions are still covered?
DONALD TRUMP: Yes. Because it happens to be one of the strongest assets.
STAHL: You're going to keep that?
TRUMP: Also with the children living with their parents for an extended period, we're...
STAHL: You're going to keep that?
TRUMP: ...Very much try and keep that in.
KODJAK: The problem with that is that some experts warn that the individual insurance market could collapse altogether if that part of the law is preserved, but young, healthy people stop paying for insurance 'cause it gets too expensive.
GREENE: Because there'd be less money in the system to actually support the people who need the insurance.
KODJAK: Exactly.
GREENE: That's the argument that Democrats are making.
KODJAK: Exactly.
GREENE: So do the Republicans have kind of a broad plan that would give us some idea of, you know, something comprehensive that would be replacing Obamacare?
KODJAK: Well, so what they have is they don't have legislative language. There's a lot of ideas out there. Various members of Congress have put out proposals, but they don't have a definitive plan which is where this talk of delay comes in. They may vote to repeal, but not cut off the money immediately while they come up with their replacement plan.
But included in those ideas there are some general principles. One is that instead of requiring people to buy insurance which is really unpopular, they would instead create incentives for people to buy insurance by offering tax credits toward your insurance premiums. But there's not a definitive proposal out there. And Republicans are talking about perhaps waiting years before they find a replacement to the Affordable Care Act.
GREENE: All of which is to say you're going to be a very busy reporter covering all of this in this year and the coming year.
KODJAK: I'm sure I will be (laughter).
GREENE: All right. That's NPR's health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak. Thanks, Alison.
KODJAK: Thanks, David.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
When sexual assault is reported to law enforcement, a majority of cases never make it to trial. But student victims have another option. They can report it to their universities under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination on campus. Public schools are obligated to investigate these crimes, and these campus investigations come with an advantage for both the accused and the accuser's confidentiality. But there are plenty of disadvantages, as we'll hear from NPR's Ashley Westerman
ASHLEY WESTERMAN, BYLINE: A court case involving the University of Kentucky has highlighted how confidentiality can complicate justice. Full disclosure - I'm a graduate of that university. But for the purposes of this story, we're going to withhold names of the accusers and the accused because we're not talking about guilt or innocence here. We're talking about the system.
The two women at the center of this case were graduate students in the UK entomology department. They each say their adviser sexually assaulted them. Let's call them Jane Doe One and Two. They say the professor groped them and said sexually suggestive things to them, so they went to the university Title IX office. We obtained a report prepared by the office outlining their allegations. When I spoke with Jane Doe Two, she told me they never wanted to go through the courts because they couldn't afford to be named.
JANE DOE TWO: I just spent a good portion of my life in grad school trying to further my career, and if I'm labeled as someone who followed a sexual assault complaint against a professor that could very easily backfire against me. There's a lot of people in academia who think that there are women who make up stuff like this.
WESTERMAN: The school launched an investigation and found enough evidence to move to the next step, an official hearing. If it found him guilty, the professor could have been fired, and everything would go on his employment record. But he resigned before a hearing could take place, highlighting what Jane Doe Two calls a loophole in the Title IX system.
JANE DOE TWO: Not just at UK, but at every single university. If a professor resigns before there's a hearing, then he's allowed to move on to another university, potentially victimizing more students.
WESTERMAN: In a statement to NPR, the professor says there is no truth to the allegations and that he resigned to protect his family from the publicity and stress of a hearing.
This gets to the heart of why letting universities handle sexual assault investigations can be problematic. In a criminal case, you can't remain anonymous. Our Constitution guarantees the right to face our accusers. On campus, the focus is on protecting the accusers. Their names are kept confidential, and there's a lower burden of proof. The Jane Does we're frustrated that their case never went to a hearing. So they reached out to the University of Kentucky independent student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel.
MARJORIE KIRK: In March, a person walked in asking for someone to talk to and I said I can talk, and they basically unloaded this huge story on me.
WESTERMAN: That's Marjorie Kirk a journalism major who had made a name for herself as an investigative reporter. The person who came to see her that day at the paper was a representative sent by the Jane Does, and their story was enough to get Kirk digging deeper.
KIRK: I felt an obligation to the safety of other people to try and report this, and that's why we started this battle for open records.
WESTERMAN: The newspaper filed two Freedom of Information Act requests to get all the documents related to the investigation. The university turned over some, but not all of them. So the paper appealed to the Kentucky attorney general who took their side. But the university still wouldn't give up the documents, citing a federal law called FERPA.
JAY BLANTON: Which specifically mandates the protection of privacy of a student's personally identifiable records.
WESTERMAN: Jay Blanton is a spokesman for the university.
BLANTON: And this institution, the University of Kentucky, has consistently held that student information, particularly in cases that might identify in a student in the case of a sexual assault, sexual misconduct, must be held confidential.
WESTERMAN: And because of a quirk in Kentucky law, the university ended up suing its own student newspaper to block the documents from being released. Marjorie Kirk who is now editor-in-chief says if confidentiality was a problem, the university could have simply redacted names and other identifying details. She says at stake is a lot more than allowing one professor to leave campus without a hearing.
KIRK: A decision would be for all the marbles. It would affect any decision that a judge anywhere was trying to come up with for similar documents. They would see this decision and likely follow the precedent.
WESTERMAN: Then, just two days after the university sued the newspaper to prevent release of the documents, representatives of the Jane Does showed up at Kirk's office and handed over the full investigation - over 100 pages. In it were interviews with witnesses and emails where one of the women confronted the professor about his behavior. It also had the professor's version of events. And so Kirk started writing about the specifics of the case, but also about the lack of an open system.
KIRK: And as we dug into the system a little more, we saw there was much more to this than one professor. And so the scope definitely grew into a system that universities were enabling.
WESTERMAN: While Marjorie Kirk was on a crusade, the Jane Does watched. They were happy with the first few articles. They maintained their anonymity. The professor didn't. But then, their personal story mushroomed into something they hadn't signed on for - dozens of articles in an open records fight.
In an effort to spotlight the broken university system, the Jane Does discovered another imperfect system. Journalists can play a big role in exposing wrongdoing, but media outlets ultimately have the say on how they pursue stories. They're not subject to the same rules as courts or universities, so it's not surprising the newspaper took the story and tried to expose as much as they could. In November, the Jane Does filed a brief supporting the university. Yes, that's right. They sided with the university. Here's Jane Doe Two.
JANE DOE TWO: There needs to be some sort of reporting system for professors accused of sexual misconduct. while still protecting the privacy of victims like me and Jane Doe One. And the records that Marjorie is calling for - those hundreds of pages of documents aren't necessary for that reporting system.
WESTERMAN: So here's what we're left with - a university struggling to protect students and hold employees accountable, a crusading journalist sued by her own school and two women still searching for a more perfect form of justice. The judge in the case says he plans to issue an opinion sometime in the next two weeks. Ashley Westerman, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Democrats may have lost the House and the Senate over the past eight years, but they always had one thing, President Barack Obama and his veto pen in the White House. On January 20, Republicans will find themselves with all the power in Washington for the first time since 2006. As NPR's Scott Detrow reports, the capital's new power dynamic is forcing Democrats to make some tough strategic choices about how they're going to work as a minority party.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: The starting point in the conversation Democrats are having with themselves right now is this - Republicans in Congress spent almost all of the past eight years opposing President Obama, and they seem to have reaped a lot of political rewards for the block opposition. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is quick and careful to reject that approach.
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NANCY PELOSI: We always, you know, always trying to find a place where we can find a common goal - giving them credit or saving face or whatever it happens to be.
DETROW: But when Pelosi and other Democrats talk about working with Trump, that common goal is conditional. They say Trump would have to be willing to do things they care about like maybe follow through on a promise to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure projects. But otherwise, Democrats are confident that drawing out their differences with the new president will be a winning strategy.
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PELOSI: But our big leverage is the public.
DETROW: Differences on things like not changing Medicare and Social Security. That's the exact playbook that worked well for Pelosi in 2005 and 2006 when Democrats ended up winning back control of Congress. It's why while Republicans are talking about repealing Obamacare, incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is warning about Medicare.
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CHUCK SCHUMER: Republicans here in Washington are gearing up for a war on seniors, and they shall not, they must not prevail.
DETROW: Schumer says Senate Democrats will give one heck of a hearing to Tom Price, Trump's pick for the Department of Health and Human Services. Democrats think they can generate a lot of positive headlines by grilling Trump's cabinet picks. Here's Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.
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CHRIS MURPHY: These are with a few exceptions radical nominees, the likes of which we have never seen in the history of this country.
DETROW: Cabinet confirmations, they say, will be a way to keep emphasizing the things they've been criticizing Trump for like not releasing his tax returns. But highlighting contrasts can only go so far when Republicans set the congressional agenda. At some point, Democrats still face a choice. Do they do their best to block every single big initiative or try to work with Republicans to make it more Democrat-friendly? Sarah Binder studies Congress at the Brookings Institution.
SARAH BINDER: On most measures whether it's spending bills, deregulation, repeal Dodd-Frank - that all requires cooperation from at least eight Democrats, and that's hard to see. So I think Democrats do have leverage.
DETROW: The hardest political calculus could be Obamacare. Republicans can repeal it without any Democratic votes, but they need Democratic support in the Senate to pass a replacement plan. Many Democrats might want to work with Republicans to keep as much of Obamacare as they can, but helping give Trump a big legislative accomplishment could make him more popular. And it could anger progressive activists. Just listen to Michael Moore, appearing on a CNN show hosted by Van Jones.
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MICHAEL MOORE: It is the responsibility of this minority of Democrats in Congress...
VAN JONES: Oh, wait. Hold on. Hold on.
MOORE: ...To block, obstruct, disrupt and do whatever they can.
DETROW: Nancy Pelosi knows Democrats all across the country are anxious, but she's urging patience as the party tries to make its case to voters.
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PELOSI: Somebody used the analogy of it's like telling somebody they're - they married the wrong person or their art is fake.
DETROW: The first scenario was something many people have seen happen to a friend or family member, the second maybe not as much. Still, Pelosi says it doesn't help when you're the one who breaks the bad news.
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PELOSI: They bought it. They'll find out sooner or later whether they made a mistake.
DETROW: Pelosi has seen voters reject Democrats, come back to the party and then reject them again. She says she is patient enough. Democrats will continue to point out the key differences between the parties and wait for voters to eventually come back. Scott Detrow, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Almost a million elephants roamed Africa 25 years ago. Now there are fewer than half that many. The main reason - ivory. Despite a ban on ivory trade, poachers continue to kill elephants for their tusks. Now, China which is the destination for most of that ivory, will shut down its market. NPR's Christopher Joyce reports on what conservationists call a breakthrough.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: Wildlife experts thought that an international ban on ivory trade in 1989 would slow or even stop the killing of elephants for their tusks. It didn't. In fact, the killing got worse. That's mostly because the ban didn't cover older ivory taken before the 1989 ban. So what's happened is people are still killing elephants, but passing off their ivory as old. And therefore legal to trade. John Robinson is with the Wildlife Conservation Society. He says efforts to stop the supply of ivory at the source in Africa have not been very successful.
JOHN ROBINSON: Addressing the demand is absolutely essential if we're going to deal with the poaching issues.
JOYCE: And the biggest demand for ivory has been in China.
ROBINSON: Almost all the ivory is for carving. China has had a history of doing so. Whole tusks are carved into elaborately assembled pieces of one kind or another.
JOYCE: Now China has agreed to close down that legal trade by the end of 2017. Robinson says it's an announcement conservationists have been waiting for since 2015 when U.S. and Chinese officials started negotiating an end to China's trade.
ROBINSON: Certainly closing down domestic ivory in China will have a dramatic impact. The Chinese market is the largest ivory market in the world.
JOYCE: The Chinese government has laid out an extensive plan that includes putting ivory carvers to work on existing museum pieces or other projects. The government says it will also educate the public on the consequences of ivory trading for elephant populations. The Obama administration already has shut down almost all trade in ivory in the U.S. Robinson says the Chinese decision may well convince other countries that trade in ivory such as Vietnam and Japan to do the same. Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The relationship between a hairdresser and his or her clients can be an intimate one. Sometimes the conversation gets personal. And some stylists are used to seeing signs that their clients have been victims of abuse. There's a new law in Illinois that recognizes that unique relationship, and it now requires hairstylists and nail technicians to go through training about domestic violence as part of their licensing. Here's NPR's Maggie Penman.
MAGGIE PENMAN, BYLINE: It's a classic scene. You see it in movies and on TV, women chatting with their hairstylist, talking about their love lives or problems at work just like they're talking to an old friend. This new Illinois law wants to use those intimate relationships to get victims of domestic violence help.
JOAN ROWAN: It is an intimate relationship, and it's a wonderful relationship.
PENMAN: Joan Rowan has been a hairstylist for decades. She owns two salons - one in Oak Lawn, Ill., and the other on the South Side of Chicago. She says she started putting pamphlets in the salon bathrooms with information and resources like the numbers for domestic violence hotlines.
ROWAN: I've had women - you know, when you're washing their head, they have lumps on their head, or you know, they ran into a door again. I've been a hairdresser for 41 years. One in three women have violence in their lives.
PENMAN: She's citing a statistic used by many domestic violence advocacy groups, including one called Chicago Says No More. This is the group that's designing the one-hour training for stylists. Kristie Paskvan is the founder of that organization. She says she knows an hour-long training won't make anyone an expert or a therapist. The aim is just to educate the stylists and give them the tools to refer clients to resources that can help.
KRISTIE PASKVAN: There's something like 88,000 salon professionals that will be trained in the next two years. That's 88,000 more individuals that'll be able to have conversations with family and friends and clients, and that raises awareness.
PENMAN: Salon professionals won't be required to intervene or held liable if they don't. Lawmakers hope to just get a little more information out there, even if it's just over a manicure. Maggie Penman, NPR News, Washington.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In Turkey, a massive manhunt continues for an attacker who killed 39 people at a nightclub in Istanbul. It happened in the early hours of the new year. The Islamic State issued a statement claiming responsibility saying the attack was carried out by what they called a, quote, "hero soldier of the caliphate." The mass shooting brings an already violent year in Turkey to an end. Just a couple of weeks ago, a gunman opened fire in an art gallery killing the ambassador from Russia.
NPR's Peter Kenyon joins us now on the line from Istanbul. Peter, what can you tell us at this point about the investigation into the nightclub attack?
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Well, about this ISIS claim of responsibility, I think we need to be a bit cautious. It hasn't been verified. The statement describes the Istanbul gunman as a heroic soldier of the caliphate and says the shooting attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul was targeting a location, quote, "where Christians celebrate their apostate holiday."
Now, this attack does seem to fit with the nature of what went on - an attack against civilians and a soft target. That's been the pattern in previous ISIS attacks, but we should mention the assailant still being sought. We still don't know what motivated him, or if he was a Turk or a foreign national. Although, we do have quotes now in some Turkish newspapers from police suggesting that authorities believe he may be from Central Asia, possibly Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan. That's not confirmed. The search is continuing, and the workweek here is starting mainly as normal.
MARTIN: This was a very hip club, I understand, that attracted a cosmopolitan kind of crowd. People from several different countries were there and presumably among those who were killed.
KENYON: Yes, many foreigners. A Lebanese delegation has already arrived to bringing families of some of the Lebanese victims. State media are just bringing forward increasingly large numbers of foreign casualties. All but one of the bodies have now been identified, more than twice as many foreigners dead as Turks. Saudi Arabia looks to have lost seven people - three Lebanese, three Iraqis as well as people from Tunisia, Morocco, France, Belgium, Israel, Libya. As you said, this club's a place that attracts foreigners as well as wealthy Turks, and that's reflected in the death toll.
MARTIN: You've been down to the Reina club this morning and talked to some people there. Let's listen to a little bit of what you found.
KENYON: The Reina nightclub entrance is covered in a blue tarp with a large Turkish flag laid over it. A knot of TV reporters shivers in the cold across the street. A man who works in a parking lot just a few yards away doesn't want to give his name but says simply, it was a massacre.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken).
KENYON: "Sadly," he says, "we're getting used to it. Every 10 or 15 days something blows up in this country. How can we work? This is the end of work." He says, "I know our security forces are on alert, and people are trying to be careful, but what can you do when some guy just hides a gun and goes on a rampage? They can't do anything. It happens in all kinds of neighborhoods, not just here. It's hard to believe, but we're getting used to this."
Police have been going through the crime scene looking for evidence that might help them catch the attacker and answer some basic questions such as was there only one gunman as officials believe? If all the bullets in the nightclub were fired from the same weapon, for instance, that might help answer that question.
Security camera footage appears to show a man dressed in black shooting and entering the club. And different footage showed an attacker inside wearing different clothes. The interior minister says the attacker changed clothes before fleeing - one of many unanswered questions.
For people here, another question is, when will these bloody attacks stop? The government's calling for unity, but people were still recovering from last month's explosion at a soccer stadium just down the road from here and then the shocking assassination of Russia's ambassador in Ankara and now this.
MARTIN: A grim scene there, clearly. What are we learning at this hour, Peter, about how Turkey may respond to this attack?
KENYON: Well, if this claim of responsibility by ISIS does hold up, one question would be, is there a connection to Turkey's military operations against the group in northern Syria? We might see at least a continuation of those strikes, if not, an escalation. We're seeing claims of that escalation already. There was a security meeting here yesterday. President Erdogan is promising the fight against terrorism will continue without let up. And today, Turkish media are reporting a joint Turkish and Russian airstrikes against ISIS targets inside northern Syria, they say, hitting more than 100 locations.
So, basically, the government's been taking a very hard line against what it calls an array of terrorist enemies. I mean, this includes not just ISIS, but Kurdish militants both in Turkey and Syria, far left groups, supporters of the cleric Fethullah Gulen. He's been blamed for last summer's failed coup attempt, which he denies. So it looks like there's been no big shift in policies, and a hard response is what's coming.
MARTIN: I mean, Peter, you've been in Istanbul now for several years. Can you just take a step back briefly and describe to us how Turkey has changed?
KENYON: Well, when I arrived in 2010, Turkey was still being held as a model for the Middle East - a functioning economically strong democracy run by pious Muslim leaders. In the years that followed, it's been crisis after crisis both involving internal politics and outside forces. And these days, Turkey is seen as having an increasingly authoritarian leader. Its involvement in Syria has made it a target of ISIS, there's a war with Kurdish militants going on and, of course, that failed coup attempt. So, yes, big changes indeed.
MARTIN: NPR's Peter Kenyon reporting from Istanbul. Thanks so much, Peter.
KENYON: Thanks, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Freelance journalist Austin Tice was taken captive in Syria in August of 2012. Aside from a video released five weeks after his capture, his parents have not seen or heard from him since. However, they've been given new information recently that's giving them new reasons to hope for his safe return in 2017. Austin's parents Debra and Marc Tice recently met with President Obama's Envoy for Hostage Affairs, a man named James O'Brien. I asked Marc and Debra to tell us what they could about their conversation with him.
MARC TICE: What he shared with us was what senator - our senator, John Cornyn, shared which is that it's the assessment of the United States government that Austin, our son, is alive, that he's still being held captive in Syria. And for that reason, we continue to ask our government and others to do everything they can to bring him home.
MARTIN: Senator John Cornyn, we should say, who's also been instrumental in working on this. So you know that he's alive.
DEBRA TICE: That means a lot, Rachel, just exactly the way that you just said it.
M. TICE: It's, you know - it's - we've never had any doubt. We have been confident from the time he first went missing, but it's fantastically uplifting to hear that same word from people in our government that can make that assessment and share that with us.
MARTIN: I understand that all these conversations are sensitive, but do you know any more about who is holding Austin? I mean, we've seen reports attributed to Reporters Without Borders that say Austin is not being held by ISIS, and there is some hint that his captors may be allied with the Syrian government. What can you tell us?
D. TICE: We can't tell you much, Rachel. You know, the most important thing that the bottom of that question, the question that you're asking behind that is, you know, what can be done on their end to resolve this situation and bring Austin safely home? But what we need is for those that are holding Austin to reach out and to let us know what needs to be done to bring him safely home.
MARTIN: Because you don't really know what his captors are demanding because you haven't been able to engage at that level of communication.
D. TICE: Exactly.
M. TICE: No, it's exactly right. And, you know, in the same way that we have been asking our government to do everything it can, we continue to reach out in whatever way we can, including this broadcast, to the Syrian government to ask them to do everything they can to locate Austin, do everything possible and hopefully work with our government to bring him home.
MARTIN: I understand you also met with President Obama this past summer. What was his message to you?
D. TICE: He assured us that it is a priority for him, that he is committed to doing this, that should it become necessary because we met with him in July that he would brief the incoming administration and make sure that Austin's return remained a high priority.
MARTIN: How have you two managed your own expectations, especially in light of this most recent news, this belief that Austin is alive? How do you internalize that...
D. TICE: Well...
MARTIN: ...And keep your expectations in check, I guess?
D. TICE: No, not at all. We don't try to contain our expectations or mitigate our hope or anything like that. We keep the light on, and we keep the sheets clean. You know, we keep the refrigerator stocked, so that when he walks in the door, we will be so ready to just hug him and get on with the next thing.
M. TICE: What about you, Marc? You know Austin's an extraordinary individual, even as I say that as his father, and so I have a lot of confidence in his strength of mind, his strength of spirit and heart and just looking forward to that big hug when he gets home.
MARTIN: Debra and Marc Tice are the parents of journalist Austin Tice. And we should also note a large banner calling for Austin's safe return has been mounted in front of the Newseum here in Washington, D.C. The banner will stay there until Austin Tice is returned safely to his family. Debra and Marc, thank you so much for talking with us.
M. TICE: Thank you, Rachel.
D. TICE: Thank you, Rachel. And we wish you all the best in the new year.
MARTIN: With all of us, know that we are wishing for Austin's safe return.
M. TICE: Thank you.
D. TICE: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. It's the new year meaning new resolutions, maybe a new workout routine. For Los Angeles residents, it means a new altered Hollywood sign reading Hollyweed. Yup. As we welcomed 2017, someone climbed the iconic hilltop sign and turned the two O's in wood to two E's. Now, as to why, maybe it was just a New Year's prank, but maybe it was a celebration of California's recent legalization of recreational pot. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There's been a lot of talk in the past year about hate crimes against minority groups. As we begin 2017, we wanted to hear how it feels to be a member of one of those groups being targeted right now, Muslim Americans. Rami Nashashibi leads a Chicago nonprofit called the Inner-City Muslim Action Network. When we reached out to him, in our conversation he brought up the San Bernardino shooting in December of 2015 when a Muslim couple shot and killed 14 people. Nashashibi told me a story about how that attack affected him from a distance. He said shortly after the shooting he was in a park on the south side of Chicago with his kids.
RAMI NASHASHIBI: As I typically always do with my children, when it comes time for one of the prayer times, I'll pray publicly. And I stood watching them play and became mindful of a couple of cars that were driving up. There was a moment where I paused, quite frankly, about whether or not this was the smartest thing to do. And one of my daughters caught me in that moment, and it was just an innocent question about why I was hesitating to pray. And...
MARTIN: She was calling you out.
NASHASHIBI: She was calling me out.
MARTIN: Nashashibi says, for him, that moment illustrated the complexity of what it means to be a Muslim American in the age of al-Qaida and ISIS. And at that time, the presidential election was just kicking into high gear.
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DONALD TRUMP: Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.
MARTIN: It was a refrain Trump repeated throughout the campaign. Last November, he also suggested that all Muslims in the country be included in some kind of government registry. But Nashashibi worries that singling out individuals based on their religion is tantamount to calling all Muslims terrorists.
NASHASHIBI: I get it. ISIS does effectively co-opt, appropriate parts of the Islamic tradition. There's no doubt. I mean, we see that unfortunately in all religious traditions. But I think the question for us is not to be blinded or naive to what is happening across the globe, but when it comes to language, language matters. And what my 10-year-old daughter and my 7-year-old daughter and my 5-year-old son grow up seeing on CNN, you know, Muslim terrorists, that matters. That has profound psychological effects on children.
MARTIN: We've seen all kinds of people go to Trump Tower to bend the president-elect's ear on a variety of issues. If you were granted 15 minutes with the next president, what would you say?
NASHASHIBI: On some level, I think I would say that whipping up the worst of the sentiments of America, using fear to mobilize people, at the end of the day will come back to haunt us, all of us, and that our community is not going to simply settle for being passive victims in this administration. We are going to organize. We are going to mobilize, and we're going to make sure our voices are heard.
MARTIN: Rami Nashashibi is the founder of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network based in Chicago. Rami, thank you so much for your time.
NASHASHIBI: Thank you, Rachel.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
At one time or another, many of us feel stuck, stuck in the wrong job, the wrong relationship, maybe the wrong city. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam has a story today about one possible solution that comes from Silicon Valley.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: After more than a decade of working in education administration, Christine Metzger awoke one day and realized she wasn't the person she wanted to be. She found what seemed like just the change she needed - a new job at a boarding school in England. She quit her job, sold her belongings and prepared to embark on her new life.
CHRISTINE METZGER: I was sleeping on an aerobed and had my three suitcases next to me. I was right about to leave Hoboken and be on my way, and I received a phone call from the folks in England saying we're really sorry, but we couldn't get you a work visa.
VEDANTAM: Instead of heading to England to start her new life, Christine found herself unemployed. The next job she found didn't have visa issues, but...
METZGER: It was a long process. And unfortunately, in the end, it turned out that the organization had a hiring freeze, and the board did not give permission to hire me.
VEDANTAM: Then the next position came - working for a nonprofit organization for the performing arts. This job she got.
METZGER: And then another transition came (laughter) a little earlier than I anticipated.
VEDANTAM: Christine was downsized. In fact, on the day she and I talked...
METZGER: Today is my last day at the organization.
VEDANTAM: She couldn't understand it. Here she was, an educated woman with years of experience under her belt, and inside she felt as rudderless as a college freshman. The pressure to discover her ideal life weighed heavily on her.
METZGER: I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that I made the exact right decision.
VEDANTAM: Christine is not alone. Lots of people feel the way she did at one point or another, lost and stuck. Psychologists and self-help gurus have tried all kinds of different advice for people like Christine, but recently, we heard a new idea from the tech world. It turns out that engineers and designers often face similar challenges when it comes to designing new products. How do you build something when you don't know what to build? Dave Evans used to work in Silicon Valley. One challenge he faced was in designing the Apple mouse.
DAVE EVANS: Should we have one button on the mouse or two buttons on the mouse?
VEDANTAM: Dave said that he and Steve Jobs and the other engineers at Apple quickly realized they actually had two problems to solve.
EVANS: Before you do problem solving, you have to do problem finding - what's the right thing to be working on?
VEDANTAM: The first challenge for the engineers was to figure out which kind of mouse users liked best. They built a couple of prototypes. Now, a prototype isn't just a model. It's a psychological tool.
EVANS: We reveal the assumptions we make that are probably wrong. We get to, as we call it, sneak up on the future and involve other people with your ideas.
VEDANTAM: It turned out people preferred one button. Now, figuring out how to build a mouse with only one button was a complicated engineering problem, but at least now the engineers knew where they were trying to go. This approach to innovation is called design thinking. A few years ago, Dave says he realized that design thinking might be useful outside the tech world too. He started teaching a course at Stanford University called designing your life. In college, many students ask themselves a really big question - what should I do with my life?
EVANS: When you can't know what you're doing - you can't navigate like a GPS would because you don't have a map and you don't have all the information - you have to wayfind. And wayfinding means taking one step at a time knowing something about the direction you're going, trying a few things, tuning it up and then doing it again and doing it again.
VEDANTAM: Dave's students often come to him saying they don't know what the right path is. He tells them...
EVANS: There's more than one of you in there. So the problem with the current approach that lots of people are taking is it starts with the wrong question. And the wrong question is how do I figure out that one best solution to my life? There is one exclusive, unique, optimal version of me, and I'm supposed to already know it, and I'm probably already late. And how do I figure it out? And how would I know if I knew? How can I be sure? And we think all those questions are the wrong questions.
VEDANTAM: So this is the guy Christine turned to for help. She went to a workshop Dave was running in New York. He asked her and the other participants to come up with three different paths they could realistically pursue.
EVANS: Once you realize none of us knows the future, we're making it up as we go along, so let's get really good at making it up as we go along. In fact, let's design it as we go along. That turns out to work much more effectively.
VEDANTAM: Now, there are many things in our lives we just can't control, like Christine not being able to get a work visa or being laid off from her job. People often spend years feeling frustrated by their constraints. But Dave says much of the time these are gravity problems.
EVANS: I happen to be a cyclist, and I'm getting older, so I'm doing that thing of putting on a little extra weight. And it's starting to bother me, so if I said, Shankar, I've got this terrible problem. It's gravity.
VEDANTAM: It might sound ridiculous, but Dave says...
EVANS: A lot of people are in fact dealing with a problem that's just like gravity.
VEDANTAM: So let's say your problem is that you desperately want to be a musician, but you can't make any money doing that.
EVANS: That's not a problem. That's a fact.
VEDANTAM: Dave says, once you accept that fact, you can find ways to design your life around it. You can figure out how to live on much less money while being a rising, starving musician.
EVANS: Or I could ask the question, since I'm never going to get to be a professional musician, how can I craft a lifestyle that keeps my income going while making my avocation, the thing I do for love not money called music, as satisfying as possible? That's a life I could design.
VEDANTAM: This is the heart of design thinking. It isn't about becoming your perfect self. It's about looking very honestly at your circumstances and asking what room you have to maneuver. Think about those designers in Silicon Valley. They're always releasing programs in beta. The idea is you try something very practical, something you can do quickly, send it out into the world and then learn from how it performs. You come back, iterate and then go back into the world again. As for Christine Metzger, she still doesn't have it all figured out, but she says this idea really helped her think about her problems differently.
METZGER: In fact, I liked what he said about with design thinking your goal is to fail early and often.
VEDANTAM: Fail early and often and then try again. Shankar Vedantam, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROBERT DE BORON'S "CHIRU")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump is expected to sit down with top intelligence officials this week to talk about their findings that Russia interfered in the U.S. election. It might be kind of an awkward conversation considering Donald Trump is still casting doubt on the assessment that Russia hacked into U.S. computers in order to influence the outcome of the vote. Trump keeps praising Vladimir Putin meanwhile and says it's time for everyone to just, quote, "move on." NPR's Scott Horsley joins us now to talk about this and more of what's in store as the new year gets underway in Washington. Happy new year, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Happy new year to you, Rachel.
MARTIN: So the U.S. intelligence community continues to build its case that Russia is responsible for cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee among other entities. Donald Trump is not convinced, is he?
HORSLEY: That's right. You know, late last week, we got the most detailed report to date on what the U.S. intelligence community is calling GRIZZLY STEPPE. That is malicious cyber activity carried out by Russian intelligence targeting the DNC and other government and private computer networks. You know, back in October, the director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security had fingered Russia as being behind those cyberattacks.
Now we have the FBI joining in that conclusion and detailing a range of cyber activity carried out by Russian operatives as far back as the summer of 2015 and as recently as this November, days after the U.S. election. But Donald Trump remains skeptical. He talked to reporters about this over the weekend while attending a New Year's Eve party at his Florida resort.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: I know a lot about hacking, and hacking is a very hard thing to prove, so it could be somebody else. And I also know things that other people don't know. And so they cannot be sure of this situation.
HORSLEY: Trump argues that U.S. intelligence agencies have been mistaken in the past. He points to the claim of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq for example. But this is a remarkable thing, Rachel, to have the president-elect questioning the consensus finding of the entire U.S. intelligence community. Trump and his team have described this focus on Russian meddling as an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of his election.
MARTIN: And Trump went out of his way to praise Vladimir Putin, tweeting that he always knew Putin was, quote, "very smart." How is that going over with Republicans?
HORSLEY: This is likely to be a source of friction. Trump has spoken frequently about wanting to work more closely with Vladimir Putin, but Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan issued a statement last week saying, quote, "Russia does not share America's interests." In fact, it has consistently sought to undermine them. GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell sounded a similar note, saying the Russians are not our friends. Arizona Senator John McCain, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, plans to hold hearings later this week on Russian hacking.
To be sure, congressional Republicans have often been critical of the Obama administration for being too soft against Russia. But after the White House ordered new sanctions last week and expelled dozens of suspected Russian agents, you have top GOP lawmakers who sound more closely aligned with the Obama administration than they do with the president-elect of their own party.
MARTIN: OK. So we're going to keep following that no doubt. Let's switch gears a little bit now. President Obama returns to Washington today from Hawaii where he was on vacation with his family. He's going to be up on Capitol Hill this week. What's he up to?
HORSLEY: The president will be meeting with House and Senate Democrats on Wednesday. And sources say they'll be mapping out their defense as Republicans work to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The GOP can repeal some but not all of Obamacare with a simple majority. And Republican lawmakers plan to start that process right away. It's still not clear, of course, what that - when that repeal would take effect or what Republicans plan to replace Obamacare with. So Democrats will be looking to highlight the popular provisions of the law and its success in extending insurance coverage to some 20 million Americans while driving the uninsured rate to an all-time low.
In the run-up to the new year, we actually saw a fairly robust sign of activity on the government-run insurance exchanges as a lot of people signed up for coverage in 2017, even though the long-term future of Obamacare is very much in doubt.
MARTIN: So what can we expect from the president? He just has under three weeks left in his tenure left in the White House. What do you know about how he's going to use that time?
HORSLEY: Well, I don't think he's going to coast into retirement. He often uses the phrase run through the tape, so expect him to be working right up to his last day in office doing what he can to secure his legacy, even if some of those actions could be reversed by the incoming president. In just the last month, we've seen the Obama administration set new limits on offshore oil drilling, declare new national monuments, OK the transfer of more inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison and grant clemency to more nonviolent drug offenders.
Now, in some cases, those measures don't go as far as the president would have liked. Guantanamo's going to still be open most likely when he leaves office. Clemency is no substitute for broader criminal justice reform, but he'll do what he can with the powers and the time he has left.
MARTIN: NPR's Scott Horsley. Thanks as always, Scott.
HORSLEY: My pleasure, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Not so many years ago, Turkey was a shining star of the Middle East, a thriving democracy, a booming economy, a cosmopolitan bridge between Europe and Asia. Istanbul's Reina nightclub was for many a symbol of that Turkey. Sunday's attack on the club, which killed at least 39 people including 25 foreigners, makes it a symbol now of how Turkey is changing. Sinan Ulgen is chairman of the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul. We reached him shortly after ISIS claimed responsibility for the nightclub attack.
SINAN ULGEN: Well, the reason why we believed even before the Islamic States took ownership of this attack are firstly the nature of the target. A popular nightclub in Istanbul has been targeted. And there's been indiscriminate use of violence, of terror. So in many ways, it did point in the direction of the Islamic State. And this certainly comes in the wake of a change in Turkish policy where Turkish policy became much more hawkish towards the Islamic State. And there's an ongoing cross-border military operation that is targeting the Islamic State territory in Syria.
MARTIN: It has been a brutal year in Turkey. Terrorists attacks have also come from Kurdish groups. Just three weeks ago, a double bombing outside of a soccer stadium killed 38 people. Can you remind us who these Kurdish groups are and what are their objectives?
ULGEN: Indeed so there has been a number of terror attacks in the past year. Some of them have been claimed by the Islamic States. Others have been claimed by Kurdish terrorist entities. The terror campaign really started in June 2015 when the negotiations between the Turkish government and the political representatives of the Kurdish broke down. So that's when we saw really an upscale in this type of terror campaign.
MARTIN: There was an attempted coup on President Erdogan this past summer. Thousands of military personnel, hundreds of thousands of civil servants lost their jobs, along with political dissidents. But how did the coup affect Turkey's ability to engage in counterterrorism efforts, to stop threats like we have seen coming from Kurdish groups or from ISIS?
ULGEN: Well, the fact that after the coup Turkey legitimately, in some cases, tried to cleanse the administration from the influence of the Gulenists who are seen as the entity responsible for this attack against Turkish democracy.
MARTIN: You're talking about Fethullah Gulen. He's the Islamic cleric based in Pennsylvania who Erdogan is blaming for that coup.
ULGEN: Yes, indeed. So once the governments started this large-scale efforts to cleanse the administration from the influence of the Gulen followers, this seemingly affected the ability of some of state structures in law enforcement but also in security overall and because of the difficulty of replacing these administration with competent people at short notice. And this is one key aspect of the ongoing vulnerability of Turkey in terms of trying to provide better security to its own people against this twin threat of terrorism.
MARTIN: As you sit here at the beginning of 2017, what do you see ahead for your country? What truths might it have to confront?
ULGEN: Well, I think two main requirements here. One is that Turkey really needs to downscale the current level of political polarization because that has become very inimical in terms of providing better security for its own citizens. And secondly, in addition to ongoing efforts at counterterrorism, whether it is the Kurdish side and more particularly vis-a-vis the Islamic State, Turkey really needs to develop a more comprehensive framework for counter-radicalization because unless this is really put into place, efforts just to preempt these attacks by focusing solely on counterterrorism is not likely to be sufficient.
MARTIN: What does it feel like in Istanbul today?
ULGEN: It certainly does not feel like a new year. The new year was expected to bring new hope. And we have really started the new year with this tragedy, almost a continuation of the bad moments of 2016 that we were all willing to forget.
MARTIN: Sinan Ulgen is chairman of the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul. He joined us earlier via Skype.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUFIT ERDAG'S "OGHLAN OGHLAN")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. We all have to answer security questions online from time to time, even Santa Claus. A resident of North Pole, Alaska, whose legal name is Santa Claus recently got a notice from Facebook saying he needed to prove his identity. Mr. Claus provided his passport and driver's license. Facebook gave him back his account and an apology saying, we're sorry. Our team processes millions of reports each week, and we sometimes get things wrong. No word on if Santa is keeping Facebook on the naughty list. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump says he has new information about Russia's efforts to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, and he intends to share that information in the next couple of days. Late last week, President Obama responded to the Russian hacking with an order to expel 3,500 diplomats, close two Russian compounds in the U.S. and sanction several government operations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin countered by doing nothing. He didn't expel any American diplomats. In fact, he invited them and their families over to the Kremlin for New Years celebrations. We're going to check in now with longtime Russian journalist Vladimir Pozner. Mr. Pozner usually talks to us from Moscow, but this morning, he's interrupting his vacation in Argentina to join us. Mr. Pozner, happy new year.
VLADIMIR POZNER: Happy new year right back to you. I'm in Patagonia surrounded by half a million penguins.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
POZNER: I'm trying to interview them, but they don't talk to me. I don't know why.
MARTIN: (Laughter) Don't know a lot about U.S.-Russian relations probably either. So let's talk about the end of 2016 when it comes to the U.S.-Russian dynamic. It went out with a bang, not a whimper. How is all of this being perceived in Moscow?
POZNER: Well, you know, the general feeling I get is that, first of all, the reaction to President Obama's sanctions was first one of almost disbelief and then people started to laugh. And the comment was very sarcastic (ph) that, you know, here's a man who was on his way out who is a loser now vindictively is trying to punish Russia for something that he says has been going on for 10 years. And if it had, why did he wait until now to act on it? Really, I would say even though people - and there are some in Russia, believe me, who liked Obama. Even among them, there's this feeling that, well, why did we do this? It really makes no sense whatsoever.
And, of course, Mr. Putin now can play the very clever game doing the tit-for-tat, which is something that's always been done over the years. One country expels diplomats. The other countries followed suit. He comes out and says we're not going to do this, clearly indicating that he hopes for better relations with the United States thanks to the election of Donald Trump as president and maybe even thinks that Donald Trump, once he becomes president, will say forget about these sanctions. We're going to negate them. So that's pretty much, I think, the general feeling.
MARTIN: So back to the hacking. U.S. intelligence agencies say they have concluded that Russia is responsible for this interference in the U.S. election. Russia, though, continues at every turn to deny any role in this. Have they been able to show any evidence that bolsters their claim?
POZNER: I've heard this now - I'm different from Donald Trump. I'm no expert in internet things and I can't say that I know this or I know that. But I have spoken with people who work for Mr. Kaspersky. I don't know if you're familiar with that name, but he runs an outfit (ph) which is one of the three top antivirus, anti-hacking agencies in the world. And I asked him is it really possible - it is possible to identify where hacking is coming from? Can you actually pinpoint it? Have you got the real possibility to do that?
And the answer I got was that, no, nobody does. What we can pinpoint is the language it's coming in from, say, Russian or English or Chinese. And, of course, anyone can use any language, but we cannot - as yet we do not yet have the technical ability to really say here's where it's coming from. So with that in mind, I don't think that the U.S. intelligence agencies can furnish that definite proof. And certainly the Russians cannot furnish proof that they didn't do it.
MARTIN: Just very briefly, these two men, Trump and Putin, seem to be in a honeymoon. Can it last?
POZNER: Frankly, I would hope it will, but I don't think so. First of all, it's not really a honeymoon 'cause you can't have a honeymoon when you're at a distance with each other. You've got to be a bit closer to a honeymoon, I believe. They haven't yet met face to face. They haven't got a real feeling for each other whether there's any chemistry involved there, and that's very important, you know. When Gorbachev met with Reagan, they really took to each other. And that led to some of the great things that they did achieve.
MARTIN: Russian journalist Vladimir Pozner, Mr. Pozner mentioned Kaspersky in our conversation. We should note NPR runs Kaspersky anti-virus programs on its computers and Kaspersky is a cooperate sponsor of NPR News. Thanks again, Mr. Pozner.
POZNER: Thank you. Happy new year to you. Bye.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
When older people are confronted with the frailties that can come with age, they often look to family. According to the AARP, more than 30 million Americans care for at least one aging family member. But increasingly, older adults can find themselves without any family to rely on. NPR's Ina Jaffe explains why this isn't just an issue of more older people and fewer children.
INA JAFFE, BYLINE: It's not just that baby boomers had smaller families than previous generations. Many of their adult children moved away, so they're not nearby. There are also fewer spouses to step in because baby boomers divorce more than previous generations. So for many older adults, having family to fall back on when they need help just isn't possible.
MARTIN: So what are the other options?
JAFFE: Well, there's a growing industry of professional home care providers. You can (laughter) you can hear the names of a couple of them in NPR's funding credits. But that can cost around $20 an hour, which is not affordable for everybody. So sometimes it's friends who fill the gap, and recently I met a group who did just that.
ELAINE FOGEL: You didn't need the queen, did you?
JIM THILLMAN: I needed the jack.
JAFFE: This is the weekly pinochle game at The LGBT Community Center of the Desert in Palm Springs. There are around a dozen people who come to the game regularly, most of them gay, some not, all older.
FOGEL: He doesn't haves aces. He doesn't have a double pinochle.
JAFFE: That's Elaine Fogel. She's 81. She has no relatives nearby. She never married, never had children. And a few months ago, she had a health crisis.
FOGEL: I woke up one night, and I couldn't catch my breath.
JAFFE: Turns out she has COPD - chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She was already using a walker. Now she also drags an oxygen generator with her wherever she goes, so no way could she move a refrigerator. That's what her friend, 69-year-old Jim Thillman, is for.
THILLMAN: We had to move it about 15 feet so we could get in and get the shelf level. That was strange.
FOGEL: That was fun.
JAFFE: Fogel says Thillman took care of the mechanical stuff. Her 63-year-old friend Mark Swanson cooked for her.
FOGEL: Mark was coming over three, four times a week bringing me real beautiful homemade meals.
JAFFE: Anything she wanted, says Swanson.
MARK SWANSON: Or whatever I was having for dinner.
JAFFE: Elaine Fogel can cook her own meals now, but she's not allowed to turn on her gas stove. It could be an explosive combination with her ever-present oxygen machine. So another friend, 78-year-old George Sellers, and his partner gave her a crockpot. Sellers says for older gay men like himself who came of age when families and society may not have been so accepting, friends often are family.
GEORGE SELLERS: And I think the older we get the more we realize that we do need a circle of friends that are going to help out.
JAFFE: None of the help that Elaine Fogel got from her pinochle friends was planned. She morbidly jokes about what her options would have been if they hadn't stepped in.
FOGEL: I signed up to donate my body to science. They'll come and take my body and everything.
JAFFE: Joke or not, it shows how important, even life-saving, friendships can be.
MARTIN: And we're joined now on the line with Ina to talk more about her story. Ina, you know, we think of older people as needing care, but this shows that part of getting older is giving care, too, right?
JAFFE: Exactly, and, you know, when I was talking to the pinochle group, none of them had specific plans for how they would get the care they needed if and when the time came. So here's a shout-out to our listeners. If you're dealing with these issues, we'd like to know about it. Email caregiving@npr.org. That's caregiving - all one word - @npr.org.
MARTIN: Thanks so much, Ina. NPR's Ina Jaffe who covers aging.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARCUS D.'S "KINDRED SPIRIT")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Public education could be in for some big changes this year. President-Elect Donald Trump has brought new ideas, among them he's thrown his support behind charter schools. And to find out what all this could mean, we turned to NPR education correspondent Claudio Sanchez. Claudio has some predictions, including that we'll see a big fight over the billions of dollars that flow from the federal government to school districts across the country.
CLAUDIO SANCHEZ, BYLINE: The Trump administration is likely to encourage more private, for-profit groups to compete with public schools for that money. And as Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, warns there will be a war over this money.
GREENE: A war. Now, the American Federation of Teachers is a big union, right. I mean...
SANCHEZ: They're one of the two big unions.
GREENE: So how are they - how are they responding here? Do they have plans on what to do?
SANCHEZ: Both the AFT and National Education Association, the other union, have vowed to oppose much of Trump's education agenda. Now, the biggest fights will unfold in Republican-led states where lawmakers have long argued that unions stand in the way of promising reforms because they're more interested in their dues-paying members than they are in children.
GREENE: OK, so the union's very angry. But, I mean, Claudio, we really can't talk about school choice without charter schools, right? They play a big role in that debate.
SANCHEZ: Oh, of course. It was really one of the cornerstones, if not the cornerstone, of his whole choice agenda. Now, the Trump administration's unconditional support for privately run, publicly funded charter schools is, I think, going to split the 25-year-old movement. Conservative sponsors of charters will side with Trump and his nominee for secretary of education. That's Betsy DeVos. She's a champion of charters in her home state of Michigan. Now, they're going to push for a major expansion of charter schools by shifting, not necessarily by increasing but by shifting more federal dollars to charters and by pressuring states to lift the cap on their growth. About 22 states have some kind of cap on the growth of charter schools. Bottom line is this, David - many conservatives in the movement view public education as a government monopoly and are intent on putting traditional public schools out of business through competition. This is their chance.
GREENE: Let's just talk briefly about college. We had so many people on our program who were just racking up so much debt and wondering whether a four-year college was worth it to them, if they should have put out all that money and just be mired in debt. Where does that go under Donald Trump?
SANCHEZ: I don't think it goes anywhere. I think the discussion about paying for college and the incredible amount of debt that some students incur, I think that's going to certainly be in the background, but I think that because he made so many promises about jobs growing, the manufacturing industry in this country, community colleges come into the picture here. I predict that community colleges will finally get the attention they've been clamoring for because for years they've been an afterthought, really, in higher education, even though they enroll more than half of all students who go on to some kind of post-secondary education after high school.
So community colleges' mission to educate and retrain Americans from all walks of life will likely get a lot of support from the Trump administration because he promised that he was going to try and connect higher education more closely to the jobs that are being created and the training that's going to be needed.
GREENE: Which often happens in community colleges.
SANCHEZ: Exactly. Now, the question is will it be more lip service? Or there may be a good chance that this is really going to help community colleges get more recognition and support to fulfill their mission.
GREENE: OK, that's NPR senior education correspondent Claudio Sanchez. Thanks for your predictions as always.
SANCHEZ: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF LITTLE PEOPLE'S "BASIQUE")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
On this program, we have been talking about the refugee crisis. It is the largest displacement of people since World War II. This year, the United States took in more than 85,000 refugees. Voluntary agencies have been helping to resettle them, and private companies have been employing refugees.
We're going to talk about that side of the story with NPR's Deborah Amos, who has been reporting on resettlement in the United States. Deb, good morning.
DEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: Good morning.
GREENE: So I know you've been following this story around the country in different places, but in the city of Chicago, you're looking at some companies who have been hiring refugees. Who are these companies?
AMOS: In Chicago, it's Tyson's Food, Scrub, a company that runs a cleaning service - also some of the biggest hotel chains in Chicago, even Trump International Hotel. These jobs are important to newcomers because the U.S. Resettlement Program requires them to find employment quickly because their benefits run out within months.
GREENE: OK, so it's a process that happens pretty quickly. And, Deb, you visited a factory that makes cheesecake in Chicago. This is not a Cheesecake Factory restaurant, this is something else.
AMOS: Yes, it's Chicago's largest cheesecake company, and at times they've had dozens of refugees on the line. And here's their story.
You have to dress up to see how Eli's Cheesecake is made like a scientist - white coat, covered shoes and hair. A hand wash is a must before stepping onto the high-tech factory floor. These famous cheesecakes are shipped across the country and around the world.
How many cheesecakes do you make every day?
MARK SCHULMAN: You know, I think in a day we could make like 300,000 portions, so it's a lot of products.
AMOS: That's Mark Shulman, president of Eli's. He says he still uses his father's simple recipe, but now the mixing and baking is all high-tech so the 220 employees have to be highly skilled. He recruits about 15 percent of his workers from refugees resettled in Chicago, those with college degrees and technical backgrounds.
SCHULMAN: When you look at a refugee coming, it is - it isn't what that person is on the day they arrive, it's what they can become.
AMOS: One example is Elias Kasongo, who arrived at the bakery in 1994. Like every refugee here, he was fleeing a war zone. For him, it was the Democratic Republic of Congo.
ELIAS KASONGO: I've been here at Eli's for the past 22 years. This is my home, yeah. It's a beautiful thing.
AMOS: Kasongo went from the dish room to the executive suites. Now he's Eli's purchasing manager, pricing Madagascar vanilla and organic cream cheese. He also serves on the board of RefugeeOne, a Chicago nonprofit that helps refugees start new lives. When I look at the list of some of the employees and their home countries, they come from the world's toughest conflicts.
So we've got Iraq, Iraq, Bhutan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Congo, Burma - that's a lot.
KASONGO: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
SCHULMAN: These are great performers, great people.
AMOS: Here on the factory floor, the mixing bowls are as big as bathtubs. A two-story conveyor belt delivers cooled cakes, thousands a day ready for toppings and boxes. To make sure the production runs on time, there's a production leader - Zemira - from Bosnia.
What's your last name?
ZEMIRA BAJREKTAREVIC: Bajrektarevic.
AMOS: Did you come as a refugee?
BAJREKTAREVIC: Yes, 1999.
AMOS: She's a manager now, but that's not where she started. She was hired because of her technical background, but didn't speak much English.
BAJREKTAREVIC: When I first came I work in cleaning in the office. After six months. I came here.
AMOS: As her language improved, she was promoted. A common story here, says Shulman. Refugees tend to make long-term commitments to work at a time when there's a talent shortage for high-tech jobs.
SCHULMAN: The change in jobs in our industry are they're more technical. People who come as refugees have great skills.
AMOS: And are highly motivated, he says. A refugee has to be motivated just to get to the U.S. It can take years of interviews and security screenings. Then there are the hurdles of a new country, a new language and culture. It's hard work, but it paid off for Ray Hermez. He was resettled in Chicago five years ago.
RAY HERMEZ: I'm - come from Iraq.
AMOS: You came as a refugee?
HERMEZ: Yeah. I came as a refugee, but now I'm a citizen. I got my citizen like in January this year.
AMOS: It's not charity, says Schulman. It's good business.
SCHULMAN: We have the success stories. I mean, we've celebrated citizenship ceremonies with a number of our associates. We've seen individuals have children, you know, buy homes and saying, hey, you know, who's the American here?
AMOS: The hiring strategy at Eli's is used at other well-known American companies - Marriott International, Wells Fargo, Western Union, says Kathleen Newland at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.
KATHLEEN NEWLAND: Employers who have awakened to the potential of refugees have been very satisfied with their experiences. You know, they find that they're hardworking, that they're loyal, tend to stay in the job longer. It's a win-win.
AMOS: This is the dish room, where the cake pans are hand scrubbed. It's where Elias Kosanga started more than 20 years ago. He turned a chance into a career.
KASONGO: Just imagine if I didn't have the job. What would I be, a homeless somewhere? So it takes someone to take a chance on you and say, hey, let's see if he has a talent. It takes the talent.
GREENE: All right, listening there to my colleague Deborah Amos who's still on the line. And, Deb, important to remember probably numbers wise, tens of millions of people displaced over the past few years. This is just one factory in one city.
AMOS: It's true. But little by little, more Fortune 500 companies are starting to recruit refugees. One example is Oliver Wyman, a global consulting firm, recruited five refugees for the first time this year. Listen to John Romeo. He runs the North American division. And he says hiring refugees is a diversity hire. Here's what he said.
JOHN ROMEO: Many refugees have shown a determination, a perseverance that is so critical to being successful in your career. We'd love to hire more including in the U.S.
GREENE: He said diversity hiring. We're talking about, like, religion, race, ethnicity, or what?
AMOS: You know, that's what I thought when he first said it, but no, he means something different. He means that the experience of being a refugee, crossing a border, thinking on your feet, surviving are all the things that make a good employee, a successful employee.
GREENE: Oh, I see, that's the diverse experience that he's talking about, which makes them different.
AMOS: Exactly.
GREENE: OK. That's NPR's Deborah Amos. Deb, thanks as always.
AMOS: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF LITTLE WEST SONG, "FLOW")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
The state of Texas may soon adopt a bathroom bill very much like the one in North Carolina that stirred up a lot of controversy. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has vowed to pass a bill requiring transgender people to use the restroom that corresponds to the sex on their birth certificate.
This proposal is threatening to split the Texas GOP and also drive a bigger wedge between the state's business interests and Lone Star evangelicals, as NPR's Wade Goodwyn reports from Dallas.
WADE GOODWYN, BYLINE: It's been no secret in Texas that since it passed last March, North Carolina's bathroom bill was intensely admired by the evangelical wing of the Texas GOP which includes many of the state's most powerful politicians, including Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. So Texas watched with particular interest as the Tar Heel State came politically unglued over the summer as PayPal and Deutsche Bank canceled planned expansions in North Carolina, the NBA and NCAA moved all-star and tournament games out of the state and entertainers in Hollywood turned up their noses.
Forbes estimated that the backlash cost North Carolina more than $600 million in the first six months after the bathroom bill was signed by Governor Pat McCrory, who was then promptly beaten on November 8. But that hasn't fazed Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. In fact, just before Christmas when the North Carolina legislature failed in its attempt to pass legislation which would have essentially nullified its bathroom bill, Patrick sent a note applauding the collapse of the effort.
But Texas's business community says it will do everything in its power to stop Texas from passing a bathroom bill. The Texas Association of Business estimates the backlash could cost the state up to $8 billion in economic impact. Chris Wallace is the association's president.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHRIS WALLACE: The message from the Texas business community is loud and clear. Protecting Texas from billions of dollars in losses is simple. Don't pass unnecessary laws that discriminate against Texans and our visitors.
GOODWYN: The Texas legislature convenes in Austin in eight days.
Wade Goodwyn, NPR News, Dallas
(SOUNDBITE OF GLEN PORTER SONG, "TRANSIENT")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
This country's 150th Congress begins its work today, and this is a new era here in Washington with Republicans controlling, well, almost everything, both the House and Senate and soon the White House.
Before the new Congress assembles today at noon, House Republicans have already taken a controversial vote behind closed doors. The vote held late last night would weaken an independent ethics office that investigates complaints against members of the House. A majority of Republicans say this new rule would make investigations more transparent and more fair. But Democrats say it runs counter to President-elect Donald Trump's pledge to, quote, "drain the swamp."
And let's talk about this with NPR's congressional correspondent Susan Davis who's in the studio this morning. Sue, good morning.
SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: So what happened here? What was this vote, and what does it do?
DAVIS: So at the beginning of every Congress, the House has to vote on the rules that govern itself, and the majority party, which is Republicans in this case, take a first bite of that apple. And they met last night to make changes to those House rules before it goes to a vote today. And Bob Goodlatte is a Republican from Virginia, and he made this proposal, which was not known ahead of time. We didn't know this was going to happen last night.
GREENE: This took some of his Republican colleagues by surprise presumably.
DAVIS: And including their party leadership, and effectively what this says is the Office of Congressional Ethics can no longer - which is an outside group, it is not governed by Congress - that it can no longer investigate anonymous complaints made against members of Congress, that the existing Health (ph) Ethics Committee that is made up of members of Congress can tell it when to or when not to start investigations, and it can make fewer things public that it used to be able to disclose in terms of how many investigations they had and who they were investigating.
GREENE: This sounds very important. So there was an independent body that would investigate complaints, ethics complaints, against lawmakers. Now, a House committee run by actual lawmakers, Republican lawmakers themselves. Or actually this committee is actually divided evenly between Republicans and Democrats, right?
DAVIS: The existing House Ethics Committee is evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.
GREENE: Oh, OK, so a bipartisan committee (unintelligible).
DAVIS: It is a bipartisan committee. And it's created that way to eliminate one party from having more power. So that is the Republicans' argument. Well, they say, look, it's gives the House Ethics Committee more power over this committee, but that's the way it should be, that this is a bipartisan committee. In some ways, their work has been redundant. The outside - this outside group cannot independently punish members. They can only make recommendations to the Ethics Committee to do that. It's just sort of the first step in an investigations process.
GREENE: What is the argument for this? I mean, the optics of this are not that great if you have lawmakers saying we want to weaken the independent body that investigates us.
DAVIS: Yes. It does not look good, particularly when you have Donald Trump, who had campaigned on this drain the swamp message and changing the way Washington works.
GREENE: This almost seems like it's protecting the swamp in a way.
DAVIS: (Laughter) Well, the OCE was created in 2008, and it came out of - the 2006 midterm elections was an era in which then minority leader who became Speaker Nancy Pelosi campaigned again on draining the swamp. She used the exact same language Donald Trump did.
GREENE: As Donald Trump.
DAVIS: And this office was created in response to a series of scandals that happened in Washington, if you remember the lobbyist Jack Abramoff who received a lot of attention then. And there was a number of lawmakers who were investigated in - with their relations to him and to other bribery scandals. And there was just this era where the public was really frustrated with Washington.
And then President Obama and House - then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi helped pass this law which created the OCE, which was to say to the public, you know, it wasn't that the Ethics Committee inside Congress wasn't working, but sometimes the problem when you have equally divided bipartisan committees is there's almost a truce. Nobody wants to be the party that actually turns on the other. So the House Ethics Committee, the criticism against it was that it was just sort of feckless and maybe an outside group was needed to sort of give it a nudge to make sure it did these investigations.
GREENE: OK, so it doesn't look good in some ways to get rid of this independent body. What is the argument for getting rid of it? I mean, it sounds like this congressman who proposed it is saying that it would be more transparent if they get rid of this body. How would that work?
DAVIS: Yeah, and that was Goodlatte's argument, and a lot of the Republicans that supported this had been subject to investigations by the OCE and were very frustrated by that process. One of their points is that, you know, in any other proceeding, if you are accused of something, you have a right to challenge your accuser. And if you - but if someone can anonymously file complaints against you, that forces you to hire counsel, to spend money, to defend yourself but you don't even know who's making the accusation against you.
And we should say that overt - since 2008, when this was created, there have been Democrats that have also criticized this process who have said it is not fair that people can accuse us of wrongdoing, and we don't have the same due process rights we would have in other courts or other proceedings.
GREENE: This seemed to catch even Speaker of the House Paul Ryan by surprise. I mean, what does that suggest about how much control he has over his caucus heading into this new Congress?
DAVIS: That's right. He, the speaker, I'm told, in this closed-door meeting advised against it, said it's never good for the House or for Congress to make changes to this kind of process without bipartisan buy-in. If you're going to say the Ethics Committee - the ethics process in Congress is bipartisan...
GREENE: We should talk about it.
DAVIS: We should talk about it, and you should bring in at least members of the Ethics Committee to have a say in that. They overrode him. You know, a fair number of Republicans voted against doing this, but a majority of the majority, which is a phrase we hear a lot, decided to do it. This will get a full vote today on the House floor in Congress. It's a question of whether they have the votes for the rules package.
The House will also vote today to elect Paul Ryan, speaker of the new Congress. And of course he is expected to easily get that. Whether or not there is defections on the floor for either him or Nancy Pelosi, who also received some pushback from her members, remains to be seen.
GREENE: OK. And then your busy (laughter) - your busy year begins with the Republicans ready to repeal Obamacare and get their agenda going.
DAVIS: And actually get some work done.
GREENE: OK. NPR congressional correspondent Susan Davis. Sue, thanks.
DAVIS: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Residents of Shanghai are trying to keep their city honest with the help of big brother. There's a new app that uses troves of data the government has collected on citizens and businesses, and they use it to rate how trustworthy they are. This comes as China is preparing to roll out a nationwide social credit system that's raised all kinds of concerns about privacy. Here's NPR's Rob Schmitz.
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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Foreign language spoken).
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: The Honest Shanghai app was announced over state-run television in November. It appeared during honesty week, a week-long celebration of virtuous behavior organized by Shanghai's government.
Here's how the app works. You sign up using your national ID number. The app uses facial recognition software to locate troves of your personal data collected by the government, and 24 hours later, you're given one of three public credit scores - very good, good or bad.
SHAO ZHIQING: (Through interpreter) We want to make Shanghai a global city of excellence.
SCHMITZ: Shao Zhiqing is deputy director of Shanghai's Commission of Economy and Informatization, which oversees the Honest Shanghai app.
SHAO: (Through interpreter) Through this app, we hope our residents learn they'll be rewarded if they're honest. That will lead to a positive energy in society.
SCHMITZ: Shao says Honest Shanghai draws on 2,000 to 3,000 items of information collected from nearly 100 government entities to determine an individual's public credit score. A good score allows users to collect rewards, like discounted airline tickets. A bad score could lead to problems getting loans and getting seats on planes and trains. Shao says Honest Shanghai will someday search beyond government records for other personal data.
SHAO: (Through interpreter) The government is not omnipotent. In order to give a well-rounded rating for each resident, we'll need to tap the market for data. We'll look to industry associations, private companies and social media.
SCHMITZ: Honest Shanghai is one of three dozen social credit systems run by local governments throughout China. They're part of a goal by China's central government to construct a nationwide social credit system by 2020. But skeptics wonder how far this will go before Honest Shanghai becomes paranoid Shanghai.
ZHU DAKE: (Through interpreter) The government asks people to be honest, but it excludes itself from such scrutiny.
SCHMITZ: Zhu Dake is a humanities professor at Tongji University in Shanghai.
ZHU: (Through interpreter) The government should be watched as well, but who's watching them? Should we develop another app that allows us to monitor them? If we did, they'd accuse us of breaking the law.
SCHMITZ: Zhu says the unilateral grading from a nationwide social credit system could lead to what he calls credit totalitarianism.
ZHU: (Through interpreter) You're wrong if I say so. You have bad credit if I say so. Where will this lead? They could easily expand the criteria and start judging people on moral or ideological grounds. They're using modern technology to create a vision of Orwell's 1984.
SCHMITZ: I asked Shanghai city official Shao about this. He pointed out that the app at this stage is completely voluntary. Plus...
SHAO: (Through interpreter) The government isn't rating people. It's done by a third party. We share government data and they decide what it means.
SCHMITZ: That third party is a software company named Zhengxin Fangsheng. A representative named Wu said his company wouldn't have worked on the Honest Shanghai app unless the government asked it to. So yes, Wu said, the government has every intention to rate its residents public credit. On Shanghai's streets, nobody I spoke to had heard of the Honest Shanghai app, but everyone seemed to like the idea. Here's saleswoman Joyce Hu.
JOYCE HU: (Through interpreter) It sounds like it will help improve the quality of citizens in the long run. As long as it doesn't violate my privacy, I'm OK with it.
SCHMITZ: Down the road, 24-year-old Xuan Zixi had some questions about Shanghai's government prying into his personal information.
XUAN ZIXI: (Through interpreter) Is it like what the American government does where they monitor what the citizens are doing all the time? It's like that, right?
SCHMITZ: As long as it's the Chinese government and not the NSA prying into his personal life, says Xuan, he trusts everything will be OK. Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Shanghai.
(SOUNDBITE OF HIROKI MIZUKAMI SONG, "HUMAN RACE")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Turkish officials are vowing to hit ISIS harder after the group claimed responsibility for an attack at an Istanbul nightclub over the weekend. Authorities have not found the person who shot and killed 39 people at that club, but they do think they know who it is. The country's state-funded TRT World news channel is showing images of a passport identifying the suspect. From Istanbul, here's NPR's Peter Kenyon.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: The passport is from the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan and belongs to a 28-year-old man named Lakhe Mashrapov. The picture matches a selfie video released by authorities Monday. Police raids have continued in neighborhoods around Istanbul since the deadly attack. Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus says investigators are going beyond identifying the main suspect to look for anyone else that may have been supporting him.
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NUMAN KURTULMUS: (Through interpreter) So we will continue with the identification of this person and not only this person but his possible links and any other supporters that might have helped him and of course the forces behind the attack.
KENYON: The claim of responsibility by ISIS prompted Kurtulmus to say Turkey's response will be to step up its military attacks against ISIS in northern Syria. That escalation appears to have already begun. The military tells the state-run Anatolia news agency that Turkish attacks have killed at least 18 ISIS fighters in the past 24 hours and at least 150 ISIS targets have been hit by airstrikes or tank and artillery fire in recent days. The tough response has public support, but Kurtulmus also warn Turks to be on alert for future attacks.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KURTULMUS: (Through interpreter) This can be an attack in a nightclub or in a prayer house or in an education facility or in an office or out in the markets out on the streets. It doesn't matter.
KENYON: Turkish media say intelligence tips led to the arrest of more than 60 ISIS suspects in the days leading up to the New Year's celebration, and dozens more have been rounded up since. Eight people are being held for questioning in connection with the nightclub attack. And Istanbul residents are getting used to the sight of special forces on the city streets. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Dealing with veterans who break the law can be complicated. They should still be held accountable for any crimes they commit. But sometimes there are underlying factors, like PTSD or substance abuse, that come into play. To address those issues, some parts of the country are setting up special courts for veterans. There are hundreds of these courts now, but their growth has been haphazard, bypassing some big cities and even entire states. Jay Price reports from one vet's court in central North Carolina.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: All rise, please.
JAY PRICE, BYLINE: In many ways, this seems like a typical courtroom.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Oyez, Oyez, Oyez - District 11A (ph) Veterans Treatment Court of the County Harnett (unintelligible) for the dispatch of business.
PRICE: But what goes on during the weekly sessions of the Harnett County Veterans Treatment Court is just the most visible part of a hybrid approach to justice. Judge Jacqueline Lee sets a friendly tone.
JACQUELINE LEE: So how are you?
WILTON MCKENZIE: I'm doing great, ma'am. How are you?
LEE: Fine. How many jobs have you got now?
PRICE: Standing in front of her as Wilton McKenzie, a former soldier who laughs a lot, even in the courtroom. Here, veterans charged with minor crimes come before a judge who's also considering what they went through in the military. Judge Lee isn't here to make a quick decision about whether veterans like McKenzie go to jail. Instead, she works to keep them on track as they get mentoring and treatment to end substance abuse or deal with mental health problems like PTSD.
LEE: We owe it to our veterans. They have gone through so much for our country, and we have an obligation to look after them when they come back.
PRICE: Since 2014, 21 veterans have completed the treatment programs and counseling required by just this one court. None of them have been re-arrested. That's similar to outcomes in veterans treatment courts around the country since the first one opened in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2008. Backers say the courts also save money and prevent crimes. That helps explain the surge in the number of veterans treatment court.
SCOTT SWAIM: Between 2008 and 2010, maybe there were 20 or 30.
PRICE: Scott Swaim is director of the nonprofit group Justice for Vets. He trains the staffs of newly established courts.
SWAIM: Just for me in the past couple years, you know, we trained 50 courts one year, 46 another, and we have a waiting list.
PRICE: His group now counts more than 300 veterans treatment courts nationwide. But some states still don't have any. In North Carolina, there are 100 counties and just three veterans courts. There are plans for at least a couple more, but advocates say the state needs as many as 17. There aren't any near the big cities, Charlotte and Raleigh.
SWAIM: Somebody in the legal system has to start it. Some judge somewhere has to say, yeah, I think it's a great idea or some legislator for some state, you know, has to legislate it and say, yes, we believe veterans treatment courts have value and, yes, you can start one.
PRICE: If you have money. Judge Lee's court in Harnett County got started with three years of state grants then won a $1.4 million federal grant this fall. That money will let it help more veterans like Wilton McKenzie, that vet with the frequent laugh. He served three hard combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and was diagnosed with PTSD.
MCKENZIE: They pointed me in right direction to get me the help that I need because I was not that type of person before the military.
PRICE: The 43-year-old McKenzie has close-cropped hair as if he were still in the Army and, until recently, a charge hanging over him of assault on a female after a fight with his wife. It was his first offense, and it meant the only job he could find is part time working for a waste hauler.
But his wife and a prosecutor and judge in his home county agreed that he deserved the kind of second chance that the Harnett treatment court could offer - if that court would accept him. It did, and he just completed more than a year and a half of treatment and counseling.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: It is with great pleasure it is hereby that you are recognized for completion of all requirements set forth as determined by the veterans treatment court.
PRICE: Like the other veterans who've completed the program in Judge Lee's courtroom, McKenzie got a formal graduation ceremony, and he got his charges dropped.
MCKENZIE: I mean, I can tell you, these people will never see me again here (laughter) not unless they ask me to come to, you know, visit (laughter).
PRICE: And if he's like all the court's other graduates so far, this will be his last brush with the law. For NPR News, I'm Jay Price in Harnett County, N.C.
(SOUNDBITE OF REKI SONG, "MOONBEAM")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin, and I'm not going to lie. I drink a ton of coffee in the morning before I drive to work. It makes me feel safer on the roads because I'm more awake, right? But in northern California, Joseph Schwab was pulled over after authorities saw him weaving in and out of traffic. Officials said his pupils were dilated. He seemed amped up. But when they did a blood test, the only thing that came up was caffeine, and drunk driving charges were dropped. So fine, make mine a decaf, please. It's MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
The Obama administration is really in a race against the clock. There are 59 detainees still at Guantanamo Bay. Nearly half of them have been cleared to be sent to third-party countries. Congress has been given the 30 days' notice before they can be moved, as the law requires.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
But the administration has only a matter of weeks to get them out of Guantanamo because when Donald Trump is sworn in, he could reverse those decisions.
Carol Rosenberg reports on the prison at Guantanamo for the Miami Herald. She's been writing about the last-minute efforts to get third-party countries to take these detainees. I asked her why it's been so difficult to transfer the prisoners who've already been cleared for release.
CAROL ROSENBERG: Some of these countries have gotten a little squishy, let's say. There's a new president coming, Donald Trump. He has a new vision for Guantanamo. He says that he wants to load it up. He says that he has no intention of closing it.
So some of the countries, it's - it seems that they're a little bit uncertain about whether they want to please the departing president and continue these deals and resettle the men who were cleared to go or they want to wait and see a little bit the lay of the land of what's going to happen when Donald Trump becomes president.
MARTIN: Do we have any idea at this point whether or not he wants to continue reviewing the cases of the people who are currently in Gitmo, or does he just want to do away with that altogether?
ROSENBERG: The answer is, I don't know, and if you find someone who knows, they should give me a call because we know very little beyond what Donald Trump said during his campaign about what he intends to do with Guantanamo. I think what you're getting at, Rachel, is if we have review boards and the review boards approve people for release with security guarantees and this administration doesn't want to release them, what do you have down there?
You have 10 men currently who are charged with crimes, facing trials - six death penalty trials. You have these 23 who were cleared, some of whom will get to go before Obama leaves the White House, and then you have what we call the forever prisoners, 26 men whom the boards have decided are too dangerous to release but for whom there's no crime that they found to charge them with. And we don't know in the next administration what will become of these people.
MARTIN: So what does that mean, Carol, that they can't be charged with anything - that there's just no evidence to charge some of these people who are knowingly connected to terrorist organizations?
ROSENBERG: So you have to remember that Guantanamo was set up as a kind of POW location. They didn't call them POWs because they didn't want to give them all the privileges. They wanted to be able to interrogate them, and they wanted to be able to deny them certain aspects of the Geneva Conventions.
But the short answer is they're war prisoners. But you have to have found an act, a crime, a war crime under the international laws of war to charge them with.
MARTIN: It's not enough to just be a foot soldier for al-Qaida or some affiliate. You have to be connected to a specific act of terror.
ROSENBERG: And the courts have proven that in the intervening years. You know, the Bush administration set up military commissions, and they intended to charge all these foot soldiers with something called material support for terror. And in the intervening years, the federal courts have said that's not a war crime.
In a way, that's a little bit the irony of Guantanamo because that is a crime in federal court. Had they brought these men into federal court, they probably would have been able to charge them in many instances with being foot soldiers. They can't at Guantanamo.
MARTIN: President Obama campaigned in 2008 on a promise to close Gitmo. He spent eight years trying to make that happen. Why did he fail in the end, do you think?
ROSENBERG: The short answer is that Congress made it impossible for him to do it, but the long answer is, when he came into office, he thought he was going to look at the prisoners of Guantanamo and either try them or let them go. But he realized that there was a third category, these forever prisoners - people he couldn't put on trial, people he was unwilling and his administration was unwilling to send away to other places.
So it became - to close Guantanamo meant to move Guantanamo, to pick up these forever prisoners and the people who would be charged and move them to the United States, what we call Guantanamo North. Create Guantanamo on U.S. soil. Congress systematically blocked that. And when you can't move Guantanamo, you can't close Guantanamo.
MARTIN: Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, thank you so much.
ROSENBERG: Thank you
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Before he became president-elect, Donald Trump was known to many Americans as the guy who said this a lot on the reality TV show "The Apprentice."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE APPRENTICE")
DONALD TRUMP: You're fired.
MARTIN: Last night, viewers of the new "Celebrity Apprentice" saw former action movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger using a new catchphrase that referenced his films.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE CELEBRITY APPRENTICE")
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: You're terminated.
MARTIN: Here to talk more about how the Terminator handled himself taking over for the Donald is NPR TV critic Eric Deggans. Hi, Eric.
ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: Hi.
MARTIN: All right, so a little backstory here - Donald Trump was fired by NBC from hosting "The Apprentice" after he made those comments about Mexican immigrants being rapists and drug dealers during the campaign. So they looked around for a new host. They hired Arnold Schwarzenegger. Last night was the premiere. How did he do?
DEGGANS: In a word, he was awful (laughter).
MARTIN: Oh, Arnold.
DEGGANS: Yes, I know. It's so disappointing to Arnold fans out there. He was wooden, overly scripted, and to me, he committed the cardinal sin of reality TV. He was not interesting. It actually made you appreciate, like, how well Donald Trump commanded the spotlight when he hosted the show, and he hosted it for something like 14 cycles.
MARTIN: Wow, OK, so it was going to be big shoes to fill no matter what because he had done the show for so long, but Schwarzenegger - I mean he's a big movie star. He's a former governor. He's got a huge following. You're saying he was just kind of not relaxed enough? What was the problem?
DEGGANS: Well, you know, to understand the problem he had, I think you have to understand why "The Apprentice" worked for Trump. I mean the celebrity version of this show gets together all these C-list performers, and they face off in these business-themed competitions. And the host fires the people who lose until there's one left. Now, Trump used the show to kind of puff up his image as this titan of business.
MARTIN: Yeah.
DEGGANS: You know, he was jumping on to private helicopters. He was strutting through these buildings with his name on them. He was firing people in these ornate board rooms. It was all about building his brand.
MARTIN: And that's his world. He lives in that world.
DEGGANS: Exactly. But this new "Celebrity Apprentice" - it doesn't really support Schwarzenegger's current brand like it did with Trump, you know? It's focused on all these things that Schwarzenegger did in the past, you know - being an action star, being governor of California, being a bodybuilding champ. We've even got a clip of him explaining how to go the extra mile when you do a task, and he explains it by talking about his teenage years.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE CELEBRITY APPRENTICE")
SCHWARZENEGGER: I remember when I was, like, 19 years old and I was managing a gym in Munich. And I was told to advertise a certain way as the manager. And I said to myself, you know, I'm going to go an extra step.
I'm going to go and take all my clothes off in the middle of the winter and put my little bathing suits on and walk in the market place where everyone was shopping.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
DEGGANS: Exactly. So now, if I want to hear stories from Arnold Schwarzenegger, I want to hear him talk about being a movie star, running California, not running a gym in Munich.
MARTIN: All right, so spoiler alert - we're going to talk about the results of Monday's show. Schwarzenegger divided the celebrities into two teams by gender. He ended up firing a couple of women. How did that go down?
DEGGANS: Well, Schwarzenegger has a problematic history with women. Back in 2003, the Los Angeles Times published a story in which six women accused him of groping and sexually harassing them. And last night, he seemed to be dismissive to some of the women competitors.
We've got a scene where he tries to talk former "Jersey Shore" star Nicole Snooki Polizzi into naming which of her teammates should be fired. Let's check it out.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE CELEBRITY APPRENTICE")
SCHWARZENEGGER: Right now I feel like a woman that is surrendering over there, that is crumbling - oh, my God, he's asking me who we should fire; oh, my God, this is maybe too much. It's not too much. I'm asking a simple question. Who do you think was the weak link on this team?
MARTIN: Oh.
DEGGANS: Yeah, that's not a good look.
MARTIN: (Laughter) Yeah, it's really not. NPR's TV critic Eric Deggans - we'll talk to you again, Eric. Thanks.
DEGGANS: I watch the bad TV so you don't have to.
MARTIN: Yeah, you said it.
(SOUNDBITE OF BLAZO SONG, "DISTANT GRAPHITE")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
From time to time, NPR reassigns its international correspondents to new countries, and our colleague Philip Reeves has arrived in Brazil to cover South America from our bureau in Rio. Phil sent us this postcard with a few of his first impressions.
PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: You arrive in a new city in a faraway land. You don't know any of its people. How do you go about meeting them? I asked a friend. Oh, he said. Why don't you go and sit on the little wall? Rio de Janeiro has many little walls. The little wall I'm talking about runs along the water's edge. It's knee-high and mostly granite like the Sugarloaf Mountain just a few hundred meters away and the giant tooth of rock across the bay that juts skywards and is crowned by the statue of Christ the Redeemer.
On my first evening alone in Rio, I took my friend's advice. I planted myself hopefully on the little wall and waited. I watched a man napping on the wall apparently unworried by the risk of rolling over in his sleep and toppling into the sea below. I watched tiny monkeys, whiskery marmosets prancing along the avenue of almond trees that give the little wall its shade. A big, white egret landed on the wall beside me. This was surprisingly friendly for a bird. But where, I wondered, were all those famously gregarious people, the Cariocas, as Rio's residents are known?
(CROSSTALK)
REEVES: The answer turned out to be here, sitting on the wall 500 yards away, outside a bar. I barely sipped my first cold Brazilian beer before a group of young lawyers in board shorts and flip flops came up. We began to talk.
They were celebrating, they said, because today in their office, it was casual Friday in this most casual of cities. Would I go with them to a party? The little wall had worked its magic. Rio is a boisterous city.
(CROSSTALK)
REEVES: This is what a normal weekday night sounds like in one of my local restaurants. Even the crickets outside...
(SOUNDBITE OF CRICKETS CHIRPING)
REEVES: ...Seem to be yelling. On the little wall, you can actually hear what people are saying.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Inaudible).
REEVES: The wall is like good pub. And like a good pub, it has regulars. Maria Bethania has been coming here for 20 years.
MARIA BETHANIA: (Through interpreter) I am always here, always, every day.
REEVES: The wall's a great place to find friends, says Bethania.
BETHANIA: (Through interpreter) People embrace you. Brazilians really embrace people.
REEVES: The little wall is in an upscale neighborhood on a peninsula overlooking Rio's Guanabara Bay. Sebastiao Barbosa, a 50-year-old AC technician, is here fishing. The bay is badly polluted, yet there are fish and squid and even turtles. For Barbosa, every minute spent on the wall is therapy.
SEBASTIAO BARBOSA: (Through interpreter) Because daily life out there is tough. It's violent. Rio is complicated.
REEVES: Sometimes that tough and violent world washes up on the little wall. Caretaker Jonas de Paula is another regular. He sits on the wall every day and catches up with the gossip. De Paula says a few weeks back, he turned up at the wall to find people feverishly diving in the water and fishing out bundles of bank notes. People around here believe this was stolen money, he says.
JONAS DE PAULA: (Speaking Portuguese).
REEVES: The treasure hunt made the local news. The media theorized that the cash had been stashed under a rock in a bag that was torn open in a storm. They ran photos of people joyfully displaying their sodden swag. Some collected the equivalent of more than a thousand dollars. If you believe rumors running along the wall, others got 10 times that.
This is another reason the little wall is like a good pub. It produces stories. I will be going back. Philip Reeves, NPR News, Rio de Janeiro.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now to a story about an anti-hero, one who's dressed in tighty whities.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS")
ED HELMS: (As Captain Underpants) Tra-la-la.
MARTIN: (Laughter) DreamWorks is turning "Captain Underpants" into a movie for release in 2017. As NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports, the studio hopes the film's got the same level of pranks and potty humor that turned Dav Pilkey's books into best sellers.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: "The Adventures of Captain Underpants" is a series of books about two fourth graders George and Harold - best friends, comic book creators and major trouble makers. Dav Pilkey first got the idea for the books from his second grade teacher in suburban Ohio.
DAV PILKEY: She was not a very pleasant person. But she was talking about something, and she happened to say the word underwear. And we all burst out laughing. And she got really, really mad. And she said, hey, boys and girls, underwear is not funny. And we all just laughed even harder. And so that's where I got the idea from.
BLAIR: One of Pilkey characters is the mean and boring Principal Krupp.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS")
HELMS: (As Principal Krupp) Ever since you've attended this elementary school, you've been responsible for one prank after another.
BLAIR: Ed Helms voices Krupp in the movie. Thomas Middleditch from the show "Silicon Valley" plays Harold. Comedian Kevin Hart voices George. George and Harold hypnotize Krupp.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS")
KEVIN HART: (As George Beard) When I snap my fingers, you will obey our every command.
THOMAS MIDDLEDITCH AND KEVIN HART: (As Harold Hutchins and George Beard) You are now the greatest superhero of all time, the amazing Captain Underpants.
HELMS: (As Captain Underpants) Tra-la-la.
BLAIR: Krupp turns into this smiling, goofy superhero who fights crime with wedgie power. George and Harold are full of ideas which fill the pages of their comic books with titles like "Captain Underpants And The Pied Pooper Of Piqua." One of their pranks - changing a school sign to read...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS")
HELMS: (As Captain Underpants) Come see my hairy armpits.
BLAIR: David Soren, director of "Captain Underpants" the movie, says they've kept George and Harold's wild imaginations.
DAVID SOREN: We really want the movie to feel like it's being made, not by me but by George and Harold and treating it like this is their project, their feature film debut.
BLAIR: Dav Pilkey has written 12 "Captain Underpants" books. The first one debuted almost 20 years ago. He says he and his fans are ready for a movie version, which he announced on a recent book tour.
PILKEY: Every time I would say, oh, and guess what? There's going to be a "Captain Underpants" movie. And every time, the room would just explode with enthusiasm. And when I would tell kids about Kevin Hart being in it again, you know, it was like the roof would fly off the building.
BLAIR: Dav Pilkey says his only request to DreamWorks was that the movie focused on George and Harold's friendship and how they use their creativity to, in Pilkey's words, save the world. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF JUSTIN SAMAHA SONG, "SLOW BOAT TO CHINA")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
A new era of one-party control begins today in Washington. The new Congress begins work with Republicans still controlling both houses and feeling pretty emboldened with their party about to control the White House as well.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
One major priority for them will be to dismantle Obamacare. And you'd think that would make for a depressing start to the year for Zeke Emanuel. He's one of the architects of the health care law.
GREENE: But he has actually been feeling pretty optimistic about a compromise that could save parts of the law. And Rachel, he's in the studio with us (laughter), and just looking at him, you don't look all that downtrodden, Dr. Emanuel.
ZEKE EMANUEL: I don't know. Well...
MARTIN: Could be the lighting, (unintelligible).
EMANUEL: I'm always optimistic.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: Well, good. Well, talk to me about why you are optimistic. I mean I know you've been connected to some of the White House conversations in talking about how to save the bill. You've met once with President-elect Donald Trump. Where do you see a compromise coming together if there is one?
EMANUEL: Well, one of the things the Republicans frequently criticize the Democrats over the ACA is the fact that it was passed only with Democratic votes.
GREENE: The Affordable Care Act, yeah.
EMANUEL: Right. It would seem crazy, then, for them to go around and say, well, we're going to pass a repeal and replacement bill only with Republican votes.
GREENE: Might seem crazy to you, but I don't know if Republicans...
EMANUEL: Well, consistency...
GREENE: ...Would say it was that crazy.
EMANUEL: Right, but consistency suggests that they want a - they would want a bipartisan bill. And I understand that the president-elect, Donald Trump, wants a bipartisan bill. He really does I think genuinely want a bill and a health care system that works for all Americans, that achieves universal coverage, no preexisting disease exclusions. And I think therefore there is some ray of optimism that we could actually get a compromise bill rather than just something rammed down the country's throat by the Republicans.
GREENE: OK, we should say you're mentioning some of the things that Donald Trump has positive comments on in terms of things potentially keeping, but how will this come together? You've got Republicans coming in saying it's priority one; dismantle the law.
They have been out there on the campaign trail I mean for months, more than a year, for a long time it seems promising voters that they are going to get rid of Obamacare. So what - how could they actually do this compromise with you and Democrats and still save face?
EMANUEL: Well, Jim Capretta, who's a conservative health policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, reminds Republicans, his fellow people, that they ran on repeal and replace, not repeal and delay.
GREENE: OK.
EMANUEL: And so that you really do need to repeal and replace, and you need to do it in one bill. Otherwise, you're really going to disrupt the individual insurance market in a very bad way, and you'll be responsible for millions of people losing their coverage but also health insurance premiums going up. And I think that is not a scenario that a lot of Republicans really want.
GREENE: Well, then how can they delay? What would give them in terms of process now? What would make it seem like they were following through on this promise but delaying enough to figure out a way to replace it?
EMANUEL: So one possibility is that they pass a resolution saying that they will then come back and pass a bill that will repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act and at the same time have a replacement for those parts of the Affordable Care Act...
GREENE: A resolution to be voting on party lines...
EMANUEL: ...In the same...
GREENE: ...And saying, we want it...
EMANUEL: The resolution should be...
GREENE: ...We officially want it gone.
EMANUEL: The resolution can be party lines, but the bill would then have to construct both the repeal part but simultaneously the replacement part. And I think if you do it that way, you could begin to negotiate with Democrats. If you just have a repeal and we'll be back in three years and tell you how we're going to fix it, then the Democrats are simply going to walk away. Chuck Schumer has made that clear.
And they should walk away because then it's all - it's the old pottery barn principle that Colin Powell made famous, which is, you break it; you have to fix it, and you take responsibility. And the Democrats will not want their fingerprints anywhere near the breaking of Obamacare and the disruption of the insurance industry in the United States.
GREENE: Well, let's keep talking about this. Let's say step one is some sort of resolution. Republicans can tell their voters that we have taken the first step. We are carrying through on this promise. Doesn't that then open the door for Republicans to begin defunding Obamacare, which really would begin the process pretty quickly of dismantling it?
EMANUEL: So the budget resolution allows the Republicans to pass a piece of legislation. The resolution itself doesn't actually repeal the Affordable Care Act.
GREENE: I see.
EMANUEL: It allows the Republicans to pass a bill with 50 votes. That's the key. It doesn't have to pass with 60 votes, the filibuster-proof majority.
GREENE: OK.
EMANUEL: But they could pass a bill with 50 votes. The question is, what is the shape of that bill? Is it just a repeal bill, or is it a repeal with replacement? And that negotiation about that bill could take several months. My own estimate is if both sides come with good faith, they could probably hammer this out in about six months. It's not a small item. I mean health care reform is big.
The question is, what are the gives and takes? I do think - again, one of the reasons I'm optimistic is that when you look at conservative and liberal health policy experts, there's about 70 or 80 percent overlap between the two groups about the shape of the future and what you would need. And I think that's, again, why I'm optimistic - because there aren't that many ways of doing health care reform. They're really limited.
GREENE: OK, we have just about 20 or 30 seconds left. President Obama goes to the Hill, meets with congressional Democrats this week. What's his message going to be?
EMANUEL: Oh, I think his message is going to be, we have to get the message out about the strength of the Affordable Care Act. You have to hold strong that it's got to be repeal with a replacement simultaneously and be clear about the principles like universal coverage and no preexisting disease exclusions that we're going to defend for the American people.
GREENE: OK, Zeke Emanuel - Dr. Zeke Emanuel's chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania and also one of the architects of Obamacare. Thanks as always for coming in.
EMANUEL: It was great and a pleasure.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Maybe some of you out there know this firsthand, but it's really hard to get around in India without cash. Everything works that way. That's how you pay your cab driver. That's how you run a lot of businesses. India is in the middle of changing its currency system, taking some notes out of circulation, and that is wreaking havoc on a whole lot of industries.
NPR's Julie McCarthy tells us the story of some Indian farmers who can't pay their farmhands because of a shortage in cash.
JULIE MCCARTHY, BYLINE: December in the northern state of Punjab, India's breadbasket, and villagers stiffen their collars against the chill and pull their woolen shawls tighter. Farmer Amrinder Singh Punia takes up a seat in the crisp evening across from his newly cultivated 25 acres and contemplates the prospect of a poor harvest come the spring.
AMRINDER SINGH PUNIA: (Foreign language spoken).
MCCARTHY: The smell of damp earth rises, and Punia says, "I didn't plant less, but I had to use more of last year's seeds and less fertilizer on this winter wheat."
PUNIA: (Foreign language spoken).
MCCARTHY: Because traders were late paying for the summer crop, Punia says he lacked the cash to buy new seeds and enough fertilizer for the current crop. On the heels of that, the government scrapped 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, igniting a nationwide cash crunch. Stocks of new notes haven't replenished the old ones fast enough, and many of India's 119 million farmers are reeling in the new financial reality.
(SOUNDBITE OF ENGINE IDLING)
MCCARTHY: The shortage of hard currency could not have come at a worse time. In the Punjab, farmers had barely harvested the summer crop when they began planting the winter one which fell simultaneously with a government currency crackdown. But the seeds, the machinery, the fertilizers, pesticides, the farmhands - all of it is paid in cash, says Manpreet Singh Grewal. He advises farmers through the Punjab Agricultural University, and Grewal says farmers trust hard cash.
MANPREET SINGH GREWAL: They keep cash in hand because it feels safe for them (laughter) to having cash in the pocket rather than keeping it in the bank.
MCCARTHY: Grewal says most farmers in this area eke out a living with plots no bigger than 10 acres and earn on average just under $3,000 a year. They are not nimble operators equipped to deal with the removal of cash from their day-to-day lives.
A bewildering stream of restrictions and flip flops during the currency crisis have confounded them. The agrarian workforce navigates with no credit cards or, Grewal says, in many cases, no formal bank accounts.
(SOUNDBITE OF WHEAT MILLING MACHINE)
MCCARTHY: The hardest hit are the farmhands. Eighteen-year-old Dharam Preet Singh is milling wheat into flour for Amrinder Singh Punia. He says his monthly salary of $120 doesn't cover expenses but is critical to his family. With a 10th grade education, Dharam says he's happy to have the job even if his salary is postponed. But his grandfather needs an operation.
DHARAM PREET SINGH: (Foreign language spoken).
MCCARTHY: "The maximum I can wait," he says, "is 15 more days." "After that," Dharam says, "it will be two months without pay, and my family will be in trouble." Amrinder Singh Punia acknowledges that he is better off than the many farmers who live on the margin, and he was able to withdraw 24,000 rupees - about $350 - from a national bank. He hopes to pay his workers some of what he owes them.
He might have been able to clear all of their back salary, but the government has placed the less formalized network that most farmers depend on, the rural cooperative banks, off limits during the currency switch. Punia has 300,000 rupees tied up in his co-op.
PUNIA: (Foreign language spoken).
MCCARTHY: "My money," he says, "is lying in the bank, and the problem is, I can't take it out." Starved of cash, India's rural economy is stagnating. It could be many months before life returns to normal. Farmers meanwhile do what they often do - watch and wait. Julie McCarthy, NPR News, Punjab, India.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning, I'm David Greene. I'm going to spare the Cleveland Browns today because this happened.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
JENNIE FAGEN: (Singing) Bills are 16 going on 17 years out of the playoffs.
GREENE: Buffalo Bills fan Jennie Fagen made a video about her team missing the playoffs again. It's a sports version of a "Sound Of Music" song.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
FAGEN: (Singing) But we can tailgate better in upstate and willingly, we Bill-ieve (ph).
GREENE: Bill-ieve it, get it? It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
As the new year begins, the outgoing and incoming administrations are dueling over whether or not Russia tried to influence the U.S. presidential election. Over the weekend, Donald Trump continued to cast doubt on President Obama's conclusion that Russia hacked and directed the leak of Democratic Party emails. This week, a U.S. Senate Committee opens hearings. Members of the House of Representatives are also looking into the matter.
California Congressman Adam Schiff is one of them. He's the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and he joins me now. Congressman Schiff, thanks for being with us.
ADAM SCHIFF: It's great to be with you.
MARTIN: The Trump camp keeps saying that the intelligence community's final report on the Russian hacking allegations isn't even done, so how can the president-elect come to a conclusion? How are you so sure?
SCHIFF: Well, the evidence is very, very strong, and I think this is the consensus of the Democrats and Republicans on the Intelligence Committees. You know, we view, obviously, a variety of intelligence, different sources, different methods of gathering it, and none of us have a question really about Russia's involvement in the hacking of our institutions and the dumping of data. There may be some varied views about the mixture of motivations for their doing so, but there's no question that the Russians were responsible for this.
MARTIN: Isn't it difficult to track down the actual genesis of a computer hack? I mean, is the intelligence that you're seeing such that it can confirm at that level?
SCHIFF: It is. And, you know, certainly the Russians are among the most sophisticated cyber actors in the world and they do their best to hide their trail, sometimes more successfully than others, but we've gotten very good at attribution. It's something that the intelligence community takes very seriously and has invested a lot of time and resources in.
And sometime you can be, you know, quite certain about attribution, and I think the level of confidence here is very high. You don't have a statement issued publicly of the kind that the Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Homeland Security issued in early October unless they're very, very confident in the evidence they've seen.
MARTIN: After President Obama issued sanctions on Russia last week over this alleged attack, your chairman, Congressman Devin Nunes, issued a tough statement. He said his committee had been urging the president for years to take strong action against Russia for its aggression around the world. Do you think President Obama should have acted sooner?
SCHIFF: I do think the president should have acted sooner on this, and I was urging the administration months ago to begin discussions with our European allies that have also been the subject of Russian meddling to impose sanctions and costs on Russia, to establish a deterrent.
And I think the steps the president took recently are important, but they should only be viewed as a first step. And I think, indeed, both Democrats and Republicans feel this way, that we need stronger action against Russia or we're likely to see more of this kind of cyber-meddling in the future.
MARTIN: Are you confident the Republican-led Congress can get to the bottom of this? I mean, you're calling for a joint special committee from the Senate and House intel committees to take this up, and it does - at this point, that seems unlikely.
SCHIFF: It does seem unlikely, which is unfortunate because I think the significance of what the Russians did, it really warrants a kind of a joint inquiry, like we did after 9/11. I also think it avoids a lot of duplication of effort by having the same agencies come to both House and Senate and potentially come to many committees in both House and Senate.
But I'm going to push as hard as I can within the Intelligence Committee to do a thorough and objective investigation. If that's the only venue where it takes place in the House, then that's what we'll do.
MARTIN: What are you hearing behind closed doors from your Republican colleagues about all this?
SCHIFF: You know, I don't think, as I mentioned, any of them have any question about Russian involvement. And so for this - on this point, I think Donald Trump is very much on his own and I'll be interested, I know, as my colleagues will be, in hearing this supposed news that Donald Trump has that he's going to share either today or tomorrow, things that evidently he has special sources of information about because none of us can imagine what that could be.
But again, you know, I think while we've had a lot of discussions about how much of this was oriented to hurting Secretary Clinton, how much of this was about helping Donald Trump, how much was it - something about getting Americans to fight Americans and sowing discord in our country, there may be differences of view in the shading of their motivations and, like many people, many countries, have a variety of motivations for what they do. But the fundamental agreement between Democrats and Republicans is this wasn't China, this wasn't some fat guy in his bed. This was the Russians.
MARTIN: Just briefly, we have to ask you about the House Republicans voting last night to weaken the independence of the Office of Congressional Ethics. What do you make of that?
SCHIFF: Well, not much of an effort to drain the swamp here when, in the middle of the night, on a holiday weekend, they effectively eviscerate the outside independence watchdog, but not surprising. You often see, as we know, that absolute power leads to abuse, and here it's led to abuse very early.
MARTIN: Congressman Adam Schiff of California, he's the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, thank you so much for your time.
SCHIFF: Thank you.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK, let's turn now to the latest in Syria where a ceasefire brokered by Russia and Turkey is in place - well, at least in theory. Rebels say President Bashar al-Assad's forces are violating that cease fire, and NPR's Alice Fordham tells us where.
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: The fighting is in a string of villages along the Barada River northwest of Damascus. Forty years ago, this was a lush rural area of farms and fruit trees. But under Assad and his father before him, the farmland was confiscated and the river water diverted to Damascus. So it's no surprise it's been rebellious since uprisings began in 2011. People there say they are enduring airstrikes from Assad or his Russian allies.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken).
FORDHAM: In this video posted at the weekend, a man watches a plane fly overhead...
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken).
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION)
FORDHAM: ...And drop a bomb nearby. In the fighting, the water supply to Damascus has been severely disrupted. The rebels blame the regime, and the regime blames the rebels. I speak to a journalist originally from the area, anonymous to protect his family who are still there. He fears the worst.
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: The cease-fire is part of the plan of conducting a massacre. First of all, you block out the area, you bomb it harshly and then say they are terrorists, they are smugglers, they are extremists, they are ISIS.
FORDHAM: The regime says there were groups there with links to al-Qaida, so the cease-fire doesn't apply. Although activists deny that, this journalist I spoke to says it's probably true. But there's also maybe a hundred-thousand civilians there. The opposition say they won't participate in peace talks till the assault stops. But their leverage is limited now, they lost their part of the city of Aleppo last month. And their key backer, Turkey, has moved closer to Assad's Russian allies who are ascendant in the region. Here's analyst Emile Hokayem from the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the short term.
EMILE HOKAYEM: In the short term, the game is up. So the Turks are basically looking to tactically adjust to all that. And that is not necessarily a retreat, but it's something that's awfully close to that.
FORDHAM: He says Turkey's shift away from the rebels will have long consequences in Syria and beyond. Alice Fordham, NPR News, Beirut.
(SOUNDBITE OF IBRAHIM MAALOUF SONG, "ILLUSIONS")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Republicans in the House of Representatives held a secret vote last night and decided to weaken ethics oversight for the House. They voted to strip the Office of Congressional Ethics of its independence. The full House is set to vote later today to approve the new rules. For reaction, we've called Richard Painter. He was chief ethics counsel to President George W. Bush. Mr. Painter has been a frequent guest on our show expressing concerns about President-elect Donald Trump's potential conflicts of interest. Mr. Painter, welcome back to the show.
RICHARD PAINTER: Well, thank you very much.
MARTIN: This could seem to some like an obscure bureaucratic move, what House Republicans did, just a change on an org chart. Can you explain the significance here?
PAINTER: Well, it's a lot more than a bureaucratic move. The Office of Congressional Ethics was set up to be independent of the members of the House of Representatives, whereas the House Ethics Committee is staffed by, controlled by, the members of the House with the majority votes, of course, being with the majority party. So when they do this, they are undermining the independence of the Office of Congressional Ethics by putting it under the thumb of the House Ethics Committee. I mean, this is putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop with American taxpayers being the chickens. This is not the way they ought to be doing it in Washington. We need independent oversight of the ethics of Congress.
MARTIN: So just to take a step back, so this - the independent nature of this panel was established around 2008. These new rule changes would mean the panel would move under the auspices of the House Ethics Committee, so, as you say, would be members of the House policing their own ethics behavior to some degree.
PAINTER: Well, exactly. You would have no independent investigations. You'd have no ability of the House Ethics Committee to stand up to the members of the House. They'd, in effect, be policing themselves, which they don't do from either party. This is not a partisan issue. We need independent oversight of ethics in Congress. And they put it in in 2008...
MARTIN: Although the...
PAINTER: And now they want to destroy it.
MARTIN: The House Ethics Committee, which is now going to be in charge of overseeing this panel, does have both Democrats and Republicans on it, so doesn't that create some kind of accountability?
PAINTER: That really just creates a partisan food fight. That's not ethics supervision. That's just using ethics as a partisan weapon. And that's what we get from Congress and these committees. We have that House Oversight Committee that, when it was controlled by Democrats, gave the Bush White House a very hard time. But then when things switched, the Republicans there wanted to do nothing but go after Hillary Clinton. I mean, that's not oversight. That's just politics. And then they get the FBI involved and so forth.
We've been through all that. We need independent oversight of the ethics in Congress, and they're not - they're taking it away. They put it in in 2008, and now they want to take it away. And if that's their attitude, I think the American people are going to have to think twice about who they're sending to Congress.
MARTIN: What about the claim that some Republicans say that with the way it was, with this Office of Congressional Ethics, the independent panel, this allowed people to make anonymous ethics complaints that were difficult for House members to defend themselves against. Do they have a point there?
PAINTER: Well, I - we have this, the executive branch, inspectors general and the agencies that were independent of the political appointees in the agencies. We have the Office of Public Integrity in the Justice Department. We have the Office of Government Ethics. Although they don't investigate complaints. They give guidance on ethics. But we have an independent apparatus in the executive branch. I don't see why Congress shouldn't play by the same rules. And I've disagreed sometimes with investigations of the House Office of Congressional Ethics. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it. And this is - that's just an excuse for taking away the oversight that these members of Congress badly need.
MARTIN: Richard Painter served President George W. Bush as chief ethics lawyer. Thank you so much for your time on this.
PAINTER: Well, thank you.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Tough talk about trade, bold promises to protect American workers - those things won Donald Trump a lot of support during the election. And this morning, Trump's transition team announced his nomination of a new U.S. trade representative. It's Robert Lighthizer, who was deputy trade representative under Ronald Reagan and is seen by many as a longtime advocate for more protectionist rules. And let's hear more about him from NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson, who's on the line. Mara, good morning.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, David.
GREENE: So who is Lighthizer?
LIASSON: Robert Lighthizer is a former Reagan administration deputy U.S. trade representative. He is currently a partner and a lobbyist at the Skadden Arps firm, where his job is to get access to foreign markets for big U.S. corporations. He has taken a tougher line on China trade practices in the past. That's in line with Donald Trump's position, and he was a supporter of Trump during the campaign. He has spoken out in favor of imposing quotas and tariffs on imports, which all presidents have done to a different extent, but his nomination signals a harder line on China and on Chinese imports, which is exactly what Donald Trump campaigned on.
GREENE: And so just to understand this job, I mean, Donald Trump talked about renegotiating NAFTA, talked about getting tough on China. This is the guy who will be in the trenches, you know, making all of that sort of thing happen.
LIASSON: Yes, along with several other Trump appointments. This doesn't necessarily mean that he wants to rip up all multilateral trade deals across the board. It sounds like he wants to get better trade deals, tougher trade deals for the U.S., not necessarily start a full-fledged trade war. But he hasn't, at least as far as we know, called for a wholesale renegotiation or removal of the United States from NAFTA, for instance.
GREENE: Which leads to a question - will he be tough enough to satisfy many American workers who went to the polls and supported Trump with a lot of expectations here?
LIASSON: Well, I don't think they're going to be looking at what are the details of trade deals. I think they'll be looking at the bottom line - are there more jobs? Do manufacturing jobs come back? Do their wages go up?
GREENE: Well, this, you know, you say that getting tough with China is going to be a big theme, I mean, not just in this presidency but certainly when it comes to trade. Donald Trump tweeted yesterday. He sort of took China to task. He said China's been taking out massive amounts of money and wealth from the U.S. in totally one-sided trade but won't help with North Korea, nice - exclamation point.
LIASSON: Right.
GREENE: I mean, isn't there a lot at stake here when it comes to trade? Because if he angers China, doesn't he need their help when it comes to containing North Korea?
LIASSON: Well, yes, and that tweet followed another tweet where of course he responded to North Korea's announcement that he - it had - it has the capacity to send a nuclear weapon to the United States. I think this raises the question about what exactly does Donald Trump want China to do about North Korea. And, of course, all presidents are frustrated with China's inability to restrain North Korea. But what exactly does he want them to do? What is he willing to give China in return? And the Chinese reaction to this was interesting. They issued a statement saying we don't pay attention to the features of president's behavior. We focus more on their policy.
GREENE: The features of a president's behavior - interesting term.
LIASSON: Sounds like that means tweeting.
GREENE: (Laughter) Yeah, so that is a feature of Donald Trump's behavior, as we've seen.
LIASSON: Yes.
GREENE: OK, speaking to NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Mara, thanks as always.
LIASSON: Thank you.
GREENE: And the news this morning - Donald Trump, his transition team, has announced the nomination of a new U.S. trade representative. It is Robert Lighthizer, who was a deputy trade representative under Ronald Reagan. And we'll be following that story all day on NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
In less than an hour, a new Congress will convene here in Washington. This is a moment Republicans have been waiting for. They have control of the House, the Senate and soon the White House. Already before they could even get on with their agenda, though, there is bickering within their ranks. House Republicans voted last night to weaken an independent ethics watchdog. This move would put the Office of Congressional Ethics under the oversight of House members themselves, namely the House Ethics Committee.
This still must be approved by the entire House in a vote expected today. This morning, President-elect Donald Trump criticized his own party. House Speaker Paul Ryan sought to put the best face on this, and let's talk about all of it with NPR political director Domenico Montanaro who's in the studio with me. Domenico, good morning.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: So what exactly are House Republicans trying to do here with this vote last night?
MONTANARO: Well, look, House Republicans have been annoyed for quite some time that they have had a lot of anonymous complaints come up that go to the Office of Congressional Ethics - OCE as it's referred to - and they can investigate and House offices have to spend a lot of money looking at these complaints that they don't even know where they came from...
GREENE: They don't know where they're coming from. They don't...
MONTANARO: Exactly.
GREENE: ...Face their accuser or anything.
MONTANARO: Right.
GREENE: OK.
MONTANARO: So what they tried to do was change how the office is structured, how it works, essentially weaken it, take a lot of the teeth out of it by putting it under the aegis of the House Ethics Committee basically meaning that the ethics of the House members would be ruled by the ethics - by the House members themselves. Now, Paul Ryan has been trying to thread a bit of a needle, split a very fine hair here and saying, look, this - first of all, privately he was against it, didn't want to have to go through with this, but now...
GREENE: But his own caucus voted for it, even though he was...
MONTANARO: His conference voted for it, so he's now backing it and saying, look, this is not weakening it. They are independent, still, but they'll have - but the Ethics Committee will have oversight. Boy, that is a fine hair to split for sure.
GREENE: What does oversight mean exactly? So why was his office created in the first place?
MONTANARO: Well, this all stems from a lot of the scandals happening in the mid-aughts to 2006 elections. You might remember that a lot of House Republicans wound up losing because of some ethics scandals in particular stemming from the Jack Abramoff scandals. And what the problem there comes in is that in 2008, they created this office, and they, you know, thought that they needed some kind of independence from the House Ethics Committee. And that's where a lot of this came from. Democrats have also been kind of annoyed by this office because of those anonymous complaints. They're not complaining today however.
GREENE: They're saying that Republicans are basically not draining the swamp as much as it was supposed to be drained...
MONTANARO: Correct.
GREENE: So one argument is that this is a waste of time. You don't get to face your accuser. The optics of this, though, lawmakers policing themselves is pretty terrible. And, I mean, it does seem to put Paul Ryan in a very difficult position at a moment when he is taking, oh - I mean, he's bringing his party into this new exciting year today in an hour.
MONTANARO: That's right. And, you know, to do this before even taking office is pretty remarkable, especially considering that John Boehner, the former speaker really did take ethics very seriously, ousted a couple of House members with very strong hard-line zero-tolerance policy. Paul Ryan says he's going to be just the same, but he's already taking, you know, some criticism from the new president-elect, Donald Trump.
GREENE: So President-elect Trump - he tweets, and let me just read a quote from a series of tweets this morning. (Reading) With all the Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the independent ethics watchdog, as unfair as it may be, their number-one act and priority?
What does it say that Donald Trump, you know, in his evolving relationship with the party that he's already criticizing them, you know, before they even convene the new Congress?
MONTANARO: Well, it's pretty fascinating. I mean, if you read between the lines of that statement, that's not exactly criticizing them saying that they should maintain an Office of Congressional Ethics. He's saying this shouldn't be the number-one priority.
GREENE: He said it was unfair, the current system.
MONTANARO: Yeah. And I think that there are members of Congress who would agree with that. But, on the transition call this morning from the Trump transition, they said that taxes and Obamacare should be their focus. They would have rather had that. This is clearly at the - at least a public relations disaster for House Republicans and for Donald Trump.
But, you know, Trump again here he's being able to try to use this as something to distract people. Again, he has - there's no oversight of his ethics as president of the United States. He hasn't released his tax returns. He hasn't set up how he's going to change the Trump organization to do anything to be able to show some level of transparency for his own ethics in office - still an open question.
GREENE: OK. NPR political director Domenico Montanaro in the studio with us. Domenico, thanks as always.
MONTANARO: Oh, thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Louisiana is losing its coast faster than any place in the world. That's because of sea level rise, development and sinking marshland. Officials are trying to rebuild those marshes and the wetlands, but much of the coast can't be saved. As Tegan Wendland at member station WWNO reports, Louisiana's history is an unwitting victim. As land disappears and the water creeps inland, ancient archaeology sites are washing away.
TEGAN WENDLAND, BYLINE: Richie Blink was born and raised in Plaquemines Parish, way down south of New Orleans along the Mississippi River. Now he works for the National Wildlife Federation. When he was a kid, his dad showed him a special place in Bay Adams where they'd go fishing.
RICHIE BLINK: We would come out of the floodgates and my dad would say, head for the lemon trees.
WENDLAND: What's locally known as the lemon trees is a stand of weathered old trees on a grassy tuft of land. It's a well-known landmark for fishermen, but they would rarely stop there to hunt or fish because it's a sacred Native American site.
BLINK: The legend goes that you should always bring some sort of sacrifice, so somebody left some lemons for the ancestors.
WENDLAND: And those grew into big trees with grapefruit-sized lemons. But as the land was lost to the Gulf of Mexico, saltwater made its way into the freshwater marsh, killing off the trees and other plants. They stand like skeletons on the edge of this scrappy, wind-beaten island. Waves beat against the dirt, washing it away, exposing shards of ancient pottery. Blink hops down off his boat, pulls it up on the eroding bank and reaches out to pick up an unassuming brown shard out of the waves.
BLINK: You can see it's just everywhere, all over the place.
WENDLAND: What do you have there?
BLINK: This is earthen pottery made by natives, and this site is in the process of being destroyed. It only has a few more years left.
WENDLAND: It's an ancient Native American site and an important archaeological find, and it's one of many historic sites being forever lost to the Gulf as rising seas and saltwater intrusion eat away at Louisiana's fragile marshes. It's not just this one, two sites like this are lost each year. When Blink saw how fast it was eroding, he decided to find an archaeologist and ask for help. That led him to Brian Ostahowski. He gets a lot of calls like this at least once a month, people who say...
BRIAN OSTAHOWSKI: I have a great archaeological site in my backyard. Chances are they probably do.
WENDLAND: So we hopped in a boat with Richie Blink and went out there.
OSTAHOWSKI: Richie wasn't lying. This is actually a very, very important archaeological site.
WENDLAND: Based on the pottery and soil, Ostahowski he says native people lived at the site 3 to 500 years ago. The pieces of broken pottery are probably from an ancient trash pile called a midden. There could even be human remains there.
OSTAHOWSKI: You're talking about a whole ceremonial center that could tell you about life ways or the change of life ways that's going to be completely gone within 10 years. It maybe took 300 years of occupation there.
WENDLAND: Three hundred years to build it, in just 10 years it could be erased. Ostahowski took samples of the soil for radiocarbon dating. Unlike the usual slow-paced archaeology dig, Ostahowski wants to excavate the mound as soon as possible and study the pottery shards and oyster shells, but the truth is there just isn't much time.
OSTAHOWSKI: We're talking about different ways that we can come up with kind of emergency action, emergency excavations.
WENDLAND: He wants to learn more, like how long people lived there and how many different occupations there might have been. These details could help fill gaps in our understanding of the prehistoric Plaquemine culture, which includes tribes that lived on the lower Mississippi before Europeans came. For Blink, it's more than ancient history at stake, it's personal history, where he grew up. He honors that in his own way.
Did you ever bring offerings when you came out?
BLINK: Yes.
WENDLAND: Like what?
BLINK: Two weeks ago I brought some lemons.
WENDLAND: And under a windswept tree on top of the small mound, a handful of dried up lemons sits in the shade. For NPR News, I'm Tegan Wendland in Plaquemines Parish, La.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
2016 was the deadliest year for migrants and refugees since World War II. Most perished while trying to reach Europe.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
But there's also a deadly migrant corridor in this country near the U.S.-Mexico border. In Brooks County, Texas the terrain is tough, temperatures are blazing and many who die there are never identified.
MARTIN: Jen Reel wants to try to change that. She's a photojournalist with the Texas Observer, and she's created a database to identify people using pictures of the things they carried with them.
JEN REEL: There were a lot of rosaries and prayer cards. Those were very difficult to photograph because people understand when they're making this trip that it's a huge risk and there's a lot of danger. I imagine that they're relying on their faith to get them through this.
MARTIN: For some, faith wasn't enough. Reel's database is called I Have a Name. Most of the things she took pictures of are from mass graves in Brooks County, Texas.
REEL: The problem was because they were so overwhelmed with lack of resources - it's a very small county, I think about 7,000 people live there - they were not identifying properly where these people were buried. Some of the remains were found, multiple sets of remains in a grave site.
MARTIN: Eventually the bodies - along with whatever items people had with them on those journeys - were exhumed by forensic anthropologists at Baylor University. They were also trying to identify them. Jen Reel met them at their lab.
REEL: They were unpacking a blue backpack that had been found with some remains. And as they were unpacking them, there were toiletries, things like that, but also a baseball. You know, growing up I had played catch almost every night after dinner with my parents. And so I wanted to create a photo essay of the personal items because I thought that these images were a way to relate. Oftentimes the images that we see come out of Brooks County are migrants who are being detained by border patrol or seeking assistance in refugee centers. So this was a different way to approach that.
MARTIN: So you got involved trying to document what was found alongside these bodies. Can you describe some of the photographs?
REEL: Sure. One case was from an individual - a presumed male - believed to be between the ages of 35 and 50. And there was a stuffed animal found with the remains. There was also what looked to be a large wedding band. And it had been sewn into the waistband of this person's jeans. And oftentimes when people make this trip they are robbed. We saw a lot of that, actually, personal items that were hidden. One gentleman had created photocopies of money that he kept in his pockets and his real money was sewn into his clothing as well.
MARTIN: Have you been able to identify any of these people?
REEL: So we launched this database on December 8. And while I was photographing for the database, I came across a case that had a child's drawing along with a woman's name and a prayer written on a piece of paper. And I did some searching online and ended up finding a missing persons ad in a small paper out of McAllen, which is down at the border. And we ended up finding the family from Ecuador who was looking for this woman. And they were able to confirm that it was her then through DNA testing.
MARTIN: As a photojournalist, it is your job to be sort of outside of the moment that you're trying to capture. But what was it like for you to document these items?
REEL: Well, I would say that the stuffed animal really stayed with me. And to me that seemed like a gift. You know, there are people waiting to be reunited with their loved ones, and they're still waiting.
MARTIN: Jen Reel is a multimedia editor at the Texas Observer. Jen, thank you so much for talking with us about your work.
REEL: Thank you so much, Rachel.
MARTIN: And an update to share since we first spoke with Jen Reel - three families recently called her team about items they recognized in the database. They're working to see if they're a match.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Protesters in North Dakota successfully blocked construction of a pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation this past year, but it is unclear what happens when Donald Trump takes office. Here's Inside Energy's Amy Sisk.
AMY SISK, BYLINE: Even now after most of the protesters have left, hundreds remain here atop what is essentially a sheet of ice. A group of campers chip away at a pile of snow.
(SOUNDBITE OF SHOVELING)
SISK: They say there is a change taking hold at camp, which was once overrun by thousands who felt a sense of excitement about the gathering. Byron Shorty, who lives on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, says now that the Army Corps of Engineers is temporarily halting pipeline construction, the protest camp is calm.
BYRON SHORTY: I want to be here to reflect. And I want to be here to help clean up our abandoned campsites, you know, that I still see. And we're in the process of cleaning those up and repurposing the things that people left behind.
SISK: Others like Jacob Chamberlain, who came here from Scotland, are doing daily chores like chopping firewood.
JACOB CHAMBERLAIN: It's not about, you know, taking selfies and saying that you were out here anymore. At this point it's about being hearty, surviving in the cold.
SISK: The Army Corps said it would conduct a lengthy environmental review of this project, even as a fossil fuel-friendly administration is coming to Washington. Standing Rock council member Chad Harrison attended a recent meeting between tribes and the Trump transition team and was pleased that could even happen.
CHAD HARRISON: My hope is that that's an indicator of how serious he'll be when it comes to Native American issues.
SISK: But North Dakota's new governor, Doug Burgum, is urging Donald Trump to approve the project. He's doing that even as he recently met with Standing Rock leaders in an effort to rebuild frayed relationships. Demonstrations have caused gridlock, disrupted businesses and severely stretched police resources. Shelle Aberle of Bismarck runs a Facebook page supporting law enforcement.
SHELLE ABERLE: It really kind of makes me sad when I see the picture that's being painted across the nation, this narrative that, you know, it's this bad cop thing happening. And that's not here in North Dakota. Not at all. Our law enforcement are there to protect both sides.
SISK: But other residents back the pipeline opponents. The Unitarian Universalist congregation has supplied food to camp and shelter.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Singing) We all need somebody to lean on.
SISK: In this protest, both sides often seem to speak right past each other. Minister Karen Van Fossan says that should be changing.
KAREN VAN FOSSAN: We aren't often talking about the things that are on our minds. And now we really are.
SISK: Kay LaCoe hopes that's true. The Bismarck resident recently called on residents to support businesses targeted by protesters. But soon after, hateful messages flooded her Facebook.
KAY LACOE: Hashtag #RacistNorthDakota.
SISK: She even received death threats and just wants a final decision on the pipeline to end all this tension.
KAY LACOE: Whatever the government and the tribe and the energy companies decide to do with that pipeline, I'm good with it. Just give me my hometown back.
SISK: But the legal battle over the pipeline will likely continue to play out as North Dakotans grapple both with the protesters and the fallout from their continued presence. For NPR News, I'm Amy Sisk in Bismarck.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK. Nigeria has this rich cultural heritage and many fine singers. But one group that burst onto the scene over the new year is grabbing a lot of attention. They sing for peace, and they have been called a boy band. Though, is that technically true, Ofeibea Quist-Arcton?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "O GOD, OUR HELP IN AGES PAST")
CHOIR: (Singing) O, God, our help in ages past...
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: Boy band, it certainly is not, maybe an old boy band. All the Nigerian voices you're listening to are senior citizens. They are mostly prominent past political and military leaders from Africa's most populous nation. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo, once also a military ruler of Nigeria, has a distinctive voice, which is enthusiastic, but probably better suited to galvanizing the masses.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "O GOD, OUR HELP IN AGES PAST")
OLUSEGUN OBASANJO: (Singing in foreign language).
QUIST-ARCTON: Their debut is a vintage hymn "O God, Our Help In Ages Past," sung in English and a range of local Nigerian languages. It's a slick and colorful video package, which zooms in on the individual singers, the conductor and the pianist, interspersed with patriotic images of Nigeria. Singing alongside Obasanjo is Nigeria's current vice president, Yemi Osinbajo. He's the sort of tremulous tenor.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "O GOD, OUR HELP IN AGES PAST")
YEMI OSINBAJO: (Singing) Before the hills in order stood...
QUIST-ARCTON: The video also features former military leader retired General Yakubu Gowon and two erstwhile military men, baritone Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe and retired General Oladipo Diya. Then there are a couple of civilians, former Vice President Alex Ekueme and gravelly voiced former interim leader Ernest Shonekan.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "O GOD, OUR HELP IN AGES PAST")
ERNEST SHONEKAN: (Singing in foreign language).
QUIST-ARCTON: It's not clear whether these Nigerian singer-leaders have come together to raise money for charity or whether they gathered to wish their compatriots goodwill for 2017. But they certainly grabbed the headlines. Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "O GOD, OUR HELP IN AGES PAST")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump chastised the U.S. intelligence community again last night. In a tweet, he put intelligence in quotation marks and suggested they delayed a briefing for him on allegations of Russian hacking because more time is needed to build a case.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Not exactly. According to our colleague Mary Louise Kelly, who covers intelligence, an official told her, quote, "the so-called Russia report was ordered by the White House. It has to go to President Obama first." Obama gets the briefing Thursday, Trump on Friday.
GREENE: Now, Russia has denied carrying out this hack. And Donald Trump, without offering evidence, has fed those doubts since the campaign.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: Once they hack, if you don't catch them in the act you're not going to catch them. They have no idea if it's Russia or China or somebody. It could be somebody sitting in a bed someplace.
GREENE: And we spoke to a cybersecurity expert who initially doubted Russian involvement as well. Matt Tait is CEO of Capital Alpha Security, a British cybersecurity firm. I asked him why he was skeptical.
MATT TAIT: Well, it just seems too fantastical to be true. Russia has very good hackers. You know, this is a government agency. So initially what I did was I decided I'm going to go and prove Crowdstrike wrong.
GREENE: They were hired by the Democratic National Committee, we should say, to look into this.
TAIT: Absolutely, and so I basically went through all of the technical evidence that had been published by them. I looked through the malware signatures that they had come up with. And eventually, what you start to discover is that there's a very large number of little pieces of information, some of which point towards Russia. Some of them point towards Russia very, very strongly. And eventually, I came to the conclusion that there's no other reasonable conclusion that you can make.
GREENE: Why couldn't it have been, like, any Joe Blow (ph), someone sitting in their bed, as Donald Trump suggested, masquerading as Russia and, you know, putting on a good disguise here?
TAIT: So there's two different hacks that took place. There's one hack that was of the DNC, and there was a different hack of John Podesta. And there's a...
GREENE: Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, yeah.
TAIT: Absolutely. And there's a series of other smaller hacks of other Democratic members. But those are the two main hacks that took place. And the DNC hack used malware. It hacked into the DNC and placed malware on the DNC network. And we're able to look at this malware, and we're able to analyze it and see where it talks to, which other companies have been hacked by similar malware.
And quite quickly, we're able to see that this is malware that was communicating with servers that also were involved in the hack of the German parliament, the Bundestag. And one of the things that was very interesting is that this is a group that we know quite well in the cybersecurity industry. There's this group called APD 28. They're very prolific. They've been involved in the hack of NATO organizations. They've been involved in the hack of journalists. They've been involved in the hack of people investigating the MH17 airline that was shot down in Ukraine. And so this is a group that is so prolific that it's not really credible that this is an individual group.
GREENE: If, I mean, Russia's really good at this, wouldn't they disguise themselves better? Would Russia really want to put so many visible signs out there in the cybersecurity world that it was them and be identified?
TAIT: Right. So this wasn't deliberate. They accidentally leaked this. And this is one of the problems of when you're hacking at a really big scale. You look for efficiencies. You're - there's just not enough members of staff that Russia has in order to be able to do hacks on this kind of scale and make sure that they never screw up. And what happens is that people make small mistakes, which means that once - when they've hacked person A you might be able to say, well, that's, you know, the same group. They've used the same malware. They've used same control infrastructure as the hack of person B.
Once you start to discover that, you know, there's not just the DNC, there's, you know, a thousand other people that have been hacked, all of whom are very narrowly tied to Russian military interests - they're hacks of NATO; they're hacks of the German parliament; they're hacks of journalists that are reporting on things that Russia is not, you know, very happy are being reported on - you stop quite quickly to build up this picture where in order for it to be someone else, it really has to be someone that is prolific who is doing this full-time. There's nobody else who would be willing to put that sort of cash, that sort of effort into doing those types of hacks.
GREENE: But you said something very important there. You're saying that Russia, in your words, screwed up here.
TAIT: Absolutely. And this is normal. It's actually very common that we see mistakes in malware, we see mistakes in hacking campaigns which allow us to work out who it was that did this.
GREENE: Let me finish with this. I mean, another major cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky Lab, very respected - we should mention Kaspersky is an NPR funder, and we do work with them on our computers. But they said that there can be false flags. There can be a lack of reliable metrics.
And Americans have gone through a situation with the Iraq War where there was talk of weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence community was - their credibility was really called into question after that. But a president took this nation to war based on intelligence. I mean, are you absolutely certain here, or could we find later on down the road that there was some amazing hacker out there who was able to pull this off and make it look like Russia?
TAIT: So one of the pieces of evidence that, to me, is more compelling than any other one was an email that was sent to John Podesta saying, hey, we're from Google, you need to change your password. And they sent him a link for him to click on. And when he clicked on that link, it took him to a page that wasn't Google and asked him to input his password. And that's how they hacked his account. But the URL shortening service that they used, we're able to basically look at the user that was logged in and discover all of the other URLs that they were shortening and discover that this was not just a hack of John Podesta.
It was a hack of, you know, a thousand people. And it becomes immediately, once you look at this, incredible to suggest that this was a false flag operation. This is someone's entire intelligence operation that was accidentally exposed due to this one error. And so while false flag operations do exist and we have to always be on the lookout for them, the only plausible alternative explanation is that Russian intelligence was hacked. So it's not credible to suggest that this particular hack was a false flag operation.
GREENE: It's impossible that Russia's intelligence community was hacked.
TAIT: So in attribution, nothing is impossible. But this is about as impossible as it comes.
GREENE: OK. Matt Tait is founder and CEO of Capital Alpha Security, a cybersecurity firm in Britain. And we reached him via Skype. Matt, thanks a lot.
TAIT: Thank you very much.
GREENE: And we should also note here that Kaspersky Lab, whose doubts about the hack that we cited, has its headquarters in Moscow.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
2017 is set to be the year when the European Union breaks up. The U.K. is moving forward with its Brexit plans, and they're using one of the EU's own constitutional rules to do it. It's a law called Article 50. Stacey Vanek Smith from our Planet Money podcast explains why the union has a built-in exit clause.
STACEY VANEK SMITH, BYLINE: Creating the European Union doesn't really sound like a job that someone would have, but for Kimmo Kiljunen it was his life's work. Kimmo is from Finland, longtime parliament member, and he's one of the architects of the EU.
You're a founding father.
KIMMO KILJUNEN: We the founding fathers (laughter) felt so strongly that now we are creating United States of Europe now.
SMITH: During the '90s, Kimmo spent years in small conference rooms hammering out treaties, trying to make this union come together. It was incredibly hard. It meant juggling the interest of dozens of countries, trying to overcome cultural differences and language barriers. Everything had to be filtered through translators into more than 20 different languages. Even something as simple as cracking a joke was a nightmare.
KILJUNEN: The first people to laugh are the Finnish delegates and Estonians, who understand Finnish. Let's say 15 seconds or 10 seconds later on start to be big laughs when those who are listening the English translator are laughing. And then comes 15 seconds more, the rest are laughing when they have been translated from English to their national languages.
SMITH: Kimmo and the other European delegates went through that process for every law and every decision. What should the European anthem be? Should we have an army? Where should the Parliament sit?
KILJUNEN: Usually they were very, very, very intensive, the days, very long days.
SMITH: But even after all of those debates many countries were still skittish, so in the last treaty that made up the EU's constitutional laws Kimmo and the other EU architects did what they had to do. They added Article 50, which was basically a prenup.
KILJUNEN: No. Having divorce option.
(LAUGHTER)
KILJUNEN: We are not Catholic in the way that this - you must be - when you are married once you are up to the life.
SMITH: Delegates from other countries would come to Kimmo with all kinds of concerns - that the EU would look like the U.S. with a really strong centralized government, or worried their own country's interests and values would get lost. And Kimmo would always point to Article 50. He'd say this is not the United States. We have an exit clause.
KILJUNEN: Here you see you are always saying that we are creating the United State of Europe here. No, we are not creating. There's an exit clause. You see it.
SMITH: When the documents were signed and the EU was official, Kimmo says it was one of the proudest days of his life. Then the financial crisis happened, there were bank bailouts, austerity measures, a Syrian refugee crisis. And the U.K. said this union is not working for us anymore and Brexit happened.
KILJUNEN: To be honest, I never would imagine that any country of - a member state of European Union would leave union.
SMITH: Kimmo was devastated. He said he didn't even believe it at first. Still, he says, Brexit is progress.
KILJUNEN: It wasn't a war. Usually these type of fundamental breaks are results of war. That's a positive side.
SMITH: But this civilized exit option could mean the end of the EU. Politicians and citizens across Europe have been critical of the EU, and there has been talk of other countries leaving, too. Still, Kimmo says, if he had to do it again, he would still include Article 50.
So you don't regret Article 50?
KILJUNEN: Absolutely no. I don't regret.
SMITH: Later this year, the U.K. is expected to trigger Article 50 and begin the long, probably painful process of leaving the EU. Stacey Vanek Smith, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOSHUA REDMAN AND THE BAD PLUS SONG, "FRIEND OR FOE")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Even before taking office, President-elect Donald Trump has redefined the presidential relationship with the media. He has verbally attacked individual reporters and has bypassed the press altogether through Twitter. Trump's new press secretary Sean Spicer says he doesn't expect that tweeting to stop.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SEAN SPICER: It is absolutely fascinating. And it makes every day, every hour just unbelievable because you know that you're having a conversation with the American people, and they can have it back with him, and he's not having to put everything through the filter of the mainstream media.
MARTIN: That's something that mainstream media needs to get used to, says Ari Fleischer. He was President George W. Bush's first press secretary. And while the relationship between any press corps and the president is inherently adversarial. Fleischer says this is something new.
ARI FLEISCHER: There's a big difference between adversarial and hostile, and this is hostile. We've never seen a candidate for office and now a president-elect of the country who the press just has it in for so much. We've also never seen it be returned this much. Donald Trump particularly enjoys going after the press, and that's why I call it a double-barreled hostile relationship.
MARTIN: Trump hasn't had a press conference since his election. One has finally been announced for January 11. But beyond that, his spokesman Sean Spicer says, quote, "business as usual is over." You were the White House press secretary. It was your job to run the daily press briefings. Do you see value in them?
FLEISCHER: I do see value in the briefing, but I'd like to make two changes. One, I would take it off the air as a live event. It should be embargoed, and so it'll be less of a TV show and more of an old-fashioned actual substantive policy briefing. And then secondly, I would democratize the room. There are 750 reporters credentialed to cover the White House, and there's only 49 seats in that room. Forty-nine seats really go to the mainstream media largely. I would update that and give those seats on a rotating basis to an entirely new group of reporters in addition to the press corps - business press, foreign journalists, social media day with the left dot-coms and the right dot-coms.
MARTIN: As you know, this is a president-elect who likes to use social media - that's an understatement. And you have praised his ability to go around the press and go directly to the American people by using Twitter in particular. How will President Trump then be held accountable if what he says isn't scrutinized or challenged?
FLEISCHER: Frankly, I'm kind of stunned at how much people focus on the fact that he tweets. Every president has taken advantage of technology since time immemorial. Kind of wonder if the FDR press corps used to say, do you think Roosevelt's going to continue to use that radio thing? This is the modern world. And President Obama showed the way. He was really the first president of the social media era. He went around the White House press corps frequently, things that George W. Bush when I was there never could have done because it would have been dismissed as government propaganda. And presidents now have the ability to get a message out going around old gatekeepers. So why should Donald Trump change that?
MARTIN: I think the concern is if he were to disband the daily press briefing, or as soon as he is in office to be less likely to sit down for one-on-one interviews.
FLEISCHER: I would criticise him if he were to do that. But as his incoming press secretary Sean Spicer said, the briefing will continue. And based on Donald Trump's actions, I see no reason to believe that he would cut back from the amount of interviews he's done with the mainstream media. Now, the news conference is different. News conferences take on a pack mentality, and it really has become an aggressive game of gotcha (ph). And I blame a lot of that on live TV and on press bias, but I would not hold regular news conferences if I were Donald Trump or really any anybody. But they do need to have one-on-one regular interviews with hard-hitting reporters.
MARTIN: What's the role of a press secretary in a Trump administration in which the president will say what he wants to whomever he wants whenever he wants on Twitter maybe even while the press secretary's doing a briefing?
FLEISCHER: Yeah, I don't think it's very much different from the role of press secretary in prior administrations. It's to take questions when the president is not or cannot and elaborate on what the president is thinking, to explain what the president is thinking. I think it's more challenging with Donald Trump than any previous press secretary because of Donald Trump's reliance on Twitter, and Donald Trump's just letting it zing when he wants to. But as always, the trick for a press secretary and the most important job is to know what the president is thinking. So regardless of the form in which the president says something or tweets it, the press secretary can elaborate on it.
MARTIN: Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, thanks so much for your time.
FLEISCHER: Thank you, Rachel.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
The Shakers are a small religious community that practices celibacy, and now the community has lost its oldest practicing member. Sister Frances Carr died in her home in Maine at the age of 89, and there are reportedly only two Shakers left in the United States. From Maine Public Radio, Susan Sharon has more.
SUSAN SHARON, BYLINE: Sister Frances Carr was just 10 years old when hard economic times forced her mother to turn over Frances and her younger sister to the Shakers Sabbathday Lake community. Their five older siblings were already living there. And Brother Arnold Hadd says that experience shaped Sister Frances' character.
ARNOLD HADD: She was always seeking out the needy and the lowly and trying to make them a part, to give them something that they didn't necessarily have.
SHARON: The Shakers were known for taking in orphans. Those who embraced the basic tenants of the Protestant sect were welcome to join when they became adults. Here's how Sister Frances described those tenants, known as the three Cs.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FRANCES CARR: It's a sharing of all things in common, so it's a religious communism, living in community. We're also a celibate community, and we also believe in the confession or sin.
SHARON: But Sister Frances also recognized that Shakerism (ph) was not the best fit for everyone, and not just because of celibacy. In her autobiography "Growing Up Shaker," she writes about the departure of her sister and other friends from the community. For most people, she said, putting God ahead of self and giving up independence was simply too much - not for her. She said that once she became a Shaker, she never felt alone.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CARR: I am very happy. No life is absolutely completely free of worry or troubles, but it's the life I've chosen, and it's where I intend to spend the rest of my life.
SHARON: Sister Frances Carr said she prayed every day for new members to join their ranks. And Brother Arnold says he and the other remaining member will continue those prayers. For NPR News, I'm Susan Sharon.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In the audio of this story, there is a reference to the “basic tenants” of the Shaker sect. The reference should have been to the “basic tenets.”]
(SOUNDBITE OF JOY WANTS ETERNITY SONG, "FROM EMBRACE TO EMBRACE")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Rachel Martin. Sometimes people need help remembering things, like the importance of clearing the snow off their cars before driving them. Apparently that's the case in Bangor, Maine. The police there are using a 1970s classic rock song to get people to be safer on the roads in the winter. Sgt. Tim Cotton wrote on his Facebook page it would be a better fit if the Manfred Mann song was called Blinded By The White, but you get the point.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLINDED BY THE LIGHT")
MANFRED MANN: (Singing) She was blinded by the light.
MARTIN: It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There are more elephants left in the world than there are giraffes. Surprising, right? You don't think about giraffes as being at risk, but they are. In fact, the International Union for Conservation of Nature says giraffes are on their way to becoming extinct. To talk more about this, we reached a leader in the effort to save these animals. His name is Julian Fennessy. He leads the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. And he joins us via Skype from Windhoek, which is the capital of Namibia. Mr. Fennessy, thanks so much for being with us.
JULIAN FENNESSY: Thanks, Rachel. It's really great to be with you.
MARTIN: Before we talk about why, let's talk about the scope of this problem. The giraffe population in Africa has fallen, I understand, by 40 percent over the last couple of decades. What are the real numbers we're talking about here?
FENNESSY: That's a little bit frightening. There's no doubt about it. So we estimate less than 100,000 giraffe in Africa. And three decades ago, we probably had 155,000. And if you look at probably 100 to 200 years ago, probably at least a million giraffe.
MARTIN: All right, so why is this happening?
FENNESSY: So basically, giraffe numbers are declining as a result of human population growth. And as a result of humans spreading out into new areas, we're losing habitat for giraffe in Africa. Just less areas that they can live and move and obviously, just be giraffe. You couple that with also impacts of disease, but mostly, in sort of East and Central Africa in the last 30 years there's been poaching, illegal hunting. So people in the civil war areas have been really, unfortunately, targeting giraffe because it's a large food source.
MARTIN: It's a food source. So it's not for pelts or some other part of the animal. It's for food.
FENNESSY: No, it's predominantly for food. In some areas like the Democratic Republic of Congo, the tail is sought after as a dowry for the bride. But yeah, mostly it is for food.
MARTIN: Your group has been working to help fix this problem by capturing giraffes and relocating them to places where they can thrive. How do you do that? And where do you move them to? I mean, can giraffes only survive in certain kinds of habitats?
FENNESSY: So throughout Africa, we've been working really closely with governments. That's the bottom line. If you don't work with governments, you're not going to make a difference. And in Uganda this last year alone, we helped set up two new populations of giraffe in Uganda, endangered Rothschild's giraffes. Capturing them is mad, it's fun, it's exciting, it's scary, it's all of these things at the one time. So you physically capture every individual with a rope. After using some drugs you get on top of it, tie it down, we put them on a truck and we took them across this little river called the Nile - obviously one of the mightiest rivers in the world. And to see the sight of giraffe across the Nile is absolutely phenomenal.
MARTIN: I was surprised to learn that there's also an issue when it comes to reproduction, right? There are four different species of giraffe, and they can't necessarily breed with one another?
FENNESSY: So a couple of months ago, we were lucky to publish that we believe there's at least four species of giraffe out there. What we've seen with these four species is that whilst many of them may live in and around the same area, they do not interbreed. So maybe they just don't like the look of each other. I'm not sure. Maybe there's some ecological factor. But what we want to do now is save them in their areas and save that biodiversity integrity.
MARTIN: Julian Fennessy is the co-founder and director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. He joined us via Skype from Windhoek, Namibia. Thank you so much for talking with us.
FENNESSY: Thanks, Rachel. I really appreciate it.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Big time athletes really put their professional careers on the line if they decide to stand up for a social cause, and commentator Frank Deford says this is something that's been going on in sports for decades.
FRANK DEFORD, BYLINE: There's no question that athletes, college as well as pro, have been more outspoken on social issues than ever before. This is quite a change. In fact, for a long time, players tended to be criticized for not being like the passionate activists that we'd seen in the '60s and '70s - Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Jim Brown, Bill Russell, Arthur Ashe. I always thought that was unfair of the critics for the athletes of the late 20th century, who are essentially only mirroring their young peers. When Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the black power salute at the '68 Olympics, young Americans of all stripes were in a protest mode. When, a couple decades later, Michael Jordan was pilloried for not picking up a pitchfork and storming the barricades of injustice, his cohort of fans was hardly any more revolutionary than he was. People sometimes forget how immature outside the sideline stripes so many of our young physical heroes are. And then when they do speak up about anything, there is invariably a large element of fandom that calls out for them to just take the big money and play ball and shut up. After all, it's revealing that entertainers are almost never expected to do anything but talk about their new movie and who designed their gown. Have you ever heard one word of substance on any red carpet? Athletes, of course, are more accessible and, as Colin Kaepernick certainly instructed us, more visible. The 49er quarterback first sat, then kneeled during pre-game renditions of the national anthem. Myself, I found the reaction something of a tempest in a teapot. Of course Kaepernick had every right to express himself. But it seems to me that if you use the "Star-Spangled Banner," you're really casting an indiscriminate net in as much as the anthem represents the whole of our government, our policies, our good and our bad. It's interesting that the nation's premier star, LeBron James, is among those unafraid to speak his piece. James has acted wisely in carefully laying out whatever is eating at him. As an African-American, when black players are so dominant in popular sports, we could even say that James holds something of an honorary position that even the fabled Ali did not possess in his time, when white athletes were still then majority. As such, LeBron James has become something of a unique cultural figure in American sports history.
(SOUNDBITE OF MALCOM KIPE SONG, "LOVE STORY")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Republicans in Congress have tried over and over to repeal Obamacare to no avail. Now, they control both houses of Congress, and they've got an ally in the White House. And now the path is much clearer. Here's Donald Trump just before the election.
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DONALD TRUMP: Obamacare has to be repealed and replaced. And it has to be replaced with something much less expensive for the people. And otherwise, this country's in even bigger trouble than anybody thought. So we're going to repeal and replace Obamacare.
MARTIN: The repeal part is already underway, although Trump and other Republicans say they want to keep some popular parts of the plan, which makes the whole thing more complicated. Today, Vice President-elect Mike Pence is up on Capitol Hill talking with Republicans about how to move forward with repeal. President Obama is also up there huddling with Democrats about how best to respond. Should they work with them to try to preserve as much of the law as possible or oppose them at every turn?
One of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, Zeke Emanuel, told us yesterday on this program that he's optimistic about what the ultimate result will be under Trump.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
EZEKIEL EMANUEL: He really does, I think, genuinely want a bill and health care system that works for all Americans that achieves universal coverage, no pre-existing disease exclusions. And I think, therefore, there is some ray of optimism that we could actually get a compromise bill rather than just something rammed down the country's throat by the Republicans.
MARTIN: Joining me now to talk about all this is NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel.
MARTIN: What can you tell us at this point about how Trump and the Republicans are going to go about this?
LIASSON: Republicans have already laid down the procedural groundwork for gutting the ACA. But there is still a big internal debate inside the Republican Party about whether it's a good idea to repeal the law without having a replacement ready to go. And Republicans haven't been able to agree on a replacement yet that would give everyone access to affordable, quality insurance. And Trump, as you just heard, wants to keep some popular parts of the law, like letting young people stay on their parents' plans, not banning people with pre-existing conditions.
But the big question is how you do that without keeping the law's mandates and subsidies. And then there's the difficulty of, quote, "repeal and delay," which is another Republican idea, where they repeal the law but put an expiration date on it. In other words, the repeal wouldn't take place for several years, kind of try to freeze the law in place. It's not clear if that's realistic because insurers, once they know the law is going away, would probably just leave the individual marketplaces. And the whole thing might just collapse.
MARTIN: So what kind of leverage do President Obama and the Democrats actually have in this dynamic?
LIASSON: They don't have a lot of leverage. I think they would like to communicate to Trump voters, many of whom are among the 19 million people who get health care through the ACA or the Medicaid expansion, about what's happening. Ironically, some of the parts of the country that depend the most on Obamacare are those rural, low-income, high-unemployment counties that voted for Trump. And those are the parts of the country where it's not so easy to get health insurance. Democrats want to make sure those voters know that Trump and the Republicans have just made their lives much harder.
But that being said, Democrats also say, as you heard from Zeke Emanuel, that if Republicans are serious about a replacement, they might be willing to participate in a debate. Of course, the joke is that Republicans could just change a few paragraphs in the ACA, rename it Trumpcare (ph) and Republicans would love it (laughter).
MARTIN: But as you pointed out, a lot of people who were part of the electorate that brought Donald Trump into the White House are beneficiaries of Obamacare. So there's clear - there is a political risk here for Republicans.
LIASSON: I think there are many political risks for Republicans. It's a risk either way. They have to repeal this law. They promised to do it. It was their No. 1 promise. Their base expects them to repeal it. But if they do, will they be blamed for huge disruptions in the health insurance system if 19 million people start losing their coverage or if they have to pay even more because they no longer have subsidies, just like President Obama and the Democrats were blamed when people weren't able to continue seeing their doctors or they had to change plans or their rates rose.
So there are consequences to repeal or to repeal-and-delay, and the consequences could be very complicated. And Republicans would be doing this on a partisan vote, on a party-line vote, with no Democratic support for repeal, just like Obama and the Democrats did to pass the ACA. And back then, we were told, the lesson was supposed to be that big changes in social programs are better done on a bipartisan basis. And that doesn't seem to be the case this time either.
MARTIN: The industry, health care, has been trying to play catch-up just making all the changes necessary to put into place Obamacare. This uncertainty can't be good for that industry. When is there going to be any kind of clarity about what's going to happen?
LIASSON: Well, I think the big question is - are they going to repeal it with a replacement, or are they going to repeal it without a replacement? And can they freeze the system in place until they come up with a replacement? Those are all big questions, and we don't have the answers to them yet.
MARTIN: NPR political correspondent Mara Liasson.
Thank you so much, Mara.
LIASSON: Thank you.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: All right. One of the biggest names at Fox News is now leaving for NBC. Anchor Megyn Kelly is a journalist who has made a number of headlines herself recently. As NPR's David Folkenflik reports, Kelly has now won a prize she long sought while Fox News is going to be scrambling to reshape its primetime lineup.
FOLKENFLIK: The move allows Megyn Kelly to shed Fox's conservative ideological baggage and its rhetorical combat. She'll be hosting a daytime weekly show and a Sunday night newsmagazine on NBC. Think of Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters instead of Bill O'Reilly. On Fox News, Kelly, a former lawyer, periodically through red meat to her jury, that is, core Fox viewers. In 2010, for instance, Kelly took authorities to task for their handling of a minor Election Day incident involving a menacing but very small hate group.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FOX NEWS LIVE")
MEGYN KELLY: I'll tell you because you clearly don't know the facts of this case. They got out an injunction...
KIRSTEN POWERS: I actually do know the...
KELLY: Let me finish. They got an injunction against Samir Shabazz.
FOLKENFLIK: A liberal media watchdog estimated she devoted three and a half hours over a two-week period to the New Black Panther Party.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FOX NEWS LIVE")
KELLY: They then...
POWERS: OK.
KELLY: ...Got rid of that injunction altogether.
POWERS: Megyn...
KELLY: So don't tell me that they did all they could.
FOLKENFLIK: Kelly later apologized for the tone of that exchange with liberal Fox News pundit Kirsten Powers. In 2013, Kelly took up rhetorical arms in the so-called war on Christmas.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE KELLY FILE")
KELLY: This is so ridiculous - yet another person claiming it's racist to have a white Santa, you know. And by the way, for all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white.
FOLKENFLIK: After an outcry, Kelly said she had been joking. Despite such moments, Kelly has largely sought to carve out a role rejecting partisan pieties. On election night in 2012, the Fox News analyst and Republican strategist Karl Rove rebuffed the network's projection, a re-election win by Barack Obama. Kelly sought to inject some reality.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FOX NEWS LIVE")
KELLY: Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better? Or is this real, and you genuinely...
FOLKENFLIK: At the first Republican primary debate in August 2015, Kelly famously asked Donald Trump about the insults he had hurled toward women, calling them fat pigs, dogs, slobs, animals.
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KELLY: You once told a contestant on "Celebrity Apprentice" it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?
FOLKENFLIK: Trump returned fire on CNN.
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DONALD TRUMP: Well, I just don't respect her as a journalist. I have no respect for her. I don't think she's very good.
FOLKENFLIK: And Trump denounced her for months. After the election, Kelly spoke to NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
KELLY: I think that many people thought I enjoyed my year of Trump because they saw me on the cover of Vanity Fair. And they thought - wow, she's got it made. And that's fine.
FOLKENFLIK: Kelly said she had received death threats.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
KELLY: It was my year of guards and guns, you know, thanks to Trump. It was - I was under security threat for most of the nine months he was really coming after me. I had strange people showing up at my house. I had strange people casing my house. I had, you know, my children not understanding who was popping up on our porch.
FOLKENFLIK: Other Fox hosts gave Trump kid-glove treatment. Kelly told associates that Fox News chairman Roger Ailes failed to defend her adequately. It turned out that Ailes, a former Republican strategist, had been privately offering political advice to Trump for a year. As Ailes was swept up in allegations of sexual harassment last summer, Kelly added her voice, saying Ailes had sexually harassed her a decade ago.
Again, Kelly on NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
KELLY: He started off with just inappropriate sexual comments. It wasn't like - hey, you look nice in that dress. It was, I'm sure you have some very sexy bras. And he wanted to see me in them. I mean, it was not ambiguous. Trust me.
FOLKENFLIK: And the Murdochs, the controlling owners of Fox, did - forcing Ailes out, seeing Kelly, not Ailes, as the future of Fox. Kelly's ambitions ranged farther afield. She had gone to meet Trump privately at his offices in late spring to smooth over their differences. And Trump appeared on her primetime special for the Fox broadcast network.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: I have great respect for you that you were able to call me and say, let's get together and let's talk. To me, I would not have done that.
FOLKENFLIK: The night was intended to showcase her human touch. Other guests included one of the O.J. Simpson's lawyers and two Hollywood stars, the kind of mix she'll presumably chase at NBC.
The move does carry risks for Kelly and for NBC. Will her skills translate? Will viewers take to her? Will her history at Fox color their perception of her? And Fox News now confronts a yawning chasm in its primetime lineup. Yet, it can now recalibrate for the Trump years and could reinforce the Fox News brand by picking someone less inclined than Kelly to challenge the new president and more likely to champion him.
David Folkenflik, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOUR TET'S "PLASTIC PEOPLE")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And you'd be excused for feeling a little bit of whiplash if you're watching the opening hours of the 115th Congress. On Monday night, House Republicans voted privately to put the independent Office of Congressional Ethics under the House Ethics Committee, which they control. And that made it look like lawmakers might essentially be policing their own ethics. By the next day, none other than President-elect Donald Trump joined critics of this move. And very quickly, House Republicans reversed themselves. Let's talk with someone who is involved in all of this. It's Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania.
Congressman, good morning.
CHARLIE DENT: Hey. Good morning, David. Thank you for having me on the program.
GREENE: Well, thanks for taking the time. We appreciate it. I know the opening of Congress is a busy time for you.
So you're former chairman of the House Ethics Committee. You know a lot about how this all works. You voted against this move - why?
DENT: Yeah. On Monday evening, I mentioned to the Republican Congress that there were some challenges with this. And I cautioned the members about the ambiguity of one provision of the amendment in particular that caused me some consternation.
GREENE: What was that?
DENT: It was the one that dealt with it - that the office of - basically, the Office of Congressional Ethics would be subject to oversight by the Committee on Ethics...
GREENE: Which would make it look like lawmakers basically handling their own policing of ethics.
DENT: Well, we do handle our own policing to be perfectly candid. And I think there is a lot of confusion about what the Office of Congressional Ethics does. It's an entity that can receive complaints from the public or anybody about members of Congress or staff. And what they do then is they can, you know, review the matter within certain timelines and then refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee, which I had the chair.
And they can only ask for two things. They can say that matter should either - they can recommend that the matter be further reviewed or dismissed. That's all they can do. They cannot sanction anyone. Only the Committee on Ethics can do that with members of Congress. Now that said, I cautioned members about this amendment, particularly that one provision - that, you know, it was unclear. It was ambiguous. It could have - and I wasn't quite sure what the intent was. And more importantly, I don't know how it would have been implemented, you know, based on what I read in the amendment. And...
GREENE: And it didn't look that good either. I mean, it - was that part of your concern?
DENT: Well, yeah - there's the perception, too. Looks like - you know, the perception was that, you know - that Congress was taking over the Office of Congressional Ethics and that...
GREENE: What were your colleagues thinking? I mean, even if you say you don't know their motive necessarily, what were they telling you?
DENT: Well, look, I know what - well, I certainly know what the motive was. There were members of Congress who felt that that office, you know, wasn't always treating them fairly. And they wanted that - they felt that only members of Congress should be dealing with their ethical situations. In fact, the Senate has no similar entity this year where that - the Senate has no outside organization that takes complaints and filters them and then sends them over to the Senate Ethics Committee. This is only a House phenomenon.
GREENE: Yeah. Both parties in the House, when this was created, sort of celebrated that they were taking a good move to deal with this.
DENT: While there was some celebration to be sure, there were also those on both sides who were critical. And, you know, there are other changes in that amendment, I should note, that were, I'll say, more procedural. Well, one of the changes would have given the Office of Congressional Ethics more time to complete what they call the preliminary review. It would give them more time to complete a second-phase review, so they would have gotten additional, you know, 30 days to 60 days.
GREENE: If I may - we don't have a whole lot of time.
DENT: Yeah.
GREENE: I want to move to the President-elect Trump.
DENT: Sure.
GREENE: How big a deal was his criticism yesterday when the party members got together and decided to reverse this?
DENT: I thought it was a factor. I won't say it was the determining factor. I felt that the leaders Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy in particular both felt that they didn't want to start off this Congress, you know, on an unethical issue like this. I really felt that they wanted to focus on more substantive policy matters and that this would be a, you know, terrible distraction. And they're right.
GREENE: And also maybe it looked like you were sort of having a difference with a Republican White House, a soon-to-be Republican White House.
DENT: Yeah, that too. That, too - there's no question. I think it had an impact, but I don't think it was the deciding impact. I really do think it was the speaker and the leader wanting to, you know, start the year off on a clean slate without this kind of a distraction. I think the tweet had an impact, but that wasn't the determining factor.
GREENE: Let me just ask you about Paul Ryan. From the outside, doesn't look like the best day for him. He did not want this move. Then he sort of seemed like he was defending it, trying to back up members of the party. But then the president sends this tweet and basically the party backs away. I mean, is that a problem at a time when all of you in Congress in this party are going to, at times, have to, you know, potentially stick up to this White House?
DENT: Oh, I said all of them. They are going to be days when we will agree with Donald Trump, and we will help him, support him in those efforts. And there are going to be days where we disagree with him. And on those days where we disagree with him, you know, we have to certainly demonstrate that we can check him, and we must. And I've always said - you know, we're members of Congress. We're not potted plants. We are - there are separations of powers, and we're - there are going to be days where we disagree with the executive branch. And that's not something that we should be too concerned with. I mean...
GREENE: All right.
DENT: ...There'll be areas of agreement. You know, I think a lot of us do want to work with him on tax reform and maybe an infrastructure program.
GREENE: OK.
DENT: There may be differences on some other issues, perhaps on Russia and other areas of foreign policy.
GREENE: All right, we'll have to leave it there. We're out of time.
Congressman Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, thanks so much.
DENT: Thank you, David. All right, take care.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
To South Korean now and the impeachment trial that could put an end to the presidency of Park Geun-hye. NPR's Elise Hu has the latest in this political drama.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: South Koreans welcomed the new year with more political uncertainty as the president refused to show up for her own impeachment trial. President Park Geun-hye is mired in abuse of power charges for giving a shadowy friend sweeping power in the government. Park is denying the corruption allegations against her - but only in the press.
PRESIDENT PARK GEUN-HYE: (Speaking Korean).
HU: "I can say for sure I didn't order anyone to do anything to give them advantages. That didn't even enter my head," Park said on Sunday.
The Korean National Assembly, last month, voted overwhelmingly to strip the president of her powers. An acting president is leading the country while a court takes up to six months to decide whether to actually remove Park from office. Chief Judge Park Han-chul opened the trial yesterday, saying the judges are aware the country is in crisis.
PARK HAN-CHUL: (Through interpreter) We will reach a decision in a fair and prompt manner after a thorough assessment of the case.
HU: The case is chaotic and confusing. It reaches almost every level of Korean society, most notably the conglomerates - like Samsung. The company has admitted to funding President Park's shadowy friend, even buying dressage horses for the friend's daughter.
CHUNG YOO-RA: (Speaking Korean).
HU: "Samsung bought the horses. I just rode them," daughter Chung Yoo-ra told a judge. She could now also face charges in the swirling scandal. If it does bring down President Park, Park would be the first democratically elected leader of South Korea to be removed from office.
Elise Hu, NPR News, Seoul.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene with one of the more embarrassing moments ever on Capitol Hill. Republican congressman Roger Marshall of Kansas was being sworn in by House Speaker Paul Ryan yesterday, and his son was in the camera shot dabbing - raised his elbow, dropped his head down. You may know the dance move. Well, Paul Ryan didn't. Ryan asked if he was all right. The young man said yeah, still in his pose. Ryan asked if he needed to sneeze. The teenager just said yeah and gave up. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Despite President-elect Donald Trump's full-throated skepticism, tomorrow Congress launches its investigation into whether Russia hacked Democrats' emails during the election. Senator John McCain's Armed Services Committee will lead things off, followed by two other Senate committees.
Last week, President Obama expelled Russian diplomats based on the conclusion of U.S. intelligence that Russia was behind the hacking. Trump's incoming White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, said the move was premature.
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SEAN SPICER: The idea that you should be talking about the conclusion or the actions that you're going to take on a conclusion that's not final yet is unbelievably irresponsible.
ALISYN CAMEROTA: Wait a minute, Sean.
SPICER: The report is not - no, no. Hold on. The report's not final. He has not been briefed...
MARTIN: That was Spicer talking on CNN. Joining me now is David Kramer. He served as assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush and is a senior director at the McCain Institute. Thanks so much for coming in.
DAVID KRAMER: Good morning.
MARTIN: We are getting mixed messages from Trump and his aides. On the one hand, Trump himself said he has information no one else has that makes him think Russia didn't do this. At the same time, his aides keep saying the final report from the intelligence community hasn't been completed, so it's too early to come to a conclusion.
What do you make of the incoming administration's reaction to all this?
KRAMER: I - I think we have to recognize that the intelligence community has concluded - it did in October - that the Russians were involved in the hacking. And then after the election, they concluded that the Russians were hacking in order to try to tip the election in favor of Donald Trump.
The final report that is - we're all waiting for was something President Obama ordered before January 20. That is something we are waiting - but at the same time, I don't think there is much debate within the intelligence community that the Russians were behind the hacking and that they did so in order to try to favor Trump.
The president-elect has decided to take on the intelligence community, which I don't find to be the best strategy as he assumes office on January 20.
MARTIN: So if you're saying that the intelligence is solid that Russia was behind this hack, what do you make of the president-elect's rejection of that? Is there - is there some credence to his doubts?
KRAMER: Well, he has indicated he has information that others don't that he plans to release - not clear when that will happen. He had indicated this past weekend he would do so either yesterday or today. He has stated that the intelligence briefing he was hoping to get had been delayed. The intelligence community has responded that it was not delayed. It's scheduled for this Friday.
So there is a lot of confusion. I think these kinds of things would be better sorted out behind the scenes rather than publicly or through tweeting.
MARTIN: You wrote in a piece in Politico the day after the sanctions were announced that the U.S. should be taking more retaliatory actions. Like what?
KRAMER: Well, the reaction among most Republicans on the Hill was that this action was too little too late. It wasn't the sense that President Obama had taken steps that would tie Donald Trump's hands when he became president. And I think the Republican reaction is generally right. I do think the steps that were taken last week were significant steps, kicking out 35 Russian intelligence operatives, closing down two sites - one in Maryland, one in New York - and then sanctioning a number of entities, including the Russian military intelligence service and the FSB, the successor to the KGB.
But I think there are other steps that could be taken, including adding the director of the FSB to the list and looking into possible hacking of our own on Russian ill-gotten gains in their personal accounts. We have said that there are assets that have been acquired by Putin and his circle. If we know that they exist, maybe we should look into going after them and lopping off a few zeros from their accounts and then having them complain that they've lost millions if not billions of dollars and then explaining how they got that money in the first place.
MARTIN: Do you think that's something Donald Trump would pursue in the White House?
KRAMER: I think it's unlikely. He had indicated during the campaign his willingness to look at the possibility of lifting Ukraine-related sanctions, not even talking about Russia-hacking-related sanctions. And he'd even indicated the possibility of recognizing Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea that was taken over in 2014. So I would be surprised if we saw any additional moves that would involve sanctions or any other steps when it comes to Russia.
MARTIN: Just briefly, let's say Trump changes U.S. policy toward Russia, extends a hand, ends sanctions, recognizes the annexation of Crimea. How does any of that undermine America's national security?
KRAMER: I - what I fear is a recognition, perhaps implicit if not explicit, of a Russian sphere of influence. And that would consign many of Russia's neighbors to a Russian area of control that I don't think would serve our interests. These countries aspired 25 years ago to be independent states. Many of them want to join Euro-Atlantic institutions like NATO and the European Union. Several of Russia's neighbors are in fact members of those organizations. They're all very nervous about what may come. And so I hope the president-elect, once he assumes office, will in fact reassure them the United States stands with them.
MARTIN: David Kramer is with the McCain Institute. He served as assistant secretary of state under George W. Bush. Thank you so much.
KRAMER: Thanks very much.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And let's turn now to Mexico. Gas prices skyrocketed there on January 1, sparking days of nationwide protests. And then the Mexican peso took yet another plunge after news yesterday that Ford is canceling plans to build a new billion-and-a-half-dollar auto plant in the country. The car company had for months been the brunt of harsh criticism by incoming president Donald Trump. Here's NPR's Carrie Kahn from Mexico City.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: The peso dropped nearly a full percentage point on news that Ford was pulling the plug on its new plant in Mexico. The latest plunge comes on top of the nosedive the Mexican currency took immediately after Trump's electoral victory. Now gas prices are up by as much as 20 percent nationwide, and 2017 is looking gloomy for Mexicans.
(SOUNDBITE OF POTS BANGING)
KAHN: So they've been protesting all week across the country, from these pot-banging demonstrators in Oaxaca to truck drivers blocking major highways and picketers at local gas stations.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting in Spanish).
KAHN: These demonstrators shouted slogans demanding Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto resign. His Treasury Secretary, Jose Antonio Meade, defended the hikes on the Aristegui Noticias website.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TREASURY SECRETARY JOSE ANTONIO MEADE: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: "This is the necessary step we had to take," says Meade. He says the government can no longer subsidize the price of gasoline as it has done for years, especially now that worldwide oil prices are rising. Three years ago, Mexico overhauled its energy laws to allow for the first time in more than 80 years foreign investment in the country's energy infrastructure. Officials say that as new players enter the gasoline market, prices will become competitive and come down. That's a promise not too many Mexicans are believing these days as they see their currency plunging and prices rising. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Mexico City.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Today could mark the beginning of the end of Obamacare. Debate about the future of the Affordable Care Act starts later this morning on the Senate floor. President-elect Donald Trump and Republican leaders have promised to repeal and replace the law. President Obama went up to Capitol Hill to strategize with Democrats on ways to preserve this part of his legacy. Vice president-elect Mike Pence was meeting separately with Republican lawmakers. We spoke earlier to Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. She's the vice chair of the Trump transition team.
The president-elect has said he'd like to be able to keep a couple of popular parts of the law, including protections for people with pre-existing conditions and allowing young adults to stay on their parents plans. Is there a consensus among Republicans about keeping those parts of the plan?
MARSHA BLACKBURN: Well, actually we're pleased that he would want to keep those because those are plans that Republicans brought to the table. And individuals that say, well, what are your plans and what is your approach? Just go back to the Blair House health care summit in 2010, and you see there very clearly where the administration laid out a government-controlled path, and we laid out a very clear reform methodology for patient-centered health care. So you've got those two approaches. Having a way for those with pre-existing conditions to buy health insurance through state-run high-risk pools, of course, those are things that are important to do. And those young adults who are still students and staying on parents' insurance, that's just good common sense.
MARTIN: More than 20 million Americans have insurance currently through the Affordable Care Act. Donald Trump has yet to say whether or not they're going to lose their coverage if and when Obamacare is repealed. Will they?
BLACKBURN: My anticipation is that as you break those numbers down and look at what makes (unintelligible) number, you see - get a clearer picture of how people will retain and hold and actually have access to affordable health care because right now it's not affordable. Now, about 12 million...
MARTIN: So you don't believe there will be a gap in care if there's - if Obamacare's repealed?
BLACKBURN: No, because you do systematic orderly process of a phase-out and a phase-in. Now, when you look at your 20 million number, you're looking at about 11 million of those that are - have come in to the process through the Medicaid process. And what we would like to do is see Medicaid sent back to the states so that they can deliver it in a method that will help produce better outcomes and be more cost effective for those that are right there where you're...
MARTIN: Congresswoman?
BLACKBURN: What you also have to look at is that those that are in the exchange, many of those had health insurance prior to Obamacare and then were forced into the exchange.
MARTIN: I think we're working with a difficult phone line. Let me just ask you this. Yesterday, we spoke to Zeke Emanuel on this program, one of the architects of Obamacare. He said he believes Donald Trump wants a bipartisan bill. Have you been in touch with Democrats on this? Are you seeing a way forward to make this a bipartisan effort?
BLACKBURN: Oh, absolutely. Democrats do want to participate in this because their providers, their constituents - they're hearing from their constituents that the insurance is too expensive to afford and too expensive to use. And they're hearing from providers that the networks are too narrow, and they cannot properly refer people for appropriate care.
MARTIN: Last question. Just briefly, could you vote to repeal but then not implement the rollback for a couple of years while you figure out replacement?
BLACKBURN: Of course there's going to be a pathway. You have to have a period of time.
MARTIN: Do you know what period of time is yet?
BLACKBURN: Well, we are working to solidify that. You have to work with your provider networks and your insurance networks to determine what is going to be that period of time.
MARTIN: OK.
BLACKBURN: The insurance marketplace has to have a period of time to do the actuarial and underwriting...
MARTIN: It's complicated process, and we're going to have to leave it there. I'm so sorry to interrupt you - Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
President Obama went to Capitol Hill this morning to strategize with congressional Democrats on ways to save his signature Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Congressman Joseph Crowley of New York was in that meeting, he chairs the House Democratic Caucus. I spoke with him earlier and I asked what exactly the president can do in these final days.
JOSEPH CROWLEY: Well, first of all, I think we're thrilled to have the president come to us in his closing days of public office - I won't say public life but public office. I think he's going to go around to bolster and to encourage us going forward. But I think that's part of what today's about. And that's why I was proud to invite him today. To hear from him directly, this is clearly - if not the, certainly one of the, most significant things that he accomplished as the president, as our president. And to talk just to bolster our caucus - we have a big fight ahead of us. And we stand ready to fight and defend the achievements over the last eight years, including...
GREENE: Sounds like more energizing than strategizing.
CROWLEY: Well, I think it's a combination of both. I think we need to hear from him in terms of - and I think, primarily, energizing. I do think that. I think we have - we understand what's ahead of us. We understand the legislative process. We understand the disadvantages that we're at.
But the one we do have is that energy. One thing we do have is we know what we've accomplished for the American people, for over 20 million people who didn't - or almost 30 million people who didn't have insurance before this or coverage before this - then they'll have it and why it's so important to keep it for them.
GREENE: If I may, let me ask you about that because we spoke this morning to Marsha Blackburn, your Republican colleague from Tennessee. And she said that even Democratic lawmakers like yourself are hearing from your constituents that insurance is just too high for many people. They're struggling to afford it under Obamacare. Are you hearing that from your constituents?
CROWLEY: No, no, we're not at all. In fact, you hear the opposite - for the first time that they're actually able to afford insurance coverage, that they have real insurance, not phony insurance, insurance that covers actual events in their lives. So I think...
GREENE: You're hearing from anybody that their insurance is too high, that they...
CROWLEY: I think some folks are committed, you know. And I think it depends on the political ideology quite frankly, unfortunately. I think that what we've been hearing from - and I think this has all been about political leverage and not about delivering for the American people from the Republican end of it.
But I think that there's certainly a constituency out there that thinks that anything the Democrats do is evil. And that simply isn't the case. But that's always something we're fighting back on. I don't think anyone questions, I think, the value of giving - for people who had no insurance or were thrown off their insurance because of pre-existing condition or because of, you know, the benefits that the Affordable Care Act now has that even Republicans recognize but they don't want to pay for.
GREENE: Well...
CROWLEY: They want to keep them. They don't want to pay for them.
GREENE: You talk about the political environment. I think people on both sides of the aisle look at the other, and there's this suspicion of evil. We had Dr. Zeke Emanuel on the program talking about the path ahead now. You know, you have this meeting with the president. Republicans are likely to do something big, maybe pass a resolution saying that Obamacare must be repealed. And then he predicts there might be this period of months where there's time and space where the parties could come together, actually dig in and talk about compromise.
Are you prepared to do that, even if it means some rhetorical restraint - not going out there yelling and saying Republicans are trying to take people off insurance but saying, let's dig in and see where we can find common ground?
CROWLEY: Well, David, this is not new for us. They have had 60 attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. Sixty attempts, knowing that none of them would be would be successful. But they've gone through this rhetorical debate constantly. And it's - look, we certainly are open to listening. We're not - we don't think that everything that we've come up with is perfect. But at the same time, we know the value of what we have created in terms of what it's done to change people's lives.
They will be taking away a benefit from millions of people who did not have that benefit prior to this. And whether it's through actually purchasing through an exchange or the broadening under the Medicaid system - and I think they belittle that. They talk about - oh, that's just because more people are now on Medicaid. You know, it's not because they have more insurance. No, Medicaid is an insurance coverage for people who have no coverage.
GREENE: But are you opening to listening and seeing if there's something that might be called Trumpcare (ph) that might keep some of the important parts of the law that you find important?
CROWLEY: Look, we've always been open to listening. There just hasn't been anything legitimately put forward to us over the last - you know, since '09, since we passed this bill. You know, it's easy to look back and say - well, we want to keep all the good things. But how do you pay for them? How do you do that and not blow out the budget? And that's what we've been able to accomplish.
GREENE: All right. Congressman Joseph Crowley of New York - he's chair of the House Democratic Caucus.
Thanks so much for taking the time this morning. I appreciate it.
CROWLEY: Thank you, David. Thank you very much.
GREENE: Take care.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Obama has been up on Capitol Hill this morning strategizing with Democrats about ways to save the Affordable Care Act, a major part of his presidential legacy. Vice President-elect Mike Pence has been in meetings with Republican lawmakers. He spoke a short while ago and made it clear why Republicans are determined to dismantle the president's signature program.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MIKE PENCE: The first order of business is to repeal and replace Obamacare. And that was our message today, and it'll be our message on Capitol Hill. And it needs to be done, not just as a promise kept but because, in the course of this election, the American people had a choice. And what appeared to many as against all odds, oftentimes with overwhelming opposition, our president-elect took his case to the American people to repeal and replace Obamacare. And the American people voted decisively for a better future for health care in this country.
MARTIN: NPR's congressional correspondent Ailsa Chang joins us now from the Capitol.
Hi, Ailsa.
AILSA CHANG, BYLINE: Hey.
MARTIN: Let's start with President Obama. What are you hearing from Democratic leaders about how that meeting went?
CHANG: Well, the big line from Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer was that Republicans are like dogs who just caught a bus. They don't know what to do now. They're basically going to take health care away from 20 million people - according to Democrats - but they have no plan for what to do after that. Here's what Schumer said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHUCK SCHUMER: For five years now, they have had nothing to put in its place. It's all starts with the ACA. As we all know, the ACA is a delicate balance. President-elect Trump even expressed support for the three most popular parts of the law - pre-existing conditions, allowing young people to stay on their parents' insurance until age 26, equal treatment for women. But Republicans will soon learn that you can't keep the good parts of the ACA and remove the rest of the law and still have it work.
CHANG: So basically, what he's saying is repeal will cause disastrous consequences. It'll make premiums skyrocket. It'll put insurance companies back in charge. It would cause rural hospitals to get hit hard. Schumer says Republicans are stuck. They have been making these extreme promises. You know, it's easy to rail against the health care law as a campaign mantra. But they're paralyzed now with the hard part, the replacement plan.
MARTIN: OK. So we'll talk about that in a second. But what do we know, at this point, about how Trump and Republicans are going to go just about getting the repealing part done?
CHANG: Well, Donald Trump had an interesting tweet this morning. He seems to be warning Republicans that they shouldn't be too disruptive to - with this repeal to families. He tweeted, Republicans must be careful in that the Dems own the failed Obamacare disaster with its poor coverage and massive premium increases. Basically, he's reminding Republicans that they can just as easily be accused of what Democrats were accused of after the rollout of the health care law, when people saw their premiums go up or they couldn't keep their old plans.
And House Speaker Paul Ryan said the goal was not to pull the rug out from underneath families. Vice President-elect Mike Pence said the same thing this morning after meeting with House Republicans. But Republicans are already paving the way to repeal the law. They've introduced legislation in the Senate to get the process started. The challenge is - do they want to repeal and replace the law simultaneously? Or do they repeal first, delay the effective date of that repeal and then replace later? And there's still no consensus among Republicans on just what they're going to do exactly.
MARTIN: Plus, there are concerns in this whole process that people would go without health insurance. Is that what's complicating the whole replacement issue?
CHANG: Absolutely. And figuring out what the replacement plan will look like is incredibly complicated. I mean, Trump has already said he wants to keep parts of the health care law, like not excluding people who have pre-existing existing conditions or allowing young people to stay on their parents' plans until they're 26 years old.
But if Republicans get rid of the individual mandate, which is probably the most objectionable aspect of the law to the GOP, what happens if not enough young, healthy people pay into the pool, and then you don't have enough money to cover the cost of very sick patients? It's extremely complicated, and Republicans don't have a solution yet to that problem.
MARTIN: So what kind of leverage do the Democrats have?
CHANG: Well, they don't have a lot of leverage right now. Republicans have enough votes, through a procedural shortcut called budget reconciliation, to repeal large parts of the law. But what Democrats are trying to do now is wage a robust messaging campaign. They're reminding the public that more than 20 million people could lose their health care coverage, including swaths of people in states with Republican senators where Medicaid was expanded under Obamacare, states like West Virginia.
In the meantime, Senate Democrats will try to get Republicans on the record on various aspects of the health care law. The chamber is considering a budget resolution which will serve as the vehicle for the repeal. And senators will be able to introduce all kinds of amendments to that vehicle in what's called a vote-a-rama next week. They're going to try to get Republicans to vote on provisions like an individual mandate...
MARTIN: Yeah.
CHANG: ...Or Medicaid expansion...
MARTIN: We'll have to leave it there. NPR's Ailsa Chang.
Thanks, Ailsa.
CHANG: You're welcome.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And across this country, museums are opening their doors to what might seem like an unlikely group of visitors, people who are blind or have other vision problems. Here in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian's American Art Museum offers tours by specially trained guides, or docents. They're specially trained, and they prove that there are many ways to experience works of art. NPR's special correspondent Susan Stamberg took a tour.
(SOUNDBITE OF SUPPORT CANE TAPPING FLOOR)
SUSAN STAMBERG, BYLINE: Dorlyn Catron's cane scopes out the museum.
This will be your cane's radio debut.
DORLYN CATRON: OK, then.
STAMBERG: Dorlyn says the cane's name is Pete.
You've named him?
CATRON: I have. Well, you know, he's this important to my life. He ought to have a name.
STAMBERG: Wonder if she'll go home and say she saw something beautiful at the museum today.
BETSY HENNIGAN: So if you want to just follow my voice, we'll head out into the courtyard and get on an elevator.
STAMBERG: Nine visitors and their slim, white canes ride up to a gallery. Docent Betsy Hennigan stops them in front of "Girls Skating," a small, bronze sculpture from 1907 by Abastenia St. Leger Eberle. The roller-skating girl is full of joy.
HENNIGAN: Her arms are extended, just all the way out.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Is her hair everywhere?
HENNIGAN: Her hair is sort of flying out behind her, so the skirt is kind of flying out...
STAMBERG: The visitors - mixed ages, races, backgrounds - stand close together, hands on top of their long canes. They face Betsy's voice, not the artwork. They're listening hard.
CAROL WILSON: Sight isn't the only pathway to understand a work of art.
STAMBERG: Carol Wilson, who trains the 12 volunteer docents, suggests they have visitors imitate the pose of a sculpture and use other senses in their verbal descriptions. Docent Phoebe Kline.
PHOEBE KLINE: For instance, there's a red in one of the paintings. And I've said it's like biting into a strawberry.
STAMBERG: Describing William Johnson's painting "Cafe," two people sitting in a jazz cafe, Betsy Hennigan talks about music.
HENNIGAN: There's no way you can see music in this piece. But I ask them to imagine hearing jazz. And then I start to even talk about - can you smell cigarettes? Can you smell the alcohol?
STAMBERG: Docent Edmund Bonder uses real music for the painting of a young woman at a piano. He describes her fingers on the upper right part of the keyboard and then, with his smartphone, plays some Debussy or Sibelius - and nobody says shush.
EDMUND BONDER: I checked with their security personnel beforehand...
(LAUGHTER)
BONDER: ...And let them know this is what's going to happen.
STAMBERG: Sometimes, low-vision and blind visitors can touch the art in latex-free gloves. Docent Phoebe Kline learned something herself when a sixth-grader felt the Hugo Robus sculpture "Water Carrier."
KLINE: She ran her hands down the body of this female figure. And her first remark was - oh, she's pregnant. And I had never thought about that. But in fact, the figure does look like a pregnant woman. Here was a kid really showing me something that I had been looking at for 35 years probably and had never noticed.
UNIDENTIFIED DOCENT #1: A lot of body language in art...
STAMBERG: The visitors move slowly through the museum - some seeing in their imaginations, others with low vision getting really close to a painting to use binoculars or magnifying devices. There are questions.
CHERYL YOUNG: I know that in poetry every word means something to the poet. So does the same concept hold true for an artist?
STAMBERG: Yes, says the docent. For painters, every stroke can count. Visitor Kilof Legge listens intently. He has taken lots of these tours. Since childhood, he's had macular degeneration, and he's deeply missed art.
KILOF LEGGE: For the longest time, I really felt angry when I came into a museum - and hurt and insulted almost because these are public places and I felt like I was denied access. And finally, to have these tours and open up the art world to me again, which I loved as a kid, I am just so grateful and excited.
STAMBERG: Every one of the visitors looked glad to be on this American Art Museum tour. And the docents had a good time, too.
UNIDENTIFIED DOCENT #2: I want to just add that this was a fabulous experience.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED DOCENT #2: You guys were great.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: Yeah, thank you.
STAMBERG: This was visitor Cheryl Young's second special museum tour. It's called America InSight. She was born sighted so has color memory and plans to join many future tours.
YOUNG: This experience for me just brought back another piece of my life that I haven't been able to explore since my vision loss.
STAMBERG: Twice a month, on Thursdays and Sundays, the Smithsonian's American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., helps blind and low-vision groups to see art in their mind's eyes.
I'm Susan Stamberg, NPR News.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: A previous Web version of this story misspelled docent Phoebe Kline's last name as Klein. ]
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
So on the night he was inaugurated eight years ago, President Obama celebrated with some of the army of volunteers who had worked on his unlikely campaign. He urged them to carry their upstart spirit forward into whatever they did next.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Because that's what America needs right now - active citizens like you who are willing to turn towards each other, talk to people you've never met and say, come on, let's go do this. Let's go change the world.
GREENE: Obama has called those fired up campaign workers one of his proudest legacies, and NPR's Scott Horsley recently caught up with some of them.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Nathan Blake says there was nothing glamorous about the work he did for Barack Obama all those years ago - a lot of knocking on doors, making phone calls - but it's a time in his life Blake will never forget.
NATHAN BLAKE: I'll be friends with some of those people forever. We've got a shared experience that was super meaningful and historic and important and good for our country.
HORSLEY: It was an obvious, Blake says, when he walked away from his Des Moines law firm that the man he was knocking doors for would eventually make it to the White House.
BLAKE: Certainly when I quit my job and joined the campaign, it was not at all clear that he was going to be even the nominee, let alone president.
HORSLEY: But even in those early days, Blake was a true believer, and he had a lot of company. Brian Kirschling, who works at a VA hospital in Iowa City, was older than a lot of volunteers, and he'd never been politically active. But by 2007, he decided it was time to roll up his sleeves, a decision Kirschling explains by quoting Dr. Seuss.
BRIAN KIRSCHLING: His quote from "The Lorax" is "unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing's going to get better. It's not."
HORSLEY: Kirschling became a precinct captain for Obama. Children's books and a Disney video were key parts of his toolkit on caucus night for attracting parents with young children.
KIRSCHLING: In the Iowa caucus, when it's about how many people are standing in your corner, I can tell you everybody in that room that had kids was in our corner (laughter).
HORSLEY: Aletheia Henry was just out of grad school in 2007 when she heard a story on the radio about a training camp Obama was running for campaign volunteers. She packed her car and drove from Ohio to Chicago listening to a tape of Obama's "Audacity of Hope" along the way.
ALETHEIA HENRY: By the time I got there after listening to the book I was really hooked.
HORSLEY: She wound up working as a field organizer for Obama in eight different states.
HENRY: I would show up in a city and not know anyone and get a name of a volunteer, and they'd say this person said you could sleep on their couch, and we'd work together on this democracy.
HORSLEY: After Obama was elected, campaign workers went their separate ways. Nathan Blake spent some time in Washington working for the Agriculture Department. He's now back in Iowa doing consumer protection work for the attorney general. Brian Kirschling, who'd never done much before in politics, decided to run for his local school board. And in a crowded field of nine candidates, he made a point of knocking doors all over the city.
KIRSCHLING: Which is exactly what I remember learning with the Obama campaign. It was uncomfortable at times to go into parts of the district that don't necessarily agree with my opinion, but it allowed me the opportunity to stand on people's doorstep or sometimes come into their house and have those conversations.
HORSLEY: Aletheia Henry went on to run Obama's successful re-election campaign in Pennsylvania. And this year, she was an adviser to Hillary Clinton's campaign there, which was not so successful. Like a number of Obama veterans, she recalls their 2008 motto - respect, empower, include. She thinks that's a useful lesson for Democrats going forward.
HENRY: I think these next few years are going to take a lot of conversation. I come from rural Ohio. I understand some of the frustration that Trump supporters are feeling. We should talk with everybody about how we can work together to make our country a little bit better.
HORSLEY: Many of those who worked to elect Obama eight years ago are disappointed with the man who will follow him to the White House, but they're not giving up on the political process. Brian Kirschling says it's easy to be apathetic, but the lesson he learned from the Obama campaign is if you want to effect change, be part of it.
KIRSCHLING: I think it's pretty cool that a guy who was a community organizer ended up energizing and empowering people across the country to get involved and do things that they might not have done before.
HORSLEY: Kirschling suspects he's one of many people who were moved by Obama to try something different. Nathan Blake agrees, his social media feed is filled by colleagues from the '08 campaign who are still carrying on their mission in politics, business or nonprofits, just as Obama predicted.
BLAKE: It's not surprising that that was inspiring to a lot of us and that we responded in a way that said, yeah, this is something I want to do with my life to continue being involved and kind of live out this Obama legacy.
HORSLEY: Blake says more than a library or foundation, that's this president's lasting impact - an army of campaign veterans who continue to serve. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEN PRUNTY SONG, "ICE + GLASS")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
One of the very first moves by the new Republican Congress was to make it easier to transfer ownership of federal public lands in the West over to states. And the state of Wyoming has become a flashpoint in this debate. Lawmakers there want to amend the state's constitution to authorize the transfer, but there's a lot of opposition because public land would lose federal protection. As NPR's Kirk Siegler reports, this move is angering hunters who bring in tens of millions of dollars to the state's economy.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Visit Wyoming, and chances are you're going to meet someone like Buzz Hettick pretty quick. He's shot just about every critter you can think of.
BUZZ HETTICK: My one wall over here, I have a desert bighorn sheep from Arizona, a black bear from Montana.
SIEGLER: Everything mounted here, he boasts proudly, was hunted off of U.S. public lands. From Buzz Hettick's place on the edge of the windswept college town of Laramie, you hardly have to drive a few minutes before you're right in the middle of those public lands, the remote country run by the Federal Bureau of Land Management.
HETTICK: I believe we're heading into a set of a old Western. Yep, this is usually where we see the bighorns is right in here in this canyon. A lot of wildlife uses public lands.
SIEGLER: So do hunters. Hunting is big business in Wyoming. A recent study estimated it brings in roughly $25 million into Albany County's economy alone. A sharp turn onto a rutted-out jeep trail and Hettick is now driving straight up a mountain. He's scoping out an elk hunt for later in the week. Some buddies are coming in from out of state.
HETTICK: What I like to do is get up high on some kind of a point where I can see a lot of country and then sit down and just start glassing.
SIEGLER: Glassing - slang for using binoculars. Hettick grew up hunting and camping in Montana. He later moved to Wyoming to work for the Forest Service. But lately, it's his volunteer job that's taking up all his time. He heads up the state chapter of an influential national lobbying group called Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.
HETTICK: I just don't see how people can look at this here and just say, well, all they see is a dollar sign attached to it. There's a lot more than that.
SIEGLER: When it comes to politics, those dollar signs in federal lands are inextricably linked in the West. There's always pressure to lease more land to private oil and gas and coal companies and lately wind, but sportsmen like Hettick now see a new threat.
HETTICK: Anytime that there is even a whisper of anybody that wants to transfer federal lands to the states, you're going to raise the ire and the hackles of the outdoor community in general, and in particular hunters and fishermen.
SIEGLER: It's more than just a whisper right now. Before the election, Republicans included a provision in the RNC platform calling for the transfer of ownership of federal lands to states. One of the biggest questions surrounding this is whether a rural state like Wyoming with a small budget could really afford to manage all this land. Buzz Hettick thinks no, and he's worried the state would have to sell it, and then there'd be no guarantee that hunters or anyone could access it.
HETTICK: I would say it's probably the biggest battle that sportsmen are going to have to face in my lifetime.
SIEGLER: Hettick's battle is starting in the Wyoming legislature. Lawmakers are considering a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow for Wyoming to own and manage federal public land. Hettick mobilized sportsmen from around the state to brave the snowy roads and travel to the capital, Cheyenne, for a recent hearing. Clad in camo, they wore keep public lands public stickers and lined up to testify.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We don't support any of the language because we don't support the amendment.
(CHEERING)
SIEGLER: Neither does Wyoming's Republican governor, who in an interview with the Casper Star Tribune questioned the legality of transferring federal lands in the first place. He also wondered how his state would pay for things like wildfires, a bill that's usually picked up by the feds. State Senator Larry Hicks, who's pushing the amendment, says he's done the math. He says an energy-rich state like Wyoming can afford to take over the land because of the increased tax revenues that will come off it.
LARRY HICKS: We run about a $3 billion budget and we're sending a billion dollars of federal minerals back to Washington, D.C. That's a 25 percent increase in our state revenues right off the bat.
SIEGLER: But for Hicks, this is about a lot more than economics, it's a cultural battle. He says rural communities that depend on mining, logging and drilling on federal lands are suffering. People are moving out, schools are shutting down. And he says the federal government's too restrictive.
HICKS: A lot of people just feel like they have no more voice, it's detrimental. I mean, there are multiple generations of families, and they feel like that their heritage and their lifestyle's just been stolen from them.
SIEGLER: Republican or Democrat, bashing the federal government is popular political sport in Wyoming. And like any relationship, Wyoming's with Washington, D.C. is complicated. In quite a few small towns here, the federal government is the largest employer. And the state depends heavily on federal dollars for everything from highways to health care to education.
GREGG CAWLEY: I'm Gregg Cawley, professor of political science at the University of Wyoming.
SIEGLER: Cawley has studied anti-federal government movements in the West since the 1970s.
CAWLEY: Every time the federal government does something that irritates Western ranchers, miners, what have you, this issue of transfer of the lands to the States is brought up again, dusted off and put forward.
SIEGLER: There's one big thing that makes it this time around a little different though, according to Cawley, and that's the unpredictable political mood in the country right now.
HETTICK: That wind's definitely picked up since we got here.
SIEGLER: Buzz Hettick, the hunter, says he's not counting on anything when it comes to federal lands. He points to what happened in Oregon, where a jury recently acquitted Ammon Bundy and his anti-government followers for their armed occupation of a Federal wildlife refuge.
HETTICK: You know what we used to call, you know, maybe five or six years ago the fringe-right or the fringe operators in this whole thing? They're starting to become more mainstream now. And I think that's why we have to really ramp up the pressure we put on our politicians.
SIEGLER: Hettick says you can bet that sportsmen will pressure Washington in even bigger numbers if the federal lands transfer proposal moves forward in Congress. But today, here, he's focused on a smaller quest.
HETTICK: If you look over at the top of this hill right over here, and there is a herd of about, oh, looks to be at least eight or 10 elk right there.
SIEGLER: The trip out here fighting all that icy wind wasn't for nothing. There are elk in these hills, maybe he'll bag one just yet this season. Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Laramie, Wyo.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Outside the big cities of India, away from the wealthier neighborhoods, people will complain about experiencing tensions or anxieties. It may well be depression, and those suffering could be treated medically, but they often don't know that because there's little recognition of depression as a disease. Here's reporter Joanne Silberner.
JOANNE SILBERNER, BYLINE: Subhani Desai’s problems started with a specific event. Desai is in his early 50s and owns a photo shop at the top of an alley in the town of Sanquelim, India. Business is slow today. He's got time to reflect on what happened several years ago when he went to the local health clinic for help with his diabetes.
SUBHANI DESAI: And I saw there some old lady - came to me and asked me, are you taking alcohol, drinking? I say yeah.
SILBERNER: The lady gave Desai a short questionnaire about how he was doing. The answer? Not well. It wasn't just the alcohol, he felt down, totally hopeless. He blames his feelings on an event so emotional that he switches to his native language to describe it.
DESAI: (Through interpreter) My eldest son - he suddenly left home.
SILBERNER: Desai doesn't know why his son, who was 19, left. Every time he looked at his son's photo, he'd take a drink and every night...
DESAI: When I'm going to my home directly, I'm going and take - watching that news program. I'm looking there.
SILBERNER: Looking there for news of his son. Desai was left with the unremitting feeling that life wasn't worth living, but that was not why he went to the clinic. Arpita Anand is a psychologist and part of a pilot program to deal with mental health issues. She says few people seek treatment for a mental disorder.
ARPITA ANAND: They very rarely talk about how they're feeling low, how they've been crying, how they have lost interest in activities, so the representation is more physical.
SILBERNER: For Desai, it was his diabetes. Others have a stomachache or physical pain or they'll talk about eating problems or sleeping problems or stress or tension or fatigue. For 28-year-old RajBai Jyoti, it was a post-surgery visit to a clinic near Sehore in central India. She and her husband work in other farmers' fields. They live at the edge of a bright, green field dotted with wild peacocks. She's sitting in her lean-to porch wearing a beautiful ivory dress covered by a chartreuse and magenta scarf. Her life has never been easy, but a couple of years ago things got even worse.
RAJBAI JYOTI: (Through interpreter) I couldn't sleep before, and I couldn't eat either.
SILBERNER: Her problem - she calls it tension - just appeared one day, and it wouldn't go away.
JYOTI: (Through interpreter) I felt that I was worrying unnecessarily. I felt that a couple of times.
SILBERNER: She wasn't sure she should take her tension seriously. Psychologist Arpita Anand says she often sees a gender difference.
ANAND: With women, they find it very difficult to focus on themselves and talk about how they're feeling, what they're going through because it's almost perceived as being selfish.
SILBERNER: Jyoti was in a way lucky. There's an estimate that 90 percent of Indians don't have access to mental health treatment. She feels better now.
JYOTI: (Through interpreter) I used to feel that all the time, but not anymore.
SILBERNER: Like Desai, Jyoti was seen at a clinic that was part of a pilot program designed to identify and treat depression in primary care clinics. They're comfortable talking about their conditions now and Desai has gotten word that his son is alive and well. But Anand says most people in India, especially poor people, will initially deny that they have a mental illness.
ANAND: The defense that usually comes up is that, oh, you don't understand what I'm really going through. That's not what I'm going through. That's not my problem.
SILBERNER: People just don't want to hear that they have a mental health problem, and they don't want their neighbors or family to hear it either. Near Jyoti's home, there's a primary care clinic headed by medical officer Wilfred Mirand. He says you can't just ask someone outright if they're depressed.
WILFRED MIRAND: If you were go - to go to some of these remote villages perhaps they would not know what you were exactly asking them. They would describe it as stress, tension. They would not know really what depression is.
SILBERNER: And you have to be very careful in what you tell patients.
MIRAND: The moment you relate that disorder to a mental illness or a psychiatrist then there would be a stigma for that.
SILBERNER: The stigma against depression appears to be lifting, at least in the big cities, helped in no small way when one of the most popular Bollywood actresses went public with her story. In more rural areas, there's something else that's fighting stigma - a program that's training local people to become mental health counselors. Several recent studies show this approach when properly done is both effective and inexpensive. For NPR News, I'm Joanna Silberner.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
All right. Tomorrow, Donald Trump will be briefed by intelligence officials on Russia's alleged cyberattacks. Now, Trump has dismissed the agency's conclusions, even questioning their competence. And as NPR's Mara Liasson reports, there's also a big split between Trump and his own party on this issue.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: The Republican Party has embraced Trump's positions on immigration, trade, the deficit and conflicts of interest. But when it comes to Russia, Trump and the GOP are not on the same page. Trump has repeatedly and consistently expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin. And he's refused to accept the intelligence community's findings that Russia hacked Democratic Party emails during the campaign. That puts him at odds with almost every other Republican in Washington. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said on CNN that he's mystified.
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LINDSEY GRAHAM: When it comes to Russia, he seems to have a blind spot. And I'm completely perplexed because the Russians are undermining democracy throughout the entire world. They're taking land owned by others by force. They did hack into our political system, and they need to pay a price.
LIASSON: Tomorrow, Trump will hear from the intelligence community directly. And yesterday, Vice President-elect Mike Pence seemed to reinforce Trump's effort to undermine confidence in the agency's work.
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MIKE PENCE: I think, given some of the intelligence failures of recent years, the president-elect's made it clear to the American people that he's skeptical about conclusions from the bureaucracy. And I think the American people hear him loud and clear.
LIASSON: But Trump has gone way beyond skepticism. Yesterday, he sided openly with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange and against the CIA. Assange is a fugitive from justice and someone most Republicans consider a traitor. Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker of the House, told radio host Hugh Hewitt that he didn't share Trump's approval of Assange.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "THE HUGH HEWITT SHOW")
PAUL RYAN: I think the guy is a sycophant for Russia. He leaks. He steals data and compromises national security.
LIASSON: Got that?
Molly McKew, an expert on information warfare and a foreign policy consultant, says the national security community can't figure out Trump's unwavering devotion to the Russian line. Experts are asking if this is something more than just Trump's sincere admiration for populist strongmen like Putin. Theories abound.
MOLLY MCKEW: The discussion in the region, certainly in intelligence services that deal with Russia, is that his behavior looks like someone who may be compromised or may be concerned about something. And nobody knows what that is. If it's financial ties or financial leverage, if it's something more than that - I don't know.
LIASSON: Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton is a Trump supporter and a harsh critic of Putin. He says give the president-elect a chance.
JOHN BOLTON: I don't think the rubber's met the road on this yet. And it's one thing to exchange niceties and compliments before a president actually takes office. It's another when you confront concrete Russian behavior, such as extending their influence throughout the Middle East, such as further military action in the eastern Ukraine, such as threatening the Baltic republics. That's the real test.
I mean, he will now have the full briefing by the top leaders of the intelligence community. And they'll bring the evidence that they have, and he'll draw his conclusions at that point.
LIASSON: What those conclusions are will send an important signal to Republicans on Capitol Hill and to the Russians who, says Molly McKew, are also mystified about the new, disruptive president-elect.
MCKEW: I think they're as nervous about Trump as the rest of us. And I think that's potentially a very big opportunity for Trump if he chooses to use it. I don't know what happened in the election. I don't know what his relationship with Russian financial interests or others are. None of us know any of that. What we do know is he will be the American president very soon. And if he wants to operate as a man defending our country's interests, he needs to have a smart, aggressive Russia policy that limits what Russia is doing to us and exposes what that is.
LIASSON: That's why Friday's private briefing for Trump is so important. His reaction to what he hears will be the first clue about how the new president plans to deal with Vladimir Putin.
Mara Liasson, NPR News, Washington.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Now, Donald Trump has said his priority as president is going to be protecting jobs, and much of his focus is expected to be U.S. trade policy. For one thing, Trump has repeatedly talked about renegotiating NAFTA, this is the free trade agreement among the U.S., Canada and Mexico. U.S. companies are the biggest foreign investors in Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexican trade is worth about half a trillion dollars each year. But lately, some of those companies are coming under fire from Trump, often in tweets. NPR's Yuki Noguchi looks at which U.S. companies might find themselves in the crosshairs.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: When Donald Trump takes to Twitter, some companies shudder. This week, Ford said it would scrap a $1.6 billion plant in Mexico in favor of expanding an existing one in Michigan. That happened on the same day Trump tweeted criticism of General Motors for manufacturing its Chevy Cruze vehicles in Mexico. GM says only a small number of the cars produced in Mexico are sold in the U.S.
BARRY BOSWORTH: Since most of these are companies that produce consumer-type goods, they can't afford bad publicity.
NOGUCHI: Barry Bosworth is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He notes, so far, Trump's targets are companies that are expanding or planning to build operations in Mexico. So far, he has not singled out U.S. companies that have built plants long ago.
BOSWORTH: He focuses in on these individual cases, but there doesn't seem to be a rule.
NOGUCHI: In November, under pressure from Trump, heating and cooling firm Carrier said it would keep hundreds of jobs in Indiana instead of moving them to a plant in Mexico. Who might be next? Bosworth says the Trump Twitter spotlight is shining the most on big companies with well-known household brands. Automakers are especially at risk because of the high volume of cross-border trade that happens in that industry, and because it's so vulnerable to consumer opinion. He says going after a maker of obscure chemicals or a small firm that makes car components doesn't make for great headlines, nor does it move public sentiment. It's about the finished products.
BOSWORTH: If they're not assembled, they can't be identified in the terms of like a specific model of a General Motors car. It doesn't have the same public appeal.
NOGUCHI: Trump has issued tough trade talk on China as well, but Bosworth notes Trump has not, for example, taken Apple to task for its huge iPhone assembly operations in China. China's economy is almost as big as the U.S.'s, and it has the power to inflict lots of pain on U.S. companies like Boeing, so interfering there could backfire for American workers. Bosworth says picking on Mexico is like fighting the weak kid on the playground. It's less likely to elicit a retaliatory response.
BOSWORTH: It's a much weaker economy, much fewer options available to them.
NOGUCHI: Derek Scissors, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says retailers, banks and other service providers aren't likely to be targeted. And, he says, he hopes the singling out of individual companies will stop once Trump takes office.
DEREK SCISSORS: When you're president, you shouldn't be bothering one company. You should be changing policies such as corporate taxes to change the whole landscape. Getting down into the details can't be done by Twitter.
NOGUCHI: Scissors says tweeting about trade does accomplish a few things. First, it appeals to Trump's base.
SCISSORS: Probably the reason that he won the election is the effort re-shore manufacturing, not to accept it as inevitable that manufacturing will head overseas.
NOGUCHI: And the tweets also telegraph a message, not just to the companies he's already mentioned, but to firms in other industries, ones that might be thinking about expanding elsewhere besides Mexico.
SCISSORS: It's not going to stop at very high-profile manufacturers that consumers know about. It will continue, he's just sending the signal now to everyone, this is your chance to make an adjustment.
NOGUCHI: Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And let's turn now to Mexico. Ford Motor Company's decision this week to cancel construction of an auto plant there has shocked that country. And people are especially disappointed in the place where the Ford plant was under construction. It was expected to employ nearly 3,000 local workers. Here's NPR's Carrie Kahn.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Usually, the dusty construction site of the now-shuttered Mexican Ford auto plant is full of activity. Yesterday, though, only one large tractor was grading roads at the 700-acre site located outside the small town of Villa de Reyes in the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosi.
JUAN GONZALEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: Guards at the site's entrance say the mood now is very tense. Guard Juan Gonzalez says it's so discouraging.
GONZALEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: "We all thought this was a long-term project," says Gonzalez. He had hoped to stay on once the Ford plant opened in three years.
GUSTAVO PUENTE OROZCO: It was a surprise, of course.
KAHN: Gustavo Puente Orozco, San Luis Potosi's secretary of economic development says the news, while not totally unexpected, came as a shock.
PUENTE: We knew it was a possibility.
KAHN: Especially, he says, since candidate Donald Trump began putting a lot of pressure on Ford to pull out of Mexico. But Puente says Ford officials in Mexico kept assuring him the project was moving forward. And he says all that construction kept going on. Ford says it was market forces that prompted them to cancel the Mexico plant. Small cars like the Ford Focus that was to be built here just haven't been selling well, especially with low gas prices. But residents in the nearby town of Villa de Reyes aren't buying that and place blame squarely on the incoming U.S. president.
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KAHN: Music from a food stall blares in the town's small outdoor market. Housewife Maria de Jesus Ramirez Martinez gets visibly angry when asked about the Ford plant closure.
MARIA DE JESUS RAMIREZ MARTINEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: "Trump is blaming us Mexicans for everything, and it's not right. It's just not right," she says. Ramirez says the town was counting on those jobs. "Without them," she adds, "more Mexicans will head north to the U.S. to find work."
San Luis Potosi has been a bright spot in Mexico's otherwise sluggish economy. With so many international companies here, unemployment is officially below 3 percent, and the region has been growing at twice the pace of the country.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHURCH BELLS SOUNDING)
KAHN: On the small town plaza, Salvador Guerra, a retiree, says he doesn't want to see the state's gains be undermined by Trump who's not even president yet.
SALVADOR GUERRA: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: "Imagine what he's going to do to us once he takes power," says Guerra. And Guerra says he's just as mad at Mexico's leaders who he says haven't done enough to stand up to Trump.
Yesterday, President Enrique Pena Nieto announced a shake-up in his Cabinet. He appointed a former finance adviser as the new foreign minister who, Pena Nieto says, will push for a more constructive relationship.
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PRESIDENT ENRIQUE PENA NIETO: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: "It should be a relationship that allows us to strengthen bilateral ties," says Pena Nieto, and he adds, "without undermining the sovereignty or the dignity of Mexicans."
Carrie Kahn, NPR News, San Luis Potosi.
(SOUNDBITE OF CUT CHEMIST SONG, "SPOON")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
The question of whether Russia tried to interfere in this country's presidential election is consuming much of Washington today. At the White House, President Obama is getting briefed on the so-called Russia Report. This is the report he ordered his spy agencies to write, laying out what they know about election year cyber meddling.
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Congress has begun its investigations into the alleged hack. And right now, the Senate Armed Services Committee is about 90 minutes into the first public hearing on this matter. And NPR's Mary Louise Kelly is there and is on the line.
Mary Louise, good morning.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: Good morning.
GREENE: Just paint us a picture of the scene over there on The Hill. I mean, this is a big moment, the nation's intelligence chiefs speaking in public - what are they saying?
KELLY: Well, it's a packed hearing room. And, for example, the head of the National Security Agency, Mike Rogers, this is the first time he has spoken, at all, in public since November. So we were - the journalists sitting around the room were noticing, as it got under way, I think the reporters are outnumbering the senators by about 10 to 1 in this hearing room (laughter)...
GREENE: Which happens at big hearings sometimes, yeah.
KELLY: Yeah. We're all placing bets on how many times Russia will get mentioned, just that word, in this hearing. I lost count after the first couple dozen, but we're probably up around 200 now.
GREENE: Well, if the word is coming up that much, are we learning anything new?
KELLY: No bombshells so far. The headline from the written statements is probably this. This is a joint statement by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and the other other intelligence officials testifying, and it reads, I'll quote you, "Russia is a full-scope cyber actor that poses a major threat to U.S. government military, diplomatic, commercial and critical infrastructure." They went on and testified about this. Let me let you hear a little bit. This is the director of National Intelligence, Clapper, speaking to senators just a few minutes ago.
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JAMES CLAPPER: Russia has clearly assumed an even more aggressive cyber posture by increasing cyber espionage operations, leaking data stolen from these operations and targeting critical infrastructure systems.
KELLY: And I will add that shortly after he said that, Clapper got asked about motive. This question of, why Russia was doing this? And the first time, if I'm not mistaken, first time we heard an intelligence official on the record say they are ascribing a motive to Putin, that Putin was involved here. But he didn't want to get into details in this - in an open hearing.
GREENE: That Putin was involved. I mean, that is something that Clapper said...
KELLY: We have not heard that on the record before.
GREENE: OK. Well, the senators, obviously, speaking as well. Senator John McCain is the chair of the committee. And he asked, first, about Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. And we should say, he's back in the headlines because Donald Trump has been tweeting about him and using Assange to cast doubt on the case that Russia was behind this. How is Assange's involvement playing out there?
KELLY: A lot of questions about Assange. I just stepped out a moment ago to come speak to you. I'm right outside the hearing room. And Senator Claire McCaskill was going to town on the Assange question as I was walking out...
GREENE: This is the Democrat from Missouri, we should say, right?
KELLY: Indeed. And Arizona Republican, John McCain, who does indeed chair the committee and did indeed kick off the questioning, started by asking about this. Assange is back in the news, we should note because he has said, yet again, just two nights ago on Fox News, that WikiLeaks, his organization, did not get the leaked Democratic emails from the Russian government. He won't say where they got them, but he says it wasn't the Russian government.
President-elect Trump has seized on that. He has been tweeting about it and questioning, yet again, whether Russia was behind the hack. So let me let you hear a bit of the exact exchange because it was just a few minutes ago. Here's Senator McCain.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHN MCCAIN: General Clapper, I just have to mention, the name Mr. Assange has it popped up. And I believe that he is the one who's responsible for publishing names of individuals that work for us, that put their lives in direct danger. Is that correct?
CLAPPER: Yes, he has.
MCCAIN: And do you think that there's any credibility we should attach to this individual, given his record of...
CLAPPER: Not in my view.
MCCAIN: Not in your view. Admiral Rogers?
MICHAEL S. ROGERS: I would second those comments.
KELLY: So, David, that's again, Senator McCain questioning there, Jim Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, and NSA director Mike Rogers. And Clapper went on to repeat this, that Julian Assange has put U.S. lives in direct danger. So pushing back hard there at these tweets that we've seen from Donald Trump.
GREENE: You know, this would be an extraordinary day on Capitol Hill alone. We also have what is happening at the White House, this intelligence report on Russia being delivered to President Obama today. Are we going to know what's in there? Is that going to be made public at some point?
KELLY: It will, not today. President Obama has received it, we're told. It's been delivered to the White House, he is getting briefed on it. He gets it first because he ordered it. Tomorrow, in New York, at Trump Tower, President-elect Trump will get the exact same briefing. And according to two U.S. officials who I have spoken to, the declassified public version, which we assume will be a lot shorter, will be delivered Monday afternoon. So we'll all get a chance to see it then.
GREENE: OK, so Donald Trump getting briefed tomorrow - can we just be very, very clear here, Mary Louise, President Obama, President-elect Donald Trump will be getting the same version of this report.
KELLY: Right. They will be getting the same report, the same top-classified - top-secret, classified version of the report. And interesting how it will be delivered. As I mentioned, it will be in Trump Tower tomorrow. The four biggest guns in U.S. intelligence will all be in that room - the head of the CIA, head of the FBI, head of the NSA, who is here testifying today, and, again, DNI Jim Clapper who's here testifying in the Senate today, all headed up to New York.
That is because Donald Trump asked for that. He asked to be briefed by the leaders of the intelligence community. It also, given how much we have heard in terms of Trump doubting, criticizing even mocking the intelligence agencies, it gives them a chance to present a united front and try to persuade him, we know what we're talking about.
GREENE: OK. That is NPR's national security correspondent Mary Louise Kelly, who's following the Armed Services Committee hearing on Russia and that alleged hack at the Senate on a day when President Obama is receiving a report on the Russia - Russia and the alleged attack from the intelligence officials, today, as well, at the White House. Mary Louise, thanks.
KELLY: You're welcome.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. It's a new year, time for a new perspective on Russia - or more of a fantasy. Decades ago, the Soviet Union imagined a glorious 2017. In the propaganda slides, nuclear-powered trains speed across a dam to Alaska; underground cities are built under the tundra; the USSR has defeated the Western imperialists, sent rockets to conquer the universe, while the last Westerners are doomed to a remote Pacific island. Not broadcasting from an island, this is MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Well, there has been Brexit, there's been the election of Donald Trump, and now France is facing a political year like no other. In May, the French will elect a new president. And many say far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who was never thought to have a real chance, is now a serious contender. Yesterday, Le Pen gave a speech which looked to a lot of people like the beginning of her campaign, and let's hear about it from correspondent Eleanor Beardsley who is in Paris. Eleanor, good morning.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: So could you start by just reminding us who Marine Le Pen is?
BEARDSLEY: Well, right, Marine Le Pen is head of France's far-right National Front party. This party is anti-immigrant, it wants to get back control of its borders and sovereignty from the EU. Le Pen says she wants to abandon the euro currency, bring manufacturing jobs back home. And she has big support from the working class. Now, David, that sounds familiar, doesn't it?
GREENE: Yeah, it does, themes we've heard a lot in the last year.
BEARDSLEY: Exactly. Well, Le Pen was delighted when Donald Trump was elected president. She hailed it as a real victory for the people. And she's also an admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
GREENE: Something else we've heard. Is there a good chance that she could win here?
BEARDSLEY: Well, David, everyone assumed she would be a finalist in France's two round voting system, but no polls have ever showed her winning. But now with Trump being elected and Brexit passing for Britain to lead the European Union, no one is sure anymore. And also, the polls got it wrong in France. The mainstream conservative candidate for president won huge in the primary in November. He got 66 percent of the vote, yet polls consistently had him in a distant third. So it was so bad that one major newspaper has renounced to doing any more polls. They say they're just not going to take them anymore.
GREENE: They're just stopping doing polling? Wow.
BEARDSLEY: Stopping doing polling, that's how wrong they got it. Anyway, you know, I've been watching Ms. Le Pen for years. Now, she took over head of the party from her father in 2011. He was an irascible, xenophobic, anti-Semitic guy. He fought in the Algerian War, and he was a tough guy. She's broken with all that. She's remaking this party. She's moving away from that neo fascist anti-Semitic past. She's brought in women and young people. And actually, she's not on speaking terms with her father right now.
So now she's also personally evolved. She used to be very combative you'd hear on the radio. She's so smooth now and calm, you know, logical. She's a trial lawyer, so she knows how to argue, and she has an answer for everything. For example, with President Putin, you know, if people say you're too close to him, she says simply, he puts his country first. He puts the needs of the Russian people first, and we need people to do that in France. That's what our leaders don't do. The French first, she says. Now, who's going to argue with that?
GREENE: Wow. Well, are people arguing? Are people hearing her message about Putin and still criticizing him, expressing concern?
BEARDSLEY: Well, there is a lot of concern about that because actually the National Front, her party, has gotten financing from a Russian bank. Now, Le Pen says that's because no French bank will lend her money, and she points to that as proof that the banks are tied up in certain hands and they're undemocratic in France. She says she'll take - they asked for loans from banks across Europe, even the U.S. What's wrong with getting a loan from a bank?
But all of this has made people think, wow, she - too close to Putin, and there is a real fear of hacking now because people watched what allegedly happened in the U.S. election when the Russians hacked into the Democratic Party. And analysts say French campaigns are woefully unprepared. No one is prepared to be hacked. And so campaigns are now, you know, hiring cyber specialists and trying to reinforce online security, but it's a huge issue now in the French campaign.
GREENE: OK. So many of the political themes we saw in Britain and the United States last year sounds like we'll be seeing in France in 2017. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley in Paris. Thanks a lot, Eleanor.
BEARDSLEY: Thank you, David.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
In Brazil, funerals are being held for the men who died in the worst prison riot in that country for a quarter century. Fifty-six prisoners were killed this weekend in a penitentiary in the northern city of Manaus. Brazil has more than 600,000 people behind bars, and this incident is raising questions over whether the government is losing control of the penal system.
NPR's Philip Reeves is in Manaus, and he sent this report.
PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: The body of a young man lies beneath a white shroud in an open coffin. It's in a yard in a back street. Members of the family of the man, who's called Felipe, sit a few feet away on white plastic chairs. They're grieving together and sharing their anger. They want to know why he was shot and decapitated while doing time in what was supposed to be a highly secure prison.
(CROSSTALK)
REEVES: Brazil's prison system is useless, they say.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking Portuguese).
REEVES: One shows a cell phone picture of young men gleefully brandishing guns and knives. This was purportedly taken inside the prison in which Felipe died, before the start of Brazil's deadliest prison riots in decades. These riots were triggered by a turf war between rival drug gangs battling for supremacy within the prison system. Most of the dead are believed to belong to Brazil's most powerful gang, the so-called First Capital Command. There are fears this gang will now seek revenge and many more lives will be lost.
The riots happened in the Anisio Jobim Penitentiary in Manaus, a city in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Deadly uprisings often break out in Brazil's overcrowded prisons in its big cities. But Manaus is in the jungle and, with less than 3 million residents, is fairly small by Brazilian standards. The city's shocked by what's happened says Celso Freitas.
CELSO FREITAS: (Speaking Portuguese).
REEVES: "No one imagined it could happen here," he says. Freitas is a church volunteer. He's come to stand outside the city morgue to offer support to families who are here identifying their dead or desperately searching for information. They include Lailsa, who's asked for her full name to be withheld for fear of gangland reprisals. She's been told her son is missing. He's not listed as dead nor as one of the many dozens of prisoners who escaped during the mayhem. Lailsa fears the worst...
LAILSA: (Speaking Portuguese).
REEVES: ...And accuses the authorities of being negligent in their handling of this disaster.
Those authorities now face many questions about how this bloodbath was allowed to happen. Rights activists say government has lost control of prisons to drug gangs who use inmates as foot soldiers. Why, in the age of security cameras and X-ray machines, were there so many weapons inside the prison?
LUIS CARLOS VALOIS: (Speaking Portuguese).
REEVES: Luis Carlos Valois is a criminal judge in Manaus. He says weapons get in because prison staff are corrupt. During the riots, Valois was drafted in to negotiate with prisoners who briefly held a group of staff as hostages. The judge says Brazil's gangs compete over the drugs trade in the streets but explains this prison killing spree on one overwhelming factor.
VALOIS: Hate, hate.
REEVES: Hate?
VALOIS: Just hate.
REEVES: In a system that offers no hope to a multitude of young men, hatred is all that's left.
Philip Reeves, NPR News, Manaus.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And let's hear about a different artistic connection, this one between Los Angeles and Latin America. In the coming year, it will be featured in more than 60 museums and art centers throughout Southern California. NPR's Mandalit del Barco has this preview.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is the name of the series that opens in September, 2017. It's an initiative between cultural institutions from Los Angeles all the way out to Palm Springs, and from Santa Barbara down to San Diego. Heather MacDonald is program officer for the Getty Foundation, which largely funded the massive project.
HEATHER MACDONALD: There's been a huge effort by many of the curators participating to think in a very, very new way and to tell stories that really weave together U.S. Latino art with Latin American art in ways that I think will be quite surprising.
DEL BARCO: That includes a survey of art and science fiction in the Americas, and works by Japanese and Chinese Latin Americans, and showings of Mexican punk films. One exhibition will feature cartoons in espanol from the 1940s, created when Walt Disney sent a group of artists to South America.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE THREE CABALLEROS")
JOAQUIN GARAY: (As Panchito Pistoles, singing in Spanish).
CLARENCE NASH: (As Donald Duck, singing in Spanish).
GARAY: (As Panchito Pistoles, singing in Spanish).
JOSE OLIVEIRA: (As Jose Carioca, singing in Spanish)
MACDONALD: Walter Disney Studios used and adapted imagery and cultural iconography from Latin America, but then artists, intellectuals, writers in Latin America responded to Disney and took that iconography and tweaked it, played with it, used it in subversive ways, political ways.
DEL BARCO: MacDonald says many of the exhibitions will be political. One will feature underground so-called renegade art from 1990s Mexico. Another explores the role of murals in LA's Chicano Movement. There will be a photo show featuring images from the bilingual newspaper La Raza. Several venues will have music and film screenings.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "I AM JOAQUIN")
LUIS VALDEZ: (As Narrator) Like a sleeping giant, it slowly rears its head to the sound of tramping feet, clamoring voices, mariachis playing, fiery tequila, explosions.
DEL BARCO: A newly restored version of the classic 1969 film "I am Joachim/ Soy Joaquin" is on the slate for a series at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And UCLA is digging into its archives to recreate the classic Latin American cinema scene of downtown LA from 1930 to 1960. Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Confirmation hearings for Donald Trump's Cabinet picks begin next week. And one of the first nominees to go before the Senate will be Rex Tillerson, Trump's choice for secretary of state. Tillerson has been harshly criticized by Democrats and also some Republicans for his business ties to Russia, but the question is whether Senate Democrats would even be able to muster the votes to block his nomination.
Senator Chris Coons met with Rex Tillerson at his offices in Washington, D.C., yesterday, and he is with us on the line from his hometown Wilmington, Del., to give us his impression. Senator, good morning.
CHRIS COONS: Good morning, David.
GREENE: So how did your conversation with Rex Tillerson go? I know you had a lot of concerns about his ties to Russia, you've expressed them. Did you ask some questions about that?
COONS: Of course.
GREENE: Of course.
COONS: We had a very long conversation, a generally constructive conversation that lasted an hour and a half. And I'm looking forward to continuing that conversation during the confirmation hearing next week because the American people deserve a chance to hear the questions that I asked and the answers that he gave.
GREENE: What did you ask him?
COONS: Well, my first and I think most important question was about his business relationships with Russia, his personal friendship with Vladimir Putin and his view of Russia and the United States. I pointedly said to him that I see a big difference between being the CEO of the world's largest oil company...
GREENE: ExxonMobil, yeah.
COONS: ...Trying to extract shareholder value from Russia, and being secretary of state, trying to fight for America's values by pressing for human rights and press freedom and democracy. And so I challenged him across a wide range of fronts - his views of Putin's aggression in Ukraine, Putin's role in the massacres in Aleppo, Putin's role in trying to separate the United States from NATO. And he had more thoughtful and thorough answers than previous public statements by President-elect Trump might have suggested his secretary of state nominee would have.
GREENE: Did he offer answers that made you think that he could put his business experience, business ties, business interests aside to represent the United States?
COONS: Well, he certainly asserted that. And I complimented him on how swiftly he has completely severed ties from ExxonMobil, and pointedly said to him that my real concern is that President-elect Trump has not released his taxes, has not come up with any plan for severing his ties to his global business enterprise. And so I said to him, you know, that was my second most pressing concern, that his activities as secretary of state - if he's confirmed - will be heavily influenced by his experience at ExxonMobil and by the world view of the oil and gas industry.
So I asked him a whole series of questions about his experiences working in difficult and dangerous places with dictators or with undemocratic governments and how he would interact with those countries and those leaders differently as secretary of state than he may have as the head of ExxonMobil.
GREENE: You know, ExxonMobil did reach this agreement with Tillerson to comply with conflict of interest requirements and sever ties to the company. You're saying you used that conversation to raise concerns about Donald Trump and conflict of interest. Did Tillerson say anything that made you feel better in that regard?
COONS: Well, he simply observed that he thought it was his obligation to sever his ties to ExxonMobil and to fully comply with the background check and financial release requirements of the committee. When I pressed him on President-elect Trump, you know, he didn't have a thorough answer. And that was sort of a theme throughout the whole conversation. I pressed him on the value of NATO, and he said I see NATO as essential to our security and our alliance with Western Europe as sort of the foundation of the seven decades of peace that we've had since the Second World War.
And I said, well, how can you speak to the alarming or concerning statements of President-elect Trump? He doesn't have full answers for that yet. And my core concern is that while Mr. Tillerson may have some reasonable answers about conflicts of interest or his view of Putin and Russia, the man for whom he would be serving hasn't addressed those core concerns.
GREENE: You going to vote for Tillerson in committee and on the Senate floor?
COONS: I don't know yet. I look forward to a full hearing. One of my core concerns - and I've expressed this to the committee chair - is that he's scheduling his hearing for the same day that we will be doing something that's inelegantly called the vote-a-rama (ph) as we try to...
GREENE: The vote-a-rama?
COONS: Yes (laughter).
GREENE: What is that?
COONS: It's an arcane piece of Senate procedure where in order to adopt reconciliation instructions under a budget bill, we have an open season where as many amendments as possible get voted on.
GREENE: Oh, I see. You're saying this hearing should not have any distractions, it should be...
COONS: Exactly.
GREENE: ...Somewhere else.
COONS: And it may well happen on a day where we are literally voting continuously for 24 hours. I don't think that's the right day to hold a hearing where the members of the Foreign Relations Committee who have real concerns - both Republicans and Democrats - want to hear his full answers, not just race in and out.
GREENE: OK, so still undecided on Rex Tillerson. That is Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. Thanks so much for talking to us this morning.
COONS: Thank you, David.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And let's learn a little more now about a tune that we'll hear twice at the inauguration later this month - once for outgoing President Barack Obama and once for incoming President Donald Trump.
(SOUNDBITE OF U.S. ARMY CEREMONIAL BAND'S PERFORMANCE OF "FOUR RUFFLES AND FLOURISHES, HAIL TO THE CHIEF")
GREENE: "Hail To The Chief," the president's official anthem, was first heard in America 205 years ago.
JOSEPH REZEK: The song was made very, very popular during the war of 1812 by Sir Walter Scott, who was probably the most popular author in the United States. And he was a Scottish author.
GREENE: That is the voice of Joseph Rezek, a professor at Boston University, who studies the overlap between British and American culture. He says "Hail To The Chief" actually grew out of a poem that was turned into a musical play called "Lady Of The Lake."
REZEK: It's set in the medieval period around wars between England and Scotland. One of the songs in that poem is "Hail To The Chief."
(SOUNDBITE OF HESPERUS: EARLY MUSIC ENSEMBLE'S PERFORMANCE OF "FOUR RUFFLES AND FLOURISHES, HAIL TO THE CHIEF")
GREENE: Ooh, the Celtic version there. The chief in "Hail To The Chief" was a ruthless Scottish chieftain named Roderick Dhu.
REZEK: He's the leader of a clan - a Highland clan who has sworn against the English. We have, in our nation, thought of the presidency as a very dignified, respectable role. And this song really is about a leader who's not a statesman, who is basically destroyed by his inability to adapt to circumstances.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HAIL TO THE CHIEF")
WASHINGTON MEN'S CAMERATA: (Singing) Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances...
GREENE: "Hail To The Chief" actually does have lyrics, lyrics that have changed a lot over the years. The version we know now originated around 1840, and that is when it became the official presidential theme - no kilt required.
(SOUNDBITE OF WASHINGTON MEN'S CAMERATA SONG, "HAIL TO THE CHIEF")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene thinking about the legacy New Hampshire Governor Chuck Morse will leave behind. He became governor Tuesday morning. He will hold office until today at noon. Morse is state Senate president and fill-in governor. The outgoing governor became a U.S. senator. A new governor is sworn in today. For his 60 hours in office, Morse got a full security detail, emergency preparedness briefings and - joke or not - someone reserved wall space in the State House for a portrait. It's MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Convicted South Carolina church shooter Dylann Roof is back in court this week. He's representing himself for the sentencing phase of his federal hate crimes trial. The 22-year-old white supremacist faces the death penalty for killing nine black worshipers at Charleston's Emanuel A.M.E. Church in hopes of starting a race war.
NPR's Debbie Elliott has been covering this trial and joins us now from Charleston. Deb, good morning.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: This is a crime that, all along, I think people have just struggled to really understand. I guess, now, Dylann Roof - I mean, you're hearing from him in court during this phase. Anything from him that can tell us more about what motivated him?
ELLIOTT: Not really. During his brief opening statement, yesterday, he gave a very short presentation, very quietly addressed jurors directly for the first time. He only said, there's nothing wrong with me. And he asked them to forget what his lawyers had said during the guilt phase of the trial. What's interesting is that he did not ask the jury to spare his life. And that's what's on the line here, you know, as he's defending himself during the sentencing phase whether he'll be executed or sentenced to life in prison.
GREENE: Well, it's on the line because the U.S. Justice Department says, I mean, this horrific crime justifies the death penalty. And I guess the Justice Department is actually going to be providing testimony, making the argument that that's what should happen here. Is that right?
ELLIOTT: Right. And thus far, they've been trying to show that by showing the impact of this massacre, that it robbed families - nine families of their loved ones, and that these people were really vital to the Charleston community - teachers, preachers, church matriarchs, a city librarian, people like Myra Thompson.
She was a retired teacher who had just become a pastor and was actually leading Bible study that night at Emanuel Church. Her husband, the Reverend Anthony Thompson, gave emotional testimony, yesterday, about their plans for the future. They were going to move closer to the grandkids, both of them going to pursue their ministries. And he tearfully described how lost he feels without her.
Now, the first witness was Jennifer Pinckney, the widow of Emanuel pastor Clementa Pinckney. She was actually in the church the night Dylann Roof opened fire in the Bible study. She was just next door in the church office hiding under the desk with her 6-year-old daughter. She described putting her hand over the child's mouth to keep quiet. They feared for their life. Prosecutors then played this video of Reverend Pinckney who was also a state senator. He was giving this lecture about the history of the church. Let's listen a little bit.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CLEMENTA PINCKNEY: Well, again, let me welcome you to Mother Emanuel. Just a little story about our church and how it really ties into the life of African-Americans in South Carolina and also a little bit in the nation.
ELLIOTT: Now, that's the very history that prosecutors say drew Dylann Roof to commit the crime at that church so it would have the biggest impact.
GREENE: So this phase is really about, I mean, presenting the pain and devastating loss, not new evidence. Or will there be some new evidence?
ELLIOTT: You know, they're going to try to introduce some new writings from Dylann Roof in which he wrote six weeks after the crime in jail, and he expressed no regret.
GREENE: OK. That's NPR's Debbie Elliott reporting in Charleston, S.C.
Deb, thanks a lot.
ELLIOTT: You're welcome.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Dangerous wildfires made a lot of news across this country last year. But there are scientists who say we need more fires, low-intensity ones that clear out overgrown forests and help prevent the bigger fires. Deciding where and when to let fires burn is tricky, and so the U.S. Forest Service is working on a new approach. From member station KQED in San Francisco, Lauren Sommer reports.
LAUREN SOMMER, BYLINE: In early September, as a thunderstorm rolled over the Sierra Nevada, lightning hit a tree, and it started to burn.
SARAH LAPLANTE: The fire was really small at that point. It was probably about a quarter of an acre.
SOMMER: Sarah LaPlante was the ranger on duty at the Sierra National Forest south of Yosemite. The fire was spreading, and she had to decide what to do.
LAPLANTE: So we didn't put firefighters right on the line trying to stop the fire right where the fire is. We can actually let the fire burn in a controlled way.
SOMMER: Let the fire burn - not what we heard from Smokey Bear.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SAM ELLIOTT: (As Smokey Bear) Yes. Let a little fire get started, catch on, destroy and your forest is nothing.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SOMMER: But, LaPlante says, fire can be good. Sierra Nevada forests actually need it so they don't get too dense or overgrown. And since this fire was miles from any town, she let it spread, keeping a close watch.
LAPLANTE: It wasn't torching trees. It was just cleaning up the forest floor, getting rid of all of that over-accumulation of dead, woody debris.
SOMMER: It's exactly what LaPlante wanted to see. But her decision to let the fire burn is pretty rare because it's a tough call to make.
LAPLANTE: It's something that you take really seriously, and there is some level of, you know, nerves.
SOMMER: And sometimes, very rarely, these decisions go wrong.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS REPORT)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Officials answering questions about a wildfire that got out of control in Lassen National Park...
SOMMER: Four years ago, rangers let a fire burn in Lassen Volcanic National Park in far-northern California. But the wind picked up, and the fire spread towards the community of Old Station. John Wallace, who ran a restaurant there, got ready to evacuate.
JOHN WALLACE: The smoke was so heavy here because it was blowing in our direction. It was a scary situation, yeah.
SOMMER: Luckily, the town was spared. But residents were angry.
WALLACE: Just the fact that they let it burn and get away from them. Yeah, I mean, any something affects you that way, I mean, people get upset.
SOMMER: Near disasters like that make forest managers hesitant to let any fire burn. And that makes it hard to change the legacy of Smokey Bear, says Alan Taylor, a fire planner with the U.S. Forest Service.
ALAN TAYLOR: We have a better understanding of the role of fire now as an agency and probably, you know, as a society.
SOMMER: So the Forest Service is piloting a new approach to fire in three national forests in California. The agency is using computer models to create fire-risk zones. Some zones, near towns and roads, are protected. Fires there would be put out. But in another zone, on about 40 percent of the land, Taylor says rangers would have to answer this question.
TAYLOR: If it's a lightning-caused fire, why are we putting it out?
SOMMER: This flips the script. Before, rangers had to make the case to let it burn. But now they'd have to justify putting a fire out if there's no danger to people or homes.
Now, there's a downside. More fire means more smoke, and California's Central Valley already has some of the worst air quality in the country.
TAYLOR: It probably will be smokier at times than what we're used to, but the fires are coming one way or the other. If we keep putting them out and the fuels keep growing, eventually it gets to the point where you can't put it out.
SOMMER: Californians will have to get more comfortable with smaller fires, Taylor says, in order to prevent catastrophic fires. If this new approach helps do that, it could be adopted by other forests across the West. For NPR News, I'm Lauren Sommer in San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALUCIDNATION SONG, "THE INFINITE VARIETY")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
I'm David Greene, and here's this guy.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL I DO IS WIN")
DJ KHALED: DJ Khaled. We the best.
T-PAIN: (Singing) All I do is win.
GREENE: Yes, that is DJ Khaled, one of the biggest names in rap for the past decade. He is the son of Palestinian immigrants, and he's now a larger-than-life presence in the music world. He's a DJ, producer, record executive and has nine albums of his own. His latest is the Grammy-nominated album "Major Key." It features Drake, Kendrick and on this track, Jay-Z. The track's "I Got The Keys."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I GOT THE KEYS")
JAY-Z: (Rapping) Always asking me the key. Till you own your own, you can't be free. Till you're on your own, you can't be me. How we still slaves in 2016? I should probably copyright this. I promise they ain't going to like this.
DJ KHALED: I got the keys, keys, keys, keys. I got the keys, keys...
GREENE: The keys - they're very important to Khaled and to millions of fans who follow him closely on Snapchat. They are life lessons that just pop in his head as he hangs out in his garden or in the hot tub or, more famously, while he's jet skiing, which is how DJ Khaled became a social media megastar last December. He was at home in Miami hanging out with his fiancee, and then he took a ride on his jet ski to visit the rapper Rick Ross. And on his way back home that evening, he got lost.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
DJ KHALED: It's so dark out here. We don't know where the hell we at, but the key is to make it. The key is never give up.
GREENE: That's from Khaled's Snapchat. And when we got him into our New York studio to chat, we asked him what happened.
DJ KHALED: It got dark quick, so I started Snapchatting (ph) because it had the flash, but I was Snapchatting also to keep my sense of humor and my spirits up and also to send messages - subliminal messages - to, like, my queen. You know, it's dark, somebody come get me. And I didn't panic, but was I worried? Absolutely.
GREENE: He did survive, we should say. Now, DJ Khaled is out with his first book, and it is called "The Keys."
DJ KHALED: Well, "The Keys," man, is the keys to success, keys to life - you know what I'm saying? - keys of winning, keys of joy, keys of happiness. The keys never run out, you know? Each key leads to the next key.
GREENE: OK.
DJ KHALED: And then every time, you know, if you text me, I'm going to hit you back with a key.
GREENE: If I text you. So what if I texted you right now, like, hey, what's up, how's New York? What key are you going to throw back at me?
DJ KHALED: It's a cold world, bundle up - key.
GREENE: (Laughter).
DJ KHALED: You know what I'm saying? Like...
GREENE: (Laughter) Yeah.
DJ KHALED: You know what I'm saying?
GREENE: (Laughter) That's very straightforward and honest, but...
DJ KHALED: Yeah, yeah.
GREENE: ...Yeah, you got that quick. That was good.
DJ KHALED: Yeah, and that's how the book is, you know what I'm saying? Because when I was coming up in the game and growing up, they hid the keys from me.
GREENE: They hid the keys from you?
DJ KHALED: Yes.
GREENE: Now, they is a very important word in your book that comes up a lot. Who are, quote, "they?"
DJ KHALED: Well, they are the people that don't want me to do this interview with you, you know, they...
GREENE: (Laughter) Well, I don't like them either, then. Let's - we got to find them.
DJ KHALED: They come in so many different forms, but they are the people that we need to stay away from, you know what I'm saying? And honestly, I had somebody actually come up to me and say, Khaled, you will be nothing. You're just a DJ. You're going to be local forever. You're not going to be able to succeed. But I stayed focused. I didn't listen to they.
GREENE: It sounds like the kind of advice that could really help kids as they're coming up.
DJ KHALED: Absolutely. And, you know, this book is definitely to uplift the young world because, you know, we just have different ways of saying it. I was just doing an interview earlier, and I was like, you know, our moms and dads always taught us, you know, to do great things, you know what I'm saying? We bless that family, but sometimes you've got to get somebody to translate it in a different way, you know what I'm saying?
GREENE: You have figured out a way to speak the language that some young people speak and also really inspire them. I mean, that's the balance that...
DJ KHALED: Yeah, it's the culture.
GREENE: OK.
DJ KHALED: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
GREENE: Well, I - can I tell you my favorite of the keys?
DJ KHALED: Please tell me.
GREENE: We have - our program is MORNING EDITION, and our staff - we're obsessed with sleep because none of us get enough of it. We have to wake up at ungodly hours of the morning. Have a lot of pillows...
DJ KHALED: Yes.
GREENE: ...I love that. We need pillows. Do you mean that literally?
DJ KHALED: I mean that so literally. I'm talking about you have to rest your greatness, you know? You know...
GREENE: (Laughter).
DJ KHALED: Yeah.
GREENE: Well, thank you. Yes, I'll think about that as I go to bed tonight - resting my greatness.
DJ KHALED: And that's - it's a very important key. Like, you know, I have a lot of pillows in my bed, my tour bus, like, you know, every time I turn, there's a pillow. You know, if I turn to the left, the right, if I turn my whole body and my leg moves, it's just pillows everywhere.
GREENE: Khaled, do you have the book with you?
DJ KHALED: Yes, I do.
GREENE: Could you read a little from page 126? I'd love people to get a feel for your writing.
DJ KHALED: Let me see, 126, I always wanted to be on this show, you know?
GREENE: You always wanted to do our show?
DJ KHALED: Yes.
GREENE: Really?
DJ KHALED: Yes - 126, have a lot of pillows.
GREENE: Thank you.
DJ KHALED: They don't want you to have a lot of pillows, so I make sure I have a lot of pillows. It's a major key to rest your greatness. Pillows are important. When you sleep, when you're supposed to sleep, got to sleep like a king or a queen. Every time you turn, there should be something comfortable to greet you, and that softness reminds you of parts of your body - it's time to relax. You know what I'm saying? Like...
GREENE: (Laughter) I do. I don't even know how to - like, you're - I'm connecting with you. You're making me feel that pillows are so important. I mean, most people would just say like, you know, dude, like, get some good pillows and go to bed, but you - I mean, there's a poetry to how you do this.
DJ KHALED: Oh, no. This is that, like, holy grail. This is for real, you know? And I'm sure you experienced it, you just didn't realize how important and adaptive (ph) it is, you know what I'm saying?
GREENE: Yeah. How do you come up with these?
DJ KHALED: I'm just being me, man. You know, I don't come up with it. I don't sit there and just think, hey, I'm going to up with something. No, you know, it's just me that just comes out of me. Like, you know, when you ask me a question, I have the answer, at least a answer that I want to give you, you know what I'm saying?
GREENE: Yeah.
DJ KHALED: Today I was with somebody on my way over here, and, you know, he was asking me a question, like, you think you need help when you do interviews or - 'cause, you know, your career's going on a higher level. You know, I'm about to go speak at Harvard.
GREENE: You are?
DJ KHALED: Yes, I'm going to speak at Harvard.
GREENE: What's...
DJ KHALED: And I'm having a speaking engagement with Arianna Huffington. And my career is going to a higher level and I'm embracing it and I'm very grateful. And the person was like, yo, you think we need to help you? I said, yo, bro, you're wasting your energy. I'm born with this, you know what I'm saying? Like, I'm not saying I don't want to learn something I might not know, you know what I'm saying? But I always told - I told the man I told you in this book too that knowing is better than learning. I know it sounds kind of weird because you have to learn to know...
GREENE: Yeah.
DJ KHALED: ...But some things that you just know. Like for instance, if you know the stove is hot and it's hot, why touch it, you know what I'm saying?
GREENE: (Laughter).
DJ KHALED: Like, you know it's hot. Like, don't touch it. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like...
GREENE: Yeah.
DJ KHALED: ...You just know. Like, there's certain things that I know that I like. You can't teach me something that I know.
GREENE: I literally am thinking back to a moment a few days ago when I touched the stove to see if it was still hot, which was really stupid.
DJ KHALED: Yeah, well, you see what I'm saying?
GREENE: Yeah.
DJ KHALED: And that's what you call playing yourself.
GREENE: Yeah.
DJ KHALED: You know what I'm saying? Like...
GREENE: Yeah. Well, I am going to go buy some extra pillows.
DJ KHALED: Yeah, it's important. That's a key.
GREENE: Yeah, that's where I'm off to. Thanks a lot, appreciate it.
DJ KHALED: All right, man, bless up.
GREENE: That is the one and only DJ Khaled. His new book is called "The Keys."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I GOT THE KEYS")
DJ KHALED: Major key...
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And that music means it is time for StoryCorps. Today, two conversations recorded 10 years apart. Recently, 25-year-old Kayla Wilson sat down with her mom at StoryCorps. We'll hear that interview in a bit, but first a conversation from 2006. Kayla was 15 at the time, and her mom was serving a three-year prison sentence on felony drug charges. Kayla talked to her grandmother Teri Lyn Coulter-Colclasure about her mom's drug addiction.
KAYLA WILSON: When I asked mom how she got started, she told me that after her papa died, she was just mad at the world and mad at God. And that's when she told one of her ex-boyfriends that she wanted to get high.
TERI LYN COULTER-COLCLASURE: How old was she when this happened?
WILSON: Fifteen, I think.
COULTER-COLCLASURE: You're right.
WILSON: Yes, ma'am. When she got busted she was at a house. And I think they were making making dope and it had spilled on my younger sister. And it was just so heartbreaking to understand that this is what's going on and this is how it's going to be. When I saw her in prison, it was horrible because you see her come out of the door in that white suit. And her hair was gone, and she loved her long hair and I just had to cry. And then having to say bye and holding on to her knowing you couldn't take her with you was the most horrible experience I've ever had.
COULTER-COLCLASURE: When your mom gets out of prison, what do you think your life is going to be like?
WILSON: I think I will have the ability to actually be a child for a little bit and not have to worry about being the mature responsible adult. I think that it'll really be nice.
(SOUNDBITE OF FABRIZIO PATERLINI SONG, "PROFUNDO BLU")
WENDY FOUNDS: My name is Wendy Founds. Today's date is December the 12, 2016, and I am here with my daughter.
WILSON: You remember the day you were released from prison and got to come home?
FOUNDS: I do (laughter). I remember how you smelled, it was vanilla. And I remember the relief of our lives get to really start from this point forward.
WILSON: I do remember specifically when you came home and you wanted to apologize. I think that was a defining moment for us because I got to tell you what I'd always wanted to tell you, which was that, you know, you can never make up for that time.
FOUNDS: I bawled for days after that conversation, but it helped me to be a better mom, and I'm still far from perfect. Did you ever wish that I was different?
WILSON: Yeah, for sure. I can remember, you know, writing in diaries how much I hated you because you chose drugs over me.
FOUNDS: Why did you decide to forgive me?
WILSON: When you finally decided to get clean, it was obvious you were sincere. And you're my mom and, you know, as my mom, I loved you. I wanted that relationship.
FOUNDS: Did that come too late?
WILSON: I don't think so. Sure would have been great to have growing up, but I'm happy you're here, and I'm happy where we're at today. And I think what we've got is awesome considering where we've been, so I'm excited to see what happens next.
(SOUNDBITE OF FABRIZIO PATERLINI SONG, "PROFUNDO BLU")
GREENE: That was Kayla Wilson with her mom Wendy Founds at StoryCorps. Kayla is now a high school teacher in Benton, Ark., and Wendy helps counsel other parents struggling with addiction. And their interview will be archived in the Library of Congress.
(SOUNDBITE OF FABRIZIO PATERLINI SONG, "PROFUNDO BLU")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
So Republicans in Congress are moving ahead with efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They've said that's a priority. But there's a new poll suggesting that their constituents might not be as eager as they are to see the law go. The survey comes from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. It shows that if lawmakers don't have something ready to replace Obamacare, only 20 percent of Americans want it repealed immediately. Here's NPR's Alison Kodjak.
ALISON KODJAK, BYLINE: The poll shows that Americans are about equally divided over the Affordable Care Act. Forty-seven percent like the ACA, and 48 percent want it to go. But of that second group, more than half say Congress should have a replacement ready before they vote to repeal. Kaiser CEO Drew Altman says the poll shows lawmakers don't really have a mandate to kill the law.
DREW ALTMAN: Most of the American people said they're either against repealing it or they're against repealing it unless Republicans put a replacement plan on the table. They want to see what comes next before they see the ACA repealed.
KODJAK: Senate Republicans this week made the first move to repeal the health-care law. They began debating a budget proposal that will serve as the legislative vehicle to repeal the taxes and subsidies that make Obamacare work. Their plan as of now - vote immediately to kill the law and come up with something to put in its place later.
ALTMAN: Republicans in Washington are feeling much more bullish about repealing the ACA without a replacement plan than the American people are.
KODJAK: One big reason - about 20 million people have health insurance thanks to Obamacare. The Republican plan to repeal now, replace later leaves them wondering what comes next. Doctors, hospitals and patient groups aren't big fans of the repeal-and-delay strategy either. And they're making sure lawmakers know it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: The cancer has returned.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Your son's infection has spread.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: You have insurance, right?
KODJAK: That's from an ad campaign by the patient-advocacy group Families USA. It's asking people to demand an Obamacare replacement that ensures the same number of people will be covered.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Repealing health care with no plan is a partisan attack by Congress that will hurt us all.
KODJAK: The American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association are among many organizations that are asking lawmakers to slow down. Andrew Gurman is president of the AMA.
ANDREW GURMAN: Our position on repeal and replace is that we need to see what the replace part is. We think that all people in this country need to understand what it is that you're being asked to substitute for what's there now so that they can have an informed opinion about whether it's better or not.
KODJAK: Another study released today shows that repealing the Affordable Care Act could also cost the economy as many as three million jobs. That study's lead author, Leighton Ku of George Washington University, says about a third of those jobs are in health care.
LEIGHTON KU: Health care is almost a fifth that the U.S. economy. So as you begin to change this health care, there are repercussions that go across all states and all sectors.
KODJAK: That's because your insurance premium is someone else's paycheck down the line.
KU: The payments that you make to health care then become income for workers and income for other businesses. And the income they receive they pay out to their workers. And they buy more goods.
KODJAK: With jobs on the line and public opinion mixed, Republicans in Congress may find they're better off speeding their work on Obamacare's replacement and putting the brakes on its repeal. Alison Kodjak, NPR News, Washington.
[POST-BROADCAST CLARIFICATION: The audio version of this story refers to an ad campaign by Families USA. In fact, the campaign is being conducted by a broad coalition of 21 doctor, nurse and patient advocacy groups, including Families USA.]
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Bernie Sanders this week really wanted to make his case on the Senate floor. The Vermont senator had this large poster board with an old tweet from Donald Trump. When we spoke to Sanders yesterday, he said he just didn't want anyone to forget what Trump wrote.
BERNIE SANDERS: This is what he said on May 7, 2015. And he repeated it many times. I was the first and only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - end of quote.
GREENE: And Sanders said he wants to hold Trump to his word. But he and many Democrats are taking no chances. They're staging a national day of protest, January 15, to warn Republicans not to cut health programs. Now, in Congress, there is talk of compromise, for example, in reworking Obamacare. But Sanders and some of his colleagues are going hard at Republicans anyway, accusing them of trying to quote, "make America sick again." Sanders said Democrats need to get out and mobilize.
SANDERS: I happen to believe that the Democratic Party has been not doing a good job in terms of communicating with people in cities and towns and in rural America all over this country. We've got to get out there.
GREENE: Well, let me ask a broader question here. I mean, campaigns are different from times of governance, I guess one could argue. And you showed this tremendous skill in getting people to your rallies and really channeling passion into votes. But at this moment, when there might be a window to sit down with members of the Republican Party to talk about compromise, do you worry that catchy slogans like make America sick again, you know, allegations about what Republicans are trying to do - could that undermine the chance for cooperation?
SANDERS: No. Let me get back to the point here. If we want to talk about politics in a democratic society, the first thing we have to do is to hold candidates accountable for what they said over and over again. David, this is, again, not something he said one time and in passing. This has been the cornerstone of his campaign. This is what he told millions of people. This is why he became president.
So the first thing that we must do is say to Mr. Trump, were you lying during the campaign? Had you no real intention of keeping this promise? But if the contrary is true - and I hope it is - let's stop the nonsense right now. Republicans are working hard. They're trying to put together the programs that will cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Tell them to stop.
GREENE: But with those goals in mind, I guess I wonder if you worry that activism risks driving the other side away from the table.
SANDERS: Activism means participating in the political process, rallying the American people to stand up and fight for what they believe in. That is a bad thing? I don't think it's a bad thing. I think one of the problems that we have in this country and one of the reasons that Mr. Trump won is that we have millions of people who have given up on the political process, who don't believe the Congress is listening to their pain.
We have a middle class which is in decline. One out of 5 Americans cannot afford the high cost of prescription drugs. We've got to start listening to people, involve them in the political process. Right now what goes on is that the American people are not actively involved in fighting for their rights. Who do you think is going to make the decisions if the American people are not involved at the grassroots level?
It will be the insurance companies. It'll be Wall Street. It'll be the drug companies. It'll be the fossil fuel industry. I don't want to break the bad news to you. But, in fact, these large corporate interests have enormous legislative and political power in this country. And when we rallied the American people, what we are saying to the members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats - hey, start paying attention to the needs of the 99 percent and not just the 1 percent. That is exactly what we have got to do.
GREENE: I listened to your message. I mean, it's a populist message that resonated with a lot of people around this country. And I think about states like Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania. Do you think, if you had been the nominee, you would've won the election against Donald Trump?
SANDERS: Well, I don't think it helps to relive history. The answer is I don't know. Nobody knows. Doesn't - it's not worth speculating about.
GREENE: Wasn't that many votes in those states that was a difference.
SANDERS: I'm more than aware of that. But what is important right now is we are where we are. Mr. Trump made some statements. Our job is to hold him accountable.
GREENE: You're doing a town hall with CNN on Monday about the Democratic strategy for dealing with Trump's administration. What is the strategy going forward for Democrats?
SANDERS: Strategy really is not complicated. One of the things that we have not done in Washington as elected officials - I think the media has not done a particularly good job on - is to understand that you have many people out there who cannot afford to pay their electric bill. Half of the elderly people in this country have zero savings as they move into retirement.
Kids can't afford to go to college or are leaving school. Fifty, $60,000 - that is the reality of millions of people. So what the Democratic Party has got to do is start listening to the needs of the middle class, the working families, lower-income people, black and white and Latino, and listen to the pain that is out there.
GREENE: Well, Senator, you say it's so simple. And you say it's about listening. How did the party get it so wrong in this election?
SANDERS: Well, it's not a question of this election. You know, it's an interesting point, David. If you go back historically into the '40s, say - FDR - even Harry Truman. If you would've stopped the man on the street at that point - the woman on the street - and you say, which party is the party of the working class in America? No one would hesitate. It was the Democratic Party. That is not how people would respond today. So I think, to answer your question, the Democratic Party swallowed the bait. They became hooked on big money. When you become hooked on big money, you're not going to stand up to Wall Street or the insurance companies.
GREENE: I just want to ask you about that poster board. Is that the reality of Washington today? Do you have a staff working to print out every single Donald Trump tweet?
SANDERS: Well, I think - I mean, it's not a question of printing out every single Donald Trump tweet. What he prided himself on - he said, I am not a typical Republican. This is what he said. He said, you got Paul Ryan. You got all these right-wing Republicans. They want to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid - not me. I don't want to do it.
And you got a lot of working-class people and senior citizens who voted for him on that basis. Well, you know what? Yes, we are going to hold them accountable. If that's what he said and if that's how he won the presidency, yes, you're damn right we're going to hold them accountable and remind them of what he said.
GREENE: Sounds like you admire - you admire Trump in some ways.
SANDERS: No, I don't admire people who lie. Why do I admire - what's there to admire?
GREENE: In terms of his message to the working class, people in this country.
SANDERS: It was a good message. Yeah. He said, I will not cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And my job and the job of the American people is to make sure that he is held accountable for what he said.
GREENE: That was Vermont's independent senator, Bernie Sanders.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to step back from his business interests when he takes office. He says he will let his two adult sons take the helm and that he won't make any new deals while he is president. But there are still many ongoing projects that are causing concerns about conflicts of interest. Here's NPR's Jackie Northam.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: Trump has some 500 business interests spread across about 20 countries. He's unwinding some of those deals as Inauguration Day approaches. But many others are moving forward. Josh Kurlantzick, a Southeast Asia specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, says most of the projects are licensing deals.
JOSH KURLANTZICK: They pay Trump a fee. And someone builds a resort. And they slap his name on it. So it's not like he's got his own skin in the game or is possibly going to be involved in shaping the resorts.
NORTHAM: Still, Kurlantzick and others say any involvement by Trump in a project, even if it's just his name, can create a huge conflict of interest, complicating any national security, foreign policy or economic concerns the U.S. has with a particular country. Take for example a $150 million project in the Philippines capital, Manila, for which Trump receives up to $5 million for the use of his name.
Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has raised human-rights concerns with a brutal anti-drug campaign that has left more than 6,000 people dead since he took office in June. Robert Manning is a former National Intelligence Council official now with the Atlantic Council.
ROBERT MANNING: I think Trump has been reluctant to make any negative criticisms about the Duterte's human-rights policies. Whether his business interests are a factor in that - I don't know how you ascertain that. I think it would certainly give him a motivation.
NORTHAM: To further complicate things, Duterte recently named Trump's main business partner in the Manila Trump Tower deal as the Philippine special envoy to the U.S. on trade and economic policy, Jose Antonio. Manning said it wouldn't be illegal for Trump to interact with Antonio in his capacity as a trade representative. But...
MANNING: It's a sticky question of deciding where national interests stop and business interests begin and vice versa.
NORTHAM: Trump has promised to keep his hands off his business empire while president. But Kurlantzick says his sons will have to build up strong relations with powerful people to help keep overseas projects moving, which could be problematic. Kurlantzick uses as an example Indonesia, where the Trump organization is involved in two resort projects. One of the business partners there was a major politician, Setya Novanto. Kurlantzick says he had to step down in 2015 after being accused of corruption.
KURLANTZICK: He briefly gave up his post, which is like the equivalent of Paul Ryan last year because he was caught on audio trying to get a $4 billion payment from an American mining company.
NORTHAM: Earlier in the year, Novanto was in New York to meet with Trump and accompany him at a news conference where Trump praised him as a great man.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: His whole group is here to see me today. And we will do great things for the United States. Is that correct?
SETYA NOVANTO: Yes.
TRUMP: Do they like me in Indonesia?
NORTHAM: Stephen Gillers, an ethics professor at New York University Law School, says Trump needs to be careful not to erode public confidence.
STEPHEN GILLERS: What we want to make sure of is that the deal our president cuts is solely for the benefit of the United States, that there is no other interest that could be affecting his judgment.
NORTHAM: Gillers says the only way for Trump to do that is to divest himself from all his business interests when he becomes president. Jackie Northam, NPR News.
POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: We incorrectly say that Indonesian politician Setya Novanto was a business partner of President-elect Donald Trump. In fact it was Trump's Indonesian business partner who arranged for Novanto and Trump to meet.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Now, when Russia's communist system came crashing down 25 years ago, many Russians hoped their country would become a democracy. We were reminded two years ago how dim those hopes have become when a prominent opposition leader was assassinated in downtown Moscow. As NPR's Lucian Kim reports, political exile has once more become the only option for a growing number of Russians.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Russia will be free.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: Russia will be free.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Russia will be free.
LUCIAN KIM, BYLINE: On a bright Sunday afternoon last November, a dozen young Russians picketed their embassy in Washington D.C. I'd come to meet Anastasiya Popova, who under different circumstances might've been sitting inside the embassy instead of standing outside it.
ANASTASIYA POPOVA: I graduated from our Russian Diplomatic Academy. And I used to work in the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs in the Department of New Challenges and Threats.
KIM: But when the 29-year-old native of St. Petersburg became interested in opposition politics, she had to choose - keep her government job or work for the other side. Popova chose politics and became an aide to Ilya Ponomarev, the only member of the Russian Parliament to vote against annexing Crimea in 2014. Before too long, Ponomarev was living in exile in the U.S. as authorities in Russia built a criminal case against him, a common tactic used against opposition leaders. Then Popova says she got a warning that she, too, should leave the country ASAP.
POPOVA: Yeah. That was the end of October 2014. And that was my personal Halloween, you know, when I find myself in the U.S. with just a suitcase. And I had no idea where to go next.
KIM: Popova follows in a long history of Russian political exiles dating back to the 1800s, Jews fleeing persecution, Russian aristocrats fleeing revolutionaries and dissidents getting the boot from the communist regime. But once they've left, exiles like Popova are cut off from their homeland.
FIONA HILL: Love it or leave it. That's exactly the idea. And if you leave it, then you leave it. And that's the bitter nature of exile.
KIM: Fiona Hill is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. She says that once they're out, political exiles have little influence back home, even with the help of the internet.
HILL: I think social media does add a different ingredient. A lot of activity can take place in social media and in the internet. But it doesn't necessarily translate to action on the ground.
KIM: Someone who's still trying to take action in Russia is Ilya Yashin, an opposition leader who's refusing to leave. I met him in a coffee shop outside Washington while he was visiting the U.S.
ILYA YASHIN: (Speaking Russian).
KIM: "Somebody has to stay and continue engaging in opposition politics," Yashin told me, "because it's an example to others to stay and fight for their country." Yashin said many political activists left Russia after his friend, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was assassinated outside the Kremlin in February 2015. According to research by Radio Free Europe, Russian applications for political asylum in the U.S. have increased for the fourth straight year. Anastasiya Popova says for dissidents like her, leaving Russia is the only choice.
POPOVA: I believe that being in U.S. and telling U.S. government the truth about the political situation in Russia is more useful than just being tortured in jail.
KIM: When it comes to dealing with Russia, Popova has a message for President-elect Donald Trump. Negotiate hard. Don't make any concessions as a sign of goodwill and keep expectations low. Lucian Kim, NPR News, Washington.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
There is a lot of talk about who is and who isn't taking part in the presidential inauguration festivities this month. A band from Alabama's oldest private historically black college is expected to march in the parade, but some alumni of Talladega College are not happy about that decision. In fact, there have been days of protests over it. Sherrel Wheeler Stewart of member station WBHM reports.
SHERREL WHEELER STEWART, BYLINE: Talladega College isn't known for its football team because it doesn't have one, but it does have a band - the Marching Tornadoes - the pride of the campus in this town about 50 miles east of Birmingham.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARCHING TORNADOES PERFORMANCE)
STEWART: Participation in this inauguration is not popular for some Talladega alims like Shirley Ferrill, a 1974 graduate. She says what Donald Trump said on the campaign trail is not consistent with the values of Talladega College. Other groups like the Rockettes and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir have had similar concerns about performing in the inauguration.
SHIRLEY FERRILL: To have them take part in anything that smacks of support for Donald Trump makes me sick.
STEWART: For Ferrill, this issue points back to the school's history, a school founded by former slaves in 1867 and a college which has supported the black community ever since.
FERRILL: I do care what others think about the college's participation. I care about the reputation Talladega has established over 150 years, and I think that reputation would be damaged by the college participating.
STEWART: Ferrill launched an online petition calling for Talladega to decline the invitation. More than 1,600 people have signed it, but the decision to go is welcomed by others.
TIFFANY HARRELL: Y'all are going?
DARRIOUS HAYES: We are going.
HARRELL: Hot diggity (ph) damn.
STEWART: That's Tiffany Harrell, a store clerk, chatting with band member Darrious Hayes, who's returning to campus this week after winter break. Hayes has been in the band since 2014, his freshman year. He says the trip to the inauguration is an opportunity.
HAYES: I have never been to D.C. Like, the alumni don't want us to go because of Trump, but we saying it's not because of Donald Trump, it's 'cause of the experience.
STEWART: On campus yesterday, it was quiet. College officials limited access, and a campus police officer even approached me.
UNIDENTIFIED CAMPUS POLICE OFFICER: Not allowing any of the reporters on the campus to talk to the students.
STEWART: No college administrators would answer questions about the decision. A Talladega spokeswoman did say it's a good opportunity for students. The Talladega Marching Tornadoes played at an NFL game in New Orleans last year, but this performance at the presidential inauguration will be its biggest ever. For NPR News, I'm Sherrel Wheeler Stewart in Talladega, Ala.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARCHING TORNADOES PERFORMANCE)
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
As the United States gets ready to inaugurate businessman and reality television star Donald Trump, Italy is considering a former comedian for prime minister - Beppe Grillo.
BEPPE SEVERGNINI: His sort of comedy became more and more political. At some point, like a few years ago, he decided to become a politician. And I think he was successful beyond his wildest dreams.
GREENE: That is the voice of Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini, who along with the rest of Italy's media is battling a pretty serious accusation from Grillo, who is a populist leader whose support is growing.
SEVERGNINI: He says that the biggest producer of fake news are the official media in Italy. And some of us didn't like it at all because, in fact, he's quite active in spreading proper fake news and...
GREENE: What's an example? You're saying Grillo and his party have been spreading fake news.
SEVERGNINI: Well, more current is that one of their website is called TzeTze. Recently they publish a story - the title was, "Is The U.S. Covertly Funding Migrant Traffickers To Italy?" - accusing America of having an international plot to bring thousands of desperate migrants from Africa to weaken the European Union or Italy. It's crazy.
GREENE: Is there any legitimate point at all that Mr. Grillo is making? I mean, has the press been very critical of him, his movement? I mean, do you see his point in any way?
SEVERGNINI: Well, he's got several points. In fact, we need an opposition. And in terms of opposition, the Five Star Movement were quite effective. They are actually better than most populist movement in Europe. What I don't like is the secrecy about them, and the fact that they accuse us of spreading fake news when we're not.
GREENE: What has been the reaction among Italian citizens to what Grillo has said, these accusations of fake news against the media?
SEVERGNINI: Journalists and politicians are not very popular nowadays, and I think it's kind of easy for whoever is in power - politicians - to use us - the media - as scapegoat. So it's not a good time to be a journalist in Italy.
GREENE: So interesting because, I mean, this does feel like it mirrors what we are seeing in the United States in a lot of ways. You have a popular politician - Donald Trump - who just won an election and has been incredibly critical of the media. And you have a media and many who have been very critical of Donald Trump suggesting that he puts out statements and tweets, they've suggested that they're not always true. I mean, there's - are you seeing a similarity here?
SEVERGNINI: Oh, yes. But let me tell you something, I am not surprised that politicians try to use Twitter or Facebook or direct television interview to bypass journalists. Fair enough, let them try. What I resent is the fact that we giving up so easily, and we've not been good enough. Because the idea of a democracy surviving without journalists and the media is a very dangerous idea. And some politicians - and I'm afraid your forthcoming president and Beppe Grillo and Le Pen in France - they are playing that game, and they are using the voters' frustration against the media. And we have to defend ourselves, speak up, try to tell people and our readers and listeners and viewers, look, we may not be perfect, but we are useful. We serve something in a democracy.
GREENE: OK, speaking to Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini. Thanks so much for your time, we appreciate it.
SEVERGNINI: Thank you.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. Merry Christmas.
No, you did not hear me wrong. It is Christmas Day on the island of Foula, just off the coast of Scotland. You see, the fine folk of Foula, just over 30 strong, are big on tradition - Norse tradition. And that includes the use of the ancient Julian calendar, meaning Christmas comes 12 days after the rest of Britain. So if you had a kind of crummy New Year's, there's a chance for a redo. New Year's Eve at Foula Island January 12. It's MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Energy independence, climate change, the security of America's electrical grid - the forces that shape our power supply are in flux. Of course, the fuels that power the grid have gotten significantly cleaner these past eight years. And today, the Obama administration's Energy Department releases its final assessment of the country's energy picture and where they'd like to see it go. My co-host Rachel Martin sat down this week with outgoing Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Thank you so much for coming in.
ERNEST MONIZ: Thank you, Rachel.
MARTIN: I will start with a big question. How would you grade America's energy independence at this moment?
MONIZ: I would say very well. Certainly, we are now the largest producer of natural gas and oil, for example. But we also have seen tremendous growth in our renewables. In fact, things like wind, solar, etc., have now surpassed hydro. Natural gas has surpassed coal. These are tremendous shifts in this electricity system.
However, I do want to caution - we are not at the point where we produce as much energy as we use, so we still do have some oil imports. But we may reach that point in the next decade some time.
MARTIN: Does nuclear power have a place in this energy mix?
MONIZ: We believe it's very important to maintain nuclear power, as it is, today, clearly our biggest zero-carbon source of electricity. So we believe both that we need to help sustain the current plants, and secondly, we are developing next-generation technologies. And let's face it - the long-term carbon challenge, where we go to deep decarbonization, let's say by mid-century, we need, essentially, every arrow in the quiver. And I think nuclear has to stay on the table.
MARTIN: You say that renewables have thrived over the past few years. Are they competing on equal footing now with fossil fuels in the open marketplace? Or are there still federal subsidies that have been involved in boosting them?
MONIZ: Well, there are still some incentives today for producing wind and solar. However, in many situations, without subsidy, we are seeing straight-up competitiveness. And the costs of the renewables are dropping very dramatically. It's not renewable production but, say, LED lighting. We're talking about a 94 percent drop in costs since 2008. That's why we say it's not about a future revolution. We are in the revolution right now in energy technology.
MARTIN: Has that change happened fast enough to mitigate the risks of climate change?
MONIZ: Well, I think a combination of the deployment of renewables, for example, and other things, including natural gas, has displaced so much coal. This last year is the first year - in history - when natural gas was the largest supplier of electricity in the country. And coal has come down substantially. And of course, that has lowered carbon emissions.
So it's really the combination of those two things plus a lot of progress on the demand side on energy efficiency. Now, you bring all those together, and we believe that we are on track for meeting the commitments made in the Paris accord.
MARTIN: Although Donald Trump very well could just tear that agreement up, or America's part.
MONIZ: But I'm saying is that the world is clearly moving to low carbon. There is, developing, a multi-trillion-dollar market in clean energy technologies globally. And we surely want to be part of that.
MARTIN: You do talk a lot about energy security in this report. And that means not just energy independence but the physical security of energy infrastructure that could be vulnerable to attacks in this day and age. Do you think the federal government has done a sufficient job of staying ahead of security threats?
MONIZ: Well, I think we're working very, very hard. And I think we're doing a pretty good job. One thing is by the absence of a major incident, for example, in the cyberworld. You say physical, but I would say physical and cyber. In fact, we should note that in the - for the energy infrastructure, we have many, I would say, evolving threats. But there's no question about it, they are increasing. And the energy infrastructure, from my perspective - regrettably - is one of the major targets.
We have also seen direct physical attacks on the electricity system. There was a famous one a few years ago in California where some people with automatic rifles basically took out some transformers and could have created an incredible Silicon Valley blackout. We were a bit lucky, frankly, in that.
MARTIN: Donald Trump has tapped Rick Perry to be your successor, to lead the Department of Energy. He's someone who, at one point, suggested doing away with the department altogether. What will it mean for the priorities you've outlined in this report to hand your department over to this next administration?
MONIZ: Well, of course, we'll see what the policies are. It's not for me to predict that. But what I will predict is that Governor Perry, presuming he is confirmed - that he would come in and see an incredible place that is fundamentally one of the most powerful science and technology organizations anywhere - applying science and technology to our energy problems, being a backbone of basic research, sustaining the nuclear deterrent, cleaning up nuclear materials that could be in the wrong hands globally - a tremendous diversity of missions all based upon the application of science and technology.
So I think, again, anyone coming in to the department is going to recognize that and recognize the major responsibility to sustain that.
MARTIN: Last question - I know it's somewhat blasphemous to ask a scientist how he is feeling, but I will do so anyway. As you reflect on your tenure at the Department of Energy, how are you feeling about America's energy independence, our ability to secure our energy future and the battle against climate change?
MONIZ: I think we are in an extraordinarily well-placed position. Again, I think we...
MARTIN: You are feeling good. You are feeling optimistic. Can I put that word in your mouth?
MONIZ: Yes, you may indeed. I will even repeat it. I feel optimistic. Of course - I often say I'm a physicist, and therefore, I am inherently optimistic. But what I see is that we have the solutions. And we will continue to develop the solutions for this low-carbon trajectory, supporting our economy, supporting our environment and supporting our security simultaneously.
MARTIN: Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, thank you so much for your time.
MONIZ: Thank you, Rachel.
(SOUNDBITE OF LIFEFORMED'S "UNDISCOVERY")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
In the city council here in Washington D.C. last month passed one of the most generous paid-leave laws in the country, up to eight weeks of paid parental leave for full and part-time private-sector workers in the city. Now, several dozen cities, counties and states actually passed their own minimum-wage, paid or sick-leave bills last year. And this is a trend that is expected to continue, as NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Marcia Goodman's job as a Chicago employment attorney is a busy one.
MARCIA GOODMAN: The last few years have been a period of kind of unprecedented, intense government activism on employment issues both at the state and the federal level.
NOGUCHI: Demographics are shaping some of the changes. Baby boomers caring for aging parents and millennials having children are demanding paid leave. There are other drivers. The gig economy is redefining traditional relationships between employers and employees. There is broader public support for minimum-wage increases. And lower-wage workers in some places like San Francisco and Seattle have won battles requiring employers to post predictable work schedules.
GOODMAN: The types of laws that states and cities have been passing that I see just accelerating - maybe even more so under a Trump presidency.
NOGUCHI: Many labor experts believe Republican control of the White House and both houses of Congress means some recent federal policies liberalizing rules on unionization and pay equality might be rolled back. That means workers' advocates are pinning more hopes on state and local policy-making. Nancy Vary, a director for Conduent, a human resources consultancy, says keeping up with the changes makes it hard for employers to plan for their business.
NANCY VARY: We're at the point where it appears that every few months, another law is popping up somewhere that may change your calculus.
NOGUCHI: Proliferation of new local laws means there are growing differences between for example the federal minimum wage of seven dollars and 25 cents and the base wage in cities like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.
VARY: The disparity is growing. There's no question.
NOGUCHI: And it complicates matters for people like Eric Oppenheim, CEO of Republic Foods, which operates 17 Burger King franchises in Maryland and Washington D.C.
ERIC OPPENHEIM: We have three different wage requirements we're dealing with for entry-level job positions within the same market.
NOGUCHI: That means employees get less flexibility to move between stores. And it means trimming bonuses, reducing vacation and less hiring to make up for the higher cost of labor.
OPPENHEIM: Yeah. We're moving some people up. But in order to compensate for that, we'll be cutting entry-level or newer positions because we just can't afford to continue to add people at those higher rates.
NOGUCHI: Lizzy Simmons is senior government relations director for the National Retail Federation.
LIZZY SIMMONS: If you have an employee who works across multiple stores, and those stores are in different jurisdictions with different labor laws, I mean, that certainly gets complex and confusing both for the employer trying to keep records and for the employee.
NOGUCHI: But Ellen Bravo, director of the advocacy consortium Family Values @ Work, says she hopes employers will choose to raise their baseline wages and offer more paid leave for all employees.
ELLEN BRAVO: If I were a national employer, I'd say, what's the best policy? And let me just apply it to everybody now 'cause employers can always be more generous than the law.
NOGUCHI: Both workers' advocates and business groups say their lobbying efforts will focus more on state capitals and at local governments and not as much in Washington. Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
As president-elect Donald Trump has assembled his team, one top post has remained open, the director of national intelligence. Well, now several news outlets are reporting the job will go to former Senator Dan Coats, Republican of Indiana. Now, today the current national intelligence director is scheduled to brief a very skeptical Donald Trump about alleged Russian hacking. NPR national security correspondent Mary Louise Kelly is here to talk about all of this with us. Mary Louise, good morning.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: Let's start with Dan Coats, who might be the new nation's intelligence chief if Donald Trump chooses him. What do we know about him?
KELLY: Well, we called him a former senator. And, in fact, his last term just ended last week. He has served in the Senate twice, first in the '90s and then again from 2011 to last week.
GREENE: So barely former senator.
KELLY: Barely former - and before that, he was in the House - four terms as an Indiana congressman.
GREENE: Uh-huh.
KELLY: He is known to be close to the incoming vice president, Mike Pence, of course, also of Indiana. He has - in between those two stints at the Senate, he has served as U.S. ambassador to Germany and also worked as a lobbyist on behalf of foreign governments, foreign clients. That's something that will surely come up in questioning at his confirmation hearing.
GREENE: So vast resume - varied.
KELLY: Vast resume - one thing you will not find on it is a lot of direct intelligence experience. Senator Coats did serve on the Intelligence Committee. But other than that, he's - he will be a newcomer to this world of the 17 U.S. spy agencies.
GREENE: Probably something else that would raise questions if he is indeed the choice.
KELLY: Indeed.
GREENE: Weren't there some questions about whether Donald Trump was going to have a director of national intelligence at all?
KELLY: Well, as this delay dragged on, and Trump did not name a director of national intelligence, people did start to wonder. Is he planning to, or is he just going to figure out a way not to do that?
GREENE: Could he reorganize everything?
KELLY: Well, the - there have been reports. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Trump wants to revamp the office of DNI, that he finds it bloated and too bureaucratic. I will say Trump's people have denied that. The spokesman for Trump, Sean Spicer, came out and called the Wall Street Journal story 100 percent false. But I will tell you - since that - since the day that that office opened - I mean, I remember covering this a dozen years ago, when they were standing up the DNI office. And from day one, it's been open to this criticism of bureaucratic bloat.
GREENE: Why?
KELLY: I think the concern is that it is a general divorced from his troops. I mean, the DNI does not send spies into the field. It does not have case officers working on the front lines in Iran or China or Russia or any of the other places that the U.S. is trying to spy on. It's supposed to hover above and coordinate the work of the agencies that do do that. So it is -
GREENE: Take the broad view - but not hands-on.
KELLY: Well, by definition, it is another layer of bureaucracy. Now, does Trump see that as a problem? We don't know. But given the degree to which he has criticized U.S. spy agencies, it's going to be awfully interesting to watch what kind of stamp he tries to put on them.
GREENE: Extraordinary that criticism of U.S. spy agencies this week - I mean, Donald Trump questioning intelligence agencies' work when it comes to the alleged Russian hack. Yesterday we heard the current director of national intelligence, James Clapper, push back against that criticism on the Hill. What exactly happened there? You were covering it.
KELLY: Right. This was a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. This was the first public hearing where U.S. spy chiefs have testified and been asked to weigh in publicly on all of these issues. And Clapper, responding to the criticism from Trump - he went out of his way to praise what he called the patriots working in U.S. intelligence. He talked about that image of the stars up on the wall at CIA headquarters, which - each one represents someone who has died while serving at CIA. Jim Clapper did not tell Trump to back off. But he walked right up to that line. Let me play you a little bit of what he actually said yesterday.
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JAMES CLAPPER: I think there is an important distinction here between healthy skepticism, which policymakers, to include policymaker number one, should always have for intelligence. But I think there's a difference between skepticism and disparagement.
KELLY: That's DNI Jim Clapper speaking yesterday in remarks clearly that he wants policymaker number one to hear. And yesterday Trump himself seemed to walk back some of his earlier criticism. He was tweeting about intelligence. But he said he's a big fan.
GREENE: He's saying he's a big fan of the intelligence community.
KELLY: That's what he says.
GREENE: OK. Well, I mean, so that is the context, as we have this meeting that is going to take place at Trump Tower today. Clapper, the current DNI, is going to be giving Donald Trump a top-secret briefing on Russia and those cyber activities. Set this up for us.
KELLY: Right. So this is the top-secret briefing laying out the Russia report, which is reviewing the evidence - what U.S. intelligence knows and how they know it. That was delivered to the White House yesterday. There is a public version forthcoming on Monday. It is, of course, already leaking. The Washington Post this morning is reporting that there were intercepted communications right after the November election. That is in Moscow. As they celebrated Trump's win, U.S. spy agencies were listening in. And the Post is -
GREENE: Russian officials were celebrating.
KELLY: The Post is quoting officials saying, this is one piece of the evidence that has led U.S. officials to believe Russia intervened. And the reason why was to try to swing the election.
GREENE: Though possible they might've been celebrating just because they liked that Donald Trump is...
KELLY: Without knowing exactly what was said, it's hard to say.
GREENE: Yeah.
KELLY: This is one piece of evidence that they're going to lay out. And you're right. It's an absolutely fascinating dynamic that will unfold at Trump Tower today. Also, in the room, we're going to have CIA Director John Brennan. I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago and asked him about what the relationship will be between U.S. spy agencies and Donald Trump. Without naming names, he talked about the importance of making sure the next administration appreciates how serious the Russia threat is. Let's hear a little bit of that.
JOHN BRENNAN: Some people who are going to be coming into the administration are unfamiliar with the extent of the threats - the nature of it, how diverse it is. And so we have a special responsibility and obligation to make sure that they are as informed, as enlightened, as knowledgeable as possible because they have the responsibility to protect this country's future.
KELLY: That's CIA Director John Brennan. And he will have his chance today to inform and enlighten the president-elect and to lay out in detail what exactly the classified intelligence is that supports the case that Russia interfered in the election.
GREENE: OK. Donald Trump getting that classified report today - and we'll get some sort of public version of it next week, we think. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, thanks as always.
KELLY: Thank you.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Let's meet the new governor of North Carolina. Democrat Roy Cooper won a close contentious election, and his state is seen as a hotbed of partisan politics heading into 2017. Jeff Tiberii of member station WUNC reports.
JEFF TIBERII, BYLINE: Roy Cooper's political career took off 28 years ago this month. He was part of a coup to overthrow the speaker of the North Carolina House, a fellow Democrat. Joe Mavretic assembled 20 Democrats who worked with Republicans to take over the chamber.
JOE MAVRETIC: We were well organized, and we handled the clandestine part of it very well, the counter-intelligence part of it extraordinarily well.
TIBERII: It was a huge risk for the young lawmaker. Cooper was just 31 years old and in his second term. Within two years, Cooper was appointed to the state Senate. Then he moved on to North Carolina's attorney general for four terms. In November, he narrowly defeated Republican incumbent Pat McCrory for the executive mansion.
MAVRETIC: This is a governor who when he sees something that needs to be done, he's willing to roll the dice.
TIBERII: These are tumultuous times in North Carolina. Cooper will have to take some big chances in the current political climate. Republicans hold veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the legislature, and they plan to make Cooper's life difficult.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The House will come back to order.
TIBERII: Days after he was declared the winner, lawmakers held an unscheduled special session and stripped the incoming governor of some key powers. For his part, Cooper has announced plans this week to expand the federal Medicaid program, even though state law forbids him from doing so.
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ROY COOPER: It is common sense for North Carolina to keep its option open as we go into this new health care arena under a Trump presidency.
TIBERII: Cooper is also likely to face tough fights over the budget and redistricting. And then there's House Bill 2, the bathroom bill passed last year limits protections for the LGBT community and led to economic boycotts of North Carolina. While serving as attorney general, Cooper refused to defend the measure in court. Now as governor, he wants to work with Republicans to repeal it.
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COOPER: I think, you know, campaign talk is tough, but now that we're past this election, let's roll up our sleeves.
TIBERII: A bipartisan effort to repeal the controversial law failed last month. And there's little trust between Cooper and his chief political adversary, Republican Phil Berger, who leads the state Senate.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PHILIP BERGER: I think there's a lot to be said about leadership in state government, particularly the incoming leadership in the executive branch. I think Roy Cooper did everything he could to sabotage a reasonable compromise.
TIBERII: Cooper and lawmakers are gearing up for a contentious session this year. Political scientist David McLennan says Cooper will likely have to make his case to voters if he wants to accomplish anything.
DAVID MCLENNAN: He is the governor and can command sort of the bully pulpit of North Carolina and perhaps move some public opinion.
TIBERII: McLennan says Cooper is going to spend the year fighting the legislature and may have to turn to the courts often to get his way. It will take all of Cooper's political skill to govern in this polarized state. For NPR News, I'm Jeff Tiberii in Raleigh, N.C.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. So a guy walks into a bank, goes up to the window, swipes his debit card so the teller has his info - then he robs the place. He threatens the teller, takes more than 500 bucks and bolts. Nice work, dude. You scanned your debit card. Police had his name, address. And they arrested him. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, Alvin Lee Neal had prior offenses and might go to prison for nearly four years. He was also ordered to pay the bank back. You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And earlier this week, the presidents of both the national and Alabama branches of the NAACP were arrested during peaceful sit-ins at the offices of Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions. Sessions is President-elect Donald Trump's choice for U.S. attorney general, and the NAACP vigorously opposes his appointment.
Bernard Simelton is the NAACP president in Alabama. He joined us from Huntsville to tell us why he opposes Sessions' nomination.
BERNARD SIMELTON: First of all, we oppose the Senator Sessions' nomination for the attorney general because of his previous comments that he made, everything from calling the NAACP un-American, calling us communist-inspired. And we believe that he is not a champion for voting rights issues. And I'm not saying he's for voter suppression, but he's not doing anything to stop voter suppression in his own state as well as, you know, across the country.
GREENE: There's a spokesperson for Senator Sessions who has said that much of what you're talking about and some of the things that he has said are tired and recycled charges. And I mean, we should say that they came up three decades ago. And Senator Sessions was rejected, I mean, by a Republican Congress when he was going for a federal judgeship because of his record on race.
SIMELTON: Right.
GREENE: But it's been some time now. I mean, can a person evolve? Could Jeff Sessions be a different person now?
SIMELTON: If Senator Sessions has changed his ways over the years, why does he continue to vote against voting rights expansion? Why does he continue to vote against immigration policies? Why does he continue to vote against things like the Lilly Ledbetter Act that was supposed to make women's pay equal to men?
GREENE: Do those things rise to the level where senators should oppose Jeff Sessions, or are those just issues on which there's a lot of very passionate disagreement?
SIMELTON: When you look at what the attorney general's responsibilities are, we cannot have someone in there that's going to not enforce some of the laws because he does not believe in them. If the issue comes up to him where there's a pay inequity and he has voted against it, is he going to be able to look at that and decide and help his staff make the right decision when it comes to discrimination and just pay discrimination and immigration issues? Is he going to be able to do that? And again, based on his recent past history, the answer is no.
GREENE: Well, OK - can I ask you about some things he has done recently? I mean, he was part of a push to desegregate Alabama schools when he was a U.S. attorney. He also demanded the death penalty for a person who killed an African-American teen. And that person was a son of a Ku Klux Klan leader.
Does that show a different Jeff Sessions than the one you're describing?
SIMELTON: Well, no - that's showing that, you know, he's doing what he was supposed to do. That's not doing that his heart is passionate for one way or the other. That's just showing that, you know, he was doing his job. You got to be a person that can look at issues, you know, fair and square and without a bent towards, you know, one way or the other.
GREENE: What is your message to Democratic senators in Washington who may share some of your concerns but decide that they don't rise to the level of blocking a nomination? And perhaps they know Senator Sessions from working with him in the Senate and they decide to support him.
SIMELTON: Well, my message to them is to not give him a free pass when it comes to the confirmation hearings but to ask the very tough questions that Senator Sessions has asked people to have come before him before.
GREENE: So he has actually been in the other role of questioning potential attorney general nominations.
SIMELTON: Right. Yeah, he's a member of the judiciary committee.
GREENE: You know, I noticed in the NAACP's news release that you referred to Senator Sessions by his full, formal name, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
SIMELTON: Right - third. Right.
GREENE: I wondered if there was some message in that. I mean, if there...
SIMELTON: Well, that's his name.
GREENE: I mean, are you invoking, like, an echo of a different time and an older American South?
SIMELTON: Well, you know, some people have said - well, he was named after Confederate generals. Well, you know, a person's name - you know, they don't have choice with that. But that's his name, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. And so that's why we put that in there. You know, just like with President Obama, you know, when he was elected, I mentioned something about, you know, Barack Hussein Obama. We are just saying that's his name.
GREENE: What's next for you?
SIMELTON: Well, we had a meeting with our NAACP leaders, and we don't rule out any additional sit-ins and protests. And, you know, we may do a prayer vigil the day of his confirmation hearing or the day before it begins. And there are some of us that's going up to D.C. to see if there's any way that we can be a part of the people who testify and participate in that as much as we can.
GREENE: All right. We've been speaking to Bernard Simelton. He is president of the Alabama chapter of the NAACP.
Thanks so much for your time.
SIMELTON: OK, thank you. And I appreciate you all giving me this opportunity again.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
So if you happen to visit Bavaria in January, you might not think of packing a bathing suit. Then again, you might be Nuala Moore from Dingle, Ireland.
NUALA MOORE: One should always have their bathing suit in the winter.
GREENE: Moore travelled to Burghausen, Germany, to compete in the 2nd International Ice Swimming Association World Championships being held today. Yes, you heard that right - ice swimming.
MOORE: It's like putting your entire body into your freezer (unintelligible). It's extremely painful.
GREENE: Yeah, that just doesn't sound fun. So this eight-lane competition pool has actually been carved out of the frozen Salzach River. That's near Austria. It sits at the foot of a hulking stone castle. And the water hovers just above 32 degrees. Competition organizers promise no icebergs in the pool. Moore, who is swimming the 1-kilometer event, says she was terrified the first time she took a dip in frosty waters.
MOORE: Absolutely terrified, and I think that's one of the most amazing things. You get to see how fragile you actually are - that moment where you really are not everything that you believe you are.
GREENE: So it took Moore two years to warm up to the cold, so to speak, to stay in for the 20-some minutes it takes to swim a kilometer. To get started, she devised a curious training method - dunking in buckets of ice at a local fish factory. OK. Since then, she has swum in Siberian pools carved out of the ice with chainsaws. She's paddled across the Bering Strait and also circumnavigated Ireland on a relay.
MOORE: For me, my journey has not been about racing or getting quicker. My journey has just been about understanding the body and how we can achieve these amazing things and what we as individuals need to do to present 100 percent each time.
GREENE: When Moore is not dog paddling with polar bears, she runs her own bed linens shop in Ireland. More power to her for not spending her time there and forgetting these icy waters. So she probably spends a lot of time buried beneath blankets after races, I would imagine.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
It was an unusually united front on Capitol Hill yesterday. Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee got behind the intelligence community's findings that Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential election. President-elect Donald Trump, though, continues to express skepticism that Russia hacked and released Democratic Party emails.
At yesterday's committee hearing, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said it was OK to challenge the intel. But he cautioned President-elect Trump not to undermine the intelligence community. The director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, told the senators that Russia had waged a multifaceted campaign.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JAMES CLAPPER: The hacking was only one part of it. And it also entailed, you know, classical propaganda, disinformation, fake news.
GREENE: James Clapper there. Now, also on that Senate panel, questioning Director Clapper and other intelligence chiefs, was Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill. She joins us on the line now from St. Louis in her home state of Missouri. Senator, good morning.
CLAIRE MCCASKILL: Good morning.
GREENE: So what evidence have you seen so far that confirms without a doubt that Russia was indeed behind this hacking?
MCCASKILL: Well, some of the evidence will become public next week when the report that was presented to the president yesterday...
GREENE: A report that's going to Donald Trump today, yeah.
MCCASKILL: And to Donald Trump today - but, essentially, they have everything from intercepting communications at the election - after the election in terms of celebratory information coming from Russia. We have...
GREENE: This is the Washington Post story today saying that Russian officials were celebrating after Donald Trump won.
MCCASKILL: Correct. And they have technical information. And I think the important thing to remember here is that there is a vast array of intelligence workers in our country - 17 different agencies, thousands and thousands of people. There is unanimous - no one is doubting that this occurred. And the vast majority of these people that do this work are, in fact, military. So for Donald Trump to question the facts that they have uncovered - carefully uncovered - all that does is undermine the intelligence community. And, frankly, it's a gift to our enemies.
GREENE: Let me just ask you about that Washington Post story you mentioned, Russian officials celebrating. Does that lend a lot of credence in your mind to the argument that Russia was involved in a hack here?
MCCASKILL: No. No.
GREENE: Isn't it possible Russian officials might have been celebrating just because they were happy Trump won?
MCCASKILL: No. I think that the facts are centered on the actual work that was being done and the interceptions that were done and the tracking that was done by our intelligence community around the hacks. But some of the surrounding activities - as you mentioned in your piece, General Clapper said this was multidimensional.
This wasn't just hacking emails. This wasn't just getting into the servers of the Democratic Party. This was also other information that was being - coming from Russia. And Russian operatives, with the approval of the Russian government to spread misinformation, fake news, propaganda...
GREENE: Multifaceted campaign, he called it.
MCCASKILL: It was a multifaceted campaign.
GREENE: Well, have you seen evidence that we have not yet seen? You say we'll see this report in public. But you - as a member of the Armed Services Committee in the Senate, have you seen classified stuff that we haven't?
MCCASKILL: I have had classified briefings.
GREENE: You have.
MCCASKILL: And that's the hard thing about doing interviews about this - is you have to be careful.
GREENE: You can't tell me anything.
MCCASKILL: That I can't talk about the methods and sources that would compromise our ability to fight this kind of warfare, which, of course, is the warfare of choice for the terrorist community.
GREENE: Well, have you seen - let me ask you this - any indication - I mean, all the focus has been on Russia - any indication that any Americans were in on this hack or at least aware of it while it was happening?
MCCASKILL: I'm not aware of that, no.
GREENE: OK. Nothing you've seen so far.
MCCASKILL: No.
GREENE: You know, Donald Trump has repeatedly brought up U.S. intelligence failures on Iraq. And there was this distinction that came up yesterday. There's having healthy skepticism, and there is disparaging the intelligence community. Let's talk about healthy skepticism. I mean, do Americans have a right to doubt what they're hearing because of all the weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence that proved to be wrong before the Iraq War?
MCCASKILL: Well, I thought the leaders yesterday did a good job - of our intelligence community - saying, it's not as if there's been - haven't been mistakes made. But this is a very broad consensus. And I do think that the Bush administration picked through intelligence and selectively emphasized that which supported what they wanted to do, which was go into Iraq. I think they cherry-picked intelligence in order to convince the American people that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.
But I'm not going to sit here and say that the intelligence community is perfect. I will say that our intelligence community is the best in the world, that we - since that time, we have done an awful lot of work in the intelligence community because of the terrorist threat. You know, terrorism is not a country. We have to be - have eyes and ears everywhere in the world.
GREENE: You think the intelligence community has gotten better since the days before Iraq?
MCCASKILL: No question they have gotten better.
GREENE: Let me ask you this. There did seem to be a remarkable degree of bipartisan consensus that Russia was to blame yesterday. How solid, really, is this bipartisanship we seemed to see yesterday?
MCCASKILL: I think it's very solid, particularly with Senator McCain and Senator Graham and even Senator Cotton, who, you know, wanted to argue around the edges.
GREENE: Senator Tom Cotton, yeah. He seemed to be backing up Trump in some ways.
MCCASKILL: Well, he wanted to say, we don't really know that Russia wanted them to win - wanted Trump to win. But I think what you're seeing is not that anyone disagrees on the Hill that the Russians did this. I think you're seeing some reluctance, which, I guess, is understandable of a party to take on frontally their newly elected president.
GREENE: OK.
MCCASKILL: I mean, he is going to be their leader for the next four years. And I think some of the Republicans are hesitant to publicly confront him on what I think is irresponsible trashing of our intelligence community.
GREENE: All right. Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri. Senator, thanks so much for your time this morning. We appreciate it.
MCCASKILL: You bet. My pleasure.
GREENE: Now, we also reached out to Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. But none agreed to go on our air this morning. We do hope to have them on our program soon.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Over the next few weeks, we're going to meet a series of people who are pursuing the American dream through the most basic part of life, food. Today we're going to meet a fisherman in Massachusetts, a place where people once made a living fishing cod. Well, that fish has been disappearing, including in Cape Cod. But the seas aren't depleted. Different fish are still plentiful.
NPR's Allison Aubrey is going to tell us about a man who's making a living catching and selling a fish that a lot of us haven't heard about. Allison, thanks so much for being with us.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: Before we meet any people...
AUBREY: Yes.
SIMON: I want you to introduce me to this fish you've brought into the studio.
AUBREY: OK. I have brought in a prop here. This is a dogfish. Say hello to the dogfish (laughter).
SIMON: (Imitating dog barking).
AUBREY: This is a long, spiky-looking thing.
SIMON: Yeah.
AUBREY: Have you ever seen anything like it?
SIMON: Only in my nightmares.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: Let me just say that, offhand, it's not an attractive looking fish, right?
AUBREY: Well, it's actually a shark. And I was actually with a fisherman in Cape Cod, Mass., who is now fishing these.
JAMIE ELDREDGE: I'm Jamie Eldredge. I'm captain of the fishing vessel Yellow Bird. And we're at the Chatham fish pier.
AUBREY: So Jamie is this really hearty soul. He's been doing this for decades. He's a real fixture in the community. And this is his story. When the cod fishery started to go south, he realized, hey, I'm going to have to find another livelihood. He thought, I still have a mortgage on this boat. So he says he grew up seeing these dogfish. They're really plentiful.
ELDREDGE: It's what we used to call a trash fish - and throw them back or knock them off. And now we're fishing on them for a living.
AUBREY: Are you happy with fishing dogfish?
ELDREDGE: Very happy. Yeah. I enjoy being out on the water.
AUBREY: Now, the day that I went out with him, he caught 6,000 pounds of these fish in just a few hours.
SIMON: But, Allison, I have never seen anything labeled dogfish for sale in a market.
AUBREY: Right. The reason that Jamie can make a living doing this is because there is an export market. The Brits import dogfish. They turn it into fish and chips. The French buy dogfish. They make bouillabaisse. They call it saumonette. It's just Americans have never heard of it.
SIMON: So if you called it, like, mid-Atlantic thistlefish (ph)...
AUBREY: (Laughter).
SIMON: ...We might give it a try.
AUBREY: Well, you know what? I don't think it's just a naming problem. Americans are not very adventurous when it comes to fish. We typically like to just buy tuna, tilapia and shrimp. And most of what we buy - 90 percent of what we eat is imported. And most of what's being caught off our shores is being exported. And a lot of people are scratching their heads, saying, this swap doesn't make any sense at all.
SIMON: Well, I mean, it would help if the fish tasted good.
AUBREY: Would you like to taste it?
SIMON: I think I have to...
AUBREY: (Laughter) OK. All right.
SIMON: ...After that kind of introduction.
AUBREY: Well, I will tell you that this has been...
SIMON: No, no. Just - you know, just seeing it - you have prepared - or we should say NPR's test kitchens have prepared...
AUBREY: That's right. The folks down at Seasons Culinary down in Sound Bites Cafe have actually taken these filets of dog fish. And they've sauteed them in a little lemon-caper-butter sauce. I've got a little fillet for you here.
SIMON: Which will be very nice because I actually told you that I had a taste for capers.
AUBREY: (Laughter) You did.
SIMON: Thank you very much.
AUBREY: I'm spoiling you here.
SIMON: Thank you.
AUBREY: I'm just going to drizzle a little bit of this lemon-caper-butter sauce on here for you.
SIMON: You know, this looks good.
AUBREY: Go right ahead.
SIMON: Mmm. You know, I got to say this is good.
AUBREY: You like it.
SIMON: It's fleshy. It's, you know...
AUBREY: It's flaky like other white fish.
SIMON: A little flakier than swordfish, for example, but actually probably a little firmer than sea bass. It's good. I like it.
AUBREY: You know, as you give that a taste, think of it this way. When I went to Cape Cod, what I heard from the fishermen, from the advocates in this sort of sustainable fishing community was this. They say, look. We know where this fish is coming from. We know how it's produced.
Our government now sets quotas so that fish are not overfished in the U.S. - and that this is the direction that we should be going in for sort of long-term viability. One of the advocates in Cape Cod said, look. If we want these fishing communities to be here 20 years from now, Americans should be buying fish that's caught off our own shores.
SIMON: Could you actually buy this?
AUBREY: Well, you can't walk into a, you know, Safeway or Harris Teeter. But the people who are promoting dogfish and other fish that are fished off our shores are saying, we need to get this next generation of eaters. And you know what they've arrived at? College campuses. So UMass Amherst has started serving dogfish in their cafeteria. The day I went they were making dogfish tacos. They were making an Asian flash fry with this wasabi sauce. I interviewed a bunch of students. And they love it. They love the idea that it's local. They love the idea that it's sustainable.
SIMON: Yeah.
AUBREY: So I think that might be the way that these advocates go when they try to build a market for dogfish.
SIMON: There's a collaboration with PBS that we ought to know about, right?
AUBREY: This whole reporting project is part of a collaboration I'm doing with the PBS NewsHour. So we have pictures of Jamie, his fishing vessel. You can meet some of the students at UMass Amherst who are trying this. So check it out.
SIMON: NPR's Allison Aubrey, thanks very much for being with us.
AUBREY: Thanks so much, Scott.
SIMON: And bon appetit, by the way.
AUBREY: Oh, yes. Bon appetit. I'm glad you enjoy it.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The 17-year-old son of a new congressman became a kind of celebrity this week by being just a little naughty or maybe trying to appear a little naughty or that he may actually be. We won't repeat his name, although it's easy to discover. I think a 17-year-old has the right to make a mistake that won't follow him for the rest of his life, including six years from now when he applies for a job or 12 years when he wants to get married or in 20 when his children see a picture and ask, Dad, is that you? What are you doing?
The young man in question is the son of a man who was sworn into the U.S. Congress. He was posing for a photo between his father and Speaker Paul Ryan when he dabbed - the 17-year-old, not the speaker of the House. Dabbing - and this had to be explained to me - is when you put your head in the crook of one arm and extend your other arm to the side. The dance move seems to have originated in Atlanta and Migos, an Atlanta rap group, featured it prominently in a music video whose name we cannot repeat.
The dab got popularized by Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers who briefly used it for end zone celebrations, but no more because it's over. It was over once Tom Hanks, Betty White and, yes, Hillary Clinton were seen dabbing. But because it's over, dabbing - or maybe now it's retro-dabbing - may just be getting a second gust of popularity among teens like the son of the congressman being sworn in who held the Bible for his father in one hand and dabbed with his one free arm.
You sneezing the speaker of the House asked the young man with his head in the crook of his elbow. His father told the speaker he's sneezing. It's hard to know outside the confines of the family if the congressman didn't know a dab when he saw one or just didn't want to embarrass his son or the speaker.
The young man eventually took his nose out of his elbow and another photo was taken, which might have a better chance of winding up on the congressman's office wall.
The New York Times reports that the dabbing teen has been grounded. I will not second-guess a parent's decision, but imagine that you're 17 and your father's sworn into Congress. You know it's a big deal, but you're 17 and want people to think you're cool and unimpressed by big deals, so you look for a way to signal your friends and people you really want to impress that you're not really impressed, so you dab. Got it? Then again, maybe the kid just had to sneeze.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HIT THE DAB")
MARQUIS TRILL: Watch her do her dab. Watch her do her dab. I'm moving side to side. Throw my other hand. Oh, dab. Hold up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, dab. Hold up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, dab. Hold up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SIMON: Dab. You're listening to NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Adele, Johnny Cash, X, the punk band, Justin Timberlake - that's just a partial roster of the artists that Smokey Hormel has worked with over the years. Born and raised in Los Angeles, the guitarist has carved an unusual path in the music business, as Alex Cohen of member station KPCC reports.
ALEX COHEN, BYLINE: Smokey Hormel's great-grandfather, George Hormel, started the famous meat company bearing the family name. His grandfather invented Spam. But Smokey - and, yes, that's his real name - says he was never much interested in the family business.
SMOKEY HORMEL: I guess I was like 4 or 5 when "I Want To Hold Your Hand" was a big hit on the radio. And from that point on, pop culture was very guitar-centric so of course I wanted to be a hippie and play guitar (laughter).
COHEN: A few years after that, Hormel was at a party trying to work out "Light My Fire" by The Doors.
HORMEL: And then this hippie guy came over and said, hey, kid. You want to learn the blues? And he showed me this really simple blues progression.
(SOUNDBITE OF STEPPENWOLF SONG, "THE PUSHER")
HORMEL: And it was Peter Fonda. And the song he showed me was "The Pusherman" (ph) from the film "Easy Rider," which is actually a really great way to start learning the blues because it's a very simple pattern. And I've used that many times since but very inappropriate song to teach a 9-year-old (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE PUSHER")
STEPPENWOLF: (Singing) You know I've smoked a lot of grass. Oh, Lord, I've popped a lot of pills.
COHEN: Much like the character in that song, the young Hormel got intrenched too deeply in Southern California's drug culture.
HORMEL: And in order to survive that, I pretty much removed myself from the whole world of music and drugs. And I ended up studying acting and theater.
COHEN: But acting couldn't pay the bills. So like many out-of-work thespians, he took a job as a dishwasher at a local diner. The owner, Paul Greenstein, was also a musician, one obsessed with Western swing. He asked Hormel to join his band.
HORMEL: We became, suddenly, very popular. Paul, also, was connected to the whole punk rock scene. He booked the Hong Kong Cafe downtown. He was friends with X, The Blasters, The Circle Jerks, all those people would come into the diner.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MARIE MARIE")
THE BLASTERS: (Singing) Marie, Marie.
COHEN: The Blaster's eventually recruited Hormel. And he made enough money with the band that he decided to ditch his acting aspirations. But the guitarist is quick to add, playing music fulfilled many of the same dreams.
HORMEL: If you're an actor doing scenes, you learn to sort of break it down. You know what you're going for in a scene. There's certain moments you're trying to achieve. The same thing happens in a song in performance. They're both storytelling, in a way. A rock concert can be just as dynamic as a play without all the shouting (laughter).
COHEN: Much like an actor, Hormel found himself working with different casts from project to project. You can hear him on albums by Tom Waits, Norah Jones and Beck.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SING IT AGAIN")
BECK: (Singing) The misers wind their minds like clocks that grind their gears on and on.
COHEN: Over the years, Hormel has developed a singular reputation.
JOHN DOE: There are a lot of musicians in LA. And Smokey has a certain quality that is what he doesn't play. He doesn't play all the time.
COHEN: Fellow guitarist, John Doe of the seminal punk band X, says you can hear how well Smokey Hormel embodies the notion of less being more on this song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE KNOWS")
X: (Singing) Love knows what you never told me. You said you never lie.
DOE: I don't think he plays one actual note. That's just sort of running his hand up and down the fretboard. And then it feeding back, and then - it's like a soundscape where other people would just be (imitating guitar), wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah and note, note, note, note, note. And Smokey just lets it breathe and lets it become some kind of a beast rather than trying to show off how well he plays.
(SOUNDBITE OF X SONG, "LOVE KNOWS")
COHEN: In the early 2000s, Smokey Hormel was called to play on what would turn out to be Johnny Cash's final albums. One day, the legendary singer was too sick to make it into the studio. Hormel was tasked with recording a vocal track as a guidepost. So he channeled some of those acting lessons from years ago.
HORMEL: I had to think of how would Mr. Cash sing it. You know, in his current condition he wasn't that strong. He didn't have a lot of breath. So I tried to sing it as best I could the way I thought he would sing it. And then he took the tape home, and the next day he came back and he just nailed it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HURT")
JOHNNY CASH: (Singing) I hurt myself today to see if I still feel...
COHEN: These days, Smokey Hormel lives in New York where he still gets called up to play sessions. But lately, he's more focused on his own band, Smokey's Round-Up, playing western swing much like what he performed back in the days as a diner dishwasher.
HORMEL: We're not trying to get a record deal. We're not trying to please anybody else. We're just trying to keep people dancing and have fun playing these songs. So it's very freeing.
COHEN: Smokey Hormel says it's been a nice change of pace from the pressure of working with big-name celebrities. For NPR News, I'm Alex Cohen.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
We begin this hour with Russia and the new intelligence report on Russia's ambitions in the U.S. presidential election. The headline - they say Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, personally ordered a campaign to try and tip the election. Both President Obama and President-elect Trump have been briefed by U.S. spy agencies on the classified version of the report. Afterwards, Mike Pence, who will soon be vice president, had this to say.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MIKE PENCE: It was a constructive and respectful dialogue. The president-elect has made it very clear that we're going to take aggressive action in the early days of our new administration to combat cyberattacks and protect the security of the American people.
SIMON: Mike Pence, of course. NPR national security correspondent Mary Louise Kelly joins us in our studios. Mary Louise, this is beginning to sound like one - the premise of one of your spy novels and may be someday I suppose.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: Scott, I tell you, you can't make up plot twists faster than they're cranking them out.
SIMON: What does the report say about Putin's efforts?
KELLY: It says that Putin personally ordered an influence campaign and that the campaign was originally aimed at denigrating Hillary Clinton, also aimed at undermining faith in U.S. democracy writ large. As the campaign ticked along, the focus sharpened and developed into what U.S. intelligence says was a clear preference for Donald Trump.
SIMON: And according to the report, how did they try and carry this out?
KELLY: Let me answer that two ways. One - the report does describe a range of efforts from covert cyber activities to things in plain sight - fake news, cybertrolling, Russian state-owned media. The second way I would answer it, though, is the expectation, Scott, was that this review would lay out the evidence. It would share some of the why U.S. intelligence agencies are so confident that Russia interfered and did so in order to help Trump. And this review does not do that, at least the public version doesn't. The classified version will of course have more detail. But if you come to this skeptical, wanting to understand how the CIA and other agencies came to their conclusions, this is not a very satisfying report.
SIMON: And we have to - I mean, what judgment can we make about President-elect Trump's reaction given what Vice President-elect Pence said but also some tweets that the president-elect had.
KELLY: Given that President Trump has come to this skeptical. He issued a statement right after he was briefed yesterday saying he has tremendous respect for the intelligence community - his exact words. He did not say whether he was persuaded, and his statement focused on this point - Trump says whatever happened, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election. I will stop you there because that is not what the review actually says. The review doesn't weigh in on this question one way or the other. Whether Russia altered the outcome of the election or whether they succeeded in their efforts is outside the scope of the review.
SIMON: What happens now? You have a president-elect coming into office. You have a president coming into office who arguably has a stake in being skeptical of the report and not acting.
KELLY: It is hard to overstate the drama of what we have watched play out these last few weeks, and I think big picture that's one thing to watch for going forward is how this standoff between Trump and the U.S. spy agencies - who will soon be working for him - resolves itself. You have, on the one hand, leaders of the intelligence community. You have the current White House. You have members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, who all say that they believe Russia interfered with the election. And then you have President Trump - President-elect Trump saying he doesn't buy it. So the question now - he's been briefed. He's seen the full classified version. Will he be persuaded? And I think that's the question reporters will put to him next week. He's going to give his first press conference - maybe his only press conference - as president-elect.
SIMON: NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, thanks so much.
KELLY: You're very welcome.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Republicans have pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act ever since - well, ever since it was enacted in 2010. And now with control of the House and Senate and with Donald Trump as president, they may be within weeks of doing just that. We're joined now by Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio. He's a Republican who's also a member at the House Freedom Caucus. Congressman, thanks so much for being with us.
JIM JORDAN: You bet, good to be with you.
SIMON: The end of the Affordable Care Act is at hand.
JORDAN: Yeah. I mean, that's - look, I start from the premise I think health care will be better and less expensive when Obamacare is repealed. It needs to be repealed because that's what we told the voters we're going to do. It was a huge part of this last campaign. That's what they expect us to do. So let's repeal it. Let's do it as quickly as possible, and let's put in place a model that is patient-centered, doctor-centered, family-centered, not Washington-focused like we have now with the Affordable Care Act.
SIMON: But a lot of the polls suggest that, for example, Americans like the coverage for preexisting condition. They like the fact that people can stay on their parents' insurance until they're 26.
JORDAN: Yeah, but what they don't like is the things they were told that turned out not to be true, statements like if you like your plan you can keep it, statements like if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor, statements like premiums will go down, deductibles will go down, emergency room visits will go down. They didn't. They went up. Deductibles went up. Premiums went up. The website will work. So everything we were told turned out to be false, and that's why this law is so unpopular, and that's why you saw the results you did on Election Day.
SIMON: But there are tens of millions more Americans who have health care coverage, many for the first time in their lives, aren't there?
JORDAN: There is certainly some of that. And no one's denying that we need to make sure that there are some people who in our social safety net system will need some assistance and some help. No one's denying that. The speaker of the House has said that himself. But that doesn't dismiss the fact that this thing was sold on all those false claims and has been a complete disaster for the American health care market. So let's completely repeal it, and let's put in place a system that is patient-centered, not Washington-centered.
SIMON: Well, what would you say to tens of millions of Americans who might worry that in the distance between repeal and agreeing on a new system they could lose coverage, they could lose care?
JORDAN: I think you're confusing a couple things, Scott. Look, there are four steps to this process. There is a vote next week which will establish the ability to repeal Obamacare. We have to do a budget resolution so that you can do this - without getting into all the Washington speak - but the reconciliation bill itself, you can put that together, which will be the repeal bill. So you have the vote next week to set up the process. You have the vote sometime in the near future to actually repeal it. Then you have the replacement vote to replace the Affordable Care Act with what we think makes sense, which is expanding health savings accounts, empowering people across state lines, purchasing of insurance, the things that we think makes sense in a effort to improve and - our health care system.
I think that replacement bill should be done at the same time as the repeal bill. But they can't be the same bill because one requires 51 votes. Another one would require 60 votes to get through the Senate. But those should happen at the same time. And then you have the effective date of the repeal. So if we repealed - let's say we repeal the bill today. The effective date wouldn't be today. You have to give some runway to allow the market to adjust to this disaster that's been Obamacare, allow the market to switch from that and adjust to a market that's going to be better for patients and families. So that should happen definitely within this Congress. But just the date you pass repeal is not the date that it becomes effective. You have to give a ramp and a runway in order to allow that to happen.
SIMON: Is it important to you that whatever replaces the Affordable Care Act also covers the scores of millions of people who have gotten coverage and care under the Affordable Care Act?
JORDAN: You heard the speaker earlier this week, like the rest of America, where he said we're not going to pull the rug out from under people. I mean, we'll - of course we understand. They're - look, this gets to the whole social safety net system we have in this country. Americans are the most generous people on the planet. We want to help people, and people who are truly in need, we want to help. People who have a son or a daughter who have a difficult illness, you want to make sure that they're able to get coverage. So of course that's going to be part of the package that's put together as we move forward.
SIMON: Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio, thanks so much for being with us.
JORDAN: You bet. Thank you, brother. I got to run.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
President-elect Trump unleashed a series of tweets at automakers this week. He threatened to slap border taxes of up to 35 percent on certain cars made in Mexico and sent in to the U.S. Ford, GM and Toyota have all been targets. Will President Trump have the power to actually do that? NPR's economics correspondent John Ydstie joins us.
John, thanks so much for being with us.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: My pleasure.
SIMON: Let me just read one, as an example. President-elect Trump tweeted, quote, "Toyota Motor said will build a new plant in Baja, Mexico, to build Corolla cars for U.S. No way!" - bold face - "build plant in U.S. or pay big border tax." Could he actually force the company to do that?
YDSTIE: Well, Scott, you're right to wonder about this because the Constitution couldn't be clearer. Article I Section 8 gives the Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations. So I asked your question to Gary Hufbauer, the venerable trade expert over at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. And he said he thinks members of Congress might be surprised to find out just how much of their power they've ceded to the president.
GARY HUFBAUER: There are several laws passed over the last century which give the president enormous power to restrict trade.
SIMON: What are a couple of those laws, John?
YDSTIE: There's one that gives the president a huge amount of power - the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. It says the president has, essentially, unlimited power to restrict trade during time of war.
SIMON: But, of course, Congress, as it's often pointed out, hasn't declared war since the second world war, even though, of course, U.S. troops have been in combat plenty of times. Does the Congress have to declare war to activate that power?
YDSTIE: Well, no. In fact, in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon used this law to justify temporarily raising tariffs across the board on all products coming into the U.S. He cited the Korean War, an undeclared war and a war that had been over for a couple of decades by the time Nixon levied these tariffs. So according to Hufbauer, President Trump will have the power to slap a 35 percent tariff on the Mexican auto imports or a 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports and could simply cite the conflicts in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan as justification.
SIMON: But wouldn't there be some hesitancy to use this law because, I mean, implying that Mexico is our enemy or we're at war with them would, at the least, would not seem to be neighborly. I wonder if there's any other law that could be invoked.
YDSTIE: You know, there are several more generic kinds of trade laws. One is Section 301 of the 1874 Trade Act. It allows presidents to slap tariffs on countries that discriminate against or take unjustified measures against the U.S. In fact, tariffs under that law are currently in effect, including on some fine, imported French cheeses, which you're probably already aware of.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: Actually, John, I only eat Wisconsin string cheese.
YDSTIE: (Laughter).
SIMON: So President Trump would have to decide that Mexico is discriminating against the U.S. to be able to slap tariffs on cars coming across the border from Mexico.
YDSTIE: That's right.
SIMON: Yeah, but these laws only allow tariffs against countries. Trump singled out Ford, GM and Toyota in his tweets, which are not sovereign nations. Could he slap any kind of tariffs on an individual company?
YDSTIE: Well, Gary Hufbauer says probably not. But he could define the type of car in a detailed way, like a hatchback vehicle weighing 1,800 pounds, to target cars from the companies that he's trying to punish.
SIMON: So what happens if President Trump follows through and he levies 45 percent tax on goods imported from China?
YDSTIE: Well, I asked that question to Doug Irwin, who's a trade expert at Dartmouth, and he says it's pretty clear from experience that China would retaliate hard.
DOUG IRWIN: They've already done that in the past when we have imposed the anti-dumping duties or special duties on some of their goods. All of a sudden, the Chinese airlines start buying Airbus instead of Boeing. They start buying Argentine soybeans instead of American soybeans. They really shift their product purchases away from the United States in response.
YDSTIE: Scott, Irwin says some limited, targeted tariffs might be successful. But if Trump uses these powers in an undisciplined way, it could spark a trade war and it could hurt the U.S. economy and the global economy.
SIMON: NPR's John Ydstie, thanks so much for being with us.
YDSTIE: You're welcome.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
What will be President Trump's policy on space exploration? NASA, of course, is the federal agency that's charged with going boldly into the solar system. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce joins us here in the studios to talk about where President Trump might send NASA. Nell, thanks so much for being with us.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: Hey. Thank you.
SIMON: Do we know much about Trump space policy based on the campaign?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was not a huge focus of his campaign. We really don't know much about what he thinks at all, although one kid in New Hampshire did ask him what he thought. And here's what he had to say about NASA.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: You know, in the old days, it was great. Right now we have bigger problems. You understand that. We've got to fix our potholes. You know, we don't have exactly a lot of money.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: For the space community, that's not exactly encouraging, right? But then he said this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: I love NASA. I love what it represents. I love what it stands for. And I hope that someday in the not-too-distant future we can get that going. Space is terrific.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He noted that a lot of private companies have been getting involved in space. And he said that was great, too.
SIMON: And private companies were the push of the Obama administration, right?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's right. So when President Obama came into office, the space shuttles were scheduled to be retired. The plan under President Bush had been to build new rockets to put people back on the moon. President Obama had a blue-ribbon panel look at that. And he ended up axing the Bush plan, saying, no, we're not going back to the moon. And moreover, we're not building these rockets. Instead, we're going to rely on private companies to sort of offer taxi services to take astronauts up to the space station and back.
SIMON: Now, space programs operate on timetables that are laid out over years. So what can we fairly say is going to happen over the next few years in NASA during a Trump administration?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: So one thing would be that those commercial sort of space taxis are coming to fruition. They're supposed to have their first test flights with humans onboard probably next year in 2018. Meanwhile, Congress wasn't so excited when President Obama killed NASA's rocket plan. And Congress went ahead and told NASA, hey, we want you to build a big rocket anyway.
And so NASA's been busy working on that. It's building what's going to be the most powerful rocket in the world. And it is supposed to have a test flight next year. So both of those things are scheduled. And they sort of represent this kind of tension between new startup space companies inspired by Silicon Valley versus the sort of older, more legacy aerospace companies that work for NASA, building these sort of big mega projects.
SIMON: What kind of decisions could the next president make that would affect NASA?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He could make some real decisions. He could say, forget about going to an asteroid. We are going to go back to the moon. We're going to put people on the lunar surface. He could double down on private space companies. He could try to get NASA to stop building its big, massive, new rocket. So new presidents really do have an opportunity to put their mark on NASA and sort of shift its direction.
SIMON: And we should remember that NASA does a lot of basic science, too. How might that be affected?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The issue there is climate-change research. NASA has a huge budget for Earth sciences - monitoring our own planet. It spends about $2 billion a year on that. And there's been some talk that a Trump administration could shift those activities to other federal agencies. And some people see that as an effort to undermine them.
SIMON: NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce, thanks very much for being with us.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Nearly half of all Americans who died this past year were cremated. Cremation rates have reportedly doubled in the United States over the past 15 years, despite some religious objections and squeamishness about the idea of our loved ones being reduced to ashes. Why? Barbara Kemmis, executive director of the Cremation Association of North America, joins us from WBEZ in Chicago. Thanks so much for being with us.
BARBARA KEMMIS: Thank you, Scott. It's a pleasure.
SIMON: What are some of the reasons you think more people's families, I guess I should - I almost said why more people are choosing to be cremated. And that might technically be true - but usually after their death.
KEMMIS: So cremation is simply cheaper than burial. Of course, when you consider a funeral or a memorial service or celebration-of-life expenses, those are extra. And consumers also report that they see extra value with cremation and that they have more flexibility. To put it bluntly, death, even when it's anticipated, is inconvenient.
We don't want to lose our loved ones. We don't want to drop everything and gather and grieve and do what we need to do. But we must. And we can do that. But as families are spread across the country in various states, it's more and more difficult to bring people together on short notice. Cremation can expand the timeframe of grieving and memorializing your loved one.
SIMON: Because there's more cremations, more problem to run into with scattering remains? I mean, I know, for example, they're very particular about it in the San Francisco Bay area. And I know from experience you can't get your ashes scattered there in Wrigley Field in Chicago.
KEMMIS: That is true. And you might've caught the news where cremated remains were scattered at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City at the intermission, which canceled the rest of the production.
SIMON: I missed that. Oh, my word. Most of us maybe, you know, get some malted milk balls at intermission, not scattered remains. But go ahead, yeah.
KEMMIS: Yeah right. So scattering is very common. But you have to be aware of the legalities of that.
SIMON: A lot of us might recall that scene in "Meet The Parents." You know what I'm talking about?
KEMMIS: (Laughter) Yes.
SIMON: Ben Stiller pops the champagne cork and accidentally knocks over the urn of his father-in-law's mother. So is it permissible to make jokes about cremation?
KEMMIS: It's permissible. It's common. Popular culture has normalized cremation in a way 'cause - not only with the "Fockers" movies. There's also "The Big Lebowski." That's famous with the cremated remains in the coffee can. And he goes to scatter them. And they come back in his face. That's based on reality. That happens. And now you can buy urns that are in the shape and with the same pattern as that coffee can if you're a "Big Lebowski" fan.
SIMON: Oh. (Laughter) I'm not that big a fan. But I...
KEMMIS: (Laughter).
SIMON: Are there any states or cities where people are getting cremated more than others?
KEMMIS: Southern states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia tend to have lower cremation rates. Florida is higher. It's one of the states where people have chosen to retire. And when they come to retire, they think about, what happens when I die? Do I want to be buried in Florida? Do I want my body shipped back to my hometown. Or will I choose cremation?
SIMON: Barbara Kemmis is executive director of the Cremation Association of North America. Thanks for being with us.
KEMMIS: Thank you, Scott.
SIMON: A note to add - Carrie Fisher was cremated. This week, BuzzFeed published photos from her memorial service, where her ashes were placed in a huge replica of a Prozac anti-depressant pill. Her brother, Todd Fisher, told the website (reading) and so they're together and they will be together here and in heaven, and we're OK with that.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
American chestnut trees used to make up a quarter of hardwood forest in the eastern U.S. Their nuts kept wildlife thriving all winter and played a large part in the economy of places like Appalachia. Today, from Maine down to Georgia, the trees are all but gone. Robbie Harris of member station WVTF reports on a project aimed at resurrecting the American chestnut tree.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: And this is a nice, big knot. This will be viable for sure.
ROBBIE HARRIS, BYLINE: About a dozen people sit around a long farm table in Virginia's Roanoke Valley. They're extracting chestnuts from their bristly, green cradles.
NED YOST: And then we go to a very advanced technology to test these nuts for their viability.
HARRIS: Ned Yost is hosting this gathering in his barn at McDonald's Mill.
YOST: We have a little bit of water. We drop the nuts in. The good chestnuts sink. And those that will not produce a tree next spring - they float.
HARRIS: Around the turn of the last century, American chestnut trees were attacked by a fungus that arrived on trees from China. The Chinese imports have immunity. But the blight didn't wipe out every last trace of the American variety, says Carl Absher of the Virginia Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation.
CARL ABSHER: What we have here are nuts that came from some of those survivors that managed to live long enough and have flowers and produce nuts again. The thing is most of them die before they get to be knee high.
HARRIS: Every fall, he and others carefully cross-breed the native trees with their blight-resistant cousins. They plant some of them here in this test orchard at the Catawba Sustainability Center.
ABSHER: That's the purpose of this little orchard here - is to determine which ones are resistant.
HARRIS: Two-year-old hybrid saplings are now several feet high. Some have the shorter, wider characteristic of the Chinese variety. And others are taller and thinner like the American forests of old.
ABSHER: The hybrids that we're looking to produce - we want them to be indistinguishable from the American tree. We want their characteristics to be like an American chestnut. They're still going to be - a sixteenth of their genes are Chinese genes.
HARRIS: It's those Chinese genes that confer blight resistance on the hybrids growing here.
ABSHER: Out of all these 150, we maybe will get at most a half a dozen to go on to the next stage of the breeding.
HARRIS: Breeding trees this way takes dedication and patience, inoculating each one with a blight fungus to see if it's immune, then waiting years for each new generation to grow to see if they would be ideal for cross-breeding. Scientists at Virginia Tech recently began genetic sequencing of the hybrids. Jason Holliday teaches forest genetics and biotechnology.
JASON HOLLIDAY: So if we can develop a genomically - if that's a word - informed model that will tell us about blight resistance without having to actually grow the trees, that'll be very helpful and definitely more cost-effective.
HARRIS: Preliminary results suggest the model is holding up. And Holliday says it will soon be applied to test orchards up and down the East Coast. That pleases Jared Westbrook. He's the science director of the American Chestnut Foundation in North Carolina. And now he's contemplating something that for so long seemed so far off.
JARED WESTBROOK: Now what motivates me to work on the chestnut is it's symbolic. We can actually use breeding and biotechnology to take a tree that's functionally extinct and bring it back to life.
HARRIS: Westbrook says if this can be done with the American chestnut tree, it should be possible with other threatened species like the hemlock, the elm and the ash. For NPR News, I'm Robbie Harris in Blacksburg, Va.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
And some college professors are struggling to keep up with what their students already know. Corey Takahashi teaches multimedia storytelling at Syracuse University in New York, and he says that teaching has been as much a learning experience for him as for his students.
COREY TAKAHASHI: One of my intro courses focuses on storytelling for different fields of communication, from journalism to advertising and PR to fiction. Typically, undergrads drop by during my office hours with questions about becoming writers, broadcasters and filmmakers. Last semester, for the first time, I had a wave of first-year undergrads wanting to become influencers. Social media influencers use online platforms, like YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, to build a personal connection with an audience. They market themselves, their expertise or ideas and often products or brands. A quarter of my class said this is what they wanted to do now or later as a career. One of the students is already successful. I know her as the punctual front-row freshman Margot De Riemer. On YouTube and other social media, she's Margot Lee.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
MARGOT DE RIEMER: What's up, you guys? It's Margot. I wanted to show you my school morning routine here at college. So if you're interested, keep watching.
TAKAHASHI: Margot posts simple, slice-of-life videos. She started my class with around 50,000 YouTube subscribers. By the end of this semester, she had 100,000. She's not the Kardashian sisters in terms of the size of her audience. Yet Margot also has attracted advertisers and brands to sponsor some of her posts on YouTube and Instagram because she seems more authentic to other teens than a pitch person on TV. It's word-of-mouth marketing from a peer to peer.
DE RIEMER: If I see a product on my Facebook feed or if I see a product linked in one of my favorite YouTuber's bios, then I'm going to click on that and potentially buy that.
TAKAHASHI: For instance, here's a video sponsored by an app.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
DE RIEMER: Also when you're in college, you'll know that getting a package is, like, the best thing ever. So I wanted to show you a way that you can shop a smart way. I downloaded the app called Wish, and it has absolutely saved me. It is...
TAKAHASHI: Margot has learned on her own to create these videos and to negotiate with companies who want to sponsor her.
DE RIEMER: I get to be a business person. I get to be an entrepreneur and I get to be a writer and a creative director and all of that.
TAKAHASHI: Which raises the question of why Margot needs college at all. I mean, with exponential changes in media and technology, it's increasingly tough for universities to keep up. Leaving school to pursue a career in social media has crossed Margot's mind.
DE RIEMER: There's definitely a desire to just move to Los Angeles and live by myself and work with different YouTubers and collaborate and travel the world. But I would never just drop my education for social media.
TAKAHASHI: Because who knows how long social media influencer will be around as a job or how long she'll last as one? Margot says she wants to learn more about storytelling, developing a point of view and critical thinking skills, skills which can be applied to any media career. That's what I'm here for. And guess how I found out Margot enjoyed the semester in my class - through one of her YouTube posts.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
DE RIEMER: Just finished our class of my favorite class this semester. The professors and the TA's were so good.
TAKAHASHI: I guess something's working. For NPR News, I'm Corey Takahashi in Syracuse, N.Y.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Maggie Rowe has written a memoir about faith, doubt and yocks. "Sin Bravely: A Memoir Of Spiritual Disobedience" recounts the months that she spent in an evangelical psychiatric center when she was 19, an abiding Christian who worried that she just wasn't abiding enough. Maggie Rowe, who has produced and appeared in the Comedy Central stage show "Sit 'N' Spin" and is a screenwriter and satirist, including for the highly acclaimed show "Arrested Development," joins us now from the studios of NPR West. Thanks so much for being with us.
MAGGIE ROWE: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: First, let me get some of the obvious things out of the way. Are - in the comedy writers' rooms, are you the only one who can quote scripture?
ROWE: (Laughter) That's probably true, yes. And I still remember quite a bit of it. You know, there's a Bible verse that says if you etch the word of God onto a young child's mind, it will stay forever. And it's pretty true.
SIMON: You grew up in the Chicago suburbs.
ROWE: I did, yes.
SIMON: And what drew you to Christianity at such an early age? Because your parents were religious, but you really got religious.
ROWE: Right. My parents were wonderful Christians. They were religious, but they were not fanatical in any way. I was the one who took it to the extreme. I was told in Sunday school that you had to accept Jesus into your heart if you didn't want to go to hell. So of course I did that a thousand times. But the catch was you had to mean it with all of your heart. And that's a difficult figure to determine (laughter). There was a verse that said if you are luke warm rather than hot or cold, God will spit you out of his mouth on Judgment Day. And I felt like, I mean, I don't know. I'm lukewarm. I just want to watch "The Brady Bunch" and eat Suzy Q's (laughter). I'm not on fire for the Lord, so I tried to make myself generate this fire for the Lord.
SIMON: Yeah. Parallel to that, in high school and then in college, how did theater fit into your spiritual life?
ROWE: Well, I worried about it. I only would do roles that I felt were pleasing or edifying to God because I felt that if I did something that, you know, reflected badly on God then it would reflect badly on me on Judgment Day.
SIMON: Yeah. But theater is often where the most irreverent students wind up.
ROWE: Yeah. So I was an oddball in that community, and, you know, my friends would go to parties and they would drink and they would swear. Like, even swearing, that seemed to me like it'd be so great if I could just say [expletive] like my friends. You know, I wanted to be a normal kid, but I had the pressure of my eternal destiny weighing down on me.
SIMON: You went off to Cornell and had - well, I'll refer to it as a spiritual crisis and maybe it was a personal crisis.
ROWE: Yeah, it was both. When I went to college, I was so focused on this new experience of my life that I really just pushed down all of my fears of hell and damnation. And then I went to see this film. It's Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams," this Japanese art flick. And as I was watching it, it had these images of retribution. There's a young boy who disobeys his mother, and so his mother gives him a sword to drive into his stomach. And all of these images just served to bring all of this repressed material to the surface. And I heard this screaming in the theater, and then realized it was coming from my mouth (laughter). And three months later, I checked myself into an evangelical psychiatric facility. Their slogan was psychiatry where the Bible comes first. So that creates a little bit of a conflict sometimes.
SIMON: You had some differences with Bethanie in particular.
ROWE: Yes, yes. So Bethanie was the first woman I met when I was there, and she was one of these Christians that supposedly really wanted to help, but what she was actually doing was far from it. I had told her that I would get so upset about my eternal destiny that I would vomit. I was just so nauseous. It was - I just felt terrible. And what she said to me was, oh, you look in the mirror and you see someone who you think is fat and I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not worried - the last thing I'm worried about is my weight. I'm not (laughter) like it would be - but she had determined that I had an eating disorder. And no matter what evidence I gave her to the contrary, she held on tight to that diagnosis.
SIMON: You were afraid of sin. I mean, you were afraid of burning.
ROWE: Yes, I was. And even if it wasn't a literal burn - because they would say that, they would say, oh, the fire is just a metaphor - but it was a metaphor for eternal suffering. But we're not crazy. We don't literally think it's burning (laughter).
SIMON: You learned a lot from the other people who were there, though, didn't you? I get that impression.
ROWE: I really did. I really did. And I mean, the one I learned the most from was I had a psychiatrist there who told me - it's the title of the book - but there's a doctrine called pecca fortiter, and it means brave sin. And Martin Luther coined the term, and basically the idea is that the most important thing is to understand God's forgiveness. And if you need to sin in order to do that, that's what you need to do. So my psychiatrist told me all these fears that you're having, it's drawing you further and further away from God. The best thing that you can do is to do exactly what you feel in your heart that you want to do. And, you know, first I objected. I was like, oh, I can't just sin. And he was like, well, what are you going to do? You're not going to - are you going to murder somebody, or are you going to put a gas bomb on a train? Like what - and his thing was follow what you intrinsically believe and then let the Bible follow, which was a pretty radical idea...
SIMON: Yeah.
ROWE: ...For me at the time.
SIMON: For a lot of people in show business, can't comedy be a kind of faith?
ROWE: Yes. And the ability to find even just, like, the absurdity of my situation, the fact that I - that it was a film. And I later read Kurosawa - there was a, you know, where he was talking about what he wanted the movie to evoke was fear of the afterlife (laughter).
SIMON: Oh my.
ROWE: So mission accomplished.
SIMON: Yeah, sounds like you're doing pretty well now.
ROWE: I think so. I think so. I'm - meditation was a big thing that really helped me out of this process, being able to sit with the fear and being able to say I don't know if I'm going to go to hell. That really was what I had to come to terms with. And it's a pretty horrible possibility, so it was a tough road to be able to accept that.
SIMON: Maggie Rowe - her book, "Sin Bravely." Thanks so much for being with us.
ROWE: Thank you for having me.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
U.S. intelligence officials say Vladimir Putin personally authorized cyber attacks on the U.S. elections to hurt Hillary Clinton's candidacy. President-elect Trump says he accepts their report but says Russian meddling had no role in his election. What will be his response? What will President Trump's foreign policy look like? He's rejected U.S. military involvement overseas as vehemently, and even in the same language, as Bernie Sanders.
But Trump also wants to build a wall along the border with Mexico. He cites Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad as strong leaders. One of the people Trump has sought for advice on foreign policy is Richard Haass. He's president of the Council on Foreign Relations and has a new book, "A World In Disarray: American Foreign Policy And The Crisis Of The Old Order." Richard Haass, who's been on NPR almost as much, over the years, as Nina Totenberg, joins us now...
RICHARD HAASS: (Laughter).
SIMON: ...From the studios of the Radio Foundation in New York.
Richard, thanks so much for being with us.
HAASS: Good morning, Scott.
SIMON: How big a deal is this prospect of Russian meddling? John McCain says it amounts to an act of war.
HAASS: Well, it is a big deal because it's not isolated. It comes against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the takeover of Crimea, the Russian military intervention in Syria, which really was a series of war crimes, now this. And I think what it tells us is that Russia, under Vladimir Putin, has opted to be, what Henry Kissinger once called in a different context, a revolutionary power. Rather than working within the world of the day, he's trying to bring about a very different one. And it ought to concern us, Scott, because one comparison I give you is Vladimir Putin is more independent, has more freedom of action than, say, somebody like Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. He can, essentially, take Russia where he wants to take it.
SIMON: What about people who say, look, the CIA has meddled in campaigns overseas - Iran in 1953, Chile in the 1970s. They - that's sometimes what they do, isn't it?
HAASS: It is sometimes what they do. The difference here is it's Russia meddling in our campaign. And, again, it's not an isolated action. If it were a one-off, that'd be one thing, but it's not a one-off. And I think it also shows us Mr. Putin's sensitivity to the so-called colored revolutions, the attempt by the United States and the Europeans to promote liberalism throughout the former Soviet space in Europe. And it shows just how frightened he is of liberalism within his own country. I don't think he takes his own power, his own political permanence for granted.
SIMON: What can the U.S. do, though, when all is said and done?
HAASS: Well, what we've got to do is talk to the Russians. I think there's no advantage in ignoring them. I think we can show them a degree of respect, but we've also got to be tough. We should be strengthening the military arm of NATO. In some ways, we demilitarized NATO in Europe after the end of the Cold War. We've got to reintroduce some military capability there. We should only reduce sanctions introduced after Ukraine if the Russians behave in better ways. We've got to strengthen our cyber defenses and maybe strengthen some of our cyber attacks. Let Mr. Putin know, for example, that two can play that game. And we should look for ways in which we could raise challenges to him domestically. Again, that's his Achilles' heel.
SIMON: In your new book, you suggest, I believe you call it a world order 2.0. What would that be like?
HAASS: Well, world order 1.0, which has actually been around for a couple of centuries now, is a world of sovereign states. And essentially, we recognize and respect each other's ability to do pretty much what we want inside our borders. And the whole idea's that you should not violate borders with military force. That's all necessary. It's simply not sufficient in a world of globalization in which anything that happens inside a country, now, is not simply its business alone.
If a disease breaks out in one country, it very quickly - because of globalization - can threaten everybody around the world as we saw with, say, Ebola or Zika. Or if there's a terrorist that's allowed to operate in one country, or given our previous conversation, some hackers that are allowed to operate inside the territory of one country, suddenly, this can affect everybody else.
So what I'm arguing for is a world of what I would call sovereign obligation, a world order 2.0, where countries now have to understand and accept their own obligation to make sure that things do not emanate from their own territory that could have an adverse consequence on others. And this ranges from terrorism, to climate change, to disease, you name it. And I believe, essentially, this ought to be the new steering or navigating principle of American foreign policy.
SIMON: What about something like Syria?
HAASS: Well, Syria's a sign that, you know, we're far from there. I think that the inability or unwillingness of the world to deal with it is a real tragedy. It's a strategic nightmare. I think at this point what we've got to do is find some limited ways to help innocent civilians, to try to prevent the creation of new refugees. But I don't think we're in a position to change the fundamental politics of Syria. I think Bashar al-Assad is there for quite a while.
I also think we should continue to take the fight to the terrorists - against ISIS - in both Iraq and Syria. That's something that's consistent with what I've talked about. The big challenge will be securing areas that have been liberated from ISIS. We've got to find some partners there. And at the moment, partners are few and far, you know, between.
SIMON: You also worry, in this book, that the U.S. is - just has too much debt, and the U.S. economy is just too weak - although, both have been improving - to be influential.
HAASS: I am worried about that. I think the U.S. economy is poised to grow. I think some combination of tax cuts, corporate tax relief, deregulation will probably see some significant boost in American economic growth. But debt, potentially, is our Achilles' heel. If we allow Social Security, disability, Medicare, Medicaid to continue to grow, we increase our spending on things like infrastructure, American debt will grow. And that leaves us extraordinarily vulnerable to the markets or to the machinations of central bankers elsewhere. This is something that we have got to address before it gets out of control.
SIMON: Richard, we have 30 seconds left. Has President Trump offered you - President-elect Trump offered you a job? Would you take it?
HAASS: Well, I think when any president offers one a job, and I've not been offered one. You've got to discuss it. I think there's an obligation to take it seriously. But I also think one should only accept it if there's significant alignment in your views of the job and, more important, your views about what the United States ought to be doing in the world. That's not a conversation we have yet had. And if we do have it, we'll just have to see how it plays out.
SIMON: Richard Haass, who's head of the Council on Foreign Relations. His book - "A World In Disarray." I'm afraid I said a word in disarray on Twitter. Forgive me for dropping the L.
HAASS: (Laughter) Thank you, sir.
SIMON: Thanks so much.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The inauguration of President Trump is a couple weeks away, and his team has been scrambling to find performers. One group that signed on is the famous precision dancing troupe The Rockettes. And while they are known for synchronization onstage, cracks have begun to show in their ranks. Jeff Lunden sent this report.
JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE: When you see The Rockettes in person - thirty-six dancers of the same shape and height, all tapping and kicking in unison - it's thrilling.
ROSEMARY NOVELLINO-MEARNS: The Rockettes are the most famous dancers in the United States of America. They are America. They are apple pie.
LUNDEN: Rosemary Novellino-Mearns danced at Radio City, and she wrote a book about it.
NOVELLINO-MEARNS: You may like them. You may not like them. That's not the point. They are what they are.
LUNDEN: And dancing at presidential inaugurations has traditionally been part of the job, but this time is different. Some of The Rockettes don't want to perform for Donald Trump, whose comments about women have made them uncomfortable. That puts them in conflict with their employer, Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which agreed to the appearance without consulting the dancers. The conflict has been playing out in public, kind of.
AUTUMN WITHERS: You don't want your face and your image and your talent up there on that stage in celebration of someone like that.
LUNDEN: That's former Rockette Autumn Withers, who's still good friends with many members of the troupe. She says according to their contract...
WITHERS: When you're an active Rockette, any interview with the media must be orchestrated through their PR department.
LUNDEN: So most of the communication has been on the down-low. One Rockette, Phoebe Pearl, criticized the decision on Instagram. Later, she made her account private. Another spoke to Marie Claire magazine under a pseudonym. No current dancers would speak to NPR for this story, which didn't surprise former Rockette Lora Anderson.
LORA ANDERSON: And now you know why. I got spoke out once, and I couldn't dance for two weeks. I went to the building, and they took my ID and did not let me in. It's hard for one person to speak out against a multibillion-dollar company.
LUNDEN: We still don't know who that pseudonymous Rockette is, but we do know that she secretly recorded a meeting between the dancers and Madison Square Gardens chairman James Dolan. MSG has said that participation is voluntary, but in the meeting Dolan also stressed that participation was good for the brand. When a dancer asked if this was tolerating intolerance, Dolan reportedly replied quote, "yeah, in a way, I guess we are doing that." Former Rockette Autumn Withers...
WITHERS: Yeah. I mean, that just cuts right to my heart, telling these women to tolerate intolerance.
LUNDEN: MSG issued a statement saying, quote, "while Mr. Dolan stands behind everything he said during the meeting, no one in that room believed they were speaking publicly." Autumn Withers says to be fair, there are several Trump supporters among the ranks. And MSG says they've gotten more volunteers than slots to fill. Still, Withers thinks the dancers are between a rock and a hard place, and she says several of her friends have already declined.
WITHERS: If they elect to not participate, will they be rehired? If they do participate, is it kind of a covert way of guaranteeing that you will be rehired?
LUNDEN: And there's also been some pressure on social media - people writing shut up and dance, says Rosemary Novellino-Mearns.
NOVELLINO-MEARNS: I think they're afraid. I get that it is their job. And probably, if I was there, and they said, this is your job - you have to do it - I probably would do it, but I certainly wouldn't do it quietly.
LUNDEN: And in quiet resistance, some Rockettes are speaking loudly. For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There have been a number of attacks in recent years in the more vulnerable parts of airports, including the 2013 shooting at LAX in Los Angeles - to last year's bombing in Istanbul's airport. For more on securing airports, we're joined now by Jeffrey Price. He's an aviation security expert and professor at Metropolitan State University. Professor, thanks so much for being with us.
JEFFREY PRICE: Thank you.
SIMON: After several incidents, should airports be secured at the perimeter? Do we need to rethink how transportation - how security is laid out?
PRICE: I definitely think it's time for the airport side of the house to have really sort of the renovation that the airline side of the house had post-9/11. Post-9/11 we really focused more on protecting the aircraft, which has been the traditional target with the stand-up of the TSA, screening checkpoints being taken over by the TSA, personnel upgrading of all of that equipment. We did a tremendous amount to try and protect the aircraft even more.
What was sort of left behind with all of that was protecting the airport. With the exception of increasing some credentialing requirements for airport ID badges, there wasn't much that spoke to the security of the rest of the facility. I'm not advocating screening everybody as they come in the building. I don't think that would be effective. And that has its own challenges. But there are other things that the industry can and should be doing to protect the public areas of the airport.
SIMON: But let me ask. In an instance like this, I mean, this is a man who passed through airport security - isn't it? - you know, with a gun that he - apparently had all the documentation he needed to have.
PRICE: Exactly? It was basically, for everything we know right now, a lawful process that he followed to get the gun onboard the aircraft and fly to the destination and retrieve the firearm. The challenge that's going to be brought up now is, well, should airlines even be allowed to carry that? Well, they have for about four or five decades. We haven't had too many problems as a result of that.
Some people say, well, you should just ship your gun there. Well, he could have done that, too, and then driven over to where he shipped it to - and come right back to the airport. So I don't know that that process itself really needs to be looked at. The challenge we're really looking at is protection of a public area. And that's one of the most challenging things a security official will ever do - is protect a public area.
SIMON: Well - and how do you do that in baggage claim realistically?
PRICE: Realistically, first, there's an understanding that sometimes you can't prevent every single thing. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is respond to it. But by increasing law-enforcement patrols in the airport public areas, which I think is more important than any other area - not that any other life is less - worth anything or more. But when there's a shooting at a mall, the mall shuts down for a few days. When there's a shooting at an airport, the entire airport transportation system can be affected by that.
So there's simple things you can do. Increasing law-enforcement patrols in those areas so you provide more immediate response. Then there's more complex things that you can do from technology using gunshot locators and other kind of mass-screening-type technologies that have been tested and used in the U.S. military to try and protect checkpoints.
SIMON: Yeah. It's - is it - let me put it this way, Mr. Price. At some point, do security officials need to tell the American people, look. We can tighten up here - but something that's just an invitation for people to figure out another way around it.
PRICE: Unfortunately that's the way security works - is that as soon as we plug one gap, people are looking for the next gap. And, sometimes, plugging one gap opens up another one. So you unfortunately end up in sort of an endless game of whack-a-mole, where you're rushing to whatever the latest security gap that's been identified or has already been identified - but just find the exploited. And there is a level of personal responsibility, as well - just personal awareness and doing what you can do to be aware of your surroundings to the best of your ability.
SIMON: Jeffrey Price at Metropolitan State University, thanks so much.
PRICE: Absolutely, Scott.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Now we turn to someone who's wrapping up his first week in a new job. It happens to be in the House of Representatives. Jason Lewis, congressman from Minnesota, a Republican, is a new lawmaker, but he already has a national profile. Mr. Lewis has hosted his own radio show and has been a frequent substitute for Rush Limbaugh. Mr. Lewis joins us now from his new offices on Capitol Hill. Congressman Lewis, thanks for being with us.
JASON LEWIS: Scott, great to be with you.
SIMON: Is there something that got done that you'd told yourself, well, I'm glad we got that accomplished?
LEWIS: Well, we're working on regulations this week, and I'm very enthusiastic about making certain some of these burdensome regulations that I believe have been holding back the economy and giving us this 1 percent growth in many quarters - to let the economy and the engines of economic growth restart again. And that's one of the reasons I ran for Congress. But the larger picture, Scott, is that I'm very fortunate to be in a session where we have unified government, and we can actually get some things done.
SIMON: What about criminal justice issues? You've been outspoken on those, I gather.
LEWIS: Well, I have, and I'm a big fan of the SAFE Act. I think there's - it doesn't do anyone any good to treat some of the addiction problems - the opioid problem and others - as a crime all the time and putting people in jail that - who need some treatment. I mean, I think it's a medical health issue. So I'm looking forward to working on that issue and making certain people can get back on their feet.
SIMON: Yeah. You want to repeal the Affordable Care Act?
LEWIS: Well, it's not a matter of - do we want to repeal the Affordable Care Act? I've been in the individual market now for the last few years. And I can tell you at the Lewis family, Scott, my premiums have tripled. The exchange in Minnesota called MNsure is a total debacle. Last year, we had a 50 percent increase in premiums on MNsure - this year, 66 percent increase. So when I hear my friends on the other side of the aisle say, oh, gosh, what about access to health care? I say, right now, there is no access to health care.
SIMON: I gather, though, according to reports in The Star Tribune and other places, that the percentage of uninsured Minnesotans has dropped to the lowest level in state history.
LEWIS: Remember...
SIMON: And the second lowest in the nation.
LEWIS: Remember, there's a crucial difference between having health insurance and having health care. When we talk about access, if your deductible is 10, 11, $12,000, if your co-pays are going up along with your premiums - remember, health insurance used to be - your premiums go up, your co-pays, your deductibles should go down. Under the Affordable Care Act, we're getting the opposite. Your premiums are going up, but your co-pays and deductibles are going up. Your out-of-pocket expenses are no longer deductible until they hit 10 percent of your income.
SIMON: But what about people who weren't insured before, but are now?
LEWIS: Well, look, I'm a big believer in guaranteed renewability. It's hardly insurance if once you get sick, they can drop you. I do think people need to buy insurance when they're young and healthy, and so the industry has a steady stream of revenue. Minnesota had one of the more successful high-risk pools that was effectively banned under the Affordable Care Act. We're going to find a way to handle that problem, and it is a problem. Pre-existing conditions are a real problem, and we're going to address that as we work to repeal the ACA.
SIMON: I have to ask you, Congressman, while you're our guest.
LEWIS: Sure.
SIMON: Did you once compare same-sex marriage and slavery?
LEWIS: No, of course not. There were so many things taken out of context. We had two television stations, Scott, during the campaign that did truth tests on all of these attack ads that were run against me. Both of those independent journalists - one the NBC affiliate, the other the ABC affiliate - said my words were taken out of context.
SIMON: Let me ask you directly. How do you feel about same sex marriage?
LEWIS: I'm a big believer in federalism. I think marriage and family law belongs to the states. In Minnesota, we voted on same-sex marriage. That's the right way to do it. It shouldn't be imposed from Washington. It shouldn't be imposed by a court. It should be decided by the people of the state. I may not agree with that, but I'm more than willing to abide by a process that is constitutional and correct.
SIMON: You must be hiring staff now.
LEWIS: Oh, yes.
SIMON: Would you hire gays on your staff?
LEWIS: Oh, of course. I mean, I've been 25 years in the press. More importantly, that's none of my business. I don't care what people's personal life revolves around or anything else. That - we spend too much time on that.
SIMON: One thing you want to get done over these next two years?
LEWIS: Yeah. I want to get economic growth going again. You take a look at, for instance, the growth - and I'll be perfectly bipartisan about this, Scott. During the Clinton administration, but especially during the Reagan administration, where we had some five quarters during the recovery in the early '80s of 7 percent growth, we haven't hit - we have averaged, I believe, just a bit under 3 percent growth during the Obama years and the last couple of quarters at 1 percent growth. Median household income is still below what it was before the recession. That is not a robust recovery. That is what we have to get going, and we're going to do it in the 115th Congress.
SIMON: Congressman Jason Lewis, Republican of Minnesota, thanks so much for being with us.
LEWIS: You bet, Scott.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Hey you, listening to the radio, call your mother, your father, your grandparents. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have released a study that confirms we need each other to keep going. Just like BJ Leiderman keeps writing our theme music. They followed 1,600 adults with an average age of 71 and found that people who are lonely have a higher mortality rate. Companionship may be more important than income or health.
Rosemary Blieszner, a professor of human development at Virginia Tech, told The New York Times that one of the great gifts the elderly can develop is the ability to overlook. You bring a lot more experience to your friendships when you're older, she said. You know what's worth fighting about and not worth fighting about.
Go to a movie with a senior citizen, have lunch, watch reruns of "Law & Order," introduce them to Instagram, help them stay connected to life. They might be around longer and you might learn a lot from them.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU'VE GOT A FRIEND IN ME")
RANDY NEWMAN: You've got a friend in me. You've got a friend in me. When the road looks rough ahead and you're miles and miles from your nice warm bed, you just remember what your old pal, boy, you've got a friend in me.
SIMON: You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Lawmakers have a busy week ahead assessing President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet nominations. On Wednesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold a hearing about Rex Tillerson, who's been tapped as secretary of state. Tillerson is a former CEO of ExxonMobil. He's done business around the world. There will be plenty of questions about that, as NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: This could be a tough confirmation battle for Tillerson. He's already laid out a divestment plan to distance himself from his former company. And he's made the rounds on Capitol Hill for private meetings with senators. Lawmakers still have a lot of questions about his life's career, doing business with autocrats in oil-rich countries, including with Russia's Vladimir Putin.
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BEN CARDIN: He did business with Russia. He was able to get things done there. And those relationships will be subject to questioning during the confirmation hearings.
KELEMEN: That's Senator Ben Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and someone who's been tough on Russia over the years. He supports U.S. sanctions, some of which got in the way of Tillerson's business dealings in Russia. So his questions will be about what the former ExxonMobil chief believes now about that. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Bob Corker, isn't worried.
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BOB CORKER: My guess is that people are going to realize that his views on Russia are not, in any way, out of the mainstream.
KELEMEN: Speaking at a breakfast organized by the Christian Science Monitor, Corker predicted Tillerson will win over senators at his confirmation hearing.
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CORKER: I predict that people are going to see what a distinguished individual this person is. I think people are going to view him as a great patriot, personally. This guy was an eagle scout at a young age. He's been at same company for 41 and a half years.
KELEMEN: Tillerson did seem to make a positive impression on Cardin, the Maryland Democrat, who says the former ExxonMobil CEO assured him he supports an international climate change agreement.
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CARDIN: That was encouraging to hear. And that he stressed for me his background in science and that he is a believer in science. That also was encouraging.
KELEMEN: If confirmed, though, Tillerson would have to carry out the president's policies. And Donald Trump once described climate change as a hoax. That raises another question, how much influence Tillerson will have in shaping U.S. foreign policy. Corker believes it will be a lot. And he says Tillerson will be able to figure out, in his words, how the palace guard operates around the president, and will be able to pick his own team at the State Department.
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CORKER: Obviously, Tillerson, having been the CEO of a global enterprise with 70,000 employees, understands that you can't function well without a team. And he's been granted those freedoms to put the people in place that he needs to put in place.
KELEMEN: Career diplomats are hoping he'll look to them. The president of the American Foreign Service Association, Barbara Stephenson, wrote an open letter about that.
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BARBARA STEPHENSON: It encourages the new secretary to count on, us to rely on us, to use us and to count on us to give him our unvarnished, best advice, which comes from a deep knowledge of the places where we work, from having the languages that we speak, and that we will give him our best advice and counsel and he should count on us.
KELEMEN: Tillerson hasn't been to the State Department since he was tapped for the job, but he has spoken with the current secretary, John Kerry. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The last ceremonial act of the 2016 presidential election played out on the House of Representatives floor on Friday afternoon. As NPR's Scott Detrow reports, the formal counting of the Electoral College's votes included one last, maybe fitting, round of controversy.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Ever since Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, a lot of Democrats have been searching for something - anything - to suddenly appear and reverse the results. At first, many clung to the idea that the Electoral College could simply vote for someone else. That didn't work. Their very last chance came Friday when a joint session of Congress convened to count the votes. As state results were read, House Democrats like Jim McGovern of Massachusetts rose to object.
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JIM MCGOVERN: Especially given the confirmed and illegal activities engaged by the government of Russia...
DETROW: Vice President Joe Biden was presiding. And he gaveled down objection after objection.
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BARBARA LEE: Mr. President, I object on behalf of the millions of Americans, including members of the intelligence community, who are horrified by...
VICE PRES JOE BIDEN: There is no debate. Debate is prohibited.
DETROW: That's because challenges need a Senate sponsor, too. And no senators volunteered. Finally, Biden appear to have had enough.
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BIDEN: It is over.
(LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE)
DETROW: That blunt assessment won applause from Republicans. This wasn't the first time the official vote count had some drama. After the 2000 recount, many House Democrats tried the same tactic. That got awkward since the loser of that race, Al Gore, was presiding.
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AL GORE: Is the objection in writing and signed by a member of the House and a senator?
DETROW: It happened so many times that, for Gore, it became a painful joke.
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GORE: This is going to sound familiar to you...
(LAUGHTER)
GORE: ...To all of us.
DETROW: This year, all 50 states eventually were tallied. And Biden read the results.
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BIDEN: Donald Trump of New York has received for president of the United States 304 votes.
DETROW: And with that, the long, messy, unpredictable 2016 presidential election was finally officially over. Scott Detrow, NPR News, the Capitol.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
And it's time for sports.
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SIMON: It's less than a month until the Super Bowl. And the NFL playoffs begin today. NPR's Tom Goldman joins us now for the first time in 2017. Good morning, Tom.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Well, good morning. And Happy New Year.
SIMON: And Happy New Year to you, my friend. Now, I know you're deeply opposed to making predictions, which just makes you smart compared to the rest of us.
GOLDMAN: (Laughter).
SIMON: But what will you be watching for in these playoffs?
GOLDMAN: Well, OK. Number one - can a team lose its star quarterback to injury and still win with a third-string rookie making his first NFL start in a playoff game? That would be Oakland, which lost Derek Carr, its starting quarterback, to a broken leg - then the second-stringer to a shoulder injury. Next man up is Connor Cook, starting against Houston in today's first game. Now, history says it'll be a tough day for the rookie. But his coach liked the way Cook looked when he came in last week and threw 21 passes in a loss to Denver. But, of course, that wasn't a playoff game.
And then tomorrow, when two hot teams meet in frigid temperatures, who stays hot? That would be the New York Giants against the Green Bay Packers in Green Bay, where weather is supposed to be around 13 degrees at game time - makes me cold just to say that. The Packers have won six straight with the best quarterback in the NFL right now, Aaron Rodgers, leading the way. The Giants are playing well. We've seen this before, Scott, with the Giants. In 2007, 2011, they caught fire late. They beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl both times. But I'm not sure they can...
SIMON: And some guy just catches a pass next to his helmet - is what happens - the Giants, yeah.
GOLDMAN: That's all it takes, yeah. But I'm not sure they can do that again this time unless their offense plays better and unless they find a wide receiver who can catch a ball with his head.
SIMON: (Laughter) Yeah. That's quite a - they work on that in training camp now.
GOLDMAN: Yeah.
SIMON: Joe Mixon of the Oklahoma Sooners wants to go pro. Videos made public - that's utterly ugly to watch. Is it going to make it difficult for him to go pro?
GOLDMAN: Well, you know, we won't know that until late April when the NFL draft happens. Mixon is a very good running back. But in 2014, he was suspended the entire freshman season after an argument at an Oklahoma restaurant ended with him punching a woman in the head. And that resulted in several fractures in her face. At the time, Mixon was charged with a misdemeanor and ordered to do community service and counseling.
But as you mentioned, a surveillance video showing the incident didn't emerge until last month. And when it did, it created a national outcry. Mixon publicly apologized. And his head coach was criticized for saying if the incident happened now with the heightened awareness of violence against women, Mixon would've been kicked off the team.
SIMON: Yeah. I can't let the week go by without noting that Robert Marchand - I believe that's how you would pronounce his name...
GOLDMAN: Wait.
SIMON: ...Set a new record for cycling. Oh, we use it. I'm sorry. He cycled 92 laps around a velodrome near Paris in an hour, set a new world record. He is 105 and says, I'm now waiting for arrival, which, Tom, I think, is a clear taunt at both of us. Don't you?
GOLDMAN: It's a clear taunt, obviously. And are we up to it, Scott? He's got the heart to back it up, though. It's apparently a very big, strong heart that beats slowly. His coach says Marchand has the heart of a 60-year-old.
SIMON: (Laughter).
GOLDMAN: So 60 must be the new 40 when it comes to healthy hearts. I don't know. But yeah, 92 laps - that translates to 14 miles in one hour. That's quite impressive.
SIMON: And he didn't take up cycling until he was 68. Can you imagine that?
GOLDMAN: Yeah. He wanted to do something in his youth.
SIMON: (Laughter).
GOLDMAN: He took it up with a vengeance, though. He bikes between six and 12 miles a day on a stationary bike. So no excuses. It's 2017. Let's get out there.
SIMON: All right. NPR's Tom Goldman, thanks so much.
GOLDMAN: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
We want to alert our listeners now. This is a local news update from the sheriff's office in Oconee County, Ga. Quote, "around 4 p.m. Wednesday, dispatch notified Chief Deputy Lee Weems that someone had reported a baby camel running loose in Epps Bridge Road. Our deputies are not trained in South American camelid identification, but they quickly determined that the animal in question was actually a llama." Chief Weems joins us now on the line from Georgia. Chief Weems, thanks very much for being with us.
LEE WEEMS: How are you?
SIMON: Sounds like a serious situation, sir. What's been going on?
WEEMS: Well, we had a llama that belongs to a resident here in the county that apparently decided to go for a little stroll and managed to get from her pasture right into our busiest commercial area. Deputies responded to the scene and got it into the parking lot of the Cook Out restaurant, which is a local fast food chain, and they got the llama into the dumpster area behind the restaurant and closed the gates and trapped it in there.
SIMON: Citizens are very grateful for that quick action, I'm sure. To what do you attribute the confusion between camel and llama?
WEEMS: (Laughter) Well, that I don't know. When the dispatcher called me, she was laughing. And she's like, yeah, we've gotten a call of a baby camel in the road and she said, no, we think it's a llama. And I guess someone's not - just like our deputies, they aren't trained in South American camelid identification.
SIMON: Yeah. You're going to - you're going to take care of that in the future, sir?
WEEMS: (Laughter) I hope it doesn't come up again. But it's causing such a stir that the alpacas are going to start demanding equal time.
SIMON: Oh, boy. And we - and they get organized. We know. We hear from alpacas all the time.
WEEMS: That's right.
SIMON: There's been a lot of attention to this story, Chief Deputy, hasn't there?
WEEMS: Yeah. It's - I guess people just needed a laugh or president-elect Trump didn't tweet anything that day.
SIMON: (Laughter) Now you're making me laugh and I'm trying to keep a straight face. I want to share some of the Facebook message that you posted.
WEEMS: Sure.
SIMON: OK. You're with a longtime resident of the county named Rufus.
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WEEMS: Her family's been escaping from pastures here for years and nobody has paid attention. And now some South American upstart camelid gets loose and everybody goes nuts.
SIMON: Now, I hope we don't get too personal. You referred to her as her, but there's a little more going on than that, isn't there?
WEEMS: Well, that it is - Rufus is the heifer's actual name.
SIMON: Yeah.
WEEMS: But it is a heifer. You know, there was a picture that we posted on our page with our Captain James Hale. We were jokingly calling him the llama whisperer. The heifer that's in that little video in the audio clip that you just played is Captain Hale's daughter's show heifer. She actually is going to show that heifer this year, and they have the livestock shows in the state.
SIMON: Well, forgive me for putting it this way, but nice-looking heifer.
WEEMS: (Laughter) Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
SIMON: So if I were to visit Oconee County, would I have to worry about llama or alpaca running free and running into me on the street?
WEEMS: I hope not. I hope not. I hope that the llama stays contained and that we don't have any more of this. Quite frankly, it's taken up a good bit of our time, and it would be nice if the llama would stay contained.
SIMON: Yeah, and the residents of Oconee County could sleep safely tonight.
WEEMS: Yes, sir, you know, because you just can't relax when you have llamas running loose.
SIMON: Boy, do I know that, absolutely. Chief Weems, I've got to tell you, you're a pretty funny guy.
WEEMS: Well, thank you.
(LAUGHTER)
WEEMS: Well, I suffer from a severe lack of adult supervision.
SIMON: (Laughter).
WEEMS: So it's - and my boss is a little bit more touched in the head than I am, so it all tends to get out there.
SIMON: Well, Chief Deputy Lee Weems, thanks very much for being with us.
WEEMS: Yeah, thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The U.S. intelligence report presented to President-elect Trump on Friday says that Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, personally ordered a campaign to hurt Hillary Clinton during the U.S. presidential campaign and to try to help Donald Trump win the election. We're going to turn now to our Moscow correspondent Lucian Kim.
Lucian, thanks for being with us.
LUCIAN KIM, BYLINE: Sure thing, Scott.
SIMON: The report was published when it was nighttime in Moscow. What's the reaction been today?
KIM: Well, the first thing to know is that it's a Russian Orthodox Christmas today, so it's a holiday. Putin celebrated the holiday in an ancient monastery near St. Petersburg. And then he met some local fishermen for a cup of tea. As for state television, they did report on this news. They said it's more of the same, nothing new. The main goal is to undermine the legitimacy of Trump's election and that the report provided no evidence.
It should be said that Putin has responded to these charges in the past at a press conference a couple of weeks ago. And he really mocked the idea that Russia could have thrown a U.S. election. He said, basically, the Democrats are sore losers and that the information leaked was much more important than how it got out.
SIMON: Lucian, help us understand, are charges like these potentially damaging, or is there an element of pride that they're even accused?
KIM: Yeah. I mean, I don't think they're damaging at all. I think Putin can be quite happy with these results. He had a real problem two years ago after the intervention in Ukraine. Western powers were ignoring and isolating Russia. Obama called the country a regional power. And today, Putin is deciding war and peace in Syria. And, you know, he's being attributed with powers of influencing a U.S. election. So, in some ways, it makes Russia seem much bigger than it really is.
One thing to keep in mind is that Russians have been told, for some time, that they're at war with the West, not really a shooting war but an information war, sort of a struggle for influence. So there's a widespread perception here that Russia is, itself, the victim of a Western conspiracy. So I think you can say, from the Kremlin's perspective, Russia's just giving the West a taste of its own medicine. More broadly speaking, I think this report really doesn't matter very much here in Moscow. People here are waiting for the inauguration of Donald Trump and nothing else really matters.
SIMON: NPR's Moscow correspondent Lucian Kim, thanks so much for being with us.
KIM: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The airport in Fort Lauderdale is open today, a day after the shooting that left five people dead and six wounded. The baggage claim at Terminal 2 is closed. That's where 26-year-old Esteban Santiago opened fire yesterday. He is a military veteran whom the FBI says had a history of mental health problems. He arrived on a plane from Alaska yesterday, removed his gun from a checked bag, loaded it in a bathroom and opened fire. NPR's Greg Allen joins us from the airport. Greg, thanks for being with us.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Sure, Scott.
SIMON: What do we know about - I guess we still have to say the alleged shooter at this point.
ALLEN: That's right. Police arrested him yesterday without incident after he fired multiple shots in the baggage-claim area. But we know, as you said, he's a decorated military vet. He had service in Iraq. He grew up in Puerto Rico, served in the National Guard there and then also in Alaska.
He was actually discharged from the National Guard in Alaska last August for unsatisfactory performance, which included kind of going away without leave. And then later in the year in November, he walked into an FBI office in Anchorage. He told agents there that he thought the government was forcing him to watch ISIS videos. Here's something - here's a briefing we got last night on this from FBI Special Agent George Piro.
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GEORGE PIRO: At that time, he clearly stated that he did not intend to harm anyone. However, his erratic behavior concerned FBI agents that were interviewing him. And they contacted local police and turned him over to the local police. He was taken into custody by the local police and transported to a medical facility for a mental-health evaluation.
SIMON: Well, it certainly sounds as if the FBI acted responsibly. Obviously, this is going to be examined in the days and weeks ahead. Do authorities believe that he acted alone?
ALLEN: They do, Scott. At this point, there was some flurry yesterday when there - some thought there was a second shooter. That appeared not to be true. There was just one person shooting. Right now it's an investigation that's being led by the Broward Sheriff's Office here in Florida. And they're working with the FBI on this. They say they're not ruling out terrorism yet.
But if that is the case, the FBI will take the lead. So we'll have to see how this goes. But he's been - he was interrogated last night. They'll be talking to him today. He'll have a court appearance tomorrow. We'll be finding out much more about this in the days ahead.
SIMON: Greg, the Fort Lauderdale Airport is open today. How do things seem. How do passengers seem?
ALLEN: You know, surprisingly normal. Last night was crazy. It took several hours to get people off the planes and out of the airport. People didn't get out here until late last night. They reopened the airport this morning for flights in and out. As we said, everything's open except the baggage claim in Terminal 2.
But it is a little bit busier than usual because of all the backed-up flights. Some flights were cancelled. So we'll see how it goes. Governor Scott, our Florida governor, was here, talking to passengers. And he's around, reassuring people, trying to help them with their problems. He said he was at the hospital last night. His main priority is keeping Floridians and visitors safe here.
SIMON: NPR's Greg Allen at the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Greg, thanks so much for being with us.
ALLEN: You're welcome.
SIMON: And, of course, as we just heard, that shooting took place at baggage claim, which is outside the area secured by the TSA.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Being lonely is difficult for people of any age, but it can be especially harmful for seniors. Isolation for them is linked to shorter life spans and illness. Anna Gorman of Kaiser Health News reports from San Francisco on one effort to help them feel more connected.
ANNA GORMAN, BYLINE: Eighty-three-year-old Emil Girardi lives in Nob Hill just off the cable car line.
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GORMAN: His friend Shipra Narruhn is here to visit him. She hops on an antique elevator to the sixth floor. They have plans to eat lunch at their favorite Italian restaurant.
SHIPRA NARRUHN: Hi, Emil. How are you doing?
EMIL GIRARDI: Hi, Shipra.
NARRUHN: (Laughter) Good to see you. Big hug.
GORMAN: Shipra and Emil became friends about six years ago. They were paired by a group called Little Brothers - Friends of the Elderly. It's designed to reduce loneliness by matching seniors with volunteers. Before meeting Shipra, who's 67, Emil spent years feeling trapped in his apartment.
GIRARDI: I didn't want to go out of the house. I was very comfortable going from my bedroom to the dining room. That was my day.
GORMAN: Researchers say that puts seniors at greater risk of memory loss, strokes and high blood pressure. It can be as bad for their health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Carla Perissinotto is a geriatrician at UC San Francisco.
CARLA PERISSINOTTO: What we know about loneliness is that if someone reports feeling lonely, they are more likely to lose their independence and they are at greater risk of dying.
GORMAN: Loneliness is often caused by life changes common in older adults - retirement, the loss of a spouse, children moving away.
PERISSINOTTO: The usual social connections we have in younger life end up changing as we get older.
GORMAN: There isn't much research on how to solve the problem, but Perissinotto says groups like Little Brothers can help seniors build new social connections. It's now in seven U.S. cities. San Francisco director Cathy Michalec says the home visits are key, especially for seniors who can't get around so well anymore.
CATHY MICHALEC: As you age, your mobility isn't the same. So those 50 stairs that you used to be able to go up and down all the time you can't go up and down all the time.
GORMAN: And that can lead to loneliness.
MICHALEC: Our elders just say, well, it's easier to stay in the house.
GORMAN: Emil spent most of his adult life mixing drinks at San Francisco's bars. His nickname was Tony Lasagna.
GIRARDI: Of the 32 years that I was a bartender, every one of those days was spent in a bar whether I was working or not.
GORMAN: He loved the city - everything about it.
GIRARDI: The atmosphere, the energy. And it's nonstop, 24 hours. I've done it.
GORMAN: But that changed after he had a stroke and collapsed on the sidewalk. The city's streets started to scare him. At first, Shipra said they would just visit at his apartment.
NARRUHN: I can tell from talking to him that he had a lot of interests.
GORMAN: She started bringing him music. He likes the ones he can snap his fingers to.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, SNAPPING)
GORMAN: Finally, Shipra convinced him to go out to lunch.
NARRUHN: After that, it was kind of fun for me to think of things to do with him. And I have very eclectic tastes. Anything I suggested, he was open for it.
GORMAN: Over time, his fear subsided, and so did his loneliness.
GIRARDI: After she took me out of the house, then I didn't want to stop.
GORMAN: This afternoon at the Italian restaurant, the waiters greet them by name.
NARRUHN: Do you see something on the specials that you're interested in?
GORMAN: Emil says he's not afraid of getting older anymore.
GIRARDI: I'm surrounded with love. I'm surrounded with snapping fingers (laughter).
GORMAN: And for Shipra, She says Emil is part of her family.
I'm Anna Gorman in San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LA MER")
CHANTAL CHAMBERLAND: (Singing in French).
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Growing up without a mother is never easy. But 12-year-old Cammie O'Reilly has a lot of help from an unusual support group - female inmates. In the book "The Warden's Daughter," Cammie navigates the difficult waters of becoming a teenager while living with her dad, the warden, at a local prison in a small Pennsylvania town called Two Mills. Newbery medal-winning author Jerry Spinelli joins us now from member station WHYY in Philadelphia. Great to have you on the show.
JERRY SPINELLI: Thank you, Lulu. Nice to be here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So let's start with the main character, Cammie. Tell me a little bit about her and what she's going through.
SPINELLI: Well, her life is changing in the sense that she's lived being a motherless kid up until about the age of 12 and then decided that it's time to stop being motherless. I want a mother.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And as I mentioned, she lives in a prison. It's not just a motherless girl, but she has this very unusual setting.
SPINELLI: Yes. And that prison incidentally still exists. Anybody cares to visit Norristown, Pa. and go to Airy Street, and you will see what looks like an artifact from the Middle Ages. And it's the old Montgomery County Prison, and it still stands there. And I met someone who, in fact, was the model for Cammie O'Reilly. And her name was Ellen Adams. And she told me one day about 15 years ago, I grew up in prison. I pretty much took that tag line and cooked up a story to go with it.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tell me a little bit about how you came up with the other characters in the book. You have two people who might be mothers for young Cammie. One is called Eloda Pupko, who takes care of Cammie. The other is Boo Boo, another inmate who is sort of larger-than-life.
SPINELLI: The book begins pretty much with, as I say, Cammie deciding that her motherless days are coming to an end and she wants a mother now. And how does she get one? And what she does is begin to notice an inmate trustee who is the housekeeper for their quarters in the prison. And she begins more or less to audition her and to try to fashion her into the mother that she decides she wants.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What were you trying to sort of show by having these different women show these motherly instincts towards the character?
SPINELLI: There must be something about me and orphans. Maniac Magee in my book of that title was an orphan, and I have a couple of other stories along similar lines. I suppose I just find it dramatically inviting.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What is so inviting about that?
SPINELLI: People come from other people. And if you remove one of the elements in that equation, you're left with someone who is in some sense abandoned, and that changes the equation. And that invites situations and pain that would not necessarily be present. And that's what most writers are always on the lookout for, you know? The person, the situation that is different.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: This character, Cammie, what really drew me to her is that she's so angry.
SPINELLI: Yes.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: She is furious throughout this entire book. Tell me where you think Cammie's anger comes from.
SPINELLI: Something in her is unhappy, is frustrated, and that results in angry behavior for a kid whose nickname becomes Cannonball. And it just seems to me that if you take a kid who is missing something, that that is going to produce a certain kind of behavior. And it seems to me that that's what Cammie shows as she's growing up and probably not even knowing why she's that way.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Has Ellen Adams, the woman who inspired the character of Cammie, has she read the book? And what does she think?
SPINELLI: She loves it.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter).
SPINELLI: I told her in the beginning - I said, Ellen, listen, this is not going to be your biography. Cammie is younger than Ellen was when she lived in the prison. And while Ellen's mother did die, it wasn't until Ellen was in college, I believe. Whereas in the book, Cammie's mother dies before the action of the book even begins. She was hoping that I could find a spot for her dog.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) Her dog.
SPINELLI: (Laughter) I can't remember - it must've been pretty small because she said that he had the run of the prison and he used to squeeze behind the bars of the cells...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wow.
SPINELLI: ...And visit the inmates. And I tried and tried to find a way to work that puppy into the story, and I just couldn't do it, and it's one of my regrets. But she is totally happy with all the rest of it. And I think she enjoys the idea that maybe I'm making her famous.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Jerry Spinelli. His new book is "The Warden's Daughter." Thanks so much for being with us.
SPINELLI: Thank you, Lulu.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
They say the best place to get tacos in Buffalo, N.Y., is a Mexican restaurant called La Divina. But this is not a restaurant review. It's a story about one of the biggest immigration worksite raids in recent years. In October, federal agents swooped down on La Divina and three other restaurants. They arrested the owner and hauled off his whole undocumented workforce. And as NPR's John Burnett reports, some people are asking if the operation was fair.
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: It was 9:30 the morning of October 18. The staff at La Divina was making salsa, grilling chicken and stocking the shelves with Mexican Cokes and Corona beer. Suddenly, agents from Homeland Security Investigations rushed in.
JOSE ANTONIO RAMOS: (Speaking Spanish)
BURNETT: "I heard someone shouting - don't move, don't move. It was ICE," says Jose Antonio Ramos, a 29-year-old Mexican cook working illegally. ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "I was in shock. I was complying with their orders, but they were mistreating us," he says. "They pointed guns at our heads. They pushed us on the floor and handcuffed us. They brought in dogs."
RAMOS: (Speaking Spanish).
BURNETT: Fourteen workers have been charged with civil and criminal immigration violations. Twelve workers were in the country illegally, but they were released because they didn't meet the government's enforcement priorities. The restaurant's owner is Sergio Mucino, a 42-year-old legal permanent resident from Mexico City. He and his two managers are charged with harboring undocumented immigrants. The federal criminal complaint alleges the trio provided them housing and transportation, paid them in cash off the books and avoided income taxes.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BURNETT: During a recent lunch rush, we find Sergio Mucino behind the counter at La Divina making tacos. He says he cannot discuss the raid, but he's happy to talk about his menu.
SERGIO MUCINO: We try to offer authentic street tacos, make it more like a Mexican atmosphere - as close as we can to the Mexican tacos.
BURNETT: While Mucino is out on bail and is reopening his restaurants, most of his illegal workforce is out of a job and facing deportation, this despite the statements from the feds that they were targeting the abusive employer, not his employees. Over at the lunch counter, Jeff Dugan, who works at a local marketing company, is digging into a plate of chicken quesadillas. He supports the immigration raid.
JEFF DUGAN: I want the workers to be in good, you know, standing and then that they're working under our laws and that they're taken care of because when they're not, you know, they get put in subpar housing. And they're getting underpaid and overworked. I feel bad for them.
BURNETT: Thirteen hours a day, six days a week are what Jose Antonio Ramos and his co-workers put in. They earned the equivalent of $6.50 an hour, below the federal minimum wage.
RAMOS: (Speaking Spanish).
BURNETT: "I guess my only complaint would be the long hours," he says. But you need to make money to eat and take care of your family. You have no choice. Ramos wears an electronic ankle monitor and faces a civil violation for overstaying a work visa.
The city has rallied around the Buffalo restaurant workers. Churches are supporting them while they await their immigration hearings. There have been demonstrations outside the ICE office and a local petition asking federal authorities to let the workers go. An ICE spokesman defends the raid. He says they focused on Mucino. But during the course of the investigation, they learned some workers had re-entered the country after being deported, which is a felony.
But are those violations a reason for federal agents to storm a restaurant kitchen with handguns drawn and police dogs?
NICOLE HALLETT: It's really small potatoes. It really did shock this community. I think it shocked the national immigrant rights community.
BURNETT: Nicole Hallett is an immigration law professor at the University of Buffalo. She's representing four of the workers.
HALLETT: But most of the time when someone gets charged with criminal re-entry, it's because they have other criminal history. So they very rarely will indict someone for criminal re-entry if that is the only thing that they have.
BURNETT: Under George W. Bush, worksite sweeps were common. Obama has mostly taken a more low-key approach, such as auditing employer records. But a top ICE official in Washington, who asked not to be named, says raids like Buffalo have to be conducted now and again to send a chilling effect to employers who exploit their workers. Nicole Hallett says these raids can easily backfire.
HALLETT: If one of your goals is to protect workers from exploitation, obviously, arresting the workers as part of that enforcement action makes workers very afraid to come forward and report if there's exploitation happening.
BURNETT: Obama's homeland security team will be gone soon, and there will be a new sheriff in town. President-elect Trump and his advisers have talked about cracking down on unauthorized immigrants and the job magnets that attract them. It's reasonable to ask if the Buffalo restaurant raid will become the norm rather than the exception.
John Burnett, NPR News, Buffalo.
(SOUNDBITE OF LUKAS GRAHAM SONG, "7 YEARS")
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Danish band Lukas Graham has had quite the year. They've been nominated for three Grammys - best pop group, record of the year and song of the year.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "7 YEARS")
LUKAS GRAHAM: (Singing) Once I was 7 years old, my mama told me, go make yourself some friends or you'll be lonely. Once I was 7 years old...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lukas Forchhammer fronts the band and he writes the lyrics. He told us about the loving and unusual upbringing he had in Denmark.
LUKAS FORCHHAMMER: I grew up in a neighborhood called Christiania, a squatted settlement, an ex-Army base that was abandoned in 1970 and squatted in 1971, a quite unique place with no cars, no streetlights, no leashes on the dogs and schools would have been outside. And so it was more like a rural upbringing, you could say, even though it was in the center of our capital city of Copenhagen.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MAMA SAID")
LUKAS GRAHAM: (Singing) Remember asking both my mom and dad why we never travelled to exotic lands. We only ever really visit friends. Nothing to tell when the summer ends. We never really went buying clothes. Folks were passing on the stuff in plenty loads.
FORCHHAMMER: My father was from Ireland, and so I listened to a lot of folk music from a very, very early age on, as well. And my dad had a very eclectic musical collection. So I was listening to anything from British Invasion bands to, like, Otis Redding and James Brown.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DON'T YOU WORRY 'BOUT ME")
LUKAS GRAHAM: (Singing) Hey, my friend, how you been? What are you going through? What is this trouble that's troubling you?
FORCHHAMMER: And so from a - from the age of 8, I was basically being classically trained as a soprano soloist in the Copenhagen's Boys Choir. Music, in general, was a very, very healthy release for an energetic child like myself.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DON'T YOU WORRY 'BOUT ME")
LUKAS GRAHAM: (Singing) Sometimes your life can bring you down. Sometimes you run for miles and miles. Sometimes you scream without hope. Now once you feel you hit the ground, then victory comes back around. And you'll be proud to let them know. Don't worry about me.
FORCHHAMMER: I talk a lot about my father in my songs, but that is probably mainly because he's dead. We were just reaching outside of Denmark into Germany and Europe when my father passed away, so it was a very difficult time in my life.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU'RE NOT THERE")
LUKAS GRAHAM: (Singing) I only got you in my stories, and you know I tell them right. I remember you and I when I'm awake at night.
FORCHHAMMER: A thing like losing a parent is, what you could say, a personality-shaping event. It is something that's going to travel with you for the rest of your life, just like having a baby and creating a new life is also a personality-changing event. If my father hadn't died at the time he died, I wouldn't have become the guy I am. I wouldn't have written the songs that allowed me to travel around the world. I probably wouldn't have slowed down enough to settle down with my girlfriend and have a child of my own.
So at the end of the day, my father's passing was what you could call a cataclysmic event in my life that I should respect and cherish.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU'RE NOT THERE")
LUKAS GRAHAM: (Singing) Though I know that you're not there, I still write you all these songs. It's like you've got the right to know what's going on.
FORCHHAMMER: When I look back on my childhood and growing up in Christiania and I think about my father and my mother and then the house my dad built, I would remember him definitely in the kitchen where we had our big stereo and the record collection and the record player. And he'd be cooking, like, roast chicken with potatoes in the oven or coq au vin, like, boiling.
That's what I hope my daughter will remember me as. Like, when she's being interviewed in 20 years in national Danish radio asking her about what does she remember her father, I hope she says, he taught me how to ride a bike or he was teaching us how to cook great things in the kitchen or - I really hope my kids don't say, oh, he was always on tour or I remember my father singing. I really hope that my children remember me for something normal.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU'RE NOT THERE")
LUKAS GRAHAM: (Singing) As I struggle just remember how you used to look and sound, at times I still think I can spot you in the crowd.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Lukas Forchhammer of the band Lukas Graham. The band's self-titled album is out now. This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU'RE NOT THERE")
LUKAS GRAHAM: (Singing) You're not there to celebrate the man that you made. You're not there to share in my success and mistakes.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Before becoming the host of WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY, you may recall I was an international correspondent for NPR. I reported from South America, Mexico, the Middle East. Decoding different cultures was pretty much my job, so let's see if I can decode this week's Puzzle.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm joined by the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzlemaster, Will Shortz. Good morning.
WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Good morning, Lulu. Welcome to the show.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm so excited to be here and to play The Puzzle. So remind us of last week's challenge.
SHORTZ: I asked, can you construct a word square consisting of five five-letter men's names? And my answer, I said, had four good names and one not-so-common one. My answer was Kemal - K-E-M-A-L - Emile, Milan, Alain and Lenny. And the tough name there being Milan, M-I-L-A-N. It's very common...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I was about to say Milan. I don't know.
SHORTZ: I know, it's - I read that it's...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It wouldn't meet the Scrabble test, I think.
SHORTZ: (Laughter) It's a very common name in Eastern Europe, I read, but not around here. Of course, people sent in all sorts of answers. One that I particularly like from our winner had Abram, Blane, Randy, Andre and Meyer. Blaine was the odd one out there, B-L-A-N-E, but still pretty impressive.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. We received about 100 different word squares. And this week's winner is - and I love this story - 16-year-old Marisa Schiller from Sandusky, Mich. And she joins us on the line now. Congratulations, Marisa.
MARISA SCHILLER: Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tell us, how did you hear about The Puzzle?
SCHILLER: My teacher showed us in class and he said, you can figure it out. And so I tried to figure it out.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And we've got your teacher, Kurt Wentzel, on the line here, too. Mr. Wentzel, how long have you been assigning The Puzzle to your students? What kind of teacher are you?
KURT WENTZEL: I teach world history and geography, and also English. I've been assigning The Puzzle for about five or six years.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And I think we're playing today with your students in class. Can you get them to say hey to us?
WENTZEL: Sure thing. They want you to say hey, class.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: Hi. Hello.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Hey.
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So a special Puzzle this week with two contestants, a live studio audience right there. Marisa and Mr. Wentzel from Sandusky Junior/Senior High School, are you both ready to play The Puzzle?
SCHILLER: Yes.
WENTZEL: Yes, we are.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Awesome. So, Will, let's do this. Take it away.
SHORTZ: Yes. Marisa and Kurt, this puzzle is a welcome to you, Lulu, to the program. So we're going to start at the top. Every answer is a compound word or a familiar two-word phrase in which the first part starts T-O and the second part starts P. For example, if I gave you the clue what the main ingredient in ketchup grows on, you would say tomato plant. Tomato starts T-O and plant starts P. Number one is a product from Crest or Colgate.
WENTZEL: That would be toothpaste.
SHORTZ: Toothpaste is correct.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Good job.
SHORTZ: Number two, a product from Charmin or Cottonelle.
SCHILLER: Toilet paper.
SHORTZ: That's it.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Awesome.
SHORTZ: Place on a highway where you have to stop and pay money.
SCHILLER: Toll poll.
SHORTZ: Yes, toll is right. And it's a wide part and - what do you call that, a widening of the road?
WENTZEL: Oh, a plaza. Toll plaza.
SHORTZ: Toll plaza is right. A Native American sculpture in the Northwest in which giant heads are carved into a tree.
SCHILLER: Totem pole.
WENTZEL: Into a tree?
SHORTZ: Totem pole, good one.
(LAUGHTER)
SHORTZ: Rock singer and musician with the Heartbreakers.
WENTZEL: Oh, God.
SHORTZ: Do you know that, blank and the Heartbreakers?
WENTZEL: Oh, I know it. Tom Petty.
SHORTZ: Tom Petty is it, good. A pointing device on a laptop computer used as a substitute for a mouse.
SCHILLER: Toggle...
SHORTZ: It's not a toggle, no. But think of a laptop and there's a flat surface that you move your...
WENTZEL: Oh.
SHORTZ: ...Hand around on.
SCHILLER: Touch pad.
SHORTZ: What do you call that? A touch pad, good one.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah.
SHORTZ: A small ornamental stud inserted in part of the mouth.
WENTZEL: A tongue...
SHORTZ: Yes.
WENTZEL: Tongue...
SHORTZ: You know this one, Marisa?
SCHILLER: No.
SHORTZ: Little ornament. It's a tongue piercing.
SCHILLER: Oh.
WENTZEL: Oh, a piercing.
SHORTZ: All right, try this one. Something smoked by Sherlock Holmes and Santa Claus.
SCHILLER: A...
WENTZEL: Something - oh.
SCHILLER: ...Tobacco pipe.
SHORTZ: Yeah, that's it, tobacco pipe. And here's your last one - a set of things for sightseers to see at an all-inclusive price.
WENTZEL: Sight - a tour package.
SHORTZ: Tour package. Nice job. It was a real combination there.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You guys did a great job. For playing our Puzzle today, you'll get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin, each of you, as well as puzzle books and games. You can read all about it at npr.org/puzzle. And what member station do you guys listen to there?
WENTZEL: Usually WFUM in Flint.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Marisa Schiller and her teacher Kurt Wentzel of Sandusky, Mich. and their class. Thanks for playing The Puzzle.
SCHILLER: Thank you.
WENTZEL: Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Bye.
(LAUGHTER)
SHORTZ: That's right.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Bye, Michigan (laughter).
WENTZEL: OK.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right, Will, what's the challenge for next week?
SHORTZ: Yes. It comes from Mike Reiss, who's a writer/producer for "The Simpsons." And he's had a number of challenges on this program. Think of a two-word phrase you might see on a clothing label. Add two letters to the end of the first word and one letter to the end of the second word, and the result is the name of a famous writer. Who is it? So again, think of a two-word phrase you might see on a clothing label, add two letters to the end of the first word and one letter to the end of the second word, and the result will be the name of a famous writer. What writer is it?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you have 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 12 at 3 p.m. Eastern, so include a phone number where we can reach you at about that time. And if you're the winner, we'll give you a call and you get to play on the air with the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzlemaster, Will Shortz. Thanks so much, Will.
SHORTZ: Thank you, Lulu.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
We begin this hour with the intelligence report on Russian attempts to meddle in the American presidential election. The report, which draws on intelligence gathered by the FBI, the CIA and the NSA, concludes that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at hobbling Hillary Clinton's candidacy. John Rizzo is a former acting general counsel of the CIA and the author of the book "Company Man." He says in his view, there is little doubt about Russia's interference.
JOHN RIZZO: I think it's about as strong a case as could be made. When the intelligence community reports something and uses the term high confidence, that means to me that they are as close to certain as they can be in the strength of their conclusions.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What do you think the balance is that has to be struck between what the public knows and then what, you know, the classified information is? I mean, there clearly has to be something that protects the sources, that doesn't put lives at risk, but also informs the wider public.
RIZZO: Yeah, I mean, it is a delicate balance. And it's driven really on a case-by-case basis. Now, in this particular case, I believe the government and the intelligence community should lean as forward as possible to inform the American people about the details and the reasons the intelligence community arrived at that conclusion because after all, there's nothing more fundamental to the American people than the integrity of their votes and their election.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: One of the things that struck me is that the report says all three agencies agree with the judgment. It goes on to say the CIA and the FBI have high confidence. And then it says the NSA has moderate confidence. What does that mean, in your view? Is there a disagreement?
RIZZO: No. The NSA saying moderate, it's a subtle difference. You know, it would be one thing if the NSA had dissented from the view. I'd be curious. I'm not sure if we will ever know what it was that the NSA was not quite as prepared to go as far as CIA and the FBI. I will say the fact that both CIA and FBI are on the same page here is significant because not to put too fine a point on it, but there have been many times over the years where the CIA and the FBI have disagreed about a conclusion.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I want to move on now to President-elect Trump and, obviously, his feelings on the report. He has backed away from his earlier dismissals of the intelligence and of the intelligence community. Do you think this will go some way to repairing, possibly, the relationship?
RIZZO: Well, it's a step in the right direction, isn't it (laughter)? When he starts to interact with the intelligence community leadership - which, after all, will be his leadership after January 20 - and he gets to know the people inside the intelligence community, I hope and trust he will come to appreciate and value not only their expertise and integrity but also their desire, as they do with all presidents, to serve the president who has been elected regardless of party and political persuasion. So CIA is a very resilient organization that way. I lived through seven different presidential administrations. It always worked out.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm going to move to something else that - something that you have obviously particular expertise on, which is the use of torture. You know, Mr. Trump has said that he could call for the CIA to go back to things like waterboarding, for example. You were instrumental in creating the legal defense for these techniques. Is it a good idea?
RIZZO: No. I think it would be a terrible idea.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why?
RIZZO: Well, I mean, leaving aside some merits of the interrogation program and all of that...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right.
RIZZO: ...It sparked a huge and to this day continuing controversy and opprobrium directed at CIA. And it proved to be a, you know, traumatic experience both for the institution and those of us who were personally attacked for it. So I think and hope that the CIA and the new CIA director would resist any entreaties to return to those days.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: John Rizzo is a former acting general counsel to the CIA. Thanks so much for coming in.
RIZZO: Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Charges have been filed against the man accused of carrying out a deadly shooting spree at Fort Lauderdale Airport Friday. Esteban Santiago killed five people and injured another six at the baggage claim area. If convicted, he could see the death penalty. Santiago is a former National Guard soldier from Alaska. And as NPR's Brakkton Booker reports, he had quite a few encounters with Alaska law enforcement in the past year and a brief stay at a mental facility.
BRAKKTON BOOKER, BYLINE: At a press conference, Alaska law enforcement officials rattled off a list of run-ins Esteban Santiago had with them starting last January. The most curious, though, came in early November. That's when Santiago walked into an FBI building in Anchorage. Police were eventually called because of what has been described as Santiago's, quote, "erratic behavior."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHRISTOPHER TOLLEY: When APD arrived on scene they were formed by investigating agents Mr. Santiago had arrived at the FBI building asking for help. Santiago was having terroristic thoughts and believed he was being influenced by ISIS.
BOOKER: That's Christopher Tolley, the Anchorage police chief. He also says Santiago had a loaded gun but left it in his vehicle prior to contacting agents.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TOLLEY: Based on the statements made to the agents on scene and their own contact with Santiago, APD transported him to a mental health facility, where he was admitted.
BOOKER: The gun was held in police possession while he was being evaluated. Santiago was released a few weeks later, but his gun was not given back immediately. Again, Police Chief Tolley.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TOLLEY: On December 8, the weapon was released to Santiago.
BOOKER: Authorities would not confirm whether it was the same weapon he used at the Florida airport. Karen Loeffler, the U.S. attorney for the District of Alaska, says despite Santiago's stint in the mental facility there was nothing preventing him from having a gun.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KAREN LOEFFLER: There is a federal law with regard to having a gun by somebody who is mentally ill, but the law requires that the person be, quote, "adjudicated mentally ill," which is a difficult standard.
BOOKER: And one presumably Santiago did not meet. Authorities say he followed proper TSA protocols when he checked his semiautomatic weapon before boarding the flight from Anchorage to Fort Lauderdale. Investigators say Santiago seems to have acted alone when he retrieved his luggage from baggage claim, dipped into a bathroom to load his weapon, then begin shooting until he ran out of ammunition. He is scheduled to have his first appearance in a federal court tomorrow in Fort Lauderdale.
Brakkton Booker, NPR News.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
It was Christmas yesterday for the more than 250 million Orthodox Christians around the world. Among those celebrating was the biggest Christian community in the Middle East, Egypt's Orthodox Coptic Christians. But as NPR's Jane Arraf reports from Cairo, it's an uneasy holiday season this year.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Christmas Eve on the street outside St. Sergius and Bacchus, the oldest church in Cairo. There are Egyptian security forces with rifles and armored vehicles. It's because an ISIS suicide bomber blew himself up in a church in Cairo last month. Twenty-five people died. Egypt's Coptic Christians were among the first to embrace Christianity almost 2,000 years ago. They make up almost 10 percent of the mostly Muslim country. Faith here runs particularly deep. As the bells toll for midnight mass, families dressed in their best clothes hurry into the small brick church with a wooden roof shaped like Noah's Ark.
JULIETTE ZAKARIA: (Through interpreter) The churches that are most threatened have the most people in them. It's a way to show we hold on to our faith.
ARRAF: That's Juliette Zakaria, one of the worshippers. Zakaria says Christians have been persecuted here since Roman times. She joins one of the rows of women with their hair covered with scarves made of lace or depicting saints. Men sit on the other side. Most of them have fasted, given up meat, eggs and milk for the past 40 days.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Singing in foreign language).
ARRAF: There's been a church on this spot for 1,700 years, built on the site where the faithful believe Jesus, Mary and Joseph took refuge, fleeing to Egypt after King Herod ordered all baby boys born in Bethlehem killed. Christians in modern-day Egypt face their own persecution. Over the last few years, Muslim extremists have destroyed churches and killed Christians in other parts of the country. Father Angelos Gergos, who is conducting the service, has told me that Christians here support President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, who took power in a military coup, because he's trying to protect them.
ANGELOS GERGOS: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: But Father Angelos doesn't touch on any of that in his sermon. He tells worshippers to remember that there's more to life than working or money. Here, religion isn't just going to mass on Sundays. For generation upon generation, it's been a vibrant living faith.
GERGOS: (Praying in foreign language).
ARRAF: The service goes on for hours. As it does, two young girls have wandered away to sit on the floor in a vestibule, chatting and looking at photos on a phone. Joyce is in fourth grade. Her friend Magi was killed in the bombing of the church in Cairo a few weeks ago. Joyce says, though, she's happy.
JOYCE: I'm happy. I'm not sad. I'm happy because she's in a good place.
MARIA: With God.
ARRAF: With God, her friend Maria adds. Those who died in the bombings are considered martyrs who can intercede in heaven for those on Earth, a long line of martyrs and saints going back 2,000 years.
Jane Arraf, NPR News, Cairo.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In this story, there are references to Coptic Christians attending “mass.” The references should have been to the “divine liturgy” or to “worship.”]
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
This week, President-elect Trump will take questions from the press for the first time since the election. On Wednesday, he will hold what he is calling a, quote, "general news conference." To understand what that may mean, NPR's media correspondent, David Folkenflik, is here with us. Hi, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey there, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So NPR's politics team has been tracking the number of days since Trump's last press conference. It's been - wait for it - 164 days. Why is a press conference so important?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, look, it may seem like self-justifying banter from the press to say he's got to come down and take questions from reporters. After all, the reporters are the ones who get to ask the questions. At the same time, this is very much ensuring that there's a degree of transparency and accountability. And let's not forget, Donald Trump has on a number of occasions said, I'll get to that later. You'll learn more about my taxes and finances later on. You'll learn more about how I'll handle the pervasive conflicts of interest that involve his business entanglements abroad.
Well, later keeps coming and the answers keep not showing up. And I think it is important for the public to hear that the man who's going to lead them for the next four years is willing to address these questions and has answers.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And I guess the idea that, you know, President-elect Trump will actually be live, presumably on the air, taking questions from reporters that are unscripted - this will be a big moment.
FOLKENFLIK: I think it's very important to be able to hear from our public leaders in ways that they can't entirely orchestrate, seeing them speak live and unscripted and take questions that they themselves haven't arranged ahead of time. I think this is a way in which citizens who are deciding what they think of their leaders who govern in their name, this is one of the ways in which they can evaluate how they feel about the quality of the leadership.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, are we sure that Trump will take questions? In his tweet, he called this a news conference. We're calling it a press conference. Is there a difference?
FOLKENFLIK: You know, about 40 years ago, as I understand it, aides to President Nixon started calling press conferences news conferences to indicate that the president is the one making the news and that the agenda isn't set by the press. So I think that you're hearing echoes of that. If he doesn't take questions, it's not a news conference or press conference at all. It's a public statement. He'll be making some remarks and then walking away from the lectern. We're going to see what happens.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Have the press really done a good job explaining what their role is?
FOLKENFLIK: I think that Trump has succeeded in many ways at making the press look like an actor in this campaign season rather than somebody holding the candidates and major political figures to account. And I think that's really undercutting the press here. Any time it holds the Trump administration accountable he'll say, well, here they are being biased again rather than accepting that that is part of the give and take of democracy and of the accountability we expect.
So that's something the press is going to have to earn back, I think, is its stature with the public as it seeks to do its job and serve its mission and show how it's arriving at its conclusions and will explain why the reporting it does is necessary. I think so much reporting at times seems designed for the Beltway insiders, people of the political class who understand why this subcommittee hearing or that nomination is so important without people saying this is what is at stake.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: On a final note, any thoughts on the timing of this news conference-slash-press conference? Why is he holding it now?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, so much is going on next Wednesday. The Republicans on Capitol Hill are holding multiple hearings for various nominees, some of whom are quite controversial. So it looks as though he intends to dominate the news cycle by having this. You know, this also was intended to be a press conference, or at least promised to be a press conference, about his business entanglements. And yet now he's promising a general news conference, which means that he's going to sweep up other controversies in it. And that's fine. I think there are a lot of other substantive issues that need to be explored as well.
But it certainly means that there will be a diminishment of attention that can be given to the question of his business entanglements. You know, each time that he promises to come forward with something, when you actually get to the point of disclosure it seems as though there's a lot less that was promised for the press and particularly for the public to understand.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: David Folkenflik, NPR's media correspondent. Great to have you on.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Brian Mast has been a public servant all his life, and this past week he was sworn into the 115th Congress. Mast, a Republican, represents the 18th District of Florida in the southeastern part of the state. He served in the Army for 12 years and he is a double amputee. He lost both his legs when a roadside bomb exploded in Afghanistan. He said that improving the Department of Veterans Affairs will be one of his top priorities. Elsewhere in the show we will be talking to a freshman Democrat, but now we're joined by Congressman Mast. Welcome.
BRIAN MAST: Hey, thank you for having me this morning.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So I saw you haven't wasted any time. Earlier this week, you were on the House floor criticizing the recent U.N. Security Council vote condemning Israel, which President Obama abstained from. What are some of your other priorities going forward, sir?
MAST: Well, that was, you know, one that was actually a very high priority for me. Not only did I serve in the U.S. Army for 12 years, but I also served with the Israeli military, and so obviously something very close to my heart. But, you know, beyond that, my top priorities are the shameful treatment that's happening to my fellow veterans as they walk into their VAs not getting the care that they've earned or the care that they deserve. And very specific for my area is making sure that the water coming out of Lake Okeechobee - a lot of people saw that going on this summer where we had large green algae blooms across the breadth of South Florida - making sure that that comes to an end.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What changes specifically would you like to see to how veterans get their health care?
MAST: I am, of course, a critic of the Department of Veterans Affairs, but I'm a critic because I want them to be better. I don't think that they should cease to exist. I think that they should up their game. And I think the number one way that you get them to up their game is also the way that you make the lives better for every single veteran. And that's giving veterans access to total choice in their care. Our veterans have to have the choice to be seen at whatever provider they wish for whatever reason.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sticking with health care but more broadly, your party has decided to make repealing the Affordable Care Act their first order of business. In your view, what should that replacement look like?
MAST: Well, the replacement's going to look like a lot of things. You're going to see a big push for us expanding the market for people to purchase their health care. And I'm sure you've heard a lot of that, purchasing health care across state lines. That's going to be one of the biggest pieces that you see of that. Making sure that there are risk pools out there for people so that we can maintain that coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. You know, when I look at the Affordable Care Act, I think that's probably one of the biggest benefits is that, you know, there's so many people that have been able to find coverage.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But one of the big criticisms, of course, is that you've said what it shouldn't look like, but you haven't been very clear about what it should look like.
MAST: And, you know, this is something that you're going to see hashed out, you know, over the coming months on the floors of Congress. And I think probably one of the biggest benefits of hashing this out on the floors of Congress and other places is that the same mistakes are not going to be made when Obamacare was passed the first time on Christmas Eve of 2009 and people didn't get to read this 2,900-page bill. Now you're going to get to see this done in the light of day. Everybody's going to get to have input from both sides. And it's going to be accomplished in the way that it should be accomplished.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm going to come back to one of your other priorities which you talk about, Lake Okeechobee and the waterways there. There's been a lot of discussions about EPA regulations being rolled back. How is that going to affect your plans in central Florida?
MAST: Well, you know, when you look at the EPA, I think one of the worst things that I've seen as it pertains to my area of south Florida is that we had this literally toxic water coming into our waterways and the EPA was not raising hell about this. And as a result, you didn't see, you know, an emergency declaration where we were now getting assistance from an organization like FEMA to help us clean this water up. And that was a major failure of the EPA. They need to continue to exist, but we need to see the EPA certainly do a better job.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Republican Congressman Brian Mast. Thank you so much for being with us.
MAST: I appreciate the time. Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Twice a year, TV critics and TV networks - not always the best of friends - get together to talk about the new season and what's on offer. It began last week, and it's called the Television Critics Association Press Tour. And it's often an opportunity for TV critics to ask tough questions of executives. So we thought it was a good time to check in with a TV critic who's been outspoken with executives on a number of issues. Maureen Ryan is the chief TV critic for Variety, and she's on the tour right now. She joins me from LA. Thanks for being with us.
MAUREEN RYAN: Thank you for having me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So interestingly, this time around three of the four biggest broadcast networks - ABC, CBS, NBC - aren't giving journalists access to executives. Why?
RYAN: Well, there's two answers to that question. One of them is the TV networks' answer, which is that they just have so much great new programming to present to us that they don't have time for their executives to come up and take questions from the crowd. And I think it's a mistake. And I think that the perception among many people, including myself, is that there's something evasive about it. And what confirmed that for me was that the Big Four said that they weren't doing executive sessions and then Fox broke away after some outcry and said that they would put their chief executives out there.
But, you know, I think regardless of what the reasoning is and regardless of what - who has said what, I think the fact is is that, you know, we're in this tremendously unsettled time in our political and social culture. And so why wouldn't you want to, you know, just have something to say or have that conversation with the media?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let me ask you, though, you - not getting the opportunity with these executives, what would you have asked?
RYAN: Well, that's a great question. I mean, I would've asked NBC, how do you think that NBC News' reporting is affected by the fact that a sitting president in a few days will have an executive producer credit on an ongoing basis on one of your TV shows? Is that something that you think is appropriate? And if so, why? You know, I think that would've been my big one for NBC. And I can think of 20 more around that, you know, that I think most journalists could sort of riff on that whole concept.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I want to turn to an issue that you wrote about recently - rape on TV. Over the past few years, there's been a growing critique of the, you know, gratuitous use of sexual assault as a sort of plot point, if you think of "Game Of Thrones," "Westworld," "Rescue Me." Do you think that this is a problem that is being addressed?
RYAN: I think partly. But I think that there are massive commercial pressures right now to make your show stand out, to make it different, to give it buzz, to give it some kind of heat. So there's this perception - and I don't think that it's true that that kind of wrenching darkness and graphic and violent fare will get people's attention. And I think to some degree, "The Walking Dead" and "Game Of Thrones" are driving this.
As far as many executives are concerned - and I don't think that they're necessarily wrong - you have one episode to grab people. One way that you can basically press a button in people's brain and get them into that place of agitation and/or interest is to assault or kill a woman.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You've interviewed a number of these showrunners, these writers. I mean, what did you discover?
RYAN: Well, I think over the years my - a lot of my reported pieces have become more statistics-driven because I think that the stats really tell the tale. You know, we did an article last summer on new shows for broadcast network TV for the season that we're in now. Ninety percent of the showrunners were white and 80 percent of them were male. And so the problem is that you're not getting a fair cross-section of, you know, human kind.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: One of the things that I found interesting is many of the female writers you spoke to in your reporting about this issue wouldn't go on the record. The male writers did, but the women didn't. Do you think that's indicative of the environment in the writers' room?
RYAN: Yes. Hollywood and especially the TV industry is an incredibly hierarchical place, and the showrunner is not running a democracy. There's very little upside to someone who is below the showrunner's rank speaking up. And what I find again and again is that I really take my hat off to men and women of color and women who actually fight these tropes in the room because every time you open your mouth for whatever reason to contradict the showrunner, you're taking your career in your hands.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you think the conversation's having an impact, though, the fact that these issues are being brought up again and again?
RYAN: I really do. And I think that more showrunners are aware that they need to have a diverse array of people around their tables, more executives are aware that they need to have an array of showrunners that reflects a cross-section of American life. And that's really where a lot of this happens, is that at the executive level, who are you hiring as showrunners? Who are you promoting? Whose careers are you fostering?
And then if you are the showrunner, are you listening to the people around that table? Are you taking them seriously? Are you not dismissing them? And I think one role that the TV critic can have is essentially pressuring people to take seriously these issues when they come up on the set, in the writers' room or amongst these writers.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Maureen Ryan, chief TV critic for Variety. Thanks so much for being with us.
RYAN: My pleasure. Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
It's not very often that you crack open a book to find a giant warning label hitting you in the face. But there it is right in the front of Scott Carney's latest work, "What Doesn't Kill Us." It says no one should attempt any of these methods or practices without appropriate experience, training, doctor approval, etc. In other words, don't try this at home, kids. The this is exposing yourself to extreme cold. We won't, but we have brought Scott Carney into the studios of Colorado Public Radio in Denver to tell us about his investigation.
Hey, Scott Carney.
SCOTT CARNEY: Hi, how you doing? Thanks for having me on.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So this is some pretty extreme stuff. The book starts with you climbing a freezing Mount Kilimanjaro practically naked. Please explain the concept.
CARNEY: Well, the idea is that humans - we evolved 200,000 years ago. Our species is basically biologically identical as that caveman way in the past. And only for the last about 150 years have we had control over our environment, where we can live at a constant 72 degrees no matter what the weather is outside.
But our underlying biology is designed to have natural fluctuations, both between night and day and also seasonally. And without those natural fluctuations, we're not able to exist in extreme environments. So I took it sort of upon myself, with the help of a Dutch sort of fitness guru named Wim Hof, to expose myself to extreme environments for about six months to try to create resistance.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So let me get this straight. The basic idea is that somehow our controlled environments - the air conditioning, the heating, the fact that we are wearing puffy jackets to keep us warm in the winter - all this technology is somehow debilitating us instead of protecting us, which is what most of us think.
You actually started out this whole excursion when you went to go meet this man called Wim Hof, trying to debunk what he was doing. Tell us a little bit about that.
CARNEY: Sure. Well, you know, it started back in 2012 when I'd heard about him. You know, he was this guy who did these crazy feats on mountains. He'd climbed something like two-thirds or three-fourths of the way Mount Everest in just shorts. And not only that, he made these claims he could control his immune system and these things that just sounded, you know, crazy and superhuman. So I was very skeptical.
So I flew out to Poland, and I did the training. And he says, you know, you're going to go stand out in the snow. And I stand in the snow, and in five minutes, I am just done. It's just so cold. I'm in my shorts, bare feet, and it's really, really painful. And so the next day, I did it, and I was able to stand in the snow for 10 minutes. And by the fifth day, I was standing there for an hour.
You know, the basics of the method are, you know, you can activate things like vasoconstriction, which are all of these muscles in your veins through your body which contract when they interact with cold. But you have no conscious way to make those muscles contract. You have to get cold to do that. And if you never get cold, those muscles get weak. And so by reintroducing and intentionally altering your environment, you can really do cool things.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But not only cool things, you maintain that it can make you less sick. You offer up people suffering from Parkinson's disease and rheumatoid arthritis who say they were helped by this training.
CARNEY: Absolutely. And I have several case studies in the book. And I think we need to make the caveat that this is not rigorously validated by the halls of medicine, although there is certainly ongoing scientific research on it. But I met people with things like Crohn's disease.
And what they were doing was taking cold showers, doing this breathing and to put it, you know, very sort of simply, it was giving their immune system something else to do than attack itself. I met a person whose rheumatoid arthritis, which was keeping him, like, basically stuck in bed, you know, able to walk and do all sorts of things now.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK. But if extreme conditioning is so successful, as you report, why hasn't it been more widely accepted?
CARNEY: Well, it is being accepted. I mean, Wim Hof is - the research and the literature around him is certainly growing, but it certainly needs more research.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm sitting here in an climate-controlled studio. And, you know, I want to know - for someone who's not going to climb Mount Kilimanjaro naked - not today, probably not this week, maybe not this month (laughter) - what are the sort of prescriptions that you would give to live a healthier life with what you discovered?
CARNEY: Well, one thing is that you don't need your thermostat up all the way all the time. Like, you can adapt - if you keep your thermostat to 63 or so, right, a point where shivering - you know, you might feel like you might need to shiver - that's probably good. Like, shivering is a natural response.
And one of the things we - you know, we do in the training is we suppress your natural shiver response to make your body find a different way to heat itself. And this is usually ramping up the metabolism. And by doing that, you'll burn more calories, you'll get thinner, but you'll also just be more adapted. You will use less energy in general, and that's a good thing.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Scott Carney - his new book is called "What Doesn't Kill Us."
Thank you.
CARNEY: Thank you so much for having me on. This has been awesome.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEEDOMETER SONG, "RUBBERNECK")
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Every now and then, we like to pull back the curtain and tell you how the show is made. So here's how it goes. Each Wednesday, we have an editorial meeting when our producers and editors pitch story ideas for the show. The ones we like get turned into the pieces that you hear. And the ones that we don't like, well...
(SOUNDBITE OF POWERING DOWN SOUND EFFECT)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Those just die. But - and there is a but - sometimes the ones that don't make the show are the ones we actually really like because, you know, they're odd or they're amusing or the person who pitched it really, really sold it well. Or they're just so bad that they're good. And that's where we are today. So in our randomly reoccurring series of Dead Pitches, we're joined by our producer Olly Dearden.
Hey, Olly.
OLIVER DEARDEN, BYLINE: Hello there.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So tell everyone what your pitch was.
DEARDEN: Twelfth Night - so this is the twelfth night of Christmas. Christmas is meant to run over 12 days. So Twelfth Night, 6 of January, Epiphany when supposedly the three wise men, the Magi, went and saw the baby Jesus.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yes.
DEARDEN: That's Jesus, not Cheesus (ph). And anyway, so that is what it's meant to mean. But also as part of modern Christmasing (ph) that we do with trees and decorations, it's the night you're meant to get rid of all your Christmas decorations because if you keep them up, it's bad luck.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's bad luck.
DEARDEN: Vegetation will not grow. Your crops will not grow, and you'll have a terrible year.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You'll be cursed.
DEARDEN: You'll be cursed essentially.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Now, this is my first week at WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY. And I heard this pitch, and I was like - why? What was the sort of compelling reason here for this?
DEARDEN: Well, I will tell you why it is unbelievably compelling.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK.
DEARDEN: Because I was cursed.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You were cursed?
DEARDEN: Yeah, although it hadn't quite hit the 6 of January, I was right - got to get the tree down, don't want to be cursed. But I noticed my 9-month-old baby daughter Dahlia (ph) playing on the floor with things. And then there was one thing she was playing with that was moving. And I was like, what is that?
And I went down, and it was some kind of disgusting creature that had come out of the tree out of hibernation. And then I look around, and they're all over the walls. They're on the ceiling.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What were they?
DEARDEN: So - right. We had to do some investigation. So I got in touch with an entomologist. His name is Mike Saunders and he is from Penn State. And I sent him a photo.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wait, wait - so you have all these bugs in your house...
DEARDEN: Right.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...And you think, let me take a picture and send it to an entomologist?
DEARDEN: No. Nobody thinks that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's what...
DEARDEN: I didn't do that. I had to get a picture off the internet because I rang up this entomologist and he goes, oh, do you have a picture? I'm like, of course I don't have a picture. What do you think I was doing?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: They're dead now.
DEARDEN: Quick, let's take a picture, love. I'm going to queue that for next year. Couldn't get a picture, so I went on the internet and Googled Christmas tree bugs and found a picture of the thing...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's a thing.
DEARDEN: ...Of the thing that most looked like the thing that came out of my tree. Here it is.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Oh.
DEARDEN: Horrendous.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That - OK.
DEARDEN: It kind of looks like a spider, I suppose.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's disgusting.
DEARDEN: They were - yeah. And they were about the size of an ant or maybe slightly bigger.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK.
DEARDEN: Just disgusting, everywhere. Anyway, Mike emailed me back when I sent him that picture. And he said, this is clearly a hemipteran, or tree bug. They're related to aphids, and they kind of hibernate in trees. When you brought it inside, it was there, you know, curled up for the winter. Because your house is so warm and you watered the tree - not my idea to water a dead tree, people. That was my wife's.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So this is a common thing.
DEARDEN: It happens if you're unlucky. It happens.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) OK.
DEARDEN: Plastic tree next year for the Deardens already.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And this is why we let the pitch die a natural death.
Olly Dearden, thank you so much.
DEARDEN: My pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I AIN'T SUPERSTITIOUS")
HOWLIN' WOLF: (Singing) Well, I ain't superstitious, black cat just crossed my trail. Well, I ain't superstitious, but a black cat just crossed my trail. Don't sweep me with no broom. I might get put in jail.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
After weeks of insisting Russia wasn't responsible for the DNC hack, President-elect Donald Trump released a statement where he seemed to at least entertain the possibility that they may have been behind the security breach. Even so, Donald Trump continues to blame the Democratic National Committee for being vulnerable to hacking. And last night, of course in a series of tweets, he reiterated the importance of having a good relationship with Russia. When I am president, Russia will respect us far more than they do now, he wrote. NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson joins us now to talk about where things stand.
Hey, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hey, Lulu. And welcome to your new home. I'm so happy you're here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I am so happy to be here. Let's start. There seems to be consensus, at least among some in the U.S. intelligence community, that the Russians interfered in our election. What questions does this raise for Trump's incoming administration?
LIASSON: Well, it raises a lot of questions because Trump's reaction to the report raises questions about what that means for the future of his relationship with the intelligence community. Will he listen to the CIA and other agencies if they bring him intelligence about North Korea, China, Iran, not to mention Russia? And what does Donald Trump's disparagement of the intelligence community mean for U.S. national security?
You know, in the hearings last week, we heard intelligence community leaders predicting the possibility of big attrition at the CIA. They could lose hundreds of skilled, experienced professionals if they think their work is not valued. And what about our international assets abroad - our intelligence assets abroad? Would you agree to spy for the U.S. in Eastern Europe or Russia if you didn't think the U.S. president had your back?
So this is why a lot of national security experts are saying that Vladimir Putin has already succeeded, not just in interfering in the U.S. election but in undermining the intelligence capacity of the United States, which has been one of his long-term goals.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You know, Trump - he continues to make this sort of full-throated defense of having better relations with Russia. And that seems like it's going to be problematic for U.S. foreign policy going forward.
LIASSON: Yes, this is a very big deal. He tweeted today - what's bad about having a good relationship with Russia? Only stupid people will think would think that was bad. This is more than a reset. Every American president wants a reset with Russia. This is a wholesale reorientation of 70 years of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy towards Russia.
Up until now, the U.S. was considered the leader of the free world, as much of a cliche as that sounds like, standing up for some kind of a democratic, global world order based on democratic values of human rights and self-determination rule of law. And we express that through our alliances with other liberal democracies like Europe and elsewhere in institutions like NATO.
But now you've got Donald Trump agreeing - it seems like he's agreeing more with leaders like Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen who don't have respect for global, democratic institutions like the EU or NATO. Most Republicans on Capitol Hill think Russia is an enemy not a friend, think Vladimir Putin is trying to undermine NATO by invading other countries, hacking, financing right-wing parties in Europe. Donald Trump, as you said, does not agree with this. He's been very, very open about this for a very long time, not just in this election campaign.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You know, we have a big week coming up in Congress. So let's talk about that for a little bit. Lots of confirmation hearings on Wednesday - you know, an issue that keeps on coming up, conflicts of interest. Now they've become part of the news this week for the nominees.
LIASSON: That's right. The Office of Government Ethics has said that a number of Trump's nominees have not completed their financial disclosure forms. The Office of Government Ethics does background checks, like the FBI does, to make sure there are no conflicts of interests. And back in 2009, Mitch McConnell said that until financial disclosure forms are completed - the process is completed, nomination hearings should not be scheduled. But now that seems to be just another norm that the Republicans and Donald Trump want to throw aside because it's possible that a number of Donald Trump's nominees will be confirmed before they have gone through this process.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: NPR's Mara Liasson, thank you so much for joining us.
LIASSON: Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
And now to a challenge in science - new research suggests some studies aren't getting the attention they deserve. A team at the University of Cambridge released a study last week highlighting all the science that is getting published in languages other than English. That's important because with English as the dominant language of science, research in Swedish or Vietnamese, for example, can get overlooked. Michael Gordin of Princeton University has studied the language of science. He told us that until the early 20th century, scientific writing was evenly split between English, French and German.
MICHAEL GORDIN: But in the wake of World War I, a wave of anti-German language actions took place in the U.S. About half the states in the union criminalized German in that you couldn't teach it in schools, you couldn't publish newspapers in it, etc. Those laws are overturned by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1923, but the damage was done. So when America emerges as a global scientific leader after World War II, there's not much foreign language competence to be had in their ranks.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So English is the dominant language now. Is this a problem?
GORDIN: It has pluses and minuses. On the one hand, it reaches a kind of utopic ideal that people wanted a long time ago, which is to have one language in which all knowledge could be communicated. On the other hand, it's enormously unfair. It produces a situation where native speakers of English, who are a minority of people who practice the sciences and engineering in the world today, basically have an ease in this language that they get for free when they're children. And everybody else comes by it laboriously.
Now the fact that there is a problem in accessing scientific data right now stems primarily from the fact that there's so much science being done. So it's impossible, even just looking at the English language literature, to master everything that's there. That's compounded if there's some important material, say, on the nature of the tropical rain forest published in Portuguese in Brazil and you don't know Portuguese.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, I was based in Brazil. And covering the Zika virus, which of course got a lot of attention, there was a lot of research being published in Portuguese. And it wasn't getting the attention that, possibly, it should have. Does this have real-world implications?
GORDIN: Absolutely, especially in the area of health emergencies. In areas that are closer to practical application, like agronomy and clinical medicine, a large amount of material is published in local languages because you need to be able to talk to your patients or talk to farmers or peasants. And that information takes some time to percolate up into English.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What are the suggestions in your mind to sort of bridge some of these language barriers?
GORDIN: I think the dominance of English in the world today is, for the near future, irreversible. On the other hand, we could do things to make it fairer and to ease the barrier of publication in English. In oral communication among scientists right now, people will tolerate a wide array of fluencies in English. But in written science, we privilege a very high standard of order. That could be relaxed and enable people with a lower level of education to participate.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Michael Gordin is a professor of history at Princeton University and author of "Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before And After Global English."
Thanks so much for being with us.
GORDIN: Thank you very much for having me.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
A new session of Congress got underway this past week. And among the freshmen members settling into their offices was Adriano Espaillat. He represents New York's 13th Congressional District, which includes Harlem and parts of the Bronx. Mr. Espaillat who, by the way, broke into the merengue after his swearing-in is the first ever Dominican-American elected to either the House or the Senate. He's also the first to have immigrated to this country illegally as a child. Elsewhere in the show, we will be talking to a freshman Republican. Congressman Espaillat joins us on the line from his office on Capitol Hill.
Welcome to the program, Congressman.
ADRIANO ESPAILLAT: Thank you, Lourdes. Thank you for having me on your program.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So let's start. You will be dealing with a Republican Congress. This week has been very tumultuous already. What is the plan moving forward - resistance, compromise?
ESPAILLAT: Well, resistance first and foremost for any repeal of the Affordable Care Act. So we're looking to question every single effort to repeal any of the provisions of the health care act.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Looking more broadly, though, it seems already that the lines are being drawn. It seems already that you're going to be facing a Congress which is at each other's throats.
ESPAILLAT: Well, as a Democrat, you know, we believe in the core values of working-class families and middle-class families, that people should get a helping hand to move up. And I'm not willing to sacrifice or compromise those values. I know that there will be room for consensus in other areas. But other areas, you know, we will have to stand up for what we believe in. And this is what our country is based on.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The Republicans got a lot of criticism under President Obama for being obstructionist, as some people saw it. Are you worried that the Democrats would get the same reputation, or are you trying to copy that exact plan?
ESPAILLAT: No, that's not the case. In fact, you know, you are an obstructionist when you try to prevent something from happening. But the Affordable Care Act already occurred. This is a repeal of something that was already put in place, approved by Congress, that is benefiting a good sector of the American population.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Clearly, though, premiums have gone up. There's a great deal of dissatisfaction. Is there a way in which it can be improved?
ESPAILLAT: Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Should it have been better? I think so. But is it something that we should dismantle? I don't think so.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you see any room for common ground?
ESPAILLAT: Well, there's room for common ground on infrastructure. I think there will be room for common ground with regards to the Affordable Care Act. I think that there are some provisions there that are important for everybody.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Immigration is certainly an issue that's going to be taken up early in this session. You have said you want to use your own life story to influence lawmakers on the topic. How do you see that happening?
ESPAILLAT: Well, you know, I would think that perhaps another colleague, before he or she makes a very brash statement about undocumented kids, will think twice that someone that was in that same predicament is sitting right next to them. I think that my personal story is one that perhaps if not change their votes could change their hearts.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: My last question - you know, you did bring in some Dominican musical heavyweights to your swearing-in. Was there a message in the music to Latinos?
ESPAILLAT: Well, you know, merengue is a simple dance. It's a two-step dance, you know. Salsa, you have to know the turns and the twirls. You have to rehearse salsa. Merengue is easy for anybody to dance, maybe even you Lourdes. So hopefully, I'll meet you, and then we can put some of that Sergio Vargas and Fefita La Grande stuff that we played during my swearing-in ceremony.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Democratic Congressman Adriano Espaillat, thanks so much for being with us.
ESPAILLAT: Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Now a different look at sports from the moment it leaves the field and how it influences our culture. This week...
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS MONTAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: A controversy over the University of Minnesota football team.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: The players for the Minnesota football team may boycott their bowl game.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: The University of Minnesota has fired Gopher football Coach Tracy Claeys following a sexual assault investigation into some of his players.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: This week, we are taking a look at a sexual assault case in Minnesota that's been weighing on the university football program there. To talk more about the complexity of cases like these, we're joined by Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins.
Thanks so much for joining us.
SALLY JENKINS: My pleasure.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: First, let's start. Talk us through what happened with the Gophers.
JENKINS: So what happened with the Gophers was there was a party, and it resulted in an allegation of a gang rape. The local prosecutor declined to prosecute because the evidence wasn't strong enough to get a conviction. However, the university went on and suspended about 10 players related to the incident under a student code of conduct hearing.
And the rest of the football team then protested this and threatened to boycott their post-season bowl because they felt it was unfair that a non-prosecution over a matter where criminal behavior couldn't be proved resulted in suspensions anyway. They later thought better of that and stood down on their threat of a boycott.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You wrote about this case. You described the frustrating, quote, "pendulum swings between inaction and false accusation." And, you know, I guess that's really the tension at the heart of so many sexual assault cases, at least for people looking in from the outside.
JENKINS: Well, so, you know, these cases are really difficult because, you know, on the one hand, we have Duke where you have false accusations. You have really, really deeply flawed investigations. You have men whose reputations are unfairly, you know, impugned or even destroyed. And on the other hand, you have situations at - say, you know, Baylor where you have a raft of sexual assaults where they really weren't investigated properly at all. The administration appears to have covered them up or to have withheld even reporting these alleged incidents to police.
And so, you know, you have these extremes - on the one hand, false accusations and over-investigation; and on the other hand, really, really significant allegations with no proper investigation at all. You know, at Florida State, we'll never know what happened with Jameis Winston because - the quarterback of that team when he was in college, because the university so interfered with the investigation that the police couldn't do a proper police investigation.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You aim a lot of criticism, though, at the players themselves and for their role in this. What do you think the problem was with what they did?
JENKINS: So the problem that I have with the Minnesota football players was that they finally discovered their own power and leverage and voices on a university campus, but they applied it to a case that is really so objectionable. There was no sign in their statements that women exist on that campus - no sign of respect for women, no sign that their teammates may have behaved in a way that, while not criminal, may have been completely objectionable. You know, I felt the campus authorities had every right to go on and suspend a number of players over this even though it may not have been, you know, risen to criminal proof.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Obviously, though, when something like this happens, sports has such a central place in our culture - how do you think it plays into the broader conversation on sexual assault?
JENKINS: So what I would like to see is - I would like to see much more activism by men - male football players, male athletic figures - because, you know, we have got to protect each other. And the best way to do that, I think, is to recruit some of these role models on campus. I mean, football players could become the standard for good behavior.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sally Jenkins is sportswriter and columnist for The Washington Post.
Thanks so much for being with us.
JENKINS: Sure.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Tilikum, an orca who became famous as a subject of the documentary "Blackfish," died this past week in Orlando. He was responsible for the death of a SeaWorld trainer and two other people, and his story and the public's reaction to it pushed SeaWorld to stop breeding killer whales in captivity. NPR's Greg Allen reports.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Tilikum was about 36 years old, relatively old for a killer whale in captivity. SeaWorld said he'd been suffering from an apparent respiratory infection, but didn't give a cause of death. Tilikum became well-known to animal rights activists and the public through the documentary "Blackfish." That film examined the death in 2010 of SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau. Following a show at the Orlando park Tilikum, a large male orca, pulled Brancheau into the water, where she died from blunt force and drowning. In "Blackfish," former SeaWorld trainer Jeffrey Ventre described working with Tilikum.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "BLACKFISH")
JEFFREY VENTRE: He arrived, I think, in 1992. I was at Whale and Dolphin Stadium when he arrived. And he's twice as large as the next animal in the facility.
ALLEN: Brancheau was the third person killed by Tilikum. The first person killed was Keltie Byrne, a part-time trainer at Sealand of the Pacific, a Canadian park that's now closed. Byrne slipped into a pool containing Tilikum and two other orcas, where she was dragged around and drowned. The second person killed was at SeaWorld Orlando. A man named David Dukes (ph), who stayed in the park after it closed, was found the next morning on Tilikum's back, dead from drowning.
Naomi Rose is an orca biologist with the Animal Welfare Institute. She says it's clear from his behavior that Tilikum was frustrated and disturbed.
NAOMI ROSE: I don't know that he meant to kill the first two people. That really looked like some sort of play behavior, you know, and they drowned. But the third death, Dawn Brancheau, that was an attack. Who knows what was going on in his head? Again, pure speculation, but I do think that he's had a very grim life.
ALLEN: Animal welfare groups have long fought to stop SeaWorld and other marine parks from holding killer whales in captivity. Orcas are an intelligent social species that spend much of their life in family groups, and in the wild range over thousands of miles. Advocates say holding these huge mammals in a tank is cruel. As a male, Tilikum was prized as a breeder, siring more than 20 calves. At SeaWorld Orlando, former trainer Jeffrey Ventre says the orca was kept isolated most of the time. Ventre, now a medical doctor, says Tilikum showed neurotic behaviors.
VENTRE: Chewing on concrete, breaking his teeth on the steel bars simply out of boredom. He got picked on a lot. And he was alone a lot. Humans in isolation or chimps in isolation begin to act abnormally. And that's what happened in his case, and it led to the death of three human beings.
ALLEN: Following Dawn Brancheau's death, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued rulings that prohibited trainers from working in the water with killer whales. Activists stepped up their campaign against SeaWorld following the release of "Blackfish." Attendance dropped at the park, a decline the company attributed in part to public reaction to the film. In response, SeaWorld's new CEO, Joel Manby, announced the company was ending its orca breeding program, making this the last generation of killer whales at its parks. It's a major change in direction for SeaWorld.
Tim Zimmermann wrote about Dawn Brancheau's death for Outside Magazine and was one of the producers of "Blackfish." Despite the orca's troubled history, he always found a deep well of public sympathy for Tilikum.
TIM ZIMMERMANN: I think that's the most amazing thing that comes out of Tilikum's story is he killed three human beings, yet when you learn about his life story he does become the victim and you do sympathize with him.
ALLEN: In announcing his death, SeaWorld said Tilikum had a special place in the hearts of the staff at the theme park, but that his life will always be connected with the death of trainer Dawn Brancheau. Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Writer Dan Kois and his family are getting ready to head out on a trip, and it's a really, really great trip. It makes me at least a little bit envious. For the next year, Dan and his wife Alia and his daughters Lyra and Harper, ages 11 and 9, will spend three months each in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica and Hays, Kan. It's kind of an experiment to investigate how families live in each of these places and discover if there is perhaps a better way for a family unit to function than the Koises do in nearby Arlington, Va. And we plan to check in with the Koises at each stop.
Dan Kois joins me now in the studio. Hey, you.
DAN KOIS: Hello.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK, so you're going to have to walk me through this. How did the idea for this come up?
KOIS: Well, so you weren't here last winter when we had our big Washington-area snowstorm.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I was not.
KOIS: That snowstorm, for our family, was like the nail for want of which the army of our family was completely defeated. You know, our schedules - like many families, our schedules were already completely on the edge of, you know, disaster at every moment. And the addition of seven days of missed school and our children being unable to leave the house and our jobs being just the same as they always were led to total, absolute chaos.
And it so happened that - at that time that I was preparing for a trip to Iceland where I was reporting a story for The New York Times about the swimming pools of Iceland...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Nice.
KOIS: ...And the way that they served as community centers and gathering places for families and friends in a place where it's hard to find a place to get together because it's freezing cold all the time. And so while I was there, I met an incredible number of families who just seemed to have it together. And I was trying to figure out why.
And, you know, thanks to cultural and governmental institutions that really supported family life, but also thanks to what seemed to be an entirely different national conception of what time spent with your kids should look like and what it should feel like. Everyone just seemed more satisfied and more calm and more happy in their interactions with their family members than I could even conceive of.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK, so how did you choose these places? I mean, they seem to span not only the globe but also sort of very different takes on parenting.
KOIS: Yeah. Well, I wanted to look for places that polling and research have shown to be really conducive to happy and satisfied family life, so places like New Zealand and the Netherlands that constantly end up at the top of these lists of places with very happy families.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So there's science behind this.
KOIS: There's some science behind - and then there's also, like, the kinds of polls that are done by, like, travel agents.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm listening to you and I'm thinking, this sounds amazing. I want to hear about this. But when you told your wife and your kids, hey, you know, this entire life that you've been living here, we're going to just leave it all behind and we're going to go have this parenting experience all around the world, what did they say?
KOIS: Well, I'm pretty sure that, as in most modern families, this was not a decision I presented to my wife as a done. We have talked about this idea for years, this - you know, the notion that the way that we are doing family life can't necessarily be the best way. And so when I sort of found a way to turn this half-baked fantasy into an actual trip we could take, my wife, who was stranded in a house with two kids in a snowstorm, was pretty into the idea.
My kids have had wildly varying responses. There are times when they are so excited about the adventure that we're about to go on and really seem to buy into the notion. Sometimes, when they're angry at us about something else, they will just out of the blue yell, and you're taking us on this stupid trip that we don't even care about. But, you know, we get a little of each.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I mean, having traveled all over the world, you often see different parenting styles in different countries. But do you think it's transferable? Do you think we can really learn lessons from other cultures and import them to something completely different, like the United States where you are living this very fast-paced, hectic life? You don't really have the same kinds of infrastructure and culture in place.
KOIS: Right. Well, that's the important part, what you just said. The infrastructure that's in place in those countries allows families to live very different kinds of lives. But I do think from each of these places you can learn things about the personal interactions between parents and kids.
And I do think that living among these families for as long as we can and seeing how families treat each other and how they treat their time together makes me feel that it is possible to learn how to have a kind of quality time together as a family that isn't quality time as we necessarily define it here, right? Quality time meaning, oh, we really drilled math facts. I really wanted to have quality time with my family that was about facing a challenge together or talking about the world together. And I do think that's transferable from other cultures. I mean, I hope so.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Writer Dan Kois. His project and future book is called "How To Be A Family." Thank you. Bon voyage.
KOIS: Thanks.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
A Palestinian drove a truck into a crowd of Israeli soldiers according to Israeli police. At least four people are dead and 15 injured. The attack took place in Jerusalem at a popular promenade with a panoramic view of the Old City. Reporter Daniel Estrin is in Tel Aviv, and he joins us now.
Can you tell us how the attack unfolded, Daniel?
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Yeah. A group of Israeli soldiers had just gotten off a bus at the Haas Promenade. Israelis call it, in Hebrew, the Tayelet. It's a popular spot for tourists and locals, both Israelis and Palestinians. It has a sweeping view of the Jerusalem skyline. And the soldiers were there on a tour with tour guides. And security footage broadcast on Israeli television shows a white truck driving off the road and onto the promenade, barreling into the group of young soldiers and then very quickly driving in reverse, apparently to try to run over more soldiers. Israeli TV reported one of the tour guides shot and killed the truck driver. And a medic said four people, apparently soldiers in their 20s, were killed - most of them pinned under the truck - who died on the scene.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What do we know about the truck driver who carried out the attack?
ESTRIN: What we know is what the Israeli police chief told reporters. He was from an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Palestinian news sites identified him as 28-year-old Fadi al-Qanbar. But there's a police gag order right now on the details of the investigation, so we don't know much more than that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Obviously, when something like this happens, it creates a lot of consternation. How are Israeli and Palestinian officials responding?
ESTRIN: Well, the Israeli Cabinet is going to be meeting for an emergency meeting soon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the scene of the attack. No official word yet from Palestinian officials, but we are seeing a lot of reaction online from Israelis and Palestinians. I watched television coverage of the attack on Facebook Live. And there was just a stream of comments - Palestinians leaving smiley emojis and Palestinian flags, making fun of the soldiers running away that you can see in the coverage - the soldiers running away during the attack; and then Israelis leaving comments blaming leftists, calling death to Arabs. So there's a lot of anger right now online.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And this is only going to heighten tensions in an already violent year between Israelis and Palestinians. Give us some context for this attack.
ESTRIN: Right. I mean, this comes after more than a year of violence, Palestinian attacks - mostly stabbings but also car rammings like this one. In most of the incidents, Israeli soldiers or civilians have shot and killed or injured the Palestinian attackers. And it's also comes a couple days after Israeli military court found an Israeli soldier guilty of manslaughter in the killing of a Palestinian in Hebron, and there is a lot of anger here among many Israelis about that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Reporter Daniel Estrin, thank you so much.
ESTRIN: Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
The journalist Nat Hentoff has died at the age of 91. He was an author, a columnist and a noted jazz critic. Hentoff wrote for The Village Voice for 50 years until he was laid off in 2009. Our colleague Ari Shapiro spoke to him then and asked him if there was a song he'd like to end the conversation on that described his career or a personal favorite.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
NAT HENTOFF: One of Duke Ellington's songs, "Things Ain't What They Used To Be." And that is, of course, continually what we are confronted with as journalists, as readers, as citizens. But the other part of that is the roots of jazz go way back to black gospel and all the songs and the field hollers in slavery time. So while things ain't what they used to be, if you're a good reporter, you got to remember what the roots of everything is that you write about 'cause it keeps coming back.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Journalist Nat Hentoff who died yesterday - he was 91.
(SOUNDBITE OF DUKE ELLINGTON SONG, "THINGS AIN'T WHAT THEY USED TO BE")
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Iran's former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has died. He was 82 years old. He was one of the leaders of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. He served as president from 1989 to 1997. And most recently, he was the leader of the moderate reformist movement. Thomas Erdbrink is the Tehran bureau chief for The New York Times, and he joins us now on the line from Tehran.
Thanks so much for being with us.
THOMAS ERDBRINK, BYLINE: Thanks for having me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So we understand Rafsanjani died from a stroke. What's been the reaction in Iran?
ERDBRINK: Well, of course, Rafsanjani was a towering figure here in Iran, as you mentioned in the short bio you just said. He was a man - a politician, a man of all seasons, very much loved and also very much hated at the same time. People have gathered around the hospital where he has died at 6 o'clock local time. But at the same time, other people are not so sad. They feel that he hasn't been the best leader. But overall, people see him as one of the key leaders of the revolution and a man whose death will mean that there will be some change here in Iran.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you say change, what do you mean?
ERDBRINK: Well, he was the leader of this moderate reformist faction. He was also a huge supporter of President Hassan Rouhani, who is in power right now. Now, Mr. Rouhani is up for elections in May. And Mr. Rafsanjani's support meant that a lot of people would gather behind Mr. Rouhani. Now, with not only the nuclear deal that Mr. Rouhani engineered in danger and now also the support of Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani not present, it could mean that his re-election is in trouble.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What does Rafsanjani's death mean more broadly for the reformist movement in Iran?
ERDBRINK: Well, Mr. Rafsanjani was a man who was always anti-American, stuck to Iranian ideology but, at the same time, was preaching, if you will, a sort of political line, saying that there should be relations with the United States. There should be an update domestically of Iran's harsh ideological rules, if you will. Now, with him gone, it is much harder for the reformers and the moderates to sort of find a voice to say this because there's just not so many people around of his generation that would agree with him.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We have about 50 seconds left. What would you say his legacy is? How will he be remembered?
ERDBRINK: Well, he will be remembered as really a key player - a king-maker even - in Iranian politics. He is and was a good friend of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, but at the same time had the stature to be able to criticize his and other policies. And yes, with him gone, people will see that it will be harder to voice certain criticisms.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thomas Erdbrink in Tehran.
Thank you so much for being with us.
ERDBRINK: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Many state legislatures around this country have a serious human resources problem. Salaries for being a state legislator are relatively low. And as Johnny Kauffman of member station WABE reports, not everybody can afford to do the job.
JOHNNY KAUFFMAN, BYLINE: On top of raising two kids, LaDawn Jones runs a law practice. She's busy, but loved serving in the Georgia legislature. She had to leave, though, after one term because it just didn't pay enough.
LADAWN JONES: I absolutely believe that we need to increase the wage for legislators to keep up with the times.
KAUFFMAN: Lawmakers in Georgia make $17,000 a year. It's considered a part-time job, but it took much more of her time than that. When the legislature was in session, Jones couldn't work at her law firm and had to hire extra help. That cost her.
JONES: If I really sat down and did the math, I'm certain that the amount that I paid out was equal or more than what I received.
KAUFFMAN: A few big states like Pennsylvania or California have full-time lawmakers who earn $80,000 or even $100,000 a year. But in most states, legislators are paid like it's part-time. That can keep people from getting into state politics, says Neil Malhotra of Stanford University.
NEIL MALHOTRA: There's very, very few working-class people in legislatures. And this might have something to do with why a lot of legislation does not seem very friendly towards working-class people.
KAUFFMAN: And it's not just working-class people who are left out, Malhotra says. Anyone with a regular job has a hard time taking several months a year off to work in a state capital. Mike Dudgeon just retired from the legislature because the requirements of his job at a videogame company were too great.
MIKE DUDGEON: Some people suggested that I sort of do the phone-it-in thing and just keep my seat in the legislature and just do the bare minimum, just go down and vote and kind of do that. But that's - I just can't do that. It's not my personality. I'm going to do anything, I'm going to do it well.
KAUFFMAN: Many lawmakers own businesses or they work in law, medicine or agriculture, professions where they can control their schedules. People with experience in fields like technology or finance have a harder time serving. Malhotra says when it comes to those issues, lobbyists are the only experts at the statehouse. And that gives them an edge in the legislative process.
MALHOTRA: You don't really write these bills. The lobbyists kind of write the bills for you.
KAUFFMAN: In Georgia, there's no sign lawmakers will get a raise anytime soon. David Shafer is a leader in the Georgia Senate.
DAVID SHAFER: I'm not in favor of increasing legislative pay. I don't know that anyone serves in the General Assembly because of the pay, and I don't know that we would attract a better legislator if the pay were higher.
KAUFFMAN: Georgia lawmakers are set to pass a more than $20 billion budget this year and grapple with a failing hospital system. Jones would love to be a part of those debates.
JONES: I could not dare ask my family to continue to make such a big sacrifice without that help.
KAUFFMAN: So instead of focusing on statewide issues from the capital, Jones plans to focus her political energy on her community. For NPR News, I'm Johnny Kauffman in Atlanta.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALWAYS THE RUNNER'S "SHOULD A BEAR INTERRUPT YOUR PICNIC")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Today in Your Health, we report on the consequence of a change at many doctor's offices. It's common that a doctor or nurse enters information on a computer instead of filling out paper forms about the patient. Those electronic medical records are much easier for researchers to explore. And it turns out that individual patients can benefit from what's learned. NPR's Richard Harris reports.
RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: Computerized medical records are all the buzz these days, but they're hardly new. Pioneers at the early HMO Kaiser Permanente were using electronic medical records as far back as the 1970s and saw them as a big part of the future of medicine.
TRACY LIEU: The part of it that they didn't envision that we're envisioning now is how proactive a role patients would be taking.
HARRIS: Dr. Tracy Lieu, who heads Kaiser's research division in Oakland, Calif., says patients don't just contribute information. They can learn from the experience of others, with patient privacy protected, of course.
LIEU: Patients are always saying, you know, don't just give me the averages. Tell me what happened to others who kind of look like me, who made the same treatment choices I did, and tell me not only did they live or die, but tell me what their quality of life was about.
HARRIS: Right now, she has a prototype of how this could work and uses pancreatic cancer as an example.
LIEU: We can put in pancreatic.
HARRIS: She pulls up data from all patients at Kaiser who have been treated for this cancer and then extracts specific information.
LIEU: And let's look at the survival curves for those patients.
HARRIS: Doctors will eventually be able to run a search like this and refine it to look only at people in certain age groups, cancer stages, treatment regimens, also information about their mental and emotional states, which comes from a short patient survey. That's pretty bare-bones information. Ideally, these medical records would provide a much fuller picture of a patient's emotional state. But Lieu says that would require more work for the patients.
LIEU: If you're a patient and someone says, gee, we'd like you to fill out this 30-item survey on a routine basis, you're going to say, why? What will this get me? How will it help my care?
HARRIS: That's one of the many problems researchers will have to solve in order to make these electronic medical records deeply useful in a world that straddles research and practical information. Another missing piece of the Kaiser records is they are shy on genetic information about patients. But the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania has sunk a lot of money and effort into adding gene scans to electronic medical records. They already have gene scans for 50,000 patients in their system. Dr. David Ledbetter, the chief scientific officer, says that number is growing fast.
DAVID LEDBETTER: Even though this is primarily a research project, we're identifying genomic variants that are actually important to people's health and health care today.
HARRIS: Geisinger patient Jody Christ volunteered to get the genetic screen done during one of her routine medical visits. Her doctor had been concerned about her high cholesterol and told her to work on getting in shape.
JODY CHRIST: So I started to ride a bike and 10 minutes in I would start to get a sensation down my left arm.
HARRIS: That made the 61-year-old from Elysburg, Pa., uneasy, so she stopped exercising. But last February, she got a call from the program that had run the genetic testing telling her she had a genetic variant that explained why she had persistently high cholesterol levels.
CHRIST: They suggested I make an appointment and come in to talk to them.
HARRIS: That led to a series of tests through the spring. Toward the end of April, Christ took a stress test, which suggested serious heart trouble.
CHRIST: April 29, they had me in for a catheter. And by May 5, I was having triple bypass surgery.
HARRIS: So how do you feel now?
CHRIST: Good, oh, real good, much, much different (laughter). I feel they saved my life.
HARRIS: Full on genetic testing like this is the exception since these tests typically cost a couple of thousand dollars. But Ledbetter says the prices are falling fast and this year could even be in the $300 range.
LEDBETTER: So we think as the cost comes down it will be possible to sequence all of the genes of individual patients, store that information in the electronic medical record. And it will guide and individualize and optimize patient care.
HARRIS: Doctors don't know how to interpret most of the genetic results, but there are a few genetic variants, like Jody Christ's cholesterol marker, that are clear indications of serious health problems. Ledbetter said, easy-to-interpret variants like that have shown up in 3.5 percent of the patients they studied.
LEDBETTER: Well, that 3.5 percent is going to grow. I don't know what the final number will be, but it'll be in the 5 to 10 percent range. And then our hope is that understanding the genetics of those single genes will also help us to understand the biology of more common forms of cancer, cardiovascular disease.
HARRIS: And he hopes even more genetically complex diseases like obesity and diabetes. Geisinger's experiment, done in partnership with a company called Regeneron, is an important foray into the new world where genetic data merge with electronic medical records.
HARLAN KRUMHOLZ: The scientific community has been sort of waiting to see what was going to happen here.
HARRIS: Dr. Harlan Krumholz is a professor of medicine at Yale University. He's excited at the prospect of being able to look at physical symptoms and medical records and then look for genetic variations that could be responsible.
KRUMHOLZ: I think what we're also discovering is that the quality of data all around us is not necessarily research quality.
HARRIS: Think of something as basic as the language in these medical records.
KRUMHOLZ: Words like shock tend to mean different things to different people, and so I think it would be unfortunate if people felt that all of a sudden we have this remarkable treasure trove. There's a long way to go to move from where we are today to where we need to be.
HARRIS: The potential is great, he says, both in terms of understanding disease and helping individual patients. In fact, that's the idea behind a massive federal effort called the Precision Medicine Initiative recently rebranded as All Of Us. But medicine is not yet at home in the world of big data.
KRUMHOLZ: Medicine's got to catch up. And medicine's got to understand how best to take advantage of all the information that's being generated every day.
HARRIS: These early experiences at Kaiser, Geisinger and elsewhere are helping find the path forward. Richard Harris, NPR News.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
One year from now, South Korea will host the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. One Olympic tradition is to select mascots. The Koreans chose two animals native to the country, a white tiger and a black bear. But as NPR's Elise Hu reports, there's a disturbing history for the bear in the country now celebrating it.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: When Korean Olympian Yuna Kim announced the PyeongChang 2018 mascots - a white tiger named Soohorang and Bandabi, an Asiatic black bear - this is how she described them.
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YUNA KIM: They are so cute and adorable, so I'm sure that you're going to fall in love with them.
HU: The adorable Asiatic black bear is better known regionally as a moon bear for the distinctive white crescent on its chest. It's a symbol of the province where the Olympic Games will be held.
ANNA JIHYUN YOU: It's a very unique and symbolic creature in Korea.
HU: Anna Jihyun You is a spokeswoman for the Olympics here. She says moon bears have long been part of Korean folklore.
YOU: I can't say exact date how far it go back, but it's a really long time ago.
HU: Its place in folklore and history hasn't spared the actual bear breed itself from cruelty in Korea. An hour's drive south of Seoul...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: He's taking us to the bears.
HU: ...You can find a bear bile farm, one of 39 sprinkled across the country. Here, farmer Kim Kwang-su keeps 230 moon bears. He breeds them and cages them for the legal minimum of 10 years. Then they're slaughtered for their gallbladders. In East Asia, bear bile is believed to solve a host of health problems from hangovers to heart disease.
Do they have much of a quality of life, then, if they're sort of living in these cages for 10 years, waiting to die?
KIM KWANG-SU: (Speaking Korean).
HU: "It's true we don't have play facilities for the bears," Kim says. "But in South Korea right now, almost all these bears are kept in cages." A century ago, moon bears roamed freely in the mountains of Korea. But bear bile became such a sought-after traditional medicine that today, the bears have been captured and farmed to near-extinction.
JILL ROBINSON: The way that these bears are farmed is particularly cruel.
HU: Jill Robinson is a veterinarian and the head of Animals Asia foundation. She first visited a bear bile farm in 1993.
ROBINSON: Cages and cages all around me with bears with the most miserable faces with six-inch catheters protruding from their abdomens, their teeth cut back, their paw tips cut back so that the claws couldn't grow and hurt the farmers as they were extracting the bile.
HU: Since then, South Korea has banned the practice of milking bears for bile while they are alive. But the animals are still living in captivity until they're killed. The bear farmer, Kim, says he has come to enjoy the bears he keeps. But for his business to survive, he slaughters them. He has no other livelihood.
KIM: (Speaking Korean).
HU: "It hurts. It hurts me. I don't even look at them when they're being slaughtered," he says. "I mean, you're not a human being if you're not sad about it." Which underlines the gulf between what's happening to the actual Asiatic black bears and the cartoon cute character of next year's Olympic mascot. While moon bear mascot Bandabi glides his way down animated mountains in promo videos, the inspiration for Bandabi spend their days banging their heads against their cages. Jill Robinson.
ROBINSON: I just really hope that the Korean government does make that connection and finally gives the - this incredible species of bear the freedom that they deserve.
HU: Demand for bear bile has collapsed recently, which led to the closure of many farms already. But nearly 800 moon bears still live in caged limbo in their home country. Elise Hu, NPR News, Dangjin, South Korea.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's ask how serious North Korea might be about launching an intercontinental ballistic missile. A spokesman says the country could launch a long range missile anytime it wants from anywhere it wants in the country. This is of interest to many people, not least of them Joel Wit, a former U.S. diplomat and visitor to North Korea. He's now at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and he's come by our studios this morning. Good morning, sir.
JOEL WIT: Good morning.
INSKEEP: Can we start with the evidence? Because North Korea makes claims all the time. What is the evidence that they have an effective missile that they could launch any moment?
WIT: Well, North Korea has been working on this missile for a number of years, and recently, we've seen it in military parades in North Korea, so we know it exists. And secondly, they've recently conducted tests of rocket engines, large rocket engines, that could be used for this weapon. And third, of course, they launched satellites into space.
INSKEEP: So they've got some - they've got some...
WIT: They've got a lot of technology they've been working on.
INSKEEP: But of course, the thing that Americans would worry about most, I suppose, is a missile that hypothetically would be launched at - what? - Anchorage, Alaska, Los Angeles. What could this missile hypothetically do?
WIT: Well, it's very interesting because the recent test of this large rocket engine has led experts to believe that North Korea can not only reach Hawaii or Alaska or the West Coast but now can also reach the east coast of the United States.
INSKEEP: Can they fire a missile that would carry a nuclear warhead?
WIT: Once again, they've conducted five nuclear tests. They're certainly working on putting a warhead on top of this long range missile, and I believe they will eventually succeed.
INSKEEP: But I guess we should say you have to be able not only to have a nuclear device that works, but you have to miniaturize it to get it on top of the missile, right? They can do that?
WIT: Exactly. And that's part of what they've been doing with these five nuclear tests. That's one of the objectives, I'm sure, although I don't - you know, I'm not there. I'm not observing the tests, but it's certainly one of the objectives of these tests that they've been conducting.
INSKEEP: So this is not saber-rattling necessarily or missile-rattling. This is a serious thing you think.
WIT: It's a serious thing. It's not going to happen overnight. They're not going to be deploying operational missiles overnight. So experts like myself think by 2020, but they're going to have to start testing them soon in order to deploy them in 2020.
INSKEEP: Now, let's remember the sequence of events. Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, said something about this missile test on the new year. Is this right?
WIT: Yeah. The North Korean leader gives an annual New Year's speech, and so it was part of that speech he gave.
INSKEEP: And then President-elect Donald Trump said on Twitter this is not going to happen.
WIT: Right, right.
INSKEEP: And now North Korea has said actually we can do this anytime we want. I can fire a missile anytime I want.
WIT: Right. So there's this kind of very superficial exchange, and no one really knows how President Trump is going to stop this from happening. And that's, of course, the million-dollar question for everyone.
INSKEEP: How could you stop this from happening?
WIT: Well, there's a lot of speculation about how you might do this, ranging from launching a preemptive attack, destroying the missile when it's being - before it's being tested, shooting it down with anti-ballistic missile systems that we might have based in Asia, to starting some sort of serious dialogue with the North Koreans and trying to head off this possibility before it happens.
INSKEEP: OK. Let me ask about that because people have tried for decades to engage this regime. You've been involved in that during the Clinton administration in the 1990s. How's that work?
WIT: You know, it's kind of hard for me to reduce 20 years of diplomatic interchange to a few seconds. But the bottom line is people - one of the myths about dealing with North Korea is that you can't talk to them. And my experience during the 1990s when I was in the State Department was you can reach agreements, and the agreements can have a real impact on what they're doing. So what I would say is we just need to be persistent and keep trying because the alternatives are really horrible.
INSKEEP: Such as a war.
WIT: Such as a war. If we try to launch a preemptive attack against a missile that's about to be launched, it's very likely the North Koreans will respond militarily.
INSKEEP: But let's be real here. Twenty years of talks, and during that time, North Korea has continued developing nuclear weapons, has conducted multiple tests of nuclear weapons and is now saying that they're on the verge of testing the delivery system.
WIT: Actually, you're right. But for 10 years of that time, North Korea was not doing anything really. And they actually cut back their programs because of an agreement we reached in 1994. I'm not saying that we can do that again. But I'm saying it's certainly worth a try. And we should forget about these myths and focus on what might work and move forward with it.
INSKEEP: Should the U.S. goal - in just a few seconds - then, in your view, be to buy time and hope that eventually the regime changes or something else happens a few years from now?
WIT: Well, you know, people have been thinking that the regime was going to change since the Soviet Union collapsed. And that ain't going to happen. So I think what we really need to do is dig in our heels and try a serious diplomatic effort, and if that doesn't work, then we can move on to much tougher measures.
INSKEEP: Joel Wit, thanks for coming by this morning, really appreciate it.
WIT: Thank you.
INSKEEP: He is at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He's a former U.S. diplomat.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now, North Korea is just one of the issues that the next secretary of defense is going to have on his plate. Here's President-elect Trump a few weeks ago in North Carolina introducing the man he hopes he - will take up that job.
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DONALD TRUMP: It is now my honor and privilege to welcome to the stage your next secretary of defense, General Mad Dog Mattis.
INSKEEP: That would be James Mattis - his given name. He's a retired Marine. Now, when he joined the president-elect on stage, he mentioned the one thing that has to happen before he can head to the Pentagon.
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JAMES MATTIS: I look forward to being the civilian leader so long as the Congress gives me the waiver and the Senate votes to consent.
INSKEEP: Civilian leader - it's a civilian job, and so retired General Mattis would need a waiver to get around a law that requires the defense secretary to be far removed from military service. This has been granted once before 67 years ago. NPR's Tom Bowman has a look back at the man who got the waiver - General George Marshall.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: General Marshall was the Army chief of staff during World War II. He created a force of more than 8 million soldiers, settled disputes with allies, laid the strategy to defeat Germany and Japan. Winston Churchill called him the true architect of victory. Marshall was famously apolitical. He didn't vote and was not chummy with those in power. Franklin Roosevelt once called him George. Marshall replied, it's General Marshall, Mr. President.
H. W. BRANDS: He was partly a standoffish guy by temperament. He was quite reserved.
BOWMAN: H.W. Brands teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin. He says it's no surprise President Truman turned to this tall, aloof general for secretary of state.
BRANDS: George Marshall was the model of the soldier statesman in the early years of the Cold War. He was someone whose temperament was such that no one worried about him becoming another Caesar, a military man taking over the government.
BOWMAN: Marshall did take over the rebuilding of Europe, with billions of dollars in American money, in what became known as the Marshall Plan. The general talked about that effort a few years before his death.
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GEORGE MARSHALL: As I've often said, it wasn't the idea of the so-called Marshall Plan as it was the execution and how we got it through Congress, and it took us from June until the following April. And I worked on that as hard as though I was running for the Senate or the presidency. And that's what I'm proud of, that part of it.
BOWMAN: Marshall's career did not end there. President Truman wanted him as secretary of defense following the disastrous first few months of the Korean War when U.S. troops were ill-prepared and forced to retreat.
ROBERT SCALES: Everyone in 1950 considered Marshall to be the iconic general of his generation.
BOWMAN: Robert Scales is a retired Army major general and former commandant of the Army War College.
SCALES: He used the power of his personality not only within the American military, which was absolute, but also among our allies.
BOWMAN: First, Marshall needed a waiver from Congress. The law said an officer nominated for defense secretary must be out of uniform for 10 years. Scales said that had more to do with concerns a former general might be too cozy with those on active duty than any worry about a loss of civilian control of the military. Still, Senator Harry Cain of Washington opposed Marshall for that very reason.
America will not solve her problems, Cain told Marshall at his hearing, by endeavoring to find a soldier old or young to carry burdens which ought to be borne and conquered by civilian citizens. And a young senator from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, asked Marshall what he thought about the need for civilian control. When I was a second lieutenant, Marshall told him, I thought we'd never get anywhere in the Army unless a soldier was secretary of war. As I grew a little older, the general said, I came to the fixed conclusion he should never be a soldier.
MARK STOLER: Marshall once said there is nothing greener than a freshly minted second lieutenant.
BOWMAN: Mark Stoler is editor of the George Marshall Papers and is a professor at the University of Vermont.
STOLER: What he had learned was that his purely military training was insufficient for the tasks that face the country at the highest level.
BOWMAN: In the end, Marshall got his waiver and was easily confirmed as defense secretary. This week, those same issues will be raised on Capitol Hill. Like General Marshall, General Mattis is seen as a consummate professional and has a lot of support in Congress. But a few Democrats, including Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, are opposed to a waiver for Mattis. Civilian control of our military, she said, is a fundamental principle of American democracy. Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep. Maybe this is an auspicious sign for the new year. Children on an island in Germany discovered chocolate eggs washing up on the beach. Deutsche Welle reports a passing cargo ship weathered a storm. Tens of thousands of Kinder Surprise chocolate eggs with little toys inside washed overboard. For kids on the island, it was sort of like discovering a message in a bottle, except it was a toy and you could eat the bottle. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Detroit auto show began over the weekend, which is happening at a moment when the auto industry is very much in the news. President-elect Trump has repeatedly targeted the industry for doing some of its work in Mexico. The industry has been pushing back in places but has some announcements of its own today. Ford and Chrysler are making news, which we will discuss with NPR's Sonari Glinton, who's at the auto show in Detroit. Hi, Sonari.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Hey, Steve, how are you doing?
INSKEEP: I'm OK, sounds interesting where you are. What's Ford saying?
GLINTON: Well, I am actually on the Ford stand where they just announced that there's going to be a new Ford Bronco - remember that? - and a new Ford Ranger that shows their commitment to building trucks and SUV. And it's very important that - trucks are dominating and SUVs are dominating in the U.S. We're building more of them and more of them are being built here in the U.S. Small cars - the American consumer's turning away from small cars right now.
INSKEEP: It had been so long since I'd even thought about the Ford Bronco I had to look it up. It's kind of halfway between a truck and an SUV looks to me.
GLINTON: Exactly. And that's - those are the cars that we're building, and it's interesting that President-elect Trump is, you know, singling out small cars when the industry here is continually saying they're going to be building bigger SUVs and more complex cars here in the U.S.
INSKEEP: But part of the news is more jobs in the United States, more investment in the United States.
GLINTON: Well, that's correct. Chrysler announced that they're going to be spending about a billion dollars here. That seems preemptive. They were the one automaker who hadn't got an angry tweet from the president-elect. Ford is announcing that it's spending money here. And every time you go to one of these press conferences, each of the automakers is intensely saying, like, how much of this car is being built. The Bronco's going to be built in the U.S. The Ranger's going to be built in the U.S., of course, because there are some tariffs that make that so. But Hyundai and other companies are saying, look, we're building in the U.S. and that's an important part of this auto show.
INSKEEP: Sonari, can I just ask - the economy is pretty strong right now, by most measures. Unemployment is very low, and auto sales, after the total trough in - during the Great Recession, have really taken off. Does it just make basic economic sense that the auto companies would be investing more and particularly investing more in the U.S. market at this time regardless of who's president of the United States?
GLINTON: Well, exactly, but they're - I mean, the U.S. is a mature market. So they're investing in sort of mature vehicles - SUVs and things like that. The smaller cars, we're, like we said, we are turning away from small cars. They're sending those, that production, to small car countries where people are buying them. In Mexico, for instance, the demand for these small cars is up while it's falling here, and they can export those cars from Mexico for a lot less. There's no tariffs for almost all of the world because Mexico has free trade agreements with, like, more than 40 countries around the globe. So they can send cars and trucks without tariffs in a way that the U.S. can't.
INSKEEP: OK. Sonari, thanks very much, really appreciate it.
GLINTON: It's always a pleasure, Steve.
INSKEEP: NPR's Sonari Glinton is at the Detroit auto show where Ford and Chrysler have made some news, both saying that they are investing more to build more vehicles within the United States.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
He may have a country to run in less than two weeks, but President-elect Trump has some unfinished business in Jupiter, Fla. A federal judge there will soon rule in a lawsuit involving Trump National Golf Course. Some club members are suing Mr. Trump for refusing to return their deposits. NPR's Greg Allen looks at Trump's long-running role in this and other court battles.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Trump owns more than a dozen golf courses, including Trump National Jupiter Golf Club. The club was in the spotlight last spring when Trump stopped by during his primary race.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The next president of the United States, Mr. Donald J. Trump.
(CHEERING)
ALLEN: Trump was eager to plug the club located just north of Palm Beach.
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DONALD TRUMP: It's a Jack Nicklaus signature course, and it's a great, great resort and place. And we have a lot of our members here, I see. And...
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TRUMP: ...We love our members.
ALLEN: But that's a love not shared by all the members of Trump's club. From the club's entrance here, members drive under live oaks and palm trees to a luxurious reserve that's off-limits to the public. And behind the club's gates, Trump and dozens of his club's members are involved in a long-running legal dispute. It began in 2012 after Trump bought the property from Marriott Vacations Worldwide.
He paid just $5 million, a bargain price. But as part of the deal, he had to assume some $40 million in debt due to members who, when they bought into the country club, put down refundable deposits. Michelle Tanzer, a lawyer who specializes in golf clubs and their membership plans, says for Trump, those refundable deposits were a problem.
MICHELLE TANZER: It's because it is also known as a loan. And if the member stays a member of the club for the full term, which is generally 30 years, then the club is obligated to pay the membership deposit back.
ALLEN: If members want out early, they can get their deposits back - deposits that were as high as $200,000 - but only after the club finds new members to take their places. When Trump bought the club, lots of members, at least 150, wanted out. Trump said anyone who decided to stay on the resignation list would have to continue to pay dues but would be barred from the club until a new member was found. Disgruntled members said he unfairly changed the deposit rules, so they filed a class-action lawsuit.
Last year, a federal judge in Miami heard the case. Because a ruling is pending, members and their lawyers aren't giving interviews. But win or lose, Trump's hardball business tactics have already been successful. More than half of the members who originally wanted out have taken their names off the resignation list, removing tens of millions of dollars in liabilities from the Jupiter club's balance sheet. This is just one of many lawsuits Trump remains entangled in as Inauguration Day approaches.
When he becomes president, Trump will be nominating judges to the federal bench and have influence and authority that makes him an even more intimidating legal opponent than before. But Steven Lubet, a law professor at Northwestern University, says legally speaking, there's no conflict in Trump's role as president and litigant. It's because of a legal principle known as the rule of necessity.
STEVEN LUBET: Which says that if every judge is potentially disqualified for some reason, then no judge is disqualified for that reason.
ALLEN: The U.S. Supreme Court dealt with this issue in 1997, when President Bill Clinton was named in a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by Paula Jones. The court ruled that a sitting president doesn't have immunity in lawsuits unrelated to the office. But then again, there's never been a president as litigious as Trump. Just last week, he was deposed in another suit, this one involving celebrity chef Jose Andres in a dispute over a restaurant at Trump's new hotel, just blocks from the White House. Greg Allen, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
There's a college football championship game tonight that is a rematch. Alabama plays Clemson almost a year to the day since the two teams played for the title last year. Now, Alabama won that game 45-40, so Clemson is thinking about revenge. NPR's Tom Goldman is here to talk about that. Hi, Tom.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Hello.
INSKEEP: What are the chances for Clemson here?
GOLDMAN: Well, last year's game, Clemson's Deshaun Watson, considered the best quarterback in college football, he had a monster performance against Alabama's vaunted defense. He ran and passed for a total of 480 yards. He threw four touchdown passes. He's back for tonight's game. Then in this year's College Football Playoff semifinals, Clemson looked really tough beating Ohio State 31-nothing while Alabama wasn't exactly the juggernaut it's supposed to be in its win over the University of Washington. Experts said 'Bama (ph) even looked a little vulnerable.
INSKEEP: Whether they looked vulnerable or not, Alabama has won four out of the last seven titles.
GOLDMAN: Good point. The fact that a lot of people are starting to talk Clemson upset - you know, it's perfect for the Crimson Tide to be the favorite and have this perceived slight that people are disrespecting, you know, your 26-game win streak, which the Crimson Tide are on, your amazing body of work. This gives Alabama that jolt of anger that athletes and teams love before a big game.
INSKEEP: You like that before a big interview on MORNING EDITION, right? That jolt of anger?
GOLDMAN: Well, you just got me angry before we started here, and it's working.
INSKEEP: (Laughter) If only people had heard that. So what should we watch for in tonight's game?
GOLDMAN: Alabama's defense against Deshaun Watson. He is very good, but he's thrown a bunch of interceptions this season. He threw two more in that Ohio State game that they won. But Alabama's defense is ruthless on turnovers. Of the 27 fumbles recovered or passes intercepted by Crimson Tide defenders this season, they returned 11 for touchdowns. You make a mistake, there's a whopping 40 percent chance the Alabama defense will turn it into a score. And defensive touchdowns can really break an opponent's spirit.
INSKEEP: Are you pinpointing, Tom, why it is that Alabama has won so many championships in recent years, defense?
GOLDMAN: I believe I am. I'm pinpointing defense. I will also pinpoint the man on the sideline with the headset, Nick Saban. He keeps winning championships dating back to his five years at LSU before his decade at Alabama. Saban is 12 and 1 in championship games. That's conference championships and national championships. If Alabama wins tonight, that'll be national championship number six for Saban. That would tie him for the most with Alabama coaching legend Bear Bryant. You can tell by those numbers Saban's teams play their best in the biggest games.
INSKEEP: How does he make that happen?
GOLDMAN: Many layers to his success. Here are a couple. He preaches process. Now, listen to this Saban quote, Steve. Quote, "I'm tired of hearing all this talk from people who don't understand the process of hard work like little kids in the backseat asking, are we there yet? Get where you're going one mile marker at a time." I'll bet he was loads of fun on car trips with the family, don't you?
INSKEEP: (Laughter) He might've been in the back seat as a kid saying that.
GOLDMAN: (Laughter) Right, exactly. Now, while he has a system, Saban also is flexible. There was this really good article in Sports Illustrated. It talks about Saban not being afraid to change. He's recently been recruiting faster, more versatile players to give Alabama the option to play this up-tempo brand of football that's become popular in recent years. As one former player said, Saban sees the writing on the wall before other people.
INSKEEP: We've been listening to NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman on this day of the College Football National Championship, Alabama and Clemson. Tom, thanks.
GOLDMAN: You're welcome.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now, when Hollywood stars gathered last night for the Golden Globe Awards, much of the attention focused on a certain recently promoted reality TV star. NPR's Mandalit del Barco reports.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: President-elect Donald Trump's name may not have been uttered on stage, but he and the election he won were referenced throughout the show. It started with host Jimmy Fallon's monologue.
(SOUNDBITE OF 74TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS)
JIMMY FALLON: This is the Golden Globes, one of the few places left where America still honors the popular vote. But...
(LAUGHTER)
DEL BARCO: Fallon joked about the company that tabulates the award show ballots.
(SOUNDBITE OF 74TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS)
FALLON: The accounting firm of Ernst and Young and Putin. But here we go.
DEL BARCO: And he referred to the Golden Globes-nominated movie "Florence Foster Jenkins."
(SOUNDBITE OF 74TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS)
FALLON: The world's worst opera singer, and even she turned down performing at Donald Trump's inauguration. It's tough to book. It's tough to book.
DEL BARCO: The star of that movie is actress Meryl Streep, who was nominated for that role and honored for her lifetime achievements by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. In accepting that award, she used her platform to defend what she called some of the most vilified segments of America - Hollywood, foreigners and the press. Streep says she was appalled at the performance given by candidate Trump when he mocked a disabled news reporter.
(SOUNDBITE OF 74TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS)
MERYL STREEP: It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. And I still can't get it out of my head because it wasn't in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it's modeled by someone on the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody's life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.
DEL BARCO: Though her voice was hoarse, Streep made a loud plea for empathy. Trump told The New York Times he did not watch the Golden Globes, and he dismissed Meryl Streep as a Hillary lover. The reality TV star told the Times he was not surprised that he'd come under attack from what he called, quote, "liberal movie people." Television people were also honored last night, including FX's "Atlanta" and "The People V. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story." The Hollywood Foreign Press Association also gave awards to AMC's "The Night Manager" and "The Crown" on Netflix.
"Elle" won for best foreign film, and actress Isabelle Huppert, who starred in it, won best actress in a drama. Casey Affleck won for his role in "Manchester By The Sea." And the best dramatic picture award went to "Moonlight." Onstage, Director Barry Jenkins thanked his mother in Miami for inspiring him. Backstage, he told reporters that as the country moves into a new presidential administration, films should continue to tell personal stories.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BARRY JENKINS: We have to give people things not to escape to - there's room for escapism - but things they can run to to reaffirm that - not that all lives matter. I don't want to step into that. But that you know what? If you're feeling something or you want to speak it, you speak it and someone there - will be there to hear your truth.
DEL BARCO: But it was precisely an escapist movie, a love letter to Los Angeles and old-fashioned musicals, that swept most of last night's movie categories. "La La Land" picked up a record seven Golden Globes. It was dubbed the year's best musical or comedy.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LA LA LAND")
RYAN GOSLING: (As Sebastian, singing) City of stars, are you shining just for me?
DEL BARCO: Singing the year's best original song from the best original score were Golden Globe Award-winning actors Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LA LA LAND")
EMMA STONE: (As Mia, singing) Never shined so brightly.
DEL BARCO: Stone called "La La Land" a film for dreamers. Mandalit del Barco, NPR News, Beverly Hills.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's a really big week in Congress. The United States Senate plans hearings on many of President-elect Trump's choices for the Cabinet. As if that wasn't enough, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans an initial step toward repealing Obamacare, which leaves Democrats who are in the minority scrambling to put up a fight. We've reached one of those Democrats this morning. Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, who of course was Hillary Clinton's running mate during the late presidential campaign, now returns to the Senate. Senator, welcome back to the program.
TIM KAINE: Hey, Steve, great to be with you today.
INSKEEP: Let's talk about Obamacare first. The Republican plan here is to repeal that law right away and replace it with something else later. Mitch McConnell says he hopes not too much later. What's wrong with that?
KAINE: Well, you used the word the Republican plan, Steve. They don't have a plan. The repeal with no plan to replace on the table is jump off the cliff and we'll figure out how to land later. And groups like the Urban Institute say that a repeal with no obvious replacement plan would be a disaster. It would reduce health coverage for millions of people, would cause insurers to leave the market, would raise premiums. And because health care is one-sixth of the economy, injecting uncertainty into that aspect of the economy is going to create other problems too. They ought to put a plan on the table before they have a repeal.
INSKEEP: Although, of course, Republicans can say this is a huge priority. Our voters expect this of us. We need to get it done.
KAINE: Well - but we're talking about people's lives. Health care is not a game. It's life and death for people, whether they have health care or not. And that's why groups like the AMA, for example - last week, the AMA wrote a letter to Congress and said it would be absolute malpractice to have a vote on repeal until you have a plan on the table so people can compare it.
INSKEEP: Oh, you mean the American Medical Association.
KAINE: Yes, the American Medical Association. And the hospitals are saying the same thing. And a group of 14 of us Democrats, we wrote a letter to Republicans last week and said the same thing. We're very willing to sit down at the table and talk about reforms and improvements, ways to fix and make the law better. But once you cast a repeal vote, you're telling us you don't want to hear our opinion. Let's sit down and talk about that now before we before we hurt a lot of people and hurt the American economy.
INSKEEP: Now, there has been a little bit of dissent in the Republican caucus. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a state where a lot of people gained insurance under Obamacare, has said that he told President-elect Trump he wants to repeal and replace on the same day. And he contends that Trump said he agreed with that notion. But you still are in a situation where you, Democrats, are in the Senate minority dealing with this huge Republican priority of repealing Obamacare. What's your political strategy for changing how this turns out?
KAINE: Steve, what we've got to do is find a couple of Senate Republicans who agree with the American Medical Association who agree with what Donald Trump said on the trail, which is nobody is going to lose their insurance, we're going to make sure people have something that's better and that's cheaper. Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump's spokeswoman, repeated that claim last week - we don't want anybody, not one person, not one family, to lose their insurance. But if you do a repeal with no replacement, a lot of people are going to lose their insurance, and it's going to be real bad.
So we just have to keep reminding our Republican colleagues of the promise that Donald Trump made on the trail, that nobody would lose their insurance. And the 48 Democrats are rock solid unified on this. And over the course of the next few weeks, as we're talking to our constituents and sharing their stories, we hope we can convince a handful of Republicans to agree with us and then engage in a discussion about what are the necessary reforms.
INSKEEP: Senator Kaine, are you going to be able to successfully slow down or stop some of President-elect Trump's Cabinet choices, many of whom you're supposed to see in hearings this week?
KAINE: We have a - we do have an aggressive schedule of hearings. But over the weekend, Steven, as you know, the Office of Government Ethics put out a letter saying, look, the Trump Cabinet nominations, as a general rule, they're way behind earlier Cabinet secretaries in terms of complying with government ethics rules, filing financial reports, having the relevant background checks done on them. And those are the kinds of things that need to be done before these nominees are confirmed. And that is an independent government agency that basically said you can't rush this because the ethics issues are important.
You know, I think these people need to comply with ethics rules and that we need to have all the information about their finances just as we have in past situations. So I think that there is some likelihood we'd be able to slow down some of the process. Whether or not any will be stopped remains to be seen, and certainly not until after the hearings will we be able to comment on that.
INSKEEP: Can I ask about slowing down some of these choices?
KAINE: Yes.
INSKEEP: Because it's many members of the national security team coming up first - Jeff Sessions for attorney general, James Mattis at the Pentagon, I could go on for a little while here. Senate Republican John Cornyn said the other day - he's quoted in The New York Times. This is his quote (reading) this is a dangerous world we're living in and why in the world would we want to make it even more dangerous just to let our colleagues delay for delay's sake President-elect Trump getting to fill his Cabinet?
Now, let me ask you, Senator Kaine, if, as people on your side say, if you believe that President-elect Trump is totally unready for the job, totally unready for the foreign policy challenges, if that's true, isn't it actually a really good idea to hurry up getting his national security team in place to help him?
KAINE: Well, I've been meeting, in fact, the two - you mentioned Jeff Sessions and General Mattis. I've met with both of them, and so I'm doing what I can to be ready to act. There are six of the nominees that appear before me on the committees that I'm on. But when you have the Office of Government Ethics that say that these folks have not yet fully complied with the ethics rules surrounding Cabinet nominees, those rules are in place for a reason. It is important to have a functioning national security team, definitely, but when there are ethics rules in place and the judgment of an independent body is that some of these nominees have not yet met those requirements, that is not a minor matter.
INSKEEP: My understanding, though...
KAINE: Taking ethics seriously is important.
INSKEEP: My understanding, though, is that some of these folks, Rex Tillerson, for example, the secretary of state nominee, and several others have turned in their paperwork. It's not that all of them haven't turned in their paperwork.
KAINE: That's true. Yeah, that is true.
INSKEEP: Are you ready to move forward quickly on the ones who've turned in their paperwork?
KAINE: Look, on the - you know, when people have complied with those, I'm ready to move forward. That's why meeting with many of them in my office. I'm not negotiating the hearing schedule. But yeah, once people have complied with the rules, yeah, then we should be having hearings and moving forward. As you know, we haven't had any hearings yet, but we've just been back one week. You know, we - the new Senate was sworn in last Tuesday. We've been in for just three days, and we come back today. But yeah, you'll start to see - you will start to see hearings this week, I imagine.
INSKEEP: Could you see some Democrats supporting your colleague Jeff Sessions who you said you met with, the nominee for attorney general?
KAINE: I believe one Democrat has already announced that he is, and I think that - I believe Joe Manchin of West Virginia has announced that he is.
INSKEEP: How about you?
KAINE: I am not on the Judiciary Committee, and so I'm going to hold until after the committee has its hearing to make my determination because the hearing is really important. But there are some very important issues. Senator Sessions' records on the civil rights laws matter deeply to us. I was a civil rights lawyer for 17 years before I got into state politics. In addition, I do serve with Senator Sessions on armed services. He has had a different position than the vast majority of the Senate on the appropriate use of torture. We had a vote about a year ago about whether the Army field interrogation guide, which basically is the do's and don'ts of interrogation tactics, should be applied to every federal agency, including the CIA and others. Over 70 of us voted and said that it should, that the U.S. should have a strong anti-torture position. Jeff Sessions voted the other way, and that's something that is deeply important. And you'll see - I'm sure you'll see serious questioning about that at the hearing.
INSKEEP: Senator Kaine, one more thing to ask about here - a Russian influence in the election. Of course, the president-elect got his intelligence briefing on Friday on what the intelligence community believes happened, how they believe the Russians were behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and a broad influence campaign. Are you persuaded that the president-elect now takes this issue seriously?
KAINE: No, I'm not. The comments of his soon-to-be chief of staff, Reince Priebus, on news over the weekend suggests that they're still trying to minimize it. And, Steve, as you know, this was not just hacking of the Democratic National Committee. It was also hacking of numerous State Boards of Elections. This is a very serious thing, and I've said to my colleagues, remember what happened after the Watergate break in? It was a - it was a bungled attempt to rifle a file cabinet at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and plant some listening devices. But Congress took it very seriously in a bipartisan way. It didn't affect the outcome of the 1972 election. That was one of the biggest landslides in American history. But Congress cared enough about the integrity of our election process that they conducted one of the most searching investigations in the history of the body. They found out everything they needed to. And here where it's not just an attack on the DNC but also on State Board of Elections, I hope that Congress shows the same backbone, the same resolve and the same commitment to the integrity of our elections.
INSKEEP: Senator, I want to put one more thing on the table, very briefly here. Of course, President-elect Trump's team has said you're just trying to delegitimize his presidency. Democrats have responded no, no, no, no, we're not trying to do that. David Frum, a conservative who's been very critical of Trump, wrote this the other day. Quote, "the Trump supporters are 100 percent right. The information is delegitimizing." Does it, in a few seconds, delegitimize this president to have this information out there?
KAINE: That's not really the issue. The issue is should we...
INSKEEP: But does it or does it not?
KAINE: I have - I don't even - I'm not even thinking about that. Let's get to the bottom of it and then we can decide. But why would we not investigate it? Why does Donald Trump keep insisting on being Vladimir Putin's defense lawyer and trying to excuse Russian behavior or minimize it at the same time as he's attacking American intelligence.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: That's Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Opening statements begin today in the murder trial of a former Massachusetts pharmacist who is accused of causing a nationwide meningitis outbreak that killed 64 people. As Gabrielle Emanuel of member station WGBH reports, this 2012 tragedy has changed lives and reshaped an industry.
GABRIELLE EMANUEL, BYLINE: Disney World is known for Mickey Mouse and Space Mountain. But what Kristen Townsley remembers from her childhood visit is a doorknob.
KRISTEN TOWNSLEY: And I reached out for a doorknob. And I sank to the ground in, like, hysterical tears because it hurt so bad to just turn a door knob.
EMANUEL: The pain continued. And Townsley went from doctor to doctor, seeking help. After several years, she got a diagnosis, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. There is no cure. So she embarked on a life of frequent treatments and medications, including injections in her spine and pelvis. At age 28, things were going well, and her pain was under control. But in October 2012, she got a call from her doctor. Three injections she'd received were contaminated. Townsley spent her 29th birthday not at a home in Alabama but in Minnesota, getting treatment at the renowned Mayo Clinic.
TOWNSLEY: My face was, like, flaking off - like, literally.
EMANUEL: The tainted injections had given her fungal meningitis, triggering a cascade of medical problems that she says continue to today. Kristen Townsley was not alone. Those tainted vials made their way to 20 states. Seven hundred fifty people were affected, and 64 of them died. Many of the victims and their families have received compensation. The FDA, the CDC and state health officials managed the crisis response. Joshua Sharfstein was in charge of Maryland's health department.
JOSHUA SHARFSTEIN: We basically had to run this as a public health emergency. We just couldn't expect that people would go to the emergency department and get correctly diagnosed 'cause it was so unusual.
EMANUEL: An investigation traced the bad injections to the New England Compounding Center in Massachusetts. They'd been using expired ingredients in unsanitary conditions and making large batches.
SHARFSTEIN: And that led Congress to pass a law significantly expanding the regulatory oversight of compounding pharmacies.
EMANUEL: These pharmacies are much smaller than the big drug manufacturers. Some produce on a tiny scale, often making drugs for just one patient at a time, say, someone with an allergy or a kid who needs a small dose. Others make medications in large batches. Congress mandated that the FDA oversee the bigger compounding pharmacies. But the small-dose pharmacies are still primarily overseen by states. In Massachusetts, where the outbreak originated, the state stepped up its regulations. As the rules changed, Stephen Bernardi changed his compounding pharmacy just outside Boston to keep pace.
STEPHEN BERNARDI: The part we're in is the anteroom, with our dishwasher and all the stuff. So everything gets prepped out here.
EMANUEL: In this room with a sophisticated ventilation system, pharmacists clean their beakers and other tools. They're subject to new procedures following the outbreak.
BERNARDI: Prior to that, you might've gotten inspected twice in 12 years. Now you're getting inspected 12 times in one year.
EMANUEL: Following the outbreak, 18 states enacted laws related to compounding pharmacies. And other states are following suit. But there's still a lot of variation state by state. So now, as courts litigate the past outbreak, regulators are in the process of reforming a complex industry with the hope of preventing future outbreaks. For NPR News, I'm Gabrielle Emanuel.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
In the tangled web of power that is the ruling establishment of Iran, few were as prominent for so many years as Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. This week, Iran will lay to rest its former president and power broker who died Sunday at the age of 82. We're going to talk about him with Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Welcome back to the program, Karim.
KARIM SADJADPOUR: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: This is a name that's very familiar to Iran specialists, not so familiar to other Americans. What was he? What was he about?
SADJADPOUR: Rafsanjani was one of the original pillars of the 1979 Revolution. And after the leader of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, died in 1989, Rafsanjani became one of the two remaining pillars, the other being the current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. And whereas Ayatollah Khamenei is someone who's deeply ideological and faithful to the kind of ideological pillars of the revolution, Rafsanjani was always seen as someone who was more pragmatic, who was interested in putting the country's interests, especially economic interests, before revolutionary ideology.
INSKEEP: Meaning that outsiders might have a chance to deal with him in some fashion? He might be favoring something like the nuclear deal with the United States and other powers?
SADJADPOUR: Exactly. He actually favored relations with the United States in contrast to Khamenei. He sought better relations with Iran's Arab neighbors, namely Saudi Arabia. And Rafsanjani was an important mentor to many younger generation pragmatic officials like the current president Hassan Rouhani and the current foreign minister Javad Zarif.
INSKEEP: Who are seen as somewhat reform-minded, have been trying to change the country. Now that makes him sound kind of positive, but I want to ask one thing. Iran's foreign minister - this is a Twitter exchange I want to describe - Iran's foreign minister sends out a tweet - the republic has lost a towering giant. To which Bret Stephens, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, responds - and you're celebrating a despicable killer. Was he a despicable killer?
SADJADPOUR: Well, in the context of the Islamic Republic of Iran, he was more moderate than many of his political peers, but he is someone absolutely who had blood on his hands. In 1965, he was implicated in the assassination of an Iranian prime minister during the time of the shah. After he came into political power, he was directly implicated in the assassinations of Iranian dissidents and writers, and he was implicated in terrorist attacks abroad.
So both of those things can be true in that he was someone who in a Western context could not be considered to be a liberal or a moderate, but in the context of the Islamic Republic of Iran he was more moderate than his peers.
INSKEEP: What does it mean that he's off the scene now just as a new president takes office in the United States?
SADJADPOUR: Well, I do think it's a blow to President Rouhani because Rafsanjani represented a counterweight, kind of a weak counterweight to the supreme leader, and he was an important mentor for Rouhani. So I kind of see it like, you know, what happened when the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States became the unipolar world power. And now Ayatollah Khomeini really has...
INSKEEP: The hard line supreme leader is the guy who's even more supreme...
SADJADPOUR: Yeah, he's kind of the unipolar power in Iran now.
INSKEEP: So does that mean that Iran could be more intransigent just as the United States tries to re-evaluate its approach to Iran?
SADJADPOUR: It is certainly a risk because there's no one like Rafsanjani who was putting - trying to put the brakes on the country and tilt it in a more pragmatic direction.
INSKEEP: In just a few seconds, Karim, is Iran broadly speaking seen as following the nuclear deal up to now?
SADJADPOUR: They are. They are. What they're not seen as following is the spirit of the deal to try to, you know, play a more positive role in the Middle East.
INSKEEP: OK. Karim, thanks for coming by as always.
SADJADPOUR: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: That's Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep with respect for Chuck Finley, a Florida man and an amazing book reader. He checked out 2,361 books from the East Lake County Library. Trouble is Mr. Finley is fictitious. The library made him up and recorded him checking out books so they would not be purged from the shelves. The supervisor blamed for this episode says he just didn't want to get rid of books that he'd be forced to buy again for real readers later. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump really does believe that Russian hackers broke into the Democratic Party's email server. That, at least, is according to Reince Priebus, who will be Trump's chief of staff, although the president-elect's own statements have been a little more ambiguous. To talk about this and other political developments, we're joined by Jonah Goldberg, who's a senior editor at the National Review. Thanks for coming by.
JONAH GOLDBERG: Great to be here.
INSKEEP: Are you persuaded that Trump is persuaded about the Russians?
GOLDBERG: No. It seems obvious to me that what Donald Trump can't do is let go of this part - this one aspect of it, which is that he doesn't want to concede that the Russians had anything to do with his victory. This victory was his and his alone. And so he is constantly trying to sort of bend all the arguments to rebut that. And so he says they didn't hack the voting machines...
INSKEEP: Which is true.
GOLDBERG: Which is true, and - which is also not disputed. The problem is, you know, one way to think about this is take the Russians out of it for a moment because the intel report is actually not as conclusive as a lot of people are claiming and just say WikiLeaks. Wherever WikiLeaks got this stuff. Did WikiLeaks affect the campaign? Of course it did. Donald Trump went around saying, I love WikiLeaks. The WikiLeaks report - the WikiLeaks leaks, which were all true, which is something that gets - confuses a lot of people.
INSKEEP: The emails were real. Sure.
GOLDBERG: The emails were real. It was all authentic - drove a lot of the narrative of the campaign. They made it very difficult for Hillary Clinton to escape an image that was locked in with the electorate. And I'm not saying that WikiLeaks was the sole determining factor, but it was a major factor in the narrative of the campaign. And if it had all come out from NPR or The New York Times and it all had been true, we would be having a very different conversation about this.
INSKEEP: Why do you find the intelligence report to be less conclusive than many people said?
GOLDBERG: Well, there are a lot of assertions, and part of it is because it's a declassified version and they don't want to...
INSKEEP: We don't have the classified evidence.
GOLDBERG: So they don't want to reveal sources and methods, so maybe there's a lot of there-there (ph). But there's a lot of assertion and a lot of conclusion and not a lot of explanation about where they got this information, what the evidence is for it. It's a little thin. And it basically says we have to trust the intel community. But as Dan Drezner of The Washington Post says, we live in a low-trust time. And the intel community, at least at the leadership level, hasn't earned a lot of trust from the American people.
INSKEEP: Let's listen to Kellyanne Conway's argument about that. Of course, she is an adviser to the president-elect and said this in recent days.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KELLYANNE CONWAY: All of this amounts to a very simple fact, which is that alleged attacks, alleged aspirations to interfere with our democracy failed. And they failed, and we know that because Donald Trump won.
INSKEEP: What do you think of that logic?
GOLDBERG: (Laughter) I think there's a lacuna in it. (Laughter) There's a - you can't get from the - where she began to where she ended without some more evidence of what she means by that. There's reason to believe, I believe, that the Russians preferred Donald Trump. I actually don't think that they actually thought Trump was going to win. I think they just wanted to bloody up and bruise the future President Clinton.
And again, I don't think - this can all be overblown. This is not exactly in a moment of great nuance and distinction in our politics. The Russians did not make Hillary Clinton refuse to campaign in Wisconsin or do any of the sort of nuts and bolts stuff that she should've done if she wanted to win.
But at the same time, it seems to me that if you had to ask Vladimir Putin to pick a favorite, his favorite would've been Donald Trump. And so when Kellyanne, who I've known for 20 years and is a friend of mine, says that there's - the signature evidence that the tampering didn't work is because Donald Trump won doesn't really track.
INSKEEP: Did you touch on what may be the reason that this really is hard for the president-elect to publicly accept? The notion that Russians might have preferred Donald Trump implies that Donald Trump would be some kind of patsy, the easier guy to deal with. Is that what makes this hard for Trump to publicly sign onto the idea that Russians hacked?
GOLDBERG: I don't know because I don't know that that's it. I think that Trump wants to just take credit for his movement and all that on his own. The problem that - what that points to, though, is this problem that's disturbing a lot of people in Washington, is that the one issue that Donald Trump has never wavered on - he's gone - tacked back and forth on a lot of issues from health care to guns to abortion - a lot of issues - to taxes. The one thing he's always stayed constant on is his praise of Russia. And that's just a strange thing. And it's like this one tic that he won't let go of. And it's - I can't really explain it.
INSKEEP: Does the incoming national security team reassure you at all? Because there are some Russian hardliners in there.
GOLDBERG: Oh, sure. I actually - I'm sort of contrarian on a lot of people in Washington. I think Rex Tillerson will be great. I think General Mattis and General Kelly are serious people. Dan Coats is a very serious person. I'm a...
INSKEEP: He's the pick for director of national intelligence.
GOLDBERG: Right. I'm a little more skeptical, wait-and-see about General Flynn, but it's - who's going to be the national security adviser. But it's - we'll wait and see.
INSKEEP: Jonah, thanks very much.
GOLDBERG: Thank you. Great to be here.
INSKEEP: That's Jonah Goldberg of National Review with coffee by his side.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And we have some other news this morning. U.S. troops unloaded tanks at the German port of Bremerhaven over the weekend. They're there to bolster NATO's deterrence against potential Russian aggression. Esme Nicholson has the story.
ESME NICHOLSON, BYLINE: Dozens of U.S. battle tanks roll onto German soil only four years after having left for good. Together with 3,500 soldiers from Fort Carson, Colo., this heavy-duty cargo makes up for largest U.S. military deployment in Europe since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Deputy commander for the U.S. Army's European Command, Lt. Gen. Timothy Ray, says the heavy brigade is destined for the border of an increasingly provocative Russia.
TIMOTHY RAY: This is clearly in response to overt aggression. This is a methodical effort on the part of the allies to go and say to all those who would threaten peace and security in Europe, no. We're not going to allow that.
NICHOLSON: NATO is also about to beef up armored presence along its eastern flank to alleviate anxiety in the Baltic States and Poland following Moscow's annexation of Crimea and its intervention in eastern Ukraine. Not only are they apprehensive about Russia. There's concern about President-elect Trump, who, in his campaign, remarked he might not come to the aid of smaller NATO nations if they don't pay their way.
And some NATO allies fear the additional troops may escalate tensions with Moscow. Germany's foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called for dialogue instead of, quote, "saber-rattling." But Estonia's former foreign minister, Juri Luik, stresses that extra U.S. military support is crucial right now.
JURI LUIK: The United States remains a key country when it comes to the peace and security in Europe. It should be cherished.
NICHOLSON: Just as the front line between Russia and the West has shifted east away from Germany since the end of the Cold War, so has the sense of unease. For NPR News, I'm Esme Nicholson in Bremerhaven.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're now going to hear about a man in New York City who is starting this new year with a second chance. He was sent to prison for a crime he committed when he was a teenager. His criminal record has followed him well into adulthood until now. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang has his story.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: Eduardo made a mistake 10 days before he turned 18.
Right...
EDUARDO: Yeah, right there.
WANG: That building out there.
EDUARDO: This building right here.
WANG: He's 32 now. But more than 14 years ago, police arrested him outside that building for selling cocaine. He says he did it to get money for marijuana, right next to the apartment building in New York City that he's lived in since he was a kid.
So you pass by it every day.
EDUARDO: Yep (laughter) basically every single day I relive that moment.
WANG: That moment led to a three-years-to-life sentence in an adult prison. But he convinced the parole board to let him out early. Still, he came home with a criminal record. That's part of the price he's paid for the first and only arrest in his life.
EDUARDO: Shortcuts, man, shortcuts, they won't get you anywhere, man, just give you a hard time. They'll give you a lot of time to think.
WANG: We're only using Eduardo's first name because he's worried a future employer or landlord might hear about his criminal record. He says it's cost him plenty of jobs since he left prison.
EDUARDO: The initial interview would go great, but towards the end when it was time to run that background check, that's when reality hit. And I've heard the word no so many times. It's hard, man. It's hard to keep telling yourself you're not going to give up.
WANG: But just before the new year, Eduardo finally got the phone call he had been waiting for - one of his attorneys told him that New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo, was granting him a pardon.
EDUARDO: I couldn't believe it. I really couldn't believe it. My heart dropped. I began to cry like a child because the first thought that went through my head was, wow, like, finally.
WANG: Eduardo received one of the first pardons in New York for former offenders who committed a nonviolent crime when they were 16 or 17 and have stayed conviction-free for at least 10 years. Anyone convicted of a sex crime does not qualify. For Eduardo, this pardon means the conviction record that's haunted him into his early 30s is now sealed from the general public. And that could help get rid of many of the barriers to jobs and housing he and thousands of other former teenage offenders have faced.
MARC MAUER: They serve no good public safety function, and yet, they really make it even more difficult for people to readjust to the community once they've completed their prison term.
WANG: That was Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project. He says New York's program could serve as a model for other states, including North Carolina. That's the only other state like New York that charges 16 and 17-year-olds for all crimes not as juveniles but as adults. Mauer says records in the adult justice system can be harder to seal than in the juvenile system. In fact, adult records about misdemeanors in New York are never sealed according to Laurie Parise, executive director of Youth Represent.
LAURIE PARISE: You can be 16 years old, you can hop a turnstile, you can get convicted for theft of services, and that will be on your record the rest of your life.
WANG: Parise is one of the attorneys who helped Eduardo apply for Governor Cuomo's pardon.
PARISE: We can't continue to define young people by the worst mistake they ever made. I mean, we've all made mistakes, some serious mistakes, not so serious mistakes, but we have to give people a chance.
WANG: Eduardo's still waiting for his chance to become a health educator. He got a master's degree last year. For now, he's working two jobs to help raise his 4-year-old daughter, and he says his memories of his arrest and time in prison motivate him today.
EDUARDO: I tell myself I am better than this. I am much better than what a piece of paper or what this judge has sentenced me. I know that this is not who I am.
WANG: And with the new pardon, he'll have more control over defining who he wants to be. Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF AFFELAYE'S "MORNING TREMOR")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Julian Castro has been secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, for the past two and a half years. He has concerns about the direction the department will take under the new Trump administration Castro is a former mayor of San Antonio where he had some experience with housing and community development. His expected successor is retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson who says his main experience for the job was growing up poor. NPR's Pam Fessler sat down with Secretary Castro before he leaves his post.
PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: Julian Castro's office is on the top floor of what he notes was once voted the second-ugliest government building in Washington.
JULIAN CASTRO: But the view is very nice.
FESSLER: The view's gorgeous.
It overlooks a stretch of the D.C. waterfront where several luxury apartment buildings are under construction, in a city where affordable housing is in short supply and homelessness is a big problem. These are some of the issues the new secretary will face. Castro says he spoke with Carson by phone about a week ago, but they didn't talk specifics.
CASTRO: I just pledged that we wanted to make sure there's a smooth transition and to make sure that he has everything that he needs as he heads toward his confirmation hearing.
FESSLER: Which is scheduled for this Thursday and where Carson will likely face questions about whether he's up for a job that he himself expressed reservations about taking.
I'm curious what you think.
CASTRO: There's no question that he's very intelligent, and I'm sure that he'll apply his skill to this position. And so I'm hopeful that the next four years will be fruitful ones in terms of fulfilling HUD's mission.
FESSLER: Which includes helping 10 million poor families with housing. Castro thinks, like other secretaries before him, that Carson will grow to appreciate what HUD does once he learns more about it. Still, he's clearly worried that the new administration will roll back some key initiatives. Carson strongly criticized HUD's latest effort to get local communities to comply with the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which is intended to reduce neighborhood segregation.
CASTRO: I'd be lying if I said that I'm not concerned about the possibility of going backward over the next four years.
FESSLER: Carson has said the new rule is excessive government regulation. He's also complained that government aid can make some people too dependent. Congressional Republicans have proposed time limits and work requirements for those getting housing assistance to make them more self-sufficient. Castro thinks that's the wrong approach.
CASTRO: The first thing we need to do is to clarify misperceptions about the families who get HUD assistance.
FESSLER: He says most are already working or are elderly or disabled.
CASTRO: I believe that the folks who live in public housing are ambitious, that they have tremendous potential and that we should invest in them. I don't believe that we should go back to the mid-1990s and scapegoating them and talking about, you know, doing away with HUD and so forth.
FESSLER: Not that Carson has said that. In fact, he's said very little. His confirmation hearing will be the first real chance the public has to see where he stands on programs, including one of the Obama administration's biggest achievements - moving tens of thousands of homeless veterans into permanent housing. That effort has bipartisan support, but future funding could be threatened. President-elect Trump wants to make deep cuts in domestic spending.
CASTRO: You know, on the other hand, the president-elect has talked about investment in infrastructure, investment in other things, and so, you know, it's possible that we're in for a surprise.
FESSLER: Although Julian Castro won't be around to find out. He's hopping on a plane first thing on Inauguration Day, returning to San Antonio to work on his memoir. Pam Fessler, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF E.S.T.'S "DID THEY EVER TELL COUSTEAU?")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The first of President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees gets a hearing this morning. Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions was one of Trump's earliest supporters in Congress, now he's in line to become the next attorney general. But a big question looms over today's hearing - can a man who was rejected for a federal judgeship 30 years ago for making racially insensitive remarks lead the Justice Department today? With us to talk about this is NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. Good morning, Carrie.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Hey, Rachel.
MARTIN: So let's go back in time a bit, 1986. This is when the Senate rejected Jeff Sessions for a judgeship. Many senators from both parties took issue with comments that he had made about black lawyers and comments he made about the KKK. Remind us what happened then.
JOHNSON: Lawyers at the Justice Department actually came forward during that process to express concern about a series of statements Jeff Sessions made. One lawyer said Jeff Sessions had called an African-American the word boy. Another said Sessions made a remark about the KKK that he used to think the group was all right until he found out they smoked pot. Now, Sessions denied some of those allegations and said others were just a bad joke. He said people painted a misleading portrait of him.
MARTIN: All right. So now 30 years later, has Jeff Sessions changed or have the views of the Senate changed or both?
JOHNSON: Well, a little bit of both, Rachel. One important thing that's changed is that for the past 20 years, Jeff Sessions has been a United States senator, a member of the club. In fact, he sits on the Judiciary Committee, the same panel that rejected him all those years ago and that will consider him today. He's pretty popular on the Hill. And he has reached across the aisle on occasion, once even reaching a deal with Democrats in the Senate gym to overhaul sentences for drug defendants.
MARTIN: A civil rights movement is afoot. Civil rights groups haven't really forgotten that fight over Sessions from the 1980s, and they're gathering evidence about his record in Congress, evidence that concerns them. What can you tell us about that effort?
JOHNSON: Well, all the reporters on the DOJ beat including me have gotten tons and tons of reports over the last few weeks detailing Sessions' record on the Hill. They're protesting his approach to voting rights. He's called the Voting Rights Act intrusive. His vote against the Violence Against Women Act, his vote against the Matthew Shepard hate crimes bill and his alleged antipathy towards same-sex marriage and transgender rights. Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund says lawmakers should be asking this question.
SHERRILYN IFILL: The question is not what is in Jeff Sessions' heart. The question is - what in his record over 40 years suggests that we can trust him to enforce the nation's civil rights laws?
JOHNSON: And Ifill and other leaders including the former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick are really urging lawmakers to dig into that record.
MARTIN: All right. So today begins the first of two days of hearings on Sessions' record. What kind of questions is he likely to get?
JOHNSON: A whole bunch about whether he'll support some of the things that Donald Trump said on the campaign trail. For instance, Sessions and Trump have both said torture works, but the FBI and CIA officials say they don't want to return to those dark days. Sessions also said he supports some kind of ban on Muslims entering the U.S., but there are questions about whether that's discriminating against an entire category of people on the basis of their religion.
MARTIN: Sessions has lined up a lot of support though from law enforcement in particular, former Justice Department officials, too. Who's going to be testifying on his behalf?
JOHNSON: A lot of luminaries - former Judge Michael Mukasey, who served as attorney general under President George W. Bush, former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, another Bush official, and an African-American who says he can attest that Jeff Sessions is not a racist. And, Rachel, there's also the head of the Fraternal Order of Police. That's the country's largest police union which is backing Sessions as a friend for cops.
MARTIN: So it sounds like he's got the support he needs. Any chance that Jeff Sessions does not become the next U.S. attorney general?
JOHNSON: Rachel, there's always a chance. You never know if there's going to be a slip up in the way a nominee answers questions. And in fact late last night, we learned that Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, is actually going to testify against Jeff Sessions which doesn't happen very often, if ever. But really for Democrats, the best strategy with these hearings may be to try to get Sessions to make promises to do things or promises not to do things.
Now, one of the things they may try to get Sessions to say is that he'll aggressively investigate any possible conflicts of interest or other corruption in the Trump administration. They also as Democrats want him to say they will not - that he will not order the Justice Department to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton.
MARTIN: NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, thanks.
JOHNSON: You're welcome.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's listen to a preview of some of the international musicians who may be hot in the next couple of years. They showed up last weekend at globalFEST in New York City, an event that's regarded as a snapshot of rising acts in international music, like Betsayda.
(SOUNDBITE OF LA PARRANDA EL CLAVO SONG)
LA PARRANDA EL CLAVO: (Singing in Spanish).
INSKEEP: Just keep that going for a moment because NPR Music's Anastasia Tsioulcas was at the festival and is on the line from New York. Hi, Anastasia.
ANASTASIA TSIOULCAS, BYLINE: Hey, Steve. Glad to be here.
INSKEEP: So who is this person we're listening to?
TSIOULCAS: So this is a singer from Venezuela named that Betsayda Machado and her band, which is called La Parranda El Clavo. There's a lot of African sound in her music, a lot of textures, a lot of rhythms and, OK, Venezuela, so how does that fit together? She comes from a community of descendants of former slaves, and they have managed, in their tiny, tiny town of El Clavo, to hold onto their African traditions and their music. And now here they are touring the world.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
LA PARRANDA EL CLAVO: (Singing in Spanish).
INSKEEP: So we're talking here not just about musical acts from different places but maybe a single act that draws on music from different places. So what is this festival like? Where is it exactly and who shows up?
TSIOULCAS: So this is in New York City every January, and it is one night at a club called Webster Hall - so three floors, three different kind of mini venues all in the same building. So you've got a couple of thousand people running up and down the stairs all night to hear all of these acts and weigh in. There's a lot of civilians, but there's a significant chunk of the audience who are music industry people - club bookers and artists managers and labels, and they're chasing the next hot thing.
INSKEEP: Do you mean literally running up and down the stairs? Like, are your knees sore now?
TSIOULCAS: Oh, yeah. There's fully training, granola bars, gel packs, you know, to go through the evening.
(LAUGHTER)
INSKEEP: Where'd this festival come from?
TSIOULCAS: So it was founded back in 2003 by a trio of very influential bookers in New York City. And they saw in the post-9/11 era a real opportunity and real reason to create a gateway for the music community to book and tour international artists because it became very hard in those years for those artists to get visas to perform in the United States and travel through the United States. And the bookers felt they could create something as a reaction to what they perceived as increasing xenophobia in the United States.
INSKEEP: So this has always been somewhat political in nature. Are there any acts that seem particularly timely, speak to now?
TSIOULCAS: Well, there are certainly always artists who want to talk about the politics of their region or of their background. But, to me, one of the most resonant acts this year was a band from Cuba called Septeto Santiaguero.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
SEPTETO SANTIAGUERO: (Singing in Spanish).
INSKEEP: Hear the trumpet going there. That's lovely.
TSIOULCAS: Yeah. And, you know, this is a big dance band. They're from this city on the southeastern tip of the island called Santiago de Cuba. There's nothing political about their music. This is music to party to. But right now when we're just at the brink of a shift of the administrations of the United States and potentially a huge shift in policy towards Cuba and Cubans, you have this openness that we've had in past several years. Who knows what's going to happen next?
INSKEEP: And we should emphasize we do not know what policy President-elect Trump might follow toward Cuba, but he has spoken about a conflict between globalism and nationalism. Where does a music event called globalFEST fit into that discussion?
TSIOULCAS: Well, it's interesting because we can look at this in terms of strictly music, you know. A lot of the artists who appear there are very much artists of 2017. You're hearing hip-hop, you're hearing punk, you're hearing R & B, you're hearing all these things that make music go right now plus tradition, you know, acoustic instruments and very, very ancient ideas and modes and rhythms and all that kind of melded together.
But also, I think we're going to see the same kind of concerns that the founders of this festival were thinking about back in the early 2000s, which is is it going to be harder for artists coming from Africa or South Asia or the Middle East and elsewhere to get a toehold in the United States in the years to come? You know, is this going to be a place where people are going to be open to sounds from around the world or are they really going to be very settled in music from here?
INSKEEP: Were there American artists at globalFEST?
TSIOULCAS: There always are. You know, it's really interesting to me, in the past several years, the bookers of globalFEST have tried to emphasize American regional music. So, for example, last night, there was a Gullah group from South Carolina, but also musicians who grew up in the States, were born in the United States, who draw on their own ethnic backgrounds and traditions. So one of those was an artist who was born and raised in Sudan named Alsarah, but, go figure, she's in Brooklyn now.
INSKEEP: OK.
TSIOULCAS: And she creates a kind of music that she likes to call Sudanese-Nubian retro-pop.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
ALSARAH AND THE NUBATONES: (Singing in Arabic).
INSKEEP: OK, so two different regions or cultures of Africa being drawn on from Brooklyn to make what we just heard.
TSIOULCAS: She is a Sudanese artist, so she sings in Arabic. And, of course, there's the sort of pan-Arabic musical tradition and certainly language, but also a very sub-Saharan African-influence style that makes it very much of black Africa.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
ALSARAH AND THE NUBATONES: (Singing in Arabic).
INSKEEP: Are we hearing in music a bit of the contradiction here? There are a lot of people in this country who are concerned about America's relation with the wider world, but we're, in effect, the global nation that has drawn people from everywhere already.
TSIOULCAS: Yeah. And, you know, how do you honor both of those instincts musically? How do you preserve and nurture regional American traditions that came through the soil? And also how do artists who really are coming from everywhere and call America their home - how do you be of this place and of this time right now and also honor the place that your ancestors came from or that you've come from?
INSKEEP: Anastasia Tsioulcas of NPR Music, thanks very much.
TSIOULCAS: My pleasure, Steve. Thanks.
(SOUNDBITE OF BATIDA SONG, "ALEGRIA")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Tonight in Chicago, President Barack Obama will follow a tradition that dates back to America's first president - the farewell address. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith has this look at how past presidents have used this moment of reflection.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: It all started with George Washington, who offered a series of warnings, what he called a solemn contemplation. His parting words have been deemed so valuable that they're read on the floor of the U.S. Senate each year, including his warning about the dangers of partisanship.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: It serves always to distract the public counsel...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: And enfeeble the public administration...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: False alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Foments occasional riot and insurrection. It opens the door to...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through channels of party passions.
KEITH: The presidential farewell address became a fixture in the 20th century right along with the arrival of television in American homes. In these modern farewell speeches, almost all of them talk about the difficulty of the job and urge the American people to be nice to the next guy, as President Harry Truman did.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HARRY TRUMAN: I want all of you to realize how big a job and how hard a job it is, not for my sake because I'm stepping out of it, but for the sake of my successor. He needs the understanding and help of every citizen.
KEITH: All the presidents look back on their years in office, some lingering on their legacies longer than others. There is pride in accomplishment, as expressed by President Ronald Reagan, who thanked the men and women of the Reagan Revolution and talked of proving the pundits wrong.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RONALD REAGAN: Once you begin a great movement, there's no telling where it'll end. We meant to change a nation, and instead we changed a world.
KEITH: But there is often talk of regret, like not securing peace. Gerhard Peters is co-director of the American Presidency Project.
GERHARD PETERS: They're almost very respectful in the way that they present their administration's accomplishments. You know, at times they're also very humble.
KEITH: Peters says in most cases it has been a president of one party handing the presidency off to a successor from the other party, and yet...
PETERS: They're very grateful to their successor and I'd expect President Obama to be, even though this has been a very political climate - this transition. I would expect him to be somewhat graceful as well.
KEITH: As with Washington's address, many of these final speeches contain warnings. President Dwight Eisenhower coined a term.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DWIGHT EISENHOWER: In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
KEITH: Many presidents talk with pride about the peaceful transfer of power and of the balance of power built into the American system of government. Here's President Gerald Ford.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GERALD FORD: This often results in difficulty and delay, as I well know. But it also places supreme authority under God, beyond any one person, any one branch, any majority great or small, or any one party. The Constitution is the bedrock of all our freedoms.
KEITH: Guard it and cherish it, he said. President Jimmy Carter said it could be tempting in times of tension and economic distress to abandon principles.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JIMMY CARTER: We must never yield to this temptation. Our American values are not luxuries, but necessities - not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself.
KEITH: American values come up again and again in these speeches. Listening to President Bill Clinton in early 2001, you could imagine President Obama striking a similar theme tonight.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BILL CLINTON: We must treat all our people with fairness and dignity, regardless of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, and regardless of when they arrived in our country - always moving toward the more perfect union of our Founders' dreams.
KEITH: And ultimately, as so many have before him, President Obama will have to say goodbye. Tamara Keith, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MATT JORGENSEN SONG, "COLORADO")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Today, the first of President-elect Trump's Cabinet choices goes before a Senate committee, and it's one of the most important jobs - attorney general of the United States.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The president-elect's choice is Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. He was an early Trump supporter, in fact one of the few lawmakers in Congress who stood behind Trump since 2015.
INSKEEP: And in today's program, we're hearing two very different views of him. Sessions has been criticized because he lost a bid to be a federal judge many years ago because of alleged racial remarks.
MARTIN: There's a lot more to his record, ranging from his youth in a tiny Alabama town to his passionate opposition to illegal immigration.
INSKEEP: Now, he is poised to run a department that oversees the FBI and federal prosecutors and touches on many parts of American life. His supporters include Alberto Gonzales who served as attorney general under President George W. Bush.
What's Senator Sessions like personally?
ALBERTO GONZALES: He's very friendly. You know, he's from the South, and he's very upfront. And he and I didn't always agree when I was the attorney general on issues, but he was fair and he was tough on the department, which I think is perfectly legitimate. And given his background both at the state and federal level, he has a great deal of interest and knowledge about the workings of the Department of Justice.
INSKEEP: I guess we should remind people he was a federal prosecutor, meaning he was an employee once upon a time at the Department of Justice.
GONZALES: And not only that, he was state attorney general for Alabama. So he has the experience of actually running something. You know, sometimes I kind of worry about people coming to the executive branch positions and not having any experience running some things.
INSKEEP: What is the challenge for Senator Sessions if he becomes attorney general, in that he's a conservative guy and in many instances his views are more conservative than the law is at the moment, issues like gay rights, for example, or torturing people?
GONZALES: Well, I know I'm not - I don't know that I would go so far as to say he supports torture. The Bush administration never supported torture. We worked very hard to ensure that the guidance that was given to the Bush administration was consistent with the anti-torture statute.
INSKEEP: I guess we should just note the Bush administration insisted that interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, were not torture. In any case, it appears those techniques are banned by a law in 2015.
GONZALES: That is correct.
INSKEEP: But Senator Sessions voted against that law. And of course, he'd be working for a president who has said he wants to bring back torture and explicitly calls waterboarding a minimal form of torture. What is the job of the attorney general in a case like that where your president may want to do things that are illegal?
GONZALES: Well, his job is to inform the president of the policies that are inconsistent with the law. And I have every expectation that Jeff Sessions as the attorney general would do that. Now, honestly, the president is head of the executive branch, and he could have the final say if he chooses to exercise his authority on the law. And he may decide that the law passed by Congress is unconstitutional given certain circumstances that may unduly restrict his authority as commander in chief to protect this country. But whenever a president acts inconsistent with advice given by the attorney general of the Department Justice, he does so at political peril.
INSKEEP: What is the attorney general's role in enforcing immigration laws?
GONZALES: Well, the attorney general will certainly have a say, will have a role in advocating the policies desired by the administration in terms of immigration laws. The attorney general also has a very interesting power that's not as widely known, which is on appeals for decisions relating to deportations. There's a court of immigration review and a court of immigration appeal within the Department of Justice so that if someone facing deportation, a decision is made to deport them, that gets reviewed. An additional power the attorney general has - he also has the power to override all of that and ultimately step into a case and make a final decision as to whether or not they should be deported.
INSKEEP: So the attorney general has an opportunity in specific cases to come down and say, I know you're about to be deported, but I'm going to save you; or the opposite - I know you might stay, but I'm going to send you out. And that sends a signal, almost like the Federal Reserve sends a signal with its interest rates. It influences what everybody else does.
GONZALES: That is correct, and that is also something - it sets a precedent for the Department of Justice but also to the extent that these cases ever get litigated in our federal courts, this is, you know, a precedent that the federal courts can look at as well.
INSKEEP: One other thing - suppose that the FBI is still investigating Russian hacking during the election campaign, the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and so forth, and FBI agents begin to say they're finding something of interest that might be uncomfortable for the sitting president by then, what is the attorney general's duty and obligation in that case?
GONZALES: I take from your question you want to know whether or not can the White House direct the Department of Justice to drop the investigation. They could direct that because the attorney general works for the president of the United States but, again, serious political peril for doing so. Now, the White House may have information that the department may not have and, as a result of that, they may communicate that information which may cause the attorney general to reconsider. So, you know, there are all kinds of complicating factors that have to be weighed here. But as a general manner, you know, it's not a good idea to have the White House weighing in and directing the department what to do. That doesn't place the president in a very good position, quite frankly. You want to be careful about that.
INSKEEP: Are you confident, then, that Jeff Sessions is the kind of person who, though he has a close relationship with the president-elect, will tell him what he needs to hear, say no when he needs to say no and protect the independence of investigators wherever they might go, whatever they might be looking at?
GONZALES: I have every expectation that he will do so. I don't know the extent of that relationship, what the relationship was like before the campaign. I know people worry about if you're close to the president you can't tell him no. I think it's just the opposite. The other unknown quantity for me, however, is I don't know how Donald Trump - how he feels or how he deals with lawyers and how he deals with advice given to him by lawyers or not - that's not good news. You know, you can tell a lot about a person when you give them bad news and how they deal with it. But, again, based on what I know, I have every expectation that Jeff Sessions will do the job that needs to be done as the attorney general United States.
INSKEEP: Alberto Gonzales, thanks very much.
GONZALES: It's my pleasure.
INSKEEP: He served as attorney general under President George W. Bush and is now the dean of the Belmont University College of Law in Nashville, Tenn.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We've got a Mexican perspective this morning of President-elect Donald Trump. The incoming president will soon translate his rhetoric about Mexico into reality.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
He spoke of building a giant wall along the southern border. Supporters now say that may mean extra wall along part of the border.
MARTIN: He once vowed to deport millions of Mexicans and others, but he has dialed that back somewhat. He says he wants to rework the North American Free Trade Agreement or drop it.
INSKEEP: A former Mexican foreign minister has written that if the new president makes unreasonable demands, Mexico has the power to just say no. Jorge Castaneda was Mexico's foreign minister in the early 2000s. He says if President-elect Trump thinks the United States has leverage over Mexico, well, Mexico has leverage, too.
JORGE CASTANEDA: Mexico has paid an enormous price for its war on drugs, which I disagree with, but the governments here have pursued. This has been a costly, bloody war for Mexico. It has done it largely because the United States has insisted, but it has done it because these have been friendly administrations on the U.S. side. It doesn't have to do it.
INSKEEP: Let me put a point on what you're suggesting there because I think I hear you saying if the Trump administration plays rough with Mexico, one thing Mexico could very well do is let more drugs flow to the United States.
CASTANEDA: Well, not make as much of an effort as it has the last 10 years to stop that flow. There is no good reason for Mexico to pay the enormous price it has paid the last 10 years for an administration in the U.S. that is unfriendly and hostile to Mexico. Nice, good neighbors, they don't build walls, they don't deport people, and they don't take jobs away from Mexicans by enticing American companies to relocate to the United States. Now, the U.S. can do that if it wants to, but Mexico can also do things on its side.
INSKEEP: How do you say no to deportations? The United States already deports a lot of people back to Mexico. We have the idea that the president-elect might send more. How do you say no to that?
CASTANEDA: You can say we will give you a lawyer to go to a hearing so that to begin with it will be very, very difficult for that system to deal with so many deportations through hearings as opposed to simple so-called voluntary repatriation. But there's another element that Mexico has, which is to tell the U.S. authorities we will take any Mexican you want to deport as long as you can prove he's Mexican, which is, by the way, exactly what the United States does with people from other countries. If I arrive at the U.S. border tomorrow and I say I'm American, the U.S. border and customs enforcement guy will say, yeah, well, you sound American, but show me proof. He's not going to let me in just because I speak good English.
INSKEEP: You're saying the busload of deportees arrives at the Mexican border, which is something that happens today, and Mexican authorities just look at these people and say, nope, can't prove they're Mexican.
CASTANEDA: Would you let a hundred of my people in who I said are American without any proof of citizenship, without any proof of birth, without anything, just because they look American and you're telling me they look Mexican? I don't know what Mexicans look like. I know Mexicans who have papers. Prove to me they're Mexican.
INSKEEP: Let's move on to the biggest thing here - NAFTA. The president-elect has said he wants to cancel or renegotiate NAFTA. Your suggestion is just say no to renegotiating NAFTA. Is that what Mexico should really do in your view, just dare the president-elect to cancel it?
CASTANEDA: If we open it up, in the interim, very few people are going to want to invest in Mexico because the rules of the game will no longer be clear. The minute you reopen it, any investor will say I'll wait until this is over so I see what the new rules are going to be. This can be extremely damaging to Mexico. We need American investment, we need Japanese investment, we need European investment, in order to grow and create jobs in Mexico so Mexicans don't go to the United States without papers and create the problems that Donald Trump says Mexicans create in the U.S. He can't have it both ways, you know, take jobs away from Mexico and at the same time not want Mexicans to go and work in the United States. That's not really going to happen.
INSKEEP: Are you underlining, though, Mexico's economic dependence on a good relationship with the United States?
CASTANEDA: It depends enormously. Eighty-five percent of our exports go to the United States. Something like 70 percent of all foreign investment in Mexico comes from the United States. President Trump should try and understand what the U.S.'s overriding interest in Mexico has been for the last hundred odd years. It's Mexican stability. The U.S. has enjoyed total peace and comfort on its southern border. A lot of countries don't have that. Count your blessings because if Mexico becomes unstable, that is a headache for the United States which dwarfs 700 jobs at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis.
INSKEEP: One final thing then - Americans are listening, some of whom - or many of whom - may have genuine concerns about illegal immigration to the United States, genuine concerns about job loss in the United States. Is there something more that Mexico could do beyond whatever it's already doing on those issues to be helpful to its neighbor?
CASTANEDA: On immigration, I think there's a lot that can be done by both countries. Even President-elect Trump has mentioned this. He wants a wall, he said, but I want beautiful doors in the wall. That makes sense. But the doors are more important than the wall in many senses. What you need to do is legalize the future flow because the U.S. economy will be needing Mexican labor for many, many years to come in the future. The wage differential between the two countries right now is almost 10 to 1. So that means that Mexicans are willing to work in the United States for more than they make in Mexico but much less than what Americans would want for the same type of jobs. Immigration from Mexico to the United States began before World War I. It's not that it just started last year when Donald Trump found out about it.
INSKEEP: Jorge Castaneda, thanks very much for taking the time.
CASTANEDA: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: He is the former foreign minister of Mexico.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep with a tip of a hat to a passing driver. It should be a winter hat since this story takes place in the snow last weekend.
Stephanie and Hugh Dawson were racing to the hospital in Chesapeake, VA. She was in labor when the truck broke down. Hugh tried to flag down the next vehicle to come along, which turned out to be a snowplow. The driver delivered the couple to the hospital where doctors delivered the baby just 15 minutes after the couple arrived. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President Obama delivers his farewell address tonight. He will speak in Chicago where his political career began. Now he says goodbye after the election of Donald Trump, who vowed to undo much of his legacy. We talked about this moment with a former Obama adviser - Austan Goolsbee.
The president has made a number of statements in recent weeks suggesting that although President-elect Trump has vowed to overturn much of his legacy, that is not as easy as it seems. He expresses confidence that many things will survive. Do you think that the president believes that?
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE: I do think the president believes that. I would say I'm a little more nervous about it maybe than the president is.
INSKEEP: Now, in an email to supporters, the president said the speech will aim to celebrate what they achieved with him and, quote, "offer some thoughts on where we all go from here," which is on Goolsbee's mind too.
GOOLSBEE: And I think the moment right now is really somewhat unusual for the farewell address of the president in that you have a successful two-term president followed by someone of a different party that's really quite contradictory in message. And you know Donald Trump ran largely on, well, I'm not Barack Obama, and Barack Obama's basically saying and I'm not Donald Trump, and they both kind of agree with each other on that point. So I think...
INSKEEP: (Laughter) And in some cases - in a few cases, at least, they got the same voters. There are people out there who said I voted for Obama and then for Trump.
GOOLSBEE: Yeah. In some ways, those overlapping voters, in a way, they're one of a special category of audience potentially for this speech. You know, if you ask who is the farewell address intended for, I think there's one instructive thing that President Obama's giving the speech back in Chicago and getting the band back together and a lot of the - trying to rekindle the magic of Grant Park, let's call it - it's not just going to be a televised address from the Oval Office with the - the way it often is.
INSKEEP: He's going back to the Midwest where, we should note, that although Hillary Clinton won Illinois, the election was effectively lost for Hillary Clinton in the Midwest because some Midwestern states didn't go for her that were expected to.
GOOLSBEE: Yeah. And that's quite an interesting dynamic. I would expect, you know, if this farewell address is like all of the previous ones of the last 30 or 40 years, there will be a fair amount of discussion of let's remember in our minds what the economy was like in 2008 and in 2009 when President Obama first got there. And let's make catalogue of all of the various ways that it's gotten better and to try to put people back in that mindset to see that they're had - though it seems frustrating and there's a lot of partisan fighting now, that we have made a lot of progress.
INSKEEP: How do you think about this moment in American history that the president will speak to?
GOOLSBEE: That's a far deeper question than small minds like mine are to analyze.
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
GOOLSBEE: But you know, I think there have been - there are some major tectonic forces at work here. And so I would be very surprised if President Obama did not address, well, what kind of nation is this, and what does it mean that we can be as divided as we seem to be in our politics, and, you know, where should we go, how can we come together?
INSKEEP: Do you have any idea what his answer to that question is?
GOOLSBEE: Well, I don't know what he's going to say in this speech. But for many years and decades, his answer has been we're a diverse country and we're going to have to come together. I think now is a moment where this is like the comic book or something, you know, the president and his bizarro world arch nemesis. They're a reflection of each other in a odd opposite way. So I would be surprised if he did not explicitly address the opposite world view in a way that tries to contrast and say the we all have to get along approach is going to be the better one.
INSKEEP: Austan Goolsbee, thanks very much.
GOOLSBEE: Yeah, Steve, nice talking to you again.
INSKEEP: He's with the University of Chicago and is a former adviser to President Obama.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The shooting in Fort Lauderdale last week has some asking questions about whether there's a connection between a shooter's military service and the violence he allegedly carried out. Esteban Santiago made his first court appearance yesterday for allegedly shooting and killing five people at the Fort Lauderdale airport on Friday. He may face the death penalty if convicted.
The Pentagon has confirmed that he is a National Guard veteran who saw combat in Iraq. But experts say it's not right to draw a connection between his military service and violent behavior. Veterans say it's a myth they have to confront all the time. Here's NPR's Quil Lawrence.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Within hours of the shooting in Fort Lauderdale, authorities confirmed that the suspect had a military ID. That's all it took, says Iraq vet Bill Rausch.
BILL RAUSCH: It's easy. It's a tight, tidy headline.
LAWRENCE: Rausch leads an organization called Got Your 6, which aims to change misperceptions about veterans.
RAUSCH: Unfortunately, it feeds a false narrative that all veterans have post-traumatic stress, that post-traumatic stress leads to mass shootings, that combat translates to these types of events. And in this situation, we don't know any of those things to be true.
LAWRENCE: Estimates vary about how many veterans have PTSD, but it's almost certainly a minority. The Department of Veterans Affairs says PTSD can be linked to violence in a minority of cases. That's usually domestic violence. In general, veterans are less likely to be involved in crime than civilians.
In the Fort Lauderdale case, there's, so far, no evidence that Esteban Santiago had PTSD. The FBI has confirmed the suspect told agents last year that he was hearing voices encouraging him to commit terrorism. That's not a symptom of PTSD. But even other mental illnesses are not statistically linked to gun violence, says Dr. Sandro Galea, Dean of Boston University School of Public Health.
SANDRO GALEA: These are common misconceptions, and they've been around for decades. There's an extraordinary stigma around mental illness. There's an actual fear, I think, of mental illness. And in many respects, our systems and structures have reinforced that.
LAWRENCE: Galea says the stigma makes it harder to get people into treatment for mental illness. And he says the easy narrative of the crazed war vet just puts off a more accurate discussion about why the U.S. alone, among developed nations, suffers regular mass shootings. Quil Lawrence, NPR News.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Critics and supporters alike of President-elect Trump have been watching his Cabinet choices to see what they say about him. Few may be more revealing than his choice for attorney general who gets a Senate hearing today.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Senator Jeff Sessions has loyally supported Trump. He's a passionate opponent of illegal immigration.
INSKEEP: Back in 1986, he lost a chance at a federal judgeship because of alleged racial remarks. He also has a compelling story of his slow rise to power from his childhood in a tiny crossroads town in Alabama.
MARTIN: We're hearing two very different perspectives on Sessions this morning. One is from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, he supports Sessions.
INSKEEP: The other is a member of the Senate committee that will consider Sessions, his colleague, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.
So I just want to begin on a personal level. What's Senator Sessions like as a colleague?
PATRICK LEAHY: Well, I know him well, of course. I've served with him. We get along fine, but we have some very, very major philosophical differences. He's opposed protections for LGBT individuals. He's spoken out against Freedom Corps' marriage equality decision. He opposed the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He opposed the nomination of Loretta Lynch, the nation's first African-American woman to serve as attorney general. These things worry me.
INSKEEP: Now, with that said, Senator Leahy, the fact that you disagree with him on a great many issues, how significant is that if he's attorney general and his job is not to advocate his personal beliefs but to enforce the law?
LEAHY: Well, it becomes very important because remember the attorney general is not a member of the president's staff. He's the attorney general of the United States. He's there to represent all of us, and it means all the laws have to be enforced fairly. And you can't bring your individual prejudices in there. And I want to be assured that he wouldn't. So I think we have to ask, what is he thinking?
INSKEEP: Well, this is what I'm wondering, though, when I say enforce the law. I'm thinking of John Ashcroft, one of President Bush's attorneys general, someone who's also very conservative and I'm sure you disagreed with on a great many issues. But we found out after the fact that in the internal debate over how far torture interrogations should go in the Bush administration, Ashcroft in a dramatic moment refused to go along with the administration. He had a view of the law and he stuck with that. Is it possible that Senator Sessions could do the same?
LEAHY: Well, that, I think, he should be asked. I think he's got to prove he's changed since 1986 because the attorney general really has to stand up for everybody in this country. I remember when I was in law school, the then-attorney general tried to hire me to come with the Department of Justice. I asked him what he would do if he had somebody come up for a prosecution that was a friend of the president's. And he said if they were - should be prosecuted, they'd be prosecuted. And that's exactly what Robert Kennedy did when he prosecuted one of his brother's friends and supporters.
INSKEEP: Robert Kennedy, who was the attorney general for John F. Kennedy in the 1960s.
LEAHY: That's right.
INSKEEP: Are you posing here really a fundamental question that you would have for Senator Sessions or any attorney general nominee? Are you willing to let the FBI, for example, pursue an investigation even if it goes into the president's business affairs or into his relationship with Russia or anything else that people wonder about?
LEAHY: If there is a sign of criminal activity, you've got to let it go wherever it goes. You can't pick and choose. And I was a prosecutor for eight years. I remember I was - sometimes say, OK, I got to prosecute a friend, but they've committed a crime. You have to do it. It's even more important for the integrity of the country if there are conflicts of interest in an administration, if there are things being done that they shouldn't do - and I hope there won't be, but if there were, you have to go and prosecute.
INSKEEP: Do you have any sense of whether Senator Sessions would have that independence?
LEAHY: Well, I was concerned when he immediately jumped forward even on the outrageous comments that Donald Trump made about justifying sexual abuse of women, that he supported him. That was - seems so easy to say, look, I don't support that, yet he stepped forward and supported it. I don't want somebody as attorney general who thinks he has to rubberstamp whatever the president says.
INSKEEP: One other thing, Senator Leahy. Democrats have wanted to draw out the hearing process for people such as Senator Sessions. Do you, Democrats in the Senate, intend to continue to draw that out and raise questions? I know you have the right, for example, to demand extended debate before there's a full Senate vote. Are you going to take this as long as you can take it?
LEAHY: Well, I'll leave that to the leaders and our leader. But I think that we should not delay for the sake of delay, but delay until questions are answered. We have a whole lot of the president-elect's nominees that have not filled out their ethics disclosures. I can never remember a time when anybody was voted on for a Cabinet position who hadn't completed their ethics report, and certainly nobody should be allowed to vote until that's done.
INSKEEP: Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, thanks very much.
LEAHY: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're now going to take a moment to unpack a phrase you've probably heard a lot these days - the 17 U.S. spy agencies. If you can name half of those, you're doing better than most of us here. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly covers the intelligence community. We asked her to stop by and see how many she can name without a cheat sheet. Good morning, Mary Louise.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel. I've been doing pushups to get ready.
MARTIN: Yeah. And we should point out, you don't even have any notes in front of you. This is legit.
KELLY: Flying blind is what it's called.
MARTIN: We are going to (laughter) put you to the test. OK. It's worth noting that the spy agencies have been in the news because of the consensus they reached that Russia intervened in the American presidential election. And that's going to be back in the news later today. The leaders of four of the biggest agencies are headed to Capitol Hill to answer questions.
KELLY: Correct.
MARTIN: We're going to get to that in a minute, but the test first. I'm going to start you off with some of the ones that tend to make fewer headlines, for example, Coast Guard Intelligence.
KELLY: Coast Guard Intelligence, which would be the first agency you would consult in the event of, say, smugglers off the coast of Florida. They have been less involved for obvious reasons in this investigation into Russian hacking. Some of the others you don't hear very often about - so there's the Energy Department. They have an intelligence wing - think nuclear security.
MARTIN: Yeah.
KELLY: There's the Treasury Department - think financial sanctions against weapons proliferators, terror groups. Another one you almost never hear about - INR. This is the State Department intelligence shop, so intel for diplomats.
MARTIN: All right. I'm counting. That's up to four.
KELLY: Four.
MARTIN: There are a whole bunch of other ones that fall under the umbrella of the Pentagon, right?
KELLY: That is correct. And we can do four in one fell swoop - Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines.
MARTIN: OK.
KELLY: All the services have their own intelligence staff. They all have different specialties and priorities, as you would imagine. Serving the entire Defense Department - the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, so that would be combat support, military intelligence for war fighters. Then there's a couple of biggies that belong to the Defense Department you never hear about. They like it that way. The NGA, for example, this is the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. In other words, the maps...
MARTIN: Maps, yeah.
KELLY: ...And imagery guys. The NRO - that would be the National Reconnaissance Office. That's the satellites guys, so they build and operate spy satellites. And then, oh, the National Security Agency, the NSA.
MARTIN: Oh, yeah, that one.
KELLY: That one, which of course is the codebreakers and cyber snooping, electronic surveillance, so they, as you would imagine, have been all over the Russia hacks.
MARTIN: All right. You got five left. I'm going to give you a hint on this one - drugs.
KELLY: Drugs - DEA.
MARTIN: Yeah.
KELLY: Drug Enforcement Administration, which prompts me to the next one, DHS - this is the whole alphabet soup - DHS being the Department of Homeland Security...
MARTIN: They have their own.
KELLY: ...Which also has its own little intel shop, and they count.
MARTIN: All right, you've got three big ones for the end.
KELLY: This was strategic. I saved the big ones for the homestretch because it's hard to forget about the FBI, familiar to most of us, the bureau that does law enforcement, also does intelligence these days. Of course, the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, so doing covert operations, doing foreign espionage. They have recently ventured into paramilitary operations, drone programs. That's been controversial. But - so CIA, which I think, Rachel, if I'm not mistaken, gets us for the win...
MARTIN: Mary Louise Kelly.
KELLY: ...To the DNI, the director of National Intelligence...
MARTIN: Nice.
KELLY: ...A relative newcomer to this crowd. They were only stood up in 2005, and the DNI's job is to oversee and coordinate all the 16 others, which I have just named - thank God (laughter).
MARTIN: You did. OK. Real quick before we let you go, we mentioned the leaders of four of these agencies will be on the Hill today talking Russia - which four?
KELLY: NSA, CIA, FBI and DNI, and this is going to be so fascinating for all kinds of reasons. One, you never get the heads of those agencies in one room speaking on the record - just doesn't happen. And then also the reason they're going to be all in one room is this new Russia report, which dropped on Friday. The headline of which, to remind people, is U.S. intelligence believes that Vladimir Putin personally ordered a campaign to influence the U.S. election, so not an uncontroversial topic before them.
MARTIN: OK, I'm going to find you a gold star. Somewhere in this building there must be one. NPR national security correspondent Mary Louise Kelly. Thanks, Mary Louise.
KELLY: You're welcome.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In a previous version of this story the Drug Enforcement Administration was said to be part of the Department of Homeland Security. In fact, DEA is part of the Justice Department.]
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We are 10 days from Inauguration Day here in Washington. Ghana already had a presidential inauguration last weekend, and it had a surprising resemblance to past inaugurations here in the United States. You really have to listen for yourself to NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton.
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PRESIDENT NANA ADDO DANKWA AKUFO-ADDO: And that I will preserve, protect...
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: Ghana's new president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo, is a seasoned politician and an articulate public speaker. He's a former foreign and justice minister and a veteran lawyer known to have a way with words in and out of the courtroom. So Ghanians and assembled dignitaries were looking forward to his maiden speech as president.
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AKUFO-ADDO: I stand here today humbled beyond measure for the opportunity to lead this country at this time and take us to a higher level of development.
QUIST-ARCTON: He did not disappoint - statesmanlike some commentators called the speech - as Akufo Addo reveled in a moment of triumph at his third attempt to become president of Ghana. It was only after Saturday's swearing in that social media lit up with indignation. Why? Well, take a listen.
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BILL CLINTON: Though our challenges are fearsome, so are our strengths.
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AKUFO-ADDO: Though our challenges are fearsome, so are our strengths.
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CLINTON: Americans have ever been a restless, questing, hopeful people.
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AKUFO-ADDO: Ghanians have ever been a restless, questing, hopeful people.
QUIST-ARCTON: President Akufo-Addo 2017. Just a tweak in the country but otherwise apparently lifted word for word from President Bill Clinton's inaugural address in 1993. And there's more.
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GEORGE W. BUSH: I ask you to be citizens.
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AKUFO-ADDO: I ask you to be citizen.
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BUSH: Citizens not spectators.
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AKUFO-ADDO: Citizens not spectators.
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BUSH: Building communities of service and a nation of character.
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AKUFO-ADDO: Building your communities and our nation.
QUIST-ARCTON: President Akufo-Addo on Saturday and before him, President George W. Bush inaugural speech 2001. There was a swift Facebook apology from the new Ghanian president's freshly minted communications director. More embarrassment than lasting political or diplomatic damage for Akufo-Addo, say the pundits, but Ghana has egg on its face. Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News, Johannesburg.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Rachel Martin. It's common practice to give a gift to a visiting dignitary. So when the president of Taiwan went to Texas, the governor Greg Abbott presented her with a clock with the Texas seal on it. So nice, right? Alas, clocks are a taboo gift in many parts of Asia because in Chinese the phrase for giving a clock sounds the same as the phrase used to say goodbye to the deceased. Foreign policy editor James Palmer put it best - it's basically the equivalent of Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President-elect Trump has made an announcement long-expected. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will serve as senior adviser. Now Kushner is praised, including by Democrats, as a calming influence on Trump. He's also a real estate developer with many business conflicts. And then there's his relationship to the president-elect. Decades ago, after John F. Kennedy named his brother as attorney general, Congress passed an anti-nepotism law to ensure appointees serve the United States, not their families. NPR's Jackie Northam reports.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: President-elect Trump announced Jared Kushner would have a key leadership role in the new administration on Monday, one day before Kushner's 36th birthday. Like his father-in-law, Kushner has made a mark as a real estate developer, but he's also been an important influential voice in Trump's inner circle.
JULIAN ZELIZER: It's clear that the president-elect very much wanted him to continue serving some advisory capacity.
NORTHAM: Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Princeton University, says it's not surprising Trump wants to keep Kushner close by.
ZELIZER: The only question was nepotism and ethics. And it seems like President-elect Trump thinks that this won't be a problem in the end.
NORTHAM: An anti-nepotism law was passed in 1967 to prevent a president from placing a relative in a Cabinet or a federal agency job. That law was challenged when President Bill Clinton named Hillary Clinton to lead a task force on health care. A federal judge ruled in that case the anti-nepotism law doesn't apply to White House staff jobs. Still, Darrell West, director of governance at the Brookings Institution, says the move could backfire on Trump because it exudes nepotism.
DARRELL WEST: Very few presidents actually go this route because it's very controversial. It always looks bad. It's - even if it's legal, it is not politically wise.
NORTHAM: Kushner will not be paid in his new role, but West says Kushner's business dealings, which include investors from foreign countries, could present conflicts of interest. Jamie Gorelick, Kushner's lawyer, says he plans to divest from his real estate holdings in anticipation of serving in public office.
JAMIE GORELICK: He is going to restructure his business so that he will no longer have any active involvement in the Kushner company entities, which are real estate entities mostly in New York.
NORTHAM: Gorelick says Kushner also plans to divest a substantial number of his assets before taking up his new role. She says, right now Kushner is doing everything he can to comply with the ethics rules. She thinks that might be enough to silence the critics. Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
I don't know about you, but when I've seen these images of self-driving cars in TV ads or in some other way, it's a little bit disconcerting, I mean, the idea that this thing is just out there making life-and-death decisions at every turn. So apparently there's some new social science research that is examining something that's a little counterintuitive. Instead of cars terrorizing people, one researcher is asking whether people might be terrorizing self-driving cars. I need some help explaining this, so our own NPR Shankar Vedantam is here to help me. Hi, Shankar.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel.
MARTIN: What does this mean, people terrorizing self-driving cars?
VEDANTAM: Well, let me set this up for you. I was talking with Adam Millard-Ball - he's a professor of environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz - and he's modeled what's going to happen when self-driving cars start showing up on the road.
MARTIN: OK.
VEDANTAM: He told me that, at its core, driving is not just about the physics of moving objects and the law of who can do what on the road. It's also about psychology. People have developed really complex and often unspoken rules of how to interact with one another on the road. You can teach a self-driving car all the rules and give it the tools to navigate around obstacles, but can these cars deal with all the psychological games that human drivers and pedestrians play on the roads?
MARTIN: I mean, I know that there's psychological warfare on the road for sure, but tell me how that applies to this situation.
VEDANTAM: So when we think of all the technologies that self-driving cars need, we often make a big assumption and that big assumption is that rational behavior is always the right course of action on the road. Millard-Ball told me he once took a taxicab ride in New York. Unlike the standard issue New York cab driver, this one actually drove his car rationally, deliberately and followed all the rules of the road. In other words, he drove like a self-driving car.
ADAM MILLARD-BALL: He didn't try and cut in. He'd yielded to pedestrians and cyclists when he should, and in a journey (ph) that two or three times as long to get across Manhattan as it would have done otherwise.
MARTIN: (Laughter) But it was a safer experience. And we note that because that feels exceptional - right? - because you can get in a cab and think that your life's on the line sometimes.
VEDANTAM: Exactly. Now, no one in their right mind would program a self-driving car to behave irrationally. But when you think about it, a good part of driving today involves the unspoken assumption that other drivers may not always behave rationally. When it comes to interacting with self-driving cars, humans will know that the robot who's operating the car will always do the rational thing.
MILLARD-BALL: A self-driving car is not going to be drunk. It's not going to look down to check it's phone. It's not going to be distracted, and it's not going to be sociopathic in that it's not going to kind of dare a pedestrian to walk out in front of it.
MARTIN: And so is that going to make us, the pedestrians, or just the other drivers, less cautious?
VEDANTAM: I think so. I mean, if you know the other car is always going to stop, even if you are in the wrong, you now have a psychological incentive to play a game of chicken because in the game of chicken, crazy beats sane when you're playing chicken. Or think of pedestrians. You know, today I know that if I step into a busy intersection, some crazy driver who is texting his girlfriend is going to hit me, so I do the rational thing and I stay on the sidewalk. But if I was certain the car is always going to stop, and presumably self-driving cars will be programmed to stop, shouldn't we expect lots of pedestrians to boldly step in front of cars?
MARTIN: I'm going to drive the bus.
VEDANTAM: (Laughter).
MARTIN: I don't know if that's going to make me safer or not. Shankar Vedantam, NPR's social science correspondent, he's also the host of a podcast that explores the unseen patterns in human behavior. It's called Hidden Brain. Thanks, Shankar.
VEDANTAM: Thank you, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
So when you work the hours on this job, you don't always get to catch the very end of the college national championship game.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Which means we both missed a dramatic moment...
MARTIN: Yeah.
INSKEEP: ...As Clemson played Alabama last night.
MARTIN: Seconds remained, and Clemson was behind. They were two yards from the end zone, down by three points, when this happened.
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SEAN MCDONOUGH: Setting up to be one of the great finishes in college football history no matter how this ends. First and goal from the two, Watson rolls to the right. Watson throws for a touchdown in the right flat. Hunter Renfrow scores with one second to go.
INSKEEP: One second.
MARTIN: One second to go. That's Sean McDonough making the call for ESPN Radio.
INSKEEP: And with that, Clemson beat Alabama 35 to 31, avenging last year's high-scoring game, which Alabama won over Clemson.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The first of President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees is getting a hearing this morning. Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions was one of Trump's earliest supporters in Congress, now he's in line to become the next U.S. attorney general. The nomination has triggered a lot of protests from civil rights groups in particular. Protesters have made their voice heard, in fact, interrupting Senator Sessions as he gave his opening remarks at the hearing this morning.
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JEFF SESSIONS: I also want to thank my dear friends...
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: No KKK. No fascist USA. No Trump. No KKK. No fascist USA. Sessions is a racist...
MARTIN: NPR's congressional correspondent Ailsa Chang has been watching the confirmation hearing. She joins us now on the line for an update. Hi, Ailsa.
AILSA CHANG, BYLINE: Hi there.
MARTIN: Just start off by telling us why Jeff Sessions is such a controversial nomination for this post.
CHANG: Well, there's a lot of concern about both his record on immigration and his record on civil rights. The chorus of opposition Democrats have heard from outside groups has been really intense. Here's how Dianne Feinstein described it. She's the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
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DIANNE FEINSTEIN: There have been sit-ins, protests and writings, and the committee has received letters of opposition from 400 different civil rights organizations, 1,400 law professors, a thousand law students, a broad task force of organizations that oppose domestic violence, 70 reproductive health organizations and many, many others.
CHANG: I mean, for one, Democrats are really concerned about his views on immigration. Sessions has been the most vocal opponent of comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate. He opposes a path to citizenship for immigrants here illegally. He does appear to support some ban on Muslims entering the country. And he's even supported limiting legal immigration because he said that would protect jobs. But Democrats, again, are also really concerned about his civil rights record.
MARTIN: All right, so let's try to get specific. What is it in Session's background that's giving people so much pause?
CHANG: Well, he's seen as unfriendly to LGBT rights. For example, in the Senate, he's voted against making it a federal hate crime to attack people based on their sexual orientation. And many Democrats haven't forgotten Sessions' controversial career as U.S. attorney in the southern district of Alabama back in the 1980s. Those were the years that did him in during Sessions' last confirmation hearing when he was nominated by then-President Reagan to be a federal district court judge.
MARTIN: And back in 1986, the Senate actually failed to confirm Sessions for a judgeship. Even many Republicans back then took issues with comments that he made about black lawyers and the KKK. Can you remind us what happened there?
CHANG: Yeah. During those confirmation hearings, a Justice Department lawyer said Sessions had called the NAACP and the ACLU un-American and communist-inspired. And it didn't even end there, a black prosecutor who had worked closely with Sessions testified that Sessions had said to him that he used to think the KKK was OK until he found out some of them were pot smokers. Sessions later said that that was just a really bad joke on his part. But that same black prosecutor also alleged that Sessions had once called him boy. Sessions adamantly denied that. There's another aspect to his prosecutor career which bothers Democrats, and that's a voter fraud case Sessions pursued against three black civil rights workers back in the 1980s. Many thought it was based on really, really flimsy evidence. Black voters saw this as a case of voter intimidation, and in the end Sessions got zero convictions out of the case.
MARTIN: Hold on. So how is Sessions and his supporters - how are they - are they trying to defend his civil rights record?
CHANG: They absolutely are. They've been reminding people that also when Sessions was U.S. attorney in Alabama, he vigorously prosecuted two KKK members who murdered a black teenager in 1981. They're also pointing out that, you know, Sessions as a senator has been known for doing some important bipartisan work. A few years ago, he helped Democrats address sentencing disparities between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. Sessions didn't think the much harsher penalties African-American men were getting for possession of crack was fair, so they applaud his work on that.
And Sessions has also said that of the 10 most important cases he's personally handled as prosecutor, four were related to voting rights and one was a school desegregation case. But former Justice Department lawyers have come forward and said that his involvement in those cases was not at all substantive.
MARTIN: NPR congressional correspondent Ailsa Chang. Thanks so much, Ailsa.
CHANG: You're welcome.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
They are popping up in neighborhoods across the country, hand-built little boxes that people put in front of their homes, churches or businesses. And they go by different names, like Little Free Pantry or Blessing Box. They are all trying to do the same thing though, to get direct food donations to people in need. Deborah Shaar of member station KMUW in Wichita has more.
DEBORAH SHAAR, BYLINE: Mature trees line the streets of a neighborhood just west of downtown Wichita. Houses sit close together with shared driveways and detached garages out back. With schools and the city's museums nearby, there's a lot of foot traffic here. And that's why Maggie Ballard thought her yard was a good place for what she calls a Blessing Box.
MAGGIE BALLARD: I felt like this is something that I could do - something small - that, you know, would benefit so many people as long as the word got out about it.
SHAAR: The bright red box is about two feet wide and is mounted on a post near the street. It looks like a little free library, but instead of books, the shelves are filled with food and personal care items. Ballard and her son check on it every day and restock as needed.
BALLARD: My son is 6 years old, so it gives him a little chore to, you know, kind of watch it and see what comes and goes and who comes and goes and maybe learn a little lesson from it.
SHAAR: There's a door on the front of the box, but no lock, so anyone can take what they need 24/7. Stacey Schwanke has stopped by with food donations a few times since the box went up in October.
STACEY SCHWANKE: We dropped off some breakfast food, some pasta, some sauce, some crackers and some soups.
SHAAR: The food pantry idea has been spreading through social media the past six months. Food pantries have gone up across the country. Much of it seems to trace back to Jessica McClard, who created what she calls The Little Free Pantry in northwest Arkansas.
JESSICA MCCLARD: The products that are stocked are put directly inside the pantry, and turnover is in about 30 to 45 minutes. The frequency of the turnover and the fact that other sites in town are also turning over that frequently, it suggests to me that the need is tremendous.
SHAAR: All of the items inside the boxes are free, and there are no forms to fill out. Those using the boxes come and go as they wish. And that sense of anonymity is something you won't find at traditional community food pantries. Maggie Ballard has only seen a few people using her pantry because most visitors come when it's dark.
BALLARD: Most of the traffic is in the middle of the night, I would say between midnight and maybe 7 in the morning.
SHAAR: Ballard says it's both awesome and sad to see the turnover of goods every day. On Christmas Eve, she watched as a family of three opened her box to find a bag of bagels and started eating them right there. Jessica McClard says these community-supported pantries are multiplying because of their simple concept.
MCCLARD: We're all short on time and money, and this is a way that people can feel like they're making a difference.
SHAAR: The food pantries come in all sizes. Some have religious connections and are located near churches. Others are adopted by businesses whose employees want to pay it forward. All are serving up food and supplies to anyone in need. For NPR News, I'm Deborah Shaar in Wichita, Kan.
(SOUNDBITE OF XPLODING PLASTIX SONG, "THE CAVE IN PROPER")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
After construction wrapped up on his new hotel in Washington, D.C., President-elect Donald Trump declared it the height of luxury. The Trump Organization spent $200 million to renovate the historic post office building, redoing all the woodwork, upgrading plumbing and electric systems. But several companies say they haven't been fully paid for that work and have filed liens against the Trump Hotel. NPR's Jackie Northam reports.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: In late October, just weeks ahead of the election, President-elect Trump made a quick detour to Washington for the official opening of his new five-star hotel just a few blocks from the White House. It included a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
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DONALD TRUMP: One, two, three.
(APPLAUSE)
NORTHAM: Trump told the crowd that the two-year renovation project was done ahead of schedule and under budget thanks to what he called an incredible team of people.
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TRUMP: Including hundreds of construction workers, electricians, maintenance workers and so many others who helped make this project a reality. They're really the important ones.
NORTHAM: And now some of those companies would like final payment for their work. Documents obtained by NPR show three Washington-area companies have filed liens against Trump International Hotel totaling $5 million. Richard Sissman is the lawyer for a subcontracting construction firm that says it's still owed about $80,000 for woodwork done on the hotel.
RICHARD SISSMAN: Trim and case work and architectural millwork, wall base crown molding - this is all fine carpentry. On these big jobs these should be paid. It's ridiculous that a small-time operator has to beg for its money.
NORTHAM: Trump has faced many liens and lawsuits for alleged non-payment for work in the past. Steven Schooner with the George Washington University Law School says resolving the liens in this case could ultimately involve the federal government because it holds the lease on the building where the Trump Hotel is located.
STEVEN SCHOONER: The way the lease is structured, it says that they may step in and discharge the lien, but they're not actually required to.
NORTHAM: Still, Schooner says, as a rule the government wants its tenants - like Trump Hotel - to solve their own problems. Requests for comment from Trump's communication team about the liens were not returned. Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There's a lot of artwork hanging in the halls of the U.S. Capitol Building. Tour groups might stop to look, but mostly the portraits and paintings go relatively unnoticed - except for one. It's a painting by a high school student, and it has launched a back and forth in Congress over free speech, artistic expression and policing. NPR congressional correspondent Susan Davis has more.
SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: The art in question hangs in this well-trafficked underground Capitol hallway. It's one of hundreds of works of art on display right now as part of the annual High School Congressional Art Competition. The artist, David Pulphus, is now in college. He was a high school student in Missouri Democrat William Lacy Clay's district that includes the town of Ferguson. Here's Clay on his constituent's painting.
WILLIAM LACY CLAY: It's a collage of different scenes that this kid has experienced over the last five years.
DAVIS: The street scene depicts dozens of black protesters. One is holding a sign that says racism kills. And at the foreground of this collage, two uniformed cops are depicted with animal heads. The painting had been hanging here since June without controversy or incident, but a wave of criticism in recent weeks from conservative media outlets prompted criticism from law enforcement advocates. That prompted one Republican to take matters into his own hands.
CLAY: Congressman Duncan Hunter, who took it upon himself to remove the painting without any authority from the Architect of the Capitol.
DAVIS: Hunter removed the painting from the wall and delivered it back to Clay's office last Friday. Hunter says the painting is offensive, and it violates existing rules governing what's acceptable art in the Capitol complex. He makes no apologies for his actions.
DUNCAN HUNTER: It was something that had to be done.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: It had to be done?
HUNTER: Yeah, yeah. So I just did it.
DAVIS: Clay reported Hunter to Capitol Police. He wants him charged with theft, but says the police declined to pursue it. Clay held a ceremony yesterday to reinstall it. He was joined by members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
CLAY: This is really not about a student art competition anymore. It's about defending the Constitution.
DAVIS: The painting was taken down by Republican lawmakers two additional times on Tuesday. Clay hung it back up each time. Washington Republican Dave Reichert, a former sheriff, is asking the Architect of the Capitol to review the painting and whether it violates any rules. Reichert objects to the art, but he had been trying to find a more peaceful resolution.
DAVE REICHERT: You know, look, I was a cop for 33 years, and that's not how you solve problems.
DAVIS: The painting is scheduled to come down no matter what this summer when the next round of winning high school art goes up for display and maybe debate. Susan Davis, NPR News, the Capitol.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
OK. Are you into these tracking watches, you know, these things you can wear to monitor your heart rate, your footsteps, even your sleep patterns? But are you also keeping track of the flooring you walk on or how many friends you hang out with? Kerry Klein of Valley Public Radio in Fresno reports on a community of health-watchers who are tracking all kinds of things.
KERRY KLEIN, BYLINE: Shaunzi used to be a little overweight, but she started exercising and ditched the jelly beans for apples and carrots. She's doing fine now, right around 6,000 pounds. She's an Asian elephant at the Fresno Chaffee Zoo.
VERNON PRESLEY: We have two savannas which we have our elephants in.
KLEIN: Lead elephant curator Vernon Presley says Shaunzi and the zoo's four other elephants are enrolled in a data-rich fitness tracking program called the Elephant Welfare Initiative. Caretakers keep detailed logs using special software.
PRESLEY: We'll get more concise information on body scoring, of how fit our elephants are, how much time we spend with our elephants.
KLEIN: Presley says the program aims to reduce bone and joint problems, improve reproductive health and ensure better overall welfare for captive elephants.
PRESLEY: We really feel this is what they call a lifestyle change in the elephant community.
KLEIN: More than 40 zoos across North America are taking part.
PRESLEY: We have to now commit even a greater amount of resources into monitoring our elephants' behavior and how well we're taking care of them.
KLEIN: The initiative arose out of a set of scientific studies published recently in the journal PLOS One. Author Cheryl Meehan of the animal welfare consulting group the AWARE Institute says she and her colleagues examined more than 250 elephants in extraordinary detail.
CHERYL MEEHAN: We collected blood and fecal samples, veterinary reports, hours and hours of video. We collected GPS data to measure daily walking distances - and also photographs to assess elephant body condition.
KLEIN: Among their results, the team found that feet and joints were healthier in enclosures with soft soil or sand - that makes sense. More surprisingly, bigger enclosures didn't seem to make for healthier elephants. And one of the most important findings - the more social engagement, the healthier the animals. Meehan says socializing appears to fend off repetitive behaviors like swaying back and forth, which can be a sign of anxiety.
MEEHAN: Elephants that spend more time in larger social groups, particularly those that included young elephants, and elephants that spend less time housed by themselves, these elephants were less likely to engage in these behaviors.
KLEIN: To make these animals healthier and happier, all this data has been brought together into the centerpiece of the Elephant Welfare Initiative, a software system that offers real-time feedback on elephant care. San Diego Zoo elephant curator Greg Vicino says the dashboards are designed to make it easy for keepers to monitor elephant health.
GREG VICINO: They're set up to look kind of like either little speedometers. Or you can make it look, basically, like a bar chart that tells you where you are now, where you stand next to the national average. And you can kind of set targets for yourself.
KLEIN: Elephant-keepers are already learning and adjusting. For instance, the research showed one way to make female elephants healthier is to make them work for food. That challenge is correlated with better reproductive health. So at the Fresno zoo, when it's time for breakfast, Shaunzi confronts a tangled network of chains and hanging objects. She reaches her trunk into a barrel above her head and shakes it until a shower of hay rains down. It's one of many new strategies helping ensure that captive elephants are healthy elephants.
For NPR News, I'm Kerry Klein in Fresno.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Barack Obama gave his final speech as the 44th president of the United States. The overriding theme of the farewell address last night in Chicago was American democracy - its strengths and the threats President Obama believes it faces. He quoted from the first president's farewell address that Americans must reject any effort to weaken what George Washington called the country's sacred ties.
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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We weaken those ties when we allow our political dialogue to become so corrosive that people of good character aren't even willing to enter into public service - so coarse with rancor that Americans with whom we disagree are seen not just as misguided but as malevolent. We weaken those ties when we define some of us as more American than others...
(APPLAUSE)
OBAMA: ...When we write off the whole system as inevitably corrupt, and when we sit back and blame the leaders we elect without examining our own role in electing them.
MARTIN: And Obama warned that's not the only way Americans have been walling themselves off into ideological bubbles and segregated social media feeds. He says America needs to break down those walls if it's to live up to its potential.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
OBAMA: If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet...
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: ...Try talking with one of them in real life.
MARTIN: Above all, the president urged Americans to engage in government, to be part of the change they want to see. Joining us now to talk about the speech is Jon Lovett. He spent three years as one of Obama's White House speechwriters.
Jon, thanks for being with us.
JON LOVETT: Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: What was your immediate reaction to Obama's farewell address as someone who knows him, who knows the kinds of speeches he's given over the years?
LOVETT: It's bittersweet. I think that it's inspiring to be reminded of why people believed in Barack Obama from the very beginning. I think it's both sad and frightening that we are in a place where the president leaving office believes it's necessary to defend the tenants of democracy, not just for people around the world, but for us as citizens. You know, presidents give farewell addresses and it's about cementing a legacy, it's about looking forward. But also, presidents - especially two-term presidents - have a unique vantage point on which to look at this country. It's a peculiar and strange job that affords presidents lessons that I think is worth imparting.
MARTIN: He, as you mentioned - it's - it is a unique job, he's done it for eight years. And inevitably people change, but especially when you sit in that post. Your outlook, I imagine, on the world starts to change. How different was this speech from one he would have given eight years ago?
LOVETT: I think that there's a remarkable consistency in who this person is. I think that this is - look, this president has been called and derided as all kinds of things, but this was a patriotic speech. You know, I found myself feeling hopeful. And I think for a lot of people who wanted a different outcome in this election and who were worried about the future of this country, it was a reminder that it's good to be hopeful. I think it was - I mean, it's hard right now to talk about this because this is not an ordinary farewell address.
Farewell addresses traditionally are not just about lessons, they're about warnings - President Washington warning about faction, President Eisenhower warning about the military industrial complex, President Jackson warning about too-powerful financial institutions. President Obama gave a warning about the defense of democracy itself, and that was a powerful and important message. And it's sad that we have to hear it, but I'm glad he delivered it.
MARTIN: He also used it as an opportunity to talk about what he considers to be some of his greatest achievements when he was in office - the economic recovery following the Great Recession, talked about Obamacare expanding health coverage for millions of Americans, the Iran nuclear deal. And he argued that these were collective achievements. Let's listen to a little bit.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
OBAMA: That's what you did. You were the change. You answered people's hopes. And because of you, by almost every measure, America is a better, stronger place than it was when we started.
MARTIN: Do you hear that as a sort of call to service?
LOVETT: Yes. This is a president leaving office having achieved a great deal. Those achievements are in jeopardy. And I think it's important that he's reminding people that, as citizens, we have agency. And people that voted for Donald Trump had agency in that decision. People that, right now, are afraid that there's nothing they can do have agency, and we need to fight.
And President Barack Obama, I believe, is a decent man. And what he's done tonight is to be a responsible, inspirational leader who doesn't resort to cynicism and who tries to remind people of the good work that's been done and that there isn't a reason to lose hope. And maybe that's too earnest, but that's where I'm at.
MARTIN: As the first black president, Barack Obama was careful about when and how he spoke about race, but he did. And he did it again last night. Let's listen to this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
OBAMA: After my election, there was talk of a post-racial America. And such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society.
MARTIN: So he's kind of acknowledging the high expectations that were put on him when he went into office.
Were the speeches where he talked about race relations in America - I mean, what was he trying to get out of those moments? What were his own expectations for the impact they would have?
LOVETT: I'd say - look, you know, you look at the speech he gave last night. And in the speech he gave, he laid out a pretty realistic version of what it means to see things from another person's perspective. But overall, I don't think the message he gave was that different than the message you can draw all the way back to the race speech he gave during the 2008 campaign.
But the one thing I'd want to say is there are a lot of people who I think, right now, are worried about what kind of country we are because of the president we just elected. But it's easy to think that what's good about us is less true than what's wrong. But I found myself reminded that, yes, you know, this country just elected someone I think is a deeply unfit and unqualified person to be president of the United States. But this is also the country that elected Barack Obama twice. And that is, in and of itself, a reason to be hopeful.
MARTIN: Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter to President Barack Obama. Thanks so much, Jon.
LOVETT: Thank you very much.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Rex Tillerson is going to Capitol Hill today to take questions from senators to see if he's fit to be the next secretary of state. Front and center will be Tillerson's history as the CEO of ExxonMobil. Senators will have to decide if that experience would be instrumental in furthering U.S. diplomacy or whether it could be a liability. Here's NPR's Michele Kelemen.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: For four decades, Rex Tillerson worked his way up through the ranks at Exxon, an energy giant with operations in dozens of countries. And that will serve him well, says Stephen Hadley, who was a national security adviser in the Bush administration.
STEPHEN HADLEY: You know, he's a man with a lot of experience in some of the most difficult parts of the world. He has done deals in difficult parts of the world. He has a network of contacts with people. And I think he will be able to make that experience and those contacts available to the new president. I think he's going to be a very strong and effective secretary of state.
KELEMEN: ExxonMobil is one of the clients of a consulting firm run by Hadley, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Defense Secretary Bob Gates. Rice and Gates encouraged President-elect Donald Trump to tap Tillerson for the job. And Hadley thinks Tillerson will make a good impression on senators.
HADLEY: He is a man of great integrity. He's an Eagle Scout, and that's the impression that he gives you. You know, he's a duty, honor, country guy, and I think the American people are going to like what they see.
KELEMEN: We speak in the noisy corridors of the U.S. Institute of Peace, where policymakers incoming and outgoing were holding a daylong conference. Activists in the room, including Paul O'Brien of Oxfam America, had different thoughts about how Tillerson can make the jump from ExxonMobil to the State Department.
PAUL O'BRIEN: Exxon has made deals in places like Equatorial Guinea and Angola where they have had sustained partnerships with corrupt and authoritarian dictators for a very long period of time. Their motive was don't worry so much about the governance, just make sure that the shareholders profit. That is precisely the wrong agenda to bring to the obligations of a secretary of state.
KELEMEN: Tillerson has agreed to sever ties with ExxonMobil with a $180 million payout. He's also promising to divest all his company shares if confirmed. Still, O'Brien wants senators on the Foreign Relations Committee to get a better sense of whether he's ready to look at the world in a different way.
O'BRIEN: That is a form of divestment of his past that he has to demonstrate in these hearings that he's willing to do in order to promote the values that the United States has fought for. Pretty much since the end of the Second World War.
KELEMEN: Senators have already been asking Tillerson about his close business dealings with Russia, and he says in his prepared remarks that he's clear-eyed about that. Russia must be held to account for its recent actions, he says, and NATO allies have a right to be alarmed about Moscow. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer is raising another potential source of controversy. Reports said ExxonMobil had indirect business dealings with Iran.
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CHUCK SCHUMER: Did Mr. Tillerson go around our Iran sanctions simply to line Exxon's pockets? That would be a very bad thing. The American people ought to know about it before the Senate has to vote to confirm.
KELEMEN: ExxonMobil says it was in compliance with all U.S. sanctions laws. Democrats don't want to rush the confirmation process. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Republican Bob Corker, has promised to give lawmakers the time they need to question Tillerson all day today and tomorrow if needed. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
(SOUNDBITE OF AMBIENT JAZZ ENSEMBLE SONG, "THE JOURNEY")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Fighting between ISIS and Iraqi forces has devastated cities in northern Iraq. Jalawla is a small city in that part of the country, and it's in the middle of land claimed by both the Iraqi government in Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government. Both sides want to control the oil-rich territory, but neither has stepped up to rebuild it. NPR's Jane Arraf walked the streets with one man who has taken on the job himself.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Yacoub Youssef is probably the most popular man in town right now. His official title is subdistrict director. He's essentially the mayor. We're taking a walk through Jalawla, a town held by ISIS in 2014. By the time Kurdish forces and Shia militias drove them out, bridges were destroyed, schools were damaged, electrical lines were down and there were explosives everywhere. Now city officials say most of the town's 80,000 residents are back.
YACOUB YOUSSEF: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: Youssef points out two bridges blown up by ISIS. We're walking across one of them repaired with concrete. When Youssef couldn't get either the Iraqi or the Kurdish government to pay for repairs, he persuaded 35 local residents to come up with $180,000 dollars to pay for it. Local contractors donated some of the labor.
YOUSSEF: (Through interpreter) If we waited for the government to do this, it would've cost millions. But our people did this work.
ARRAF: What are they going to call the bridge? I ask him.
YOUSSEF: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: (Laughter).
The challenge bridge, he tells me. Youssef is an exuberant man, the son of a local train conductor. As townspeople walk across the bridge, he shakes hands, jokes and kisses babies.
YOUSSEF: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: But he says Jalawla is complicated, and here's why. The city is ethnically mixed and disputed territory. It's part of central government-controlled Iraq, but Kurdish forces hold it now, and they've made clear they're not leaving. Neither side is able or willing to provide it with services. Youssef reflects the town's ethnic mix. His father was Arab and his mother Kurdish. His wife is Turkmen, the third biggest ethnic group here. We talk in his temporary office in the post office directorate. His own office was blown up and his house leveled.
YOUSSEF: (Through interpreter) When we returned to Jalawla, we saw that it was in ruins. It was horrible. It wasn't even like you were entering a city.
ARRAF: This is a country where most people expect the government to provide them with everything from health care to jobs to electricity and water, even land and houses. So Youssef was asking for a lot.
YOUSSEF: (Through interpreter) People have suffered a catastrophe. They see their house destroyed, there's no work and they've been in a camp for two years, and you say give me? It's difficult.
ARRAF: But he says people pitched in. Over the course of a year, they cleaned up and repaired buildings. They pooled money to buy generators. They even held a book fair to make sure that every child had something to read. And the international organizations came to help.
YOUSSEF: (Through interpreter) An organization came to us and said, our funds are from Israel. I said, it doesn't matter where you're from. I'm grateful that you're coming to support Jalawla.
ARRAF: That's a potentially dangerous statement in Iraq. But Youssef goes around with no bodyguards. We walk to the public school his wife helped to repair. He says she sold her gold jewelry to do it. The teachers tell him there's no heat, but they're proud that they managed to bring the school back. And the girls, coughing and sniffling, are still in high spirits as they race around an ornamental fountain. The fountain works, and it's painted the colors of the Iraqi and the Kurdish flags. Jane Arraf, NPR News in Jalawla, Iraq.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Rachel Martin with a job alert for President Obama. The streaming service Spotify has posted a vacancy for a president of playlists. The job requirements include having at least eight years experience running a highly regarded nation, and the job seeker must be, quote, "one of the greatest speakers of all time." The ad also demands applicants have a Nobel Peace Prize. No word yet on whether Obama is interested in submitting an application to that particular job. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Today, President-elect Donald Trump is scheduled to hold his first press conference since winning the White House. And to look back at presidential press conferences of the past, we are joined - as we are most Wednesdays - by commentator and columnist Cokie Roberts. She's here for our regular segment Ask Cokie. This is where you get to send your questions to Cokie about how Washington and politics work. Cokie, good morning.
COKIE ROBERTS, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: Let's kick off with the President Eisenhower. Before we get going in our conversation, let's listen to him expressing some skepticism about the first ever televised presidential press conference. This was back in 1955.
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DWIGHT EISENHOWER: Well, I see we're trying a new experiment this morning. I hope it doesn't prove to be a disturbing influence.
(LAUGHTER)
ROBERTS: If only you knew, Ike.
MARTIN: So that's an appropriate way to kind of set up our conversation here. Let's hear from our first listener.
CHRISTOPHER MROZINSKI: Hello, this is Christopher Mrozinski. My question is, when were the first press conferences?
ROBERTS: So Woodrow Wilson is credited with having the first one. I did not cover it, I would like you to know, but...
MARTIN: (Laughter) For the record, yeah.
ROBERTS: And it was something of a mistake. He thought he was just going to meet and shake hands with the press corps, and all of a sudden he discovers that there are - according to The Washington Times - 100 newspaper men and one newspaper woman. I have tried to find her, Rachel, and I can't, I'm distressed to say. The truth is that presidents, of course, have been dealing with newspapers from the beginning. And my personal favorite story is one that may be apocryphal, which was that Anne Newport Royall - who was known as the grandmother of the muckrakers - couldn't get an interview with John Quincy Adams. And he went swimming in the Potomac every day without any clothes...
MARTIN: What?
ROBERTS: ...And so she sat on his clothes. And when he came out, he was forced to submit to an interview. So wrap your mind around that mental image.
MARTIN: No, no. I'd rather not, no.
ROBERTS: (Laughter).
MARTIN: So let's get another question from another listener.
LIZ BURKEMPER: Hi, I'm Liz Burkemper from Troy, Mo. And my question is, is there any president that stands out as more accessible to the press or willing to answer more difficult questions? Thanks.
MARTIN: What do you think, Cokie?
ROBERTS: Well, for a long time these press conferences were off the record, so the presidents were quite accessible then. Particularly, Franklin Roosevelt would bring in members of the press a couple of times a week. But Ike's fear that the TV would be a disturbing influence was realized. They became much more formal, much less freewheeling. But, you know, even so, more freewheeling than today's press conferences, where you see President Obama calling on this person and then looking at his notes and saying, all right, the next question goes to so-and-so. It used to be that people jumped up and tried to get recognized. So, you know, it was a more genuine question and answer period.
But, like, Presidents use these things for their own purposes, not really to communicate with the American people. And now there's so many ways to do that around the press, of course. Trump's tweets are famous. Obama had his own White House videos. Or they use the press in a way that is more comfortable. President Obama loved his one-on-ones with individual members of the press.
MARTIN: So, of course, we know that the information that can come out of those press conferences is used for messaging and a variety of ways.
ROBERTS: Right.
MARTIN: But what about policy, what kind of difference does it make? Has there been a time that you know of that a president has actually changed policy because of the questions asked at a press conference?
ROBERTS: Yes. I actually did my last interview with President Ford, and it was about the Constitution and the presidency. And he said that he pardoned President Nixon because he realized in his first press conference after he took office - where our own Nina Totenberg was then a member of the writing press and asked a question that was very tough - that he realized he'd never get away from Nixon questions if he didn't pardon the former president, and so he changed the policy to his detriment. I mean, that's really why he lost his re-election, but then was later hailed for it. I'm sure there have been other instances that I don't know about because it's a good way to gauge the intensity of how people feel about things even though there are lots of other ways to gauge public opinion.
MARTIN: Commentator and columnist Cokie Roberts. She'll be joining us Wednesdays to answer your questions. You can tweet us @morningedition with the hashtag #AskCokie. You can join the conversation on Snapchat. Snap us at NPR, or you can email us at askcokie@npr.org. Hey, Cokie, thanks so much.
ROBERTS: Thank you, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
American police are more worried about their personal safety, and they blame the public criticism of law enforcement for that sense of insecurity. This is according to a national survey of police released today by the Pew Research Center. As NPR's Martin Kaste reports, it's a point of view that is echoed by the incoming Trump administration.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: The Pew survey of police is pretty wide ranging. But in this post-Ferguson era it's one stat that jumps out, the percentage of officers who've become more concerned about their safety - 93 percent. At his confirmation hearing yesterday, attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions drew a straight line between that sense of peril and public criticism of police.
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JEFF SESSIONS: We need to be sure that when we criticize law officers, it is narrowly focused on the right basis for criticism. And to smear whole departments places those officers at greater risk.
KASTE: In fact, there was a jump in the number of police killed on duty last year, and there's been a longer-term increase in the reported number of assaults on cops. But Sessions went further. He linked criticism of police to the recent spike in crime in certain cities.
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SESSIONS: Morale has been affected, and it's impacted the crime rates in Baltimore and crime rates in Chicago. I don't think there's any doubt about it.
KASTE: How does police morale affect crime rates? The Pew survey offers a possible explanation that says 72 percent of officers have now become less willing to stop and question people who seem suspicious.
EUGENE O'DONNELL: Everybody knows policing knew this was going to happen. This was inevitably going to happen.
KASTE: That's Eugene O'Donnell, former NYPD, former prosecutor, now on the faculty of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He's no partisan of Jeff Sessions, but he says it is clear to him that the broad criticisms of the last couple of years have made cops less eager to do their jobs in places like Chicago.
O'DONNELL: They have no clear mandate. They have no clear mission. They believe they're not going to be supported. And their major thing you hear from the Chicago cops is stay fetal. Go fetal, stay fetal.
KASTE: With Donald Trump about to become president, that's become the ascendant narrative in American policing, that cops are going fetal because of unfair criticism, which leads to higher crime. Chicago has become this argument's case in point. But that's not entirely fair, says Lori Lightfoot. She's at the forefront of the reform efforts there.
LORI LIGHTFOOT: I mean, in Chicago, yes, arrests are down, yes, investigatory stops are down. But at the same time, they're taking off 8,000 illegal guns off the street every year. You don't do that if you're sitting back and not doing your job. So again, somewhere in the middle is where the truth lies.
KASTE: Lightfoot rejects what she calls this dichotomy, that you can't support both the police and police reform. Still, the reformers do now find themselves in an uphill battle against the idea that they have American cops under siege. Tracey Meares is a Yale law professor and a member of President Obama's police reform task force. She admits to being depressed, but she hasn't given up on the prospects for reform.
TRACEY MEARES: I think that it is fair to say that there will be less acceleration. You know, the penetration of these ideas to smaller jurisdictions probably won't happen as fast.
KASTE: But she says she doesn't think the pressure for reform is going away long term. Martin Kaste, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The college football season came to a thrilling end this week, especially for Clemson fans. And the NFL playoffs promise more thrills ahead. But commentator Sarah Spain says the sport needs to turn its focus more to what's happening off the field.
SARAH SPAIN: It's been nearly three years since the arrest of Ray Rice. Security camera footage of the Ravens running back knocking out his then-fiancee forced the country to see in black and white the brutal reality of domestic violence. Back in 2014, many fans, coaches, players and media needed to be educated on the very basic idea that domestic violence isn't, quote, unquote, "between a man and wife" or a "family issue," it's a serious crime. Meantime, the NFL's well-publicized mishandling of Rice's suspension forced other leagues to take a hard look at their own policies on violence against women - or lack thereof - and make important changes.
In the NCAA, there are no explicit violence policies. The onus is put on individual universities to police student-athletes. Which brings us to Oklahoma running back Joe Mixon. This past November, the public saw for the first time a two-and-a-half-year-old security video in which Mixon punched a young woman, breaking her face in four places. Once again, visual proof was required for the public to truly understand the brutality of the offense, but at least this time the outrage was immediate. No one needed to be taught the seriousness of violence against women. Mixon was suspended for his entire freshman season after the assault, but kept on scholarship with his spot on the team waiting for him. He played the last two seasons under relatively limited scrutiny, shielded from media, that is until the video was released.
Years later, finally forced to fully address the issue, Mixon held a brief press conference. A week-and-a-half later, he was celebrated for his play in a high-profile bowl game and then declared for the NFL draft. Debate rages over whether Mixon should have been given a second chance, whether it's fair to rehash the incident again years later, and how he'll be viewed by prospective NFL teams. It seems years after Ray Rice, we still haven't figured out collectively the best way to deal with the issue of violence against women. Here's what I think. Right now, teams and schools are punishing for the sake of PR, to save face and sponsors. The goal instead needs to be to get to the root of the violence and ensure that athletes committing these crimes won't do it again.
If we believe these athletes do deserve a second chance, then we have to demand more transparency. Clear-cut expectations of treatment, therapy and progress. Open communication with and about the abuser. Honest conversation from coaches and higher-ups about why they believe enough progress has been made for the athlete to earn back the right to play. Transparency is also the only way to satisfy the needs of fans who don't want to feel guilty or compromised by their fandom. Whoever drafts or signs Mixon, it'll be that team's job to convince fans that a change has occurred. Now that we've got the outrage part down, it's time to take the next step.
MARTIN: That was commentator Sarah Spain. She's an ESPN sportscaster from Chicago.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
And we begin this hour with reports that Russia has collected compromising information on President-elect Donald Trump and that the chiefs of America's intelligence agencies have briefed both Mr. Trump and President Obama on those allegations. CNN broke the story late yesterday, reporting that the allegations involve Trump's personal and political life, also that they were presented in a two-page summary attached to the much-discussed report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. By last night on Capitol Hill, Trump's pick for attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions, was fielding questions about all this during his confirmation hearing. Here's Senator Al Franken, Democrat from Minnesota.
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AL FRANKEN: Without divulging sensitive information, do you know about this or know what compromising personal and financial information the Russians claim to have?
JEFF SESSIONS: Sen. Franken, allegations get made about candidates all the time, and they've been made about President-elect Trump lots of times. Most of them - virtually all of them - have been proven to be exaggerated or untrue.
MARTIN: That's Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump's nominee for attorney general. We're joined now by NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, who's in the studio with us to help answer some big questions - a lot of questions circulating this morning, Mary Louise.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: There are.
MARTIN: So what more can you tell us about what this alleged compromising information is?
KELLY: Well, we know that U.S. intelligence officials have taken it seriously enough to brief both the president and the president-elect. We know that the two-page summary you mentioned is drawn from a larger dossier. The larger dossier was compiled by a private firm. It runs 35 pages. NPR has learned that Senator John McCain gave a copy of that 35 pages to the FBI back on December 9. I have seen those 35 pages. I have not seen the two-page classified summary which, we assume, contains what U.S. intelligence believes is the most credible information.
MARTIN: So we've heard that this information has to do with Trump's political and personal life - those are big realms. What more can you say about that?
KELLY: I can say that they are serious claims. I am not going to lay them out in detail here, Rachel, not because I'm playing coy but because I'm trying to be careful. NPR has not verified these allegations. No news organization have - has. As far as we know, U.S. intelligence has not verified these allegations. I am told that U.S. intelligence has examined the sources for the claims, has found them to be credible. Another factor to remember - we said president-elect and President Obama were briefed. One factor is that one job of U.S. intelligence is to make sure their bosses aren't surprised. These claims are circulating. They are...
MARTIN: Just briefing them doesn't mean that they're giving them any kind of credence.
KELLY: It means they're trying to say - this is circulating. We knew about it, so should you.
MARTIN: How has Donald Trump responded?
KELLY: Well, we may know more later this morning. Trump is scheduled to hold a press conference this morning in New York, his first in six months. If that goes ahead, you can bet that this will be the first question. If you're about to ask me, Rachel, has he tweeted? He has. We have so far from him a tweet that reads - fake news, a total political witch hunt. Presumably, that's referring to these allegations. Meanwhile, some Trump aides who are mentioned in the dossier have personally issued denials. And as of this morning, the Kremlin is also denying all of this.
MARTIN: We said U.S. intelligence leaders are - took the claims seriously enough to have considered them worth sharing. And questions about possible links between Trump and Russia actually came up in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing yesterday, right?
KELLY: They did. I was there. This was a hearing on Russia. Democrats asked repeatedly about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. Here is one of those Democratic senators. This is Ron Wyden grilling the head of the FBI, James Comey.
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RON WYDEN: My question for you, Director Comey, is has the FBI investigating these reported relationships? And if so, what are the agency's findings?
JAMES COMEY: Thank you, Senator. I would never comment on investigations, whether we have one or not, in an open forum like this.
KELLY: And Wyden kept pushing, demanded that Comey produce an unclassified response to his answer and that he do it, Rachel, before January 20 when Donald Trump is set to assume the presidency.
MARTIN: NPR national security correspondent Mary Louise Kelly.
Thanks, Mary Louise.
KELLY: You're welcome.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Obama has taken what's likely to be his last flight aboard Air Force One. The plane carried him back to Washington, D.C. last night after a televised address to the nation from his hometown of Chicago. It was a sweeping look back at his eight years in office, an account of what Obama considers his biggest achievements and a warning about the future. Here's NPR's Scott Horsley.
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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It's good to be home.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: President Obama chose to mark the end of his time in office in the place where he got his start 30 years ago, working as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. It's where, he says, he learned change is possible when ordinary people demand it. And he says that lesson stayed with him through eight years in the White House.
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OBAMA: Because of you, by almost every measure, America is a better, stronger place than it was when we started.
HORSLEY: Obama said he wanted to say thank you to the American people for bouncing back from the Great Recession and extending health care to 20 million people. Many of the 18,000 who came to watch the speech in person wanted to say thank you to him.
SHARON BETHEA: This is epic. I was at the park when he won. I was at his inauguration, his first inauguration, so only be fitting that I come and listen to his farewell speech.
HORSLEY: Sharon Bethea lives on Chicago's South Side. She waited hours in the cold over the weekend to get tickets to the speech.
BETHEA: I'm going to miss that family so much. I'm going to miss looking at the presidency and seeing somebody that looks like me, a beautiful American family that looks like me.
HORSLEY: Obama himself got a little misty-eyed talking about his wife Michelle last night, how she'd inspired a new generation and made the White House a place that belongs to everybody.
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OBAMA: You took on a role you didn't ask for, and you made it your own with grace and with grit and with style and good humor.
(APPLAUSE)
HORSLEY: The atmosphere surrounding the speech had the feel of a family reunion, as former staffers and campaign volunteers hugged one another and traded selfies. But the mood was also bittersweet for supporters like Alison Jackson. She traveled from Massachusetts to see the president in person for the first time. Jackson is apprehensive about the man who's taking Obama's place.
ALISON JACKSON: I keep asking myself, what can we possibly do over the next four years? And I finally decided that we just have to start at the very grass roots and hope that it catches on and the hope that Obama brought us in 2008 will somehow manage to resurface again.
HORSLEY: Obama conceded for many of his supporters progress feels uneven, that for every two steps forward, it often feels like one step back. Over the long run, he argued, the country is moving in a positive direction, but he cautioned there's work to do to rebuild America's sense of common purpose.
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OBAMA: Democracy does require a basic sense of solidarity.
HORSLEY: Obama says that solidarity's been challenged at times, most recently by rising income inequality, demographic change and the specter of terrorism. America's first black president also pointed to age-old racial divisions that may have eased in recent decades, but which are not entirely healed.
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OBAMA: If every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and an undeserving minority, then workers of all shades are going to be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves.
HORSLEY: Ultimately, Obama's farewell speech was a challenge to his followers. If something needs fixing, he said, lace up your shoes and do some organizing - show up, dive in, stay at it.
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OBAMA: If you're disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clipboard, get some signatures and run for office yourself.
HORSLEY: Sometimes you'll win, sometimes you'll lose, Obama said, but he argues the work itself is energizing. And he said his own faith in America and its people has been confirmed by eight years in the White House that are now drawing to a close. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Chicago.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Last night, jurors in South Carolina unanimously voted to give Dylann Roof the death penalty. The self-described white supremacist murdered nine black parishioners at a Charleston church in 2015. South Carolina Public Radio's Alexandra Olgin reports.
ALEXANDRA OLGIN, BYLINE: It took the same 12 jurors who found Roof guilty of hate crimes three hours to give him the death sentence. Family members in the courtroom embraced after the long, emotional trial. Melvin Graham, the brother of victim Cynthia Graham Hurd, says there are too many senseless shootings in this country.
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MELVIN GRAHAM: I just want this to stop. I really do. I'm tired. Every time I hear about a shooting, I cry. We have to stop this.
OLGIN: Graham says he supports the death sentence for his sister's killer. During the trial, federal prosecutors repeatedly showed through Roof's writings how much he hated black people.
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GRAHAM: If Dylann Roof was named Abdul, we would call him a terrorist, and we'd say he'd been radicalized. And he was radicalized but not in the way that some people think - radicalized himself to believe this thing and felt that he had to act on it just like any other terrorist.
OLGIN: Graham has not yet forgiven Roof. He said he can't live with hate and thinks peace will come with time. Dylann Roof's family released a statement saying they will forever struggle to understand why he committed this attack. South Carolina prosecutors still plan to try Roof in state court where he also faces the death penalty. For NPR News, I'm Alexandra Olgin in Charleston.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
For a long time, self-driving cars were only possible in the world of science fiction. But if companies as diverse as Google and Ford are spending billions on the technology, we have to ask when that fiction becomes fact. NPR's Sonari Glinton is at Detroit's big car show to try to find out.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Two of the most important things at the North American International Auto Show are self-driving and autonomy. Now, you would think that they are the same things, but they're very different. And understanding the difference is important to understanding the future of the auto industry.
Hey, Jessica. Can I interview you on the way to Ford?
JESSICA CALDWELL: Yeah, of course.
GLINTON: Do me a favor, and introduce yourself.
CALDWELL: I'm Jessica Caldwell with Edmunds.
GLINTON: Walking between booths, I asked her the big question of the day. When are we going to get driverless cars? First she wanted to make sure I understood what a driverless or self-driving car is.
CALDWELL: A driverless car is when the car literally does all of the work for you. It drives for you. You don't need any driver input. So I think that's the dream most people have - is that they can sit in the car, and it's literally as if someone's driving for them. They don't need to sit in the driver's seat. They don't need to watch the traffic. They don't need to make sure no one's going to rear-end them. It's a place where you can just relax.
GLINTON: Got that? That is a driverless car. You don't need a steering wheel necessarily or pedals, and it can go anywhere on the road or off, which is different from an autonomous car, where it needs some kind of human input where a driver can, say, turn off a feature or turn it back on.
CALDWELL: You're still going to have to sit in the driver's seat. You're still going to have to be aware. You're going to have the option to let the car drive for you, but you can't just check out.
GLINTON: Now armed with a little bit of knowledge, on our way to Ford, let's stop by Volvo, which is owned by a big Chinese company with deep pockets. And they've started a self-driving company. Here's Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson. He says his company is being very cautious.
HAKAN SAMUELSSON: We are rather humble here and say, let's listen to these people, how they react because at the end, it will be credibility - having this product and nobody will trust it and may not use it. And I mean then it's not something we can bring to the market.
GLINTON: Volvo is testing their technology already with consumers, and they're licensing it to other companies. All right, we've arrived at Ford Motor Company.
GREG STEVENS: I'm Greg Stevens. I'm the global manager for automated driving at Ford.
GLINTON: Oh, look at you.
STEVENS: This is our car that we're displaying here at the show. It's our next-generation autonomous vehicle.
GLINTON: Now, when you say autonomous vehicle, tell me what you mean by that.
STEVENS: Yeah, what we mean is really clear. The vehicle drives itself. The people in the car have absolutely no role at all in driving the vehicle. They're purely passengers. The vehicle does everything.
GLINTON: How big of a deal is this for a company like Ford?
STEVENS: It's one of the biggest deals in the history of the automobile. And this is a vehicle that we're building to drive itself. In fact, we're not even going to have a steering wheel and pedals in it when we go to production.
GLINTON: Stevens says you won't be able to buy one of these. Ford will be using them as ride-sharing vehicles. But don't let them confuse you. It's still not a full-on self-driving car because it can't go on any road at any speed. But it's real close.
WILLIAM CHERGOSKY: There's a lot of hyperbole around the industry right now. You know, we're still waiting for our flying cars from the '60s, right?
GLINTON: William Chergosky is chief interior designer with Toyota's CALTY team. Toyota has a concept car. It will be a driverless vehicle when it's made in 2030. Chergosky says Toyota is working to develop an experience that will make passengers feel comfortable. He says Toyota is in no hurry to bring out a driverless car or to offer autonomous features early.
CHERGOSKY: Autonomous driving is coming, right? And the way that you do it responsibly - I think it's very important that we all understand what the possibilities are, what the reality is and what it can possibly do for us.
GLINTON: And whether it's autonomous vehicles or self-driving cars, both of those things are likely to be on our roads much sooner than you or I think. Sonari Glinton, NPR News, Detroit.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Clare Hollingworth has died. She was a pioneering war correspondent. Her career spanned decades, but she's best known for her very first story. In 1939, she had one of the biggest scoops of the century - the beginning of World War II. Here's John Otis with her remarkable story.
JOHN OTIS, BYLINE: Clare Hollingworth first traveled to the Polish-German border as an aid worker to help Jews and other refugees fleeing from the Nazis. When that job ended, she was hired by London's Daily Telegraph newspaper as a part-time reporter in Poland.
In her third day on the job, the 27-year-old cub reporter borrowed a car from the British consulate. The diplomatic plates allowed her to slip across the border into Nazi territory. A giant tarp along the road blocked her view. But in an interview with The Telegraph when she was in her 90s, Hollingworth described how a gust of wind blew the tarp aside.
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CLARE HOLLINGWORTH: And I looked down into the valley and saw scores, if not hundreds, of tanks.
OTIS: Her story ran on The Telegraph's front page. Three days later, Hollingworth woke to the sound of the Nazi blitzkrieg into Poland. Retired British diplomat Elizabeth Wright said that Hollingworth had trouble convincing her editors and diplomats that World War II had really begun.
ELIZABETH WRIGHT: She was in a phone box, ringing this through. And everyone was saying, OK, that can't possibly be true. And she stuck the receiver outside and said, what you can hear is the tanks rumbling in.
OTIS: Hollingworth filed many more big stories. In 1963, she revealed that British double agent Kim Philby had defected to the Soviet Union. But she was best known for covering conflicts in Algeria, Greece, Kashmir, Vietnam and Yemen. To prepare for the rigors, she sometimes slept on her apartment floor. Hollingworth once admitted she was a war junkie.
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HOLLINGWORTH: I'm really passionately interested in war, and if one is passionately interested in war, one can't help like being in it.
OTIS: Along with Martha Gellhorn, Virginia Cowles, and Clare Boothe Luce, Hollingworth paved the way for today's female war reporters. That's according to CNN's Christiane Amanpour, who spoke last year at a tribute to Hollingworth.
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CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: It's not us pioneering. It's them. It's Clare and that band of women who really did it for us.
OTIS: Hollingworth emerged from the battlefields unscathed, but Wright says she often thought about death.
WRIGHT: And I remember her saying to me once, you know, Elizabeth, I'd really love to be killed in a war by a rocket or something like that.
OTIS: Instead, Hollingworth died Tuesday in her home in Hong Kong. She was 105. For NPR News, I'm John Otis.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. The Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon centered around a secret source known as Deep Throat. Reporter Bob Woodward met regularly with Deep Throat in a parking lot below an office building just outside D.C.
This year, the lot is scheduled to be torn down as part of a new development project. But city leaders say the legend of Deep Throat will live on, and the plaque commemorating those secret meetings will be restored once the new site is completed. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The day has finally come - after postponing it once, Donald Trump will hold his first press conference today since winning the election. In fact, it'll be his first since July. Reporters are certain to ask about the allegations of incriminating evidence held by the Russian government, but those unsubstantiated claims are not the only potential conflict of interest likely to come up. So it seems like a good moment to check in again with two former White House ethics lawyers. Richard Painter served under President George W. Bush, and Norman Eisen, who worked for President Obama. Gentlemen, welcome back to the program.
NORMAN EISEN: Good morning, Rachel.
RICHARD PAINTER: Good morning.
MARTIN: Good morning. So we don't want to go into too much detail about the allegations that are being raised by this dossier. They are entirely unsubstantiated at this point, but they are out there. And Donald Trump himself is responding to them. Are you concerned about Mr. Trump's ties to Russia?
EISEN: Rachel, we're very concerned. And after Sen. Reid alerted the country at the end of October to the fact that these allegations existed, professor Painter and I wrote in our usual bipartisan fashion in Politico magazine that the tax returns that Mr. Trump has refused to release could have critical information about his ties to Russia. You know, it's very confusing because Mr. Trump says, well, I have no ties to Russia, I do no business there. And yet, his son has stated Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets, and we see a lot of money pouring in for - from Russia. The taxes have a tremendous amount of information about partnerships, about gifts, about other business dealings. And importantly to these unsubstantiated allegations, they may have business expenses which could help us substantiate some of these shocking claims that are circulating.
MARTIN: And, of course, still no word from the Trump camp as to whether or not those returns will be released. But this press conference is going to take place - we think - at this point, and there will be all kinds of questions about how Donald Trump plans to unravel this kind of spider web of potential conflicts of interest. What do you - Richard Painter, what do you need to hear from him today?
PAINTER: Well, first on the connection between anybody in his campaign and Russia, those allegations, he needs to support a investigation by the House and Senate in collaboration with the CIA and the FBI to find out who in the United States has been collaborating with the Russians to conduct espionage inside the United States on private citizens and perhaps on the United States government. That is a very important investigation that needs to happen in Congress with the CIA and the FBI. The president needs to support that and make sure that everybody cooperates because we do not need anybody who's been engaging in that type of espionage to be infiltrating the White House or any other part of our government. So that's the absolute number one priority right now. I think with respect to the president's personal finances, his disclosure of the tax returns would help enormously and have - help Americans have much more confidence in their new president. And also...
MARTIN: But that's likely not going to happen any time soon. What does he...
PAINTER: Well, that's his decision, yeah.
MARTIN: What could he say today that could give you some peace of mind?
EISEN: Five...
PAINTER: Yeah. In addition to release of the tax returns, he needs to sell the assets that he has that create conflicts of interest. And he can't be in the hotel business and bringing in foreign diplomats and foreign governments booking the hotel. He's got to get rid of the hotels, the branding where he has his name on hotels and office buildings all over the world. And that could be potential...
MARTIN: Donald Trump has said this is very difficult, Norman Eisen, real estate can't just be liquidated and all slung into a blind trust
EISEN: Rachel, like many things Donald Trump says, that's just not true. It's simple for Donald Trump. All he needs to do is affix his signature to an irrevocable power of attorney, set up a trust, get a trustee who's going to have all those complexities and worries. And Donald Trump needs to, number one, as Richard says, give up ownership, not just operations. Number two, he's got to set up that true blind trust as every president has done for the past four decades or the equivalent. Number three, we want to see that independent trustee. Number four, he's got to assure us in particular that he's not going to get unconstitutional payments from foreign governments and other benefits as he's getting today - violates the Constitution. And number five, we must have in addition - this is no substitute, but in addition - we need to have a strong ethics wall separating the business and the government. And professor Painter and I wrote yesterday in Politico laying out those five criteria in detail.
MARTIN: Richard Painter, what do you make of Donald Trump's announcement that he intends to install his son-in-law Jared Kushner as a senior White House adviser? Do you see any problem with that?
PAINTER: Well, there's a debate about whether that is not permitted under the anti-nepotism statue, and there's room for reasonable people to disagree on that. My initial reaction was that the anti-nepotism statute prohibited it. And many experts believe it does prohibit it, but there are those who agree with the Trump administration - the incoming Trump administration - that that is permitted. The president has a right to make the appointments he wants in the White House to the White House staff. What's critically important is that Mr. Kushner comply with the same ethics rules that everybody else needs to comply with, that he file a form 278 financial disclosure as the senior White House staff do, that he divest from assets that create conflicts of interest or recuse from matters in which he has a financial conflict. For example...
MARTIN: Which he says he is - he's doing.
PAINTER: Well, I think he - they need to be very careful about this and make sure, for example, if he's in the real estate business with large bank loans, he shouldn't be getting involved in the proposed deregulation of the banks. I mean, that's all about real estate lending, an awful lot of it. And we know what we got in 2008 because of excessive real estate lending. Another area is if Ivanka, his wife, is going to be importing clothing from outside the United States and selling it here, that's going to shut him out of international trade issues. A lot...
MARTIN: Lots of questions to be discussed in the days and weeks ahead. We will have both of you back to do that. Norman Eisen and Richard Painter, White House lawyers under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, thanks to you both.
PAINTER: Thanks, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Later today in New York, President-elect Donald Trump holds his first press conference since winning office. And there are a whole lot of questions that have come up even in the last 24 hours. Last night, documents came to light which point to potentially compromising but still unverified links between Russia, its intelligence services and the president-elect. Donald Trump on Twitter called the documents fake news and a political witch hunt.
Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona joins us now on the line. Senator, thanks for being with us.
JEFF FLAKE: Hey, thanks for having me on.
MARTIN: Let's start with these unverified documents alleging links between Donald Trump and Russia. Have you seen them?
FLAKE: Well, I looked on BuzzFeed at them, but I think we ought to treat them as you just presented them - unverified documents. And it seems that a few of the items have already been disproven. So we'll see where it goes from here. But as now, it's unverified.
MARTIN: These documents and its contents, though, have been circulating on Capitol Hill since at least December. What questions do they raise for you?
FLAKE: Well, like I said, they're unverified. There's a lot of information out there. There was during the campaign. There will continue to be in this era of fake news and whatnot. It's - you shouldn't take things at face value when they're simply released. And so I think we ought to wait. Donald Trump will have a press conference today, and my guess is he'll address some of this.
MARTIN: In the press conference, besides the big press conference today, I should say, there's a big confirmation hearing happening. Donald Trump's choice for secretary of state has his hearing on the Hill, Rex Tillerson. Former CEO of ExxonMobil, he has had his own close relationship with Russian officials over the years. You will be among those asking Rex Tillerson questions today. Is that something you intend to ask him about?
FLAKE: Oh, long before it gets to me on the dais, it will be asked, I'm sure. If there are unanswered questions, I'll ask them. I've had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Tillerson on the phone as well as meet with him in my office, and I'll continue the discussion in the hearing.
But obviously people will be asking about his experience with Russia. It would be strange if the former CEO and chairman of ExxonMobil did not have dealings with Russia. But obviously the question is, will he be able to put that aside - the role he played, you know, heading a major energy company - and instead being secretary of state.
MARTIN: You said you sat down with Rex Tillerson. What was he like? What were those conversations like?
FLAKE: Well, I was impressed certainly with his knowledge of what's going on around the world and, you know, gratified by his willingness to serve. We need knowledgeable people who are willing to serve in our government.
And so anybody who'd subject themselves to (laughter) hearings like will happen today and this process - that's a good thing. And I obviously think that we ought to ask pointed questions and certainly see where he is on these issues. But I'm glad he's willing to serve.
MARTIN: Of course a former CEO of a major multibillion-dollar global company with extensive ties in Russia - in the context of the larger questions about the Trump administration - incoming administration and its connections to Russia, does that give you any pause, or do you see those relationships that Rex Tillerson might have as being advantageous?
FLAKE: Well, it certainly makes questions that are asked about Russia that much more important. But I don't think that, you know, having ties with Russia as a businessman is disqualifying at all, and it can be useful.
I think Henry Kissinger said as much a while ago, that certainly you want somebody who's knowledgeable about Russian system, about the government's motives. And that can be put to good use in terms of our own national interest. But I think questions certainly ought to be asked, and I'm sure he'll have answers for them.
MARTIN: When Tillerson was at ExxonMobil, the company made deals that sometimes ran counter to official U.S. policy and sanctions, in particular, going through third parties to work with Iran and Sudan. What does Mr. Tillerson need to say to assure you that he will put U.S. interests first?
FLAKE: Well, I think what he has told senators like myself and others that he does have experience around the world, he does have experience brokering deals with governments and individuals and that he put those skills to good use as chairman of ExxonMobil - and he'll now use those skills to better our situation in the world and in our own national interest. I think that's what we'll hear from him.
MARTIN: Jeff Flake - he's a Republican senator from Arizona. He will be asking questions to Rex Tillerson, who has been nominated to become the next U.S. secretary of state by the president-elect. Senator Flake, thank you so much for your time this morning.
FLAKE: Thanks for having me on.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump is facing questions this hour from reporters. It is the first time Trump has held a formal press conference in 167 days, since late July, so we're going to get right to it. NPR political editor Domenico Montanaro is following all the action, and he's here in the studio. Hi, Domenico.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hello, Rachel.
MARTIN: Of course, this press conference is coming as these explosive reports came out last night, unsubstantiated allegations that Russia has some kind of compromising information on the president-elect. Did Trump have something to say about that?
MONTANARO: He absolutely did. But first, his incoming White House press secretary, as well as Vice President-elect Mike Pence, blasted the media saying that it was shameful and disgraceful that anybody would run with that. And they played a little bit of good cop, bad cop routine because Trump came on and said that he actually thanked the media, thought that some of them went up a notch in his view for not running with some of this information, but clearly called it fake news that he blamed on his opponents. Let's take a listen to some of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: I saw the information. I read the information outside of that meeting. It's all fake news. It's phony stuff. It didn't happen. And it was gotten by opponents of ours, as you know because you reported it and so did many of the other people. It was a group of opponents that got together, sick people, and they put that crap together.
MONTANARO: So this was something that intelligence officials say that they had had, that they were - that they could have presented to Donald Trump. It wasn't reported that they actually did present it to him. But this is something that now the Trump people are able to use to say this was all fake, this is nonsense, let's get on to different and more important issues. And certainly a lot more is going to come up in this press conference.
MARTIN: Although he also threw another grenade suggesting that it could've been something leaked from the intelligence community itself.
MONTANARO: Correct. So this still continues this thorny relationship that Donald Trump has had with the intelligence community, saying I don't know if it came from the intelligence community, but maybe it came from the intelligence community, sort of nodding to the fact that this is possible. Of course, he is the American president coming in, and intelligence is going to be something that he's going to have to lean on as the American president. So at some point, you're going to figure that they're going to get on the same page.
MARTIN: Conflicts of interest - this was something that we had expected some questions to come in about. Did he address his global business interests and how he would unravel them?
MONTANARO: He hasn't addressed it yet, though that was the focus of what was supposed to be talked about in the mid-December press conference that was postponed until now. You would imagine with the crush of media that are there that this will come up. He has said that he will try to unwind some of his business entanglements and pass off the management of the Trump Organization to his sons. We haven't heard him address that quite yet.
MARTIN: He made an announcement today, a staffing decision. He chose to use this press conference to announce leadership at the VA.
MONTANARO: He did. And, you know, Donald Trump has normally taken to these sort of provocative picks. He's tried to sort of make a show of some of these kind of high-profile people. Instead, at the VA, he said that he is going to nominate David Shulkin, who is the undersecretary for health at the Veterans Affairs Administration. That is a pretty - maintains some continuity with the Obama administration, frankly. It's this person...
MARTIN: This was someone who had been nominated...
MONTANARO: That's right.
MARTIN: ...By President Obama.
MONTANARO: He was nominated by President Obama in 2015. And he was the head of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, which may be something that gives Trump some confidence because that is a high-profile hospital in New York that a lot of people know. And, you know, when you want to maintain some continuity with the health care of the VA, it's an interesting pick given it's the first crossover.
MARTIN: How significant is it that this is the first press conference Trump has had since July?
MONTANARO: Well - and ironically, that press conference is when he called on Russia, encouraged them to, quote, "find" more of those 30,000, quote, "missing" Hillary Clinton emails. So the fact that he was mocking Hillary Clinton during the campaign for not doing a lot of press conferences, now as president-elect doing fewer press conferences than any president-elect in history - at least since Jimmy Carter - is really quite striking and probably says something about the kind of administration he would run where he feels like he can go around the press in different kinds of ways rather than talking directly through - the American people by proxy through the press.
MARTIN: NPR political editor Domenico Montanaro following President-elect Donald Trump's press conference this morning. Thanks so much, Domenico.
MONTANARO: Thanks as always.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump's pick for secretary of state is getting some tough questions this morning about the U.S. relationship with Russia. It's part of Rex Tillerson's confirmation hearing. The hearing was already expected to be dominated by questions about Russia because of Tillerson's extensive business ties. He was the former CEO of ExxonMobil. And all that was before unverified documents surfaced featuring claims of ties between Trump's presidential campaign and Russia. NPR congressional reporter Scott Detrow is following all of this, and he joins us from Capitol Hill. Good morning, Scott.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Hey, Rachel.
MARTIN: Give me the headline so far. What's going on?
DETROW: Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. The first two hours of this hearing have been all about Russia. More broadly - but the Russian alleged hacking of the presidential election kind of messing with the election, with distributing Democratic documents that we spent so much time talking about over the last few months did come up pretty early on from a question from Senator Marco Rubio.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARCO RUBIO: Do you believe during the 2016 presidential campaign Russian intelligence services directed a campaign of active measures involving the hacking of emails, the strategic leak of these emails, the use of internet trolls and the dissemination of fake news with the goal of denigrating a presidential candidate and also undermining faith in our election process?
REX TILLERSON: Senator, I have had no unclassified briefings because I've not received my clearance yet. However, I did read the interagency report that was released on January the 6. That report clearly is troubling and indicates that all of the actions you just described were undertaken.
DETROW: And Tillerson's been pretty careful in this hearing. He said a lot of times that he needs to look at classified documents answering different questions.
MARTIN: There have also been broader questions about where President-elect Trump and Rex Tillerson himself stand on Russia's role in the world. How did Tillerson respond to that?
DETROW: Well, yeah, there have been because of the warm words that Donald Trump has had for Russia, wanting to have improved relationships, and also because of ExxonMobil's long business ties with that country and Tillerson's close relationship with Putin. Tillerson made it clear in his opening statement that he would take a tough line on Russia as secretary of state.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TILLERSON: We must also be clear-eyed about our relationship with Russia. Russia today poses a danger, but it is not unpredictable in advancing its own interest. It has invaded the Ukraine, including the taking of Crimea, and supported Syrian forces that brutally violate the laws of war. Our NATO allies are right to be alarmed at a resurgent Russia.
DETROW: But Tillerson did say that the U.S. needs to engage with the country and that there could be some common interests, like dealing with terrorism. The Trump transition was clearly strategic in having former Defense Secretary Robert Gates introduce Tillerson. Gates is respected the national security community and spent decades as a Russia hawk. He said the U.S. does need to thread that needle of being tough but also engaging, and Gates said that he sees Tillerson as someone who can do that.
MARTIN: So did the senators get specific about what that would look like? I mean, being tough on Russia, but also engaging?
DETROW: Yeah. Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the committee, asked several questions early on. He asked Tillerson whether Tillerson views Putin as someone who violates human rights. Tillerson said he did. Cardin also asked does he think Russia's invasion of Crimea was legal, and Tillerson said he did not. But Marco Rubio pressed Tillerson, asking, do you think Vladimir Putin is a war criminal? Tillerson said that's not language he wants to use lightly. He needs to see more classified material.
MARTIN: Real quick, is Tillerson going to get confirmed?
DETROW: He has good chance. But watch people like Rubio because Republicans do have a slim margin and Rubio has been pretty skeptical and almost hostile early on in this hearing.
MARTIN: NPR's Scott Detrow on the Hill. Thanks, Scott.
DETROW: Sure thing.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
I've got a stack of books here.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOOK PAGES FLIPPING)
INSKEEP: Stack of books sent to me by librarian Nancy Pearl, who's in Seattle, Wash., joins the program from time to time to suggest books that are under the radar, she says, books that we ought to know about and that we may well want to read in this new year. Hi, Nancy.
NANCY PEARL: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: So the one that I'm flipping here is called "Slow Horses" by Mick Herron.
PEARL: Yes, this is the start of a series. And unlike some series of thrillers or mysteries, it gets better, each book is better than the one before. So slow horses are disgraced MI5 agents.
INSKEEP: Oh, British intelligence agents, OK.
PEARL: British intelligence agents...
INSKEEP: All right.
PEARL: ...People who did something a little stupid but have too many connections to be fired, so they're all housed in the same house away from where the rest of the agency is.
INSKEEP: It begins with a sentence, (reading) this is how River Cartwright slipped off the fast track and joined the slow horses.
PEARL: Yes, yes. And what River Cartwright did is badly screw up a surveillance assignment. And he's convinced he was set up by his rival in the service in MI5, but now the slow horses have a new task. A kidnapping and a potential beheading has been announced in London, and it's up to the slow horses to try to figure out what's going on.
INSKEEP: Wow.
PEARL: I love the characters in this. And the guy who is the head of the slow horses is this man who is probably the most thoroughly disagreeable, not particularly nice person that many people will ever read about. And I did read an interview with Mick Herron where somebody asked him how he could put words like that in this guy's mouth...
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
PEARL: ...And he said he just thought of the worst thing that anybody could say in every situation and that's what River's boss says.
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
PEARL: And I - and it's just great fun.
INSKEEP: Let's talk about another author here who's got a connection to London, Kamila Shamsie, based in London, often writes about Pakistan. The book is called "Broken Verses."
PEARL: Yes, this is one of my all-time favorite novels. And it was published originally in 2005, but it's a truly under the radar book. I think more people need to read this remarkable Pakistani author. And this is a novel that really brings to life that phrase the political is personal and the personal is political. And it's the story of a 30-year-old Pakistani woman whose mother was a leader in the women's movement in Pakistan, the kind of burgeoning women's movement in the '70s and '80s. And her kind of stepfather, her mother's lover, was the great poet of Pakistan who angered the government with his poetry.
INSKEEP: An interesting period in Pakistan where they were heading toward military dictatorship.
PEARL: Yes, they were. And the government tortured and killed The Poet, as he was known. And two years after the Poet's death when Aasmaani - who was the young woman - when she was 16, her mother disappeared. And then Aasmaani receives a letter written in the code that only the Poet and her mother knew. And so that raises all of these questions, is the Poet alive? And it's a love story, it's about mothers and daughters. It's a tribute to Pakistan that might have been had things gone differently.
INSKEEP: And it's close to the headlines, even though it's fiction because this is one of many countries where people who write, who speak out are constantly in danger, are often in danger of being arrested or killed.
PEARL: Yes. And perhaps one of the saddest things about the book is that it could have been written this year.
INSKEEP: Let's move on to another book here. The author is Becky Masterman, and the title is "A Twist Of The Knife."
PEARL: Yeah. Becky Masterman is an author that I recently discovered. And what I love about these books, they're page turners, they're really thrilling novels. And the main character is a woman named Brigid Quinn, who is a former FBI agent, now retired. Brigid is 60, I love that. When have we last seen the hero of a thriller age 60? But when Brigid was in the FBI, she was mostly assigned to cases where she had to go undercover, and all of her working life she has had to be somebody other than herself. And now she's retired and trying to figure out what it's like to be her, Brigid Quinn, and not somebody else. And then a case very similar to some of the cases that she worked on when she was in the FBI kind of falls into her lap, so the present and the past are coming together in this page-turning thriller.
INSKEEP: We're developing a theme here, I think, of violence and secrecy and fear.
PEARL: (Laughter).
INSKEEP: And now we have a novel by Duane Swierczynski called "Revolver," what's it about?
PEARL: Yes, this is the first novel I've read by this man. And as soon as I finished "Revolver," I went back and read three more of them by him. This is the story of three generations of a Philadelphia family, the Walczaks. And the book moves between three time periods - 1965, around 1995 and then 2015. In 1965, the grandfather in the family, Stan, is a Philadelphia policeman. His partner is one of the few black officers in Philadelphia, and both of them are gunned down as they're sitting in a bar talking. And Stan's son, Jimmy, becomes a policeman, and he's investigating the rape and murder of a young woman. And then Jimmy's daughter is studying forensics, and she's doing a class project on her grandfather's death. So we're moving between these three time periods. But really this illuminates race relations in the '60s, particularly Philadelphia because that's where the book is set, but in the country at large.
INSKEEP: OK, so how does it illuminate them in more recent times?
PEARL: Well, what you see in this book is the racism both overt and unspoken, even from Stan who grew up in a Polish family and is trying to come to terms with the fact that he doesn't have a white partner, he has an African-American partner. And when we're talking about racism, which we are doing a lot these days, I hope more has changed than it appears to me to have changed since the 1960s.
INSKEEP: Nancy, thanks very much as always.
PEARL: You're welcome, Steve.
INSKEEP: That's librarian Nancy Pearl.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS' "I CAME RUNNING")
INSKEEP: All Nancy's recommendations plus 300 other titles picked by NPR staff and critics are at npr.org
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Senate overnight voted to approve a budget resolution which amounts to the first step of a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. There's a long, long, long way to go. Republicans and Democrats have yet to agree on a replacement. And this huge national debate is happening amid a cloud of misinformation. That's according to a new NPR Ipsos poll. They asked what people know about the law and found that many of us are misinformed. Joining us this morning is NPR health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak to talk about the survey's findings. Hi, Alison.
ALISON KODJAK, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: So what do we think we know that we don't know?
KODJAK: Well, you know, there's just a lot of information that people are slightly or very much misinformed about. The poll is designed to gauge what people know about basic facts. And the biggest surprise, I think, was that more - about half the people - a little bit more - don't even know that the Affordable Care Act has extended insurance to millions of people who didn't have it anymore. The insurance rate - I mean, the rate of uninsured people has gone down to 9 percent which is the lowest in the nation's history, sort of the one basic piece of information that the government probably - the Obama administration probably wants out there and half the people in the country don't know that that's happened.
INSKEEP: I've wondered if this is one of the disadvantages of this law from the beginning. I mean, if you think about Social Security or Medicare, we may be confused about some of it, but we basically get what it is. This is a complicated law, and peace - people from the very beginning didn't basically get what it was.
KODJAK: That's true. And it was, you know, brought in under a huge amount of controversy. People knew that they were going to be, quote, "forced to buy insurance." And then when the law...
INSKEEP: Which is actually true. That part is true, yeah.
KODJAK: It is true. It is true. But what was lost in a lot of the debate was the extension of Medicaid to a lot of people who get Medicaid now who weren't eligible before, so low-income people now are insured who weren't before. And what was lost was some of the ways that the government helps people get insurance. And this law really only applies to a small portion of the population, now 10 million people - but this part of the law.
So most of the people who are thinking about it and talking about it and, perhaps, voting on it, it doesn't affect them directly. Also, the effects of the law happened years after the debate happened. So all this negative info was in the air already, and that sticks with people. I talked to a lot of experts in communication. They say once you get a first impression that's bad, it's really hard to make it good again.
INSKEEP: With that said, is there something real about people's concerns here? They know what they pay for insurance. They know whether they like their insurance or they don't like their insurance, and they're basically expressing a concern. Is that true?
KODJAK: Yes. That's absolutely true. And one of the big concerns is that over time, people who bought insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchanges saw the top-line rates for the insurance go up, and that meant people who don't - aren't eligible for subsidies saw their prices shoot way up. And at the same time generally, some of the insurance benefits on the market overall also were cut back and prices went up, so that people see their insurance rates go up anywhere and they blame it on the Affordable Care Act.
INSKEEP: So the president-elect has made a big promise here along with Republicans in Congress - going to replace it with something that is better and yet cheaper. What's the status of the repeal and the talk at least of replacement?
KODJAK: Well, as you said at the beginning, they're working on the repeal. They're talking about replacement. There's been no replacement plan proposed yet. And so it's unclear what's going to come in in the place of this law.
INSKEEP: And so that's - what? - weeks of debate, months of debate, who knows how much debate?
KODJAK: It looks like it's going to be at least weeks of debate because in the last few days, the Congress has said they want to replace it at the same time as they repeal it. So they're going to have to come up with that plan.
INSKEEP: Well, we'll see what happens. That's NPR's Alison Kodjak. Thanks very much for coming by.
KODJAK: Thanks for having me, Steve.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Americans spend a whole lot of money at nail salons, more than $8.5 billion a year, in fact. But there's been little regulation of the chemicals used in salons, even though many have been linked to serious health problems. Now there's a program in California that's trying to change that by getting nail salon owners to improve their safety voluntarily. Jenny Gold has the story.
JENNY GOLD, BYLINE: The first thing you notice when you walk into Mai Dang's nail salon on a busy street in Berkeley is what's missing - the stinging smell of nail products. That wasn't always the case. For a decade, Dang suffered from the effects of the chemicals she worked with.
MAI DANG: (Through interpreter) When you do nails, workers get itchy skin and watery eyes.
GOLD: Like more than 80 percent of California's nail salon workers, Dang is Vietnamese. She says she used to have frequent headaches. One of her workers developed asthma. So when she heard about a way to improve safety of her salon, she signed up.
MAI: (Through interpreter) I work every day. I need the air to be pure, to be better for me. I have to take care of my health this way.
GOLD: The California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative was started by a community clinic in Oakland called Asian Health Services. Julia Liou is the group's co-founder.
JULIA LIOU: Practically every worker was experiencing some kind of health issue, and we realized that this was an epidemic.
GOLD: Some of the chemicals used in nail salons are known to cause skin disorders and breathing problems among workers and possibly even cancer, miscarriages and birth defects. But the government doesn't require salons to minimize the risks.
Liou is trying to get salon owners to make changes on their own.
LIOU: We don't want to create a fear where it's like, oh, nail salons are so scary that, you know, people can't go to them. But we want to create a space where both the owner and the customer can feel comfortable.
GOLD: Mai Dang had to make a lot of changes to be certified as a healthy salon, including buying less toxic nail polishes, thinners and removers. She requires her staff to wear gloves and masks when using certain products, and she bought a mechanical ventilation unit.
MAI: (Through interpreter) It sucks in the air when I do artificial nails. So the workers don't have to breathe in the toxic chemicals anymore.
GOLD: In 2013, she got a healthy nail certificate that she hangs in her window. But all these changes haven't come cheap. Dang says the safer products she uses cost about 30 percent more. Overall, she spent about $3,000 on the upgrades. To pay for it, she raised her prices by $2. I asked Dang's customer Genell Johnson whether she was willing to pay more as she sat getting her new set of nails filed.
GENELL JOHNSON: Yes, I would. You get what you pay for. That's what they always say, and it's true.
GOLD: A survey of customers by the collaborative found that 90 percent were willing to pay at least a dollar more for services they knew were healthier. Johnson says she's a regular at Fashion Nails but had no idea it was a healthy salon.
JOHNSON: Now I'm going to spread the word. This will be a perfect place, knowing that they're so health conscious.
GOLD: That's exactly what salons like Fashion Nails are hoping, that customers will vote with their feet. But there's a long way to go. There are more than 8,000 nail salons in California, and so far, only 120 have joined the program.
Still, they're making progress. The EPA recently gave the Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative a grant to help offer microloans to salons that want to upgrade their safety.
For NPR News, I'm Jenny Gold.
(SOUNDBITE OF MAPS AND ATLASES SONG, "THE ONGOING HORRIBLE")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Well, just before 1:30 this morning, Senate Republicans completed the first step toward repealing the Affordable Care Act. The Senate passed a budget resolution which sets the repeal process in motion. It happened after seven hours of votes on amendments, a ritual senators call the vote-a-rama. NPR's Ailsa Chang reports on the overnight political theater and the substance affecting millions of people lurking somewhere beyond it.
AILSA CHANG, BYLINE: Best guess is the Senate is still several weeks away from repealing the Affordable Care Act. And Democrats went into Wednesday night with a messaging plan - use vote-a-rama to get Republicans on the record about what may come next. Here's how Chris Murphy of Connecticut described the strategy.
CHRIS MURPHY: We're going to figure out what parts of the Affordable Care Act they're going to preserve and what parts they're going to throw out. We're going to use votes tonight to try to divine what this secret replacement plan is.
CHANG: To that, Senate Republicans said whatever.
JOHN MCCAIN: Totally meaningless exercise.
CHANG: Or put another way by Republican John McCain of Arizona.
MCCAIN: Someday, some student of government trying to find the most boring subject ever - they will go back over these votes on vote-a-ramas.
CHANG: What McCain is getting at is this charming Senate tradition, the vote-a-rama, it's a wholly symbolic exercise. Senators are forcing each other to vote on amendments to a nonbinding budget resolution, one after another, for hours and hours. It's political theater, but McCain says he can't remember a single vote-a-rama ever being used against him.
MCCAIN: You can examine people's voting records and run against them. But when it's in a vote-a-rama, which has no impact as far as the lives of any American is concerned, it's ridiculous.
CHANG: But none of that stopped Democrats from making Republicans vote on amendments about Medicaid expansion or funding for rural hospitals or women's access to health care. The other side voted all these down. And Republican Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said he didn't feel one bit uncomfortable.
BILL CASSIDY: It'll be uncomfortable if I have to sleep on a lumpy couch. But I'm a physician who's been on call, and I've slept many times on lumpy couches.
CHANG: But any appearance of Republican unity during vote-a-rama couldn't change the fact that they're nowhere near consensus on how to replace the health care law. President-elect Donald Trump promised in a press conference Wednesday that no repeal would happen without a replacement plan. But Republicans like Susan Collins of Maine say that means repeal can't happen until late February or March.
SUSAN COLLINS: I don't see any possibility of our being able to come up with a comprehensive reform bill that would replace Obamacare by the end of this month.
CHANG: Even so, Democrats know this is a train they cannot stop.
(SOUNDBITE OF GAVEL SOUNDING)
CHANG: As the night drew to a close, all Democrats could do was stage a protest. Senators aren't supposed to give speeches during a vote, but here was Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TAMMY DUCKWORTH: And for all those with pre-existing conditions...
CORY GARDNER: The Senate will be in order. Debate is not allowed during a vote.
DUCKWORTH: ...I stand on prosthetic legs to vote no.
GARDNER: The Senate will be in order.
CHANG: And here was Al Franken of Minnesota.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
AL FRANKEN: I vote no on behalf of the more than 2.3...
GARDNER: Debate is not allowed during a vote.
FRANKEN: ...Million Minnesotans...
GARDNER: Debate is not allowed during a vote. Senate will be order.
FRANKEN: ...Who can no longer be discriminated against...
GARDNER: Senate will be in order, and the clerk will continue the roll.
FRANKEN: ...Because of the ACA.
CHANG: The House expects to take up the budget resolution Friday.
Ailsa Chang, NPR News, the Capitol.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOMBAY DUB ORCHESTRA'S "STRANGE CONSTELLATIONS")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Another busy day on Capitol Hill. More of President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet picks are testifying, including secretary of defense nominee General James Mattis. Republican Senator Jim Inhofe is on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he's one of the people putting questions to General Mattis today.
I asked him about the claims that Russia has compromising personal information on Trump and whether there was anything in those unverified documents that gives the senator pause.
JIM INHOFE: Trump is now going to be president. And I think these people who are in denial are going to have to get over it. If there's anything that could have been done that would damage him irreparably, it would have been done before the campaign, before the vote took place. So I look at this, and I think some people don't like Trump. And that's their problem. They're going to have to live with it for at least four years.
MARTIN: The chairman of your committee, John McCain, reportedly handed this dossier over to the FBI, clearly thinking that it had some significance. At this point, would you like to see the FBI pursuing this?
INHOFE: No, I don't think so. You know, I don't always agree with John McCain, and as you know, as everyone who's listening to us right now knows, John has not been real close to Trump. He wasn't someone he was promoting. And let him go ahead and do it, and let them all have a good time. And when it's over, we'll go ahead and give the guy a chance to be president of the United States and undo a lot of damage that's been done over the last eight years.
MARTIN: Let's switch gears and talk about Donald Trump's pick for secretary of defense. Trump has tapped retired Marine Corps General James Mattis for the top job at the Pentagon. Mattis has gotten a lot of support from your colleagues on the Hill, including from some Democrats. What do you want to hear from him today in his confirmation hearing?
INHOFE: Not many people understand this. Not many people believe this, Rachel, but we are in the most threatened position we've been in as a nation in the history of this country. I look back wistfully at the good old days of the Cold War where you had two superpowers. We knew what they had. They knew what we had. We had mutually assured destruction and then some. It doesn't mean anything anymore. That's a scary thing. That's what's different about today.
Now, Mattis comes in. He's - I don't think anyone's going to say there's anyone who's been a better strategist, a better Marine than Mattis. He's the right one for this time.
But under the rules that we're operating under right now, for anyone who is a - has been in the service, he must be retired for at least seven years. And in the case of Mattis, he's only been retired for three years. This hasn't happened since George C. Marshall in 1950.
MARTIN: A waiver like this.
INHOFE: A waiver like this.
MARTIN: Well, this - I'll point out this was part of the founding of this country, the idea that there would be civilian leadership of the U.S. military.
INHOFE: Sure, and I agree with that. I agree with that.
MARTIN: But you don't see that as a priority in this moment?
INHOFE: Oh, I think that in George C. Marshall's case, that was justification for a change from the behavior that we've been under for a long period of time. And the same thing is true right now for essentially the same reason. After a war - and people saw a threat and saw that this was something that most people were concerned with as they had never been during peacetime. This was after the war. In this case, we are in the middle, right now, arguably, of three wars.
MARTIN: So how do you see the Trump administration's policies as pertaining to those wars and those conflicts? I mean, the Obama administration spent a lot of time trying to extricate the U.S. from the battlefield. And the Trump administration has outlined similar threats, but at the same time, has not exactly suggested that the U.S. needs to be a more aggressive player in these conflicts.
INHOFE: Well, no. They're two different approaches altogether. You remember the line in the sand in Syria, and of course he ignored it once it came to that stage. I think when you say that our allies no longer trust us, our enemies no longer fear us, that is a concern. Now, we have a president coming into office now who is not going to second-guess. He's going to say, if you attack America, if you - if you come into conflict with us, we're going to be fighting back.
He has already talked about increasing the size of the army, the end strength of the army, to 540 - I think it is right now - thousand. Nothing's magic about these numbers, but we have been disarming America now for eight years. And this is something that is going to stop, and we're going to gain respect again around the world that we have lost in the last eight years.
MARTIN: The incoming president has had very friendly things to say about Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and has applauded his aggressive posture. Is Vladimir Putin America's friend or foe?
INHOFE: No, he's a foe. However, you do have someone who's going to be president of United States who's had dealings with him. I'm not sure, but what that might result - and it's not just the incoming president. It's several of the appointees, as I'm sure you will point out, who are in the confirmation process now that are - have had dealings with Putin, have done these things.
But, you know, when you have a relationship that is a business relationship, and all of a sudden, you become the commander in chief of the United States of America, you change your posture. You have a different function, and that function is not a function going out to see how much money you can make in conjunction with some kind of a trade agreement that's out there.
MARTIN: Will General Mattis have President Trump's ear when it comes to shaping America's military and foreign policy?
INHOFE: I'm absolutely certain of that. And one reason I am is that Mattis is the type of person who's not going to come out of retirement unless he knows that he is going to be able to do what he is trained to do. And he knows also that we'll have a president who doesn't have the same background who's relying on him.
One of the things, it's my understanding, that has made Donald Trump successful in business is that he hires people who know what they're doing and lets them do it. And that's a good style. And that's one that I think that is going to pass through to his subordinates in his Cabinet as he takes office.
MARTIN: Senator Jim Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma. Senator, thanks for taking the time.
INHOFE: Thank you, Rachel.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The president-elect took questions from reporters yesterday and offered a way to manage his worldwide business conflicts of interest, which we discuss elsewhere this morning. He also took questions about Russia and so much more. But the question he refused to take suggests his edgy relationship with the citizens who work as reporters. NPR's David Folkenflik reports.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: It had been months since Trump took questions from reporters at a press conference, and there were so many questions to ask. Reports surfaced this week that intelligence officials had briefed President Obama and Trump on unverified allegations that Russian agents may have videotaped the president-elect participating in salacious sexual activity and that his associates may have had legally questionable contacts with the Russian government. Major Garrett is White House correspondent for CBS News.
MAJOR GARRETT: He has to, it seems to me, deal with that and if possible, dispel it in his own words and not via Twitter account and not by quoting the Russians, by saying what he knows, what he believes and what he represents about himself, his campaign and the Russian government.
FOLKENFLIK: Trump greeted the reporters gathered in the marbled atrium of Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan with a smile. His transition staffers, family and corporate employees cheered him on.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
DONALD TRUMP: Thank you very much. It's very familiar territory, news conferences, because we used to give them on a almost daily basis. I think we probably, maybe won the nomination because of news conferences, and it's good to be with you.
FOLKENFLIK: Trump actually praised news organizations that showed restraint on the allegations and suggested the frequency of his presidential press conferences might depend on what coverage he received.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
TRUMP: We stopped giving them because we were getting quite a bit of inaccurate news.
FOLKENFLIK: BuzzFeed had published the full dossier on the Russian allegations, saying that readers deserve to know what information senior government officials had.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
TRUMP: I think it's a disgrace that information that was false and fake and never happened got released to the public. As far as BuzzFeed, which is a failing pile of garbage, writing it, I think they're going to suffer the consequences. They already are.
FOLKENFLIK: BuzzFeed did carefully note that many of the allegations were unverified and that there were errors. But it reported that U.S. intelligence officials, by and large, trusted the source, said to be a retired British intelligence officer researching Trump for his American political rivals. Some news executives said BuzzFeed's decisions set the bar for publication too low. At the press conference, Trump made no distinction between BuzzFeed's reporting and that of CNN.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
TRUMP: Go ahead. Go ahead. No, not you. Not you. Your organization's terrible.
FOLKENFLIK: CNN's Jim Acosta sought to be recognized. CNN had reported on the nature of the dossier and the briefings, but withheld details that the network said it could not verify.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
TRUMP: Don't be rude. No, I'm not going to give you a - I am not going to give you a question. You are fake news.
FOLKENFLIK: Unwelcome news became fake news in Trump's rhetoric.
OLIVIA NUZZI: I think the stakes are higher for us in the press, right?
FOLKENFLIK: Olivia Nuzzi covers Trump for The Daily Beast.
NUZZI: Trump has gotten away with not talking to us since he got elected. And when he does talk to us, he doesn't say anything very accurate. He doesn't generally answer our questions. So we have a lot more that we need from him than he needs from us at this point.
FOLKENFLIK: When a reporter asked about his ongoing refusal to release his past tax documents, Trump replied that the public didn't care, only the press did. After all, Trump said, I won. David Folkenflik, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF APHRODESIA SONG, "EVERY DAY")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It's a sight not seen for a generation. This morning, elements of an American armored brigade are rolling from Germany into Poland. It's part of the biggest U.S. military deployment in Europe since the end of the Cold War. And the move is part of a broader U.S. and European effort to curtail Russian aggression in the region. We're joined now by NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson. She is in the Polish town of Zagan. This is where the U.S. soldiers will be training with Polish troops over the next couple of weeks. Soraya, thanks for being with us.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Yes. Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: What can you tell us about this scene? What was the crossing like?
NELSON: Well, it happened at a quiet border post between Poland and Germany about a hundred miles southeast of Berlin. You don't have any passport or customs checks there because the countries are part of a free border agreement. So you had Polish military police escorting a convoy of humvees and other armed vehicles. And it's interesting because they're still painted beige from their last deployment in Kuwait. American, Polish and German officers then took part in a brief handover and the U.S. commander of this unit - or of this team, Colonel Christopher Norrie - said the team work in cohesion and rapid deployment of this group or his group will serve to counter any acts of aggression against NATO.
MARTIN: So how is Russia responding to this?
NELSON: Well, Russia's sort of had a different take. Certainly at the Kremlin, they were saying they saw this as a threat to their national security, that they were very concerned about this build-up in Poland.
MARTIN: Where are these U.S. troops from?
NELSON: They're from Fort Carson, and they're part of an armored brigade that will ultimately deploy with about 3,500 soldiers as well as 87 tanks, 144 Bradleys and hundreds upon hundreds of other armored vehicles. It's the first time that there are American tanks in Europe in these kind of numbers since 2013. What's interesting is that we didn't see any tanks or Bradleys today, however, because they're actually coming in by rail and by trailers. But they will be coming in along with the other troops, and their deployment will last about 9 months which will be part of a continuous rotational presence of armored U.S. elements here in Europe.
MARTIN: And is the brigade staying in Poland?
NELSON: Some of the elements will, and they're going to be training here for a few weeks in Zagan, as you mentioned. But others are going to head North to the Baltic states and other elements of the brigade are going to head to Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary where they will train with local troops there.
MARTIN: So as I understand it, the Polish defense minister had suggested that this U.S. deployment was moved up to make it happen before Trump's inauguration. Are you hearing that? What do we know about that claim?
NELSON: Well, the American officials I spoke to today - they say they were involved with the planning. They claim it wasn't moved up, and they say that the Polish comments amounted to a misunderstanding or a mistranslation. But there certainly is a lot of eagerness here in Poland and other countries in Eastern Europe to have the troops here before Donald Trump takes office. That comes partly because of his campaign remarks in which he criticizes NATO and was urging Europe to take care of its own security issues. And it's here in Zagan, the mayor told me that he hopes the new America administration will not take the troops away once Donald Trump takes office, and that it's not only in the Polish interest, but the American interests for the troops to stay here to be better prepared for any aggression.
MARTIN: NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson with U.S. troops in Poland. Thanks so much, Soraya.
NELSON: You're welcome, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin here to tell you about goat yoga, which is yoga but with goats. Lainey Morse is the owner of No Regrets Farm in Albany, Ore., where the classes take place. The goats apparently just cruise around while you're doing your sun salutations. An Oregon newspaper wrote about the goat yoga this summer, and now Lainey says there's a waitlist of 900 people long. Morse says people are desperate for something pure and peaceful. Breathe in.
(SOUNDBITE OF GOATS BLEATING)
MARTIN: Breathe out.
(SOUNDBITE OF GOATS BLEATING)
MARTIN: It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's sort through what we know and don't know about President-elect Trump and Russia. We start with words he resisted saying for months.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
DONALD TRUMP: As far as hacking, I think it was Russia.
INSKEEP: I think it was Russia, he said. Up until that moment in yesterday's news conference, Trump had not agreed with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies on this. He had suggested it could be China - or a 400-pound guy in a bed. He repeatedly took Russia's side, playing up its denials. So his acknowledgement was news, though he took it back 53 minutes later.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
TRUMP: Well, Russia - but you know what? - could have been others also.
INSKEEP: NPR's Mary Louise Kelly has been tracking the Russia story for us, and she's here now.
Good morning.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: So do you conclude from his various statements that he now agrees with the intelligence agencies on this?
KELLY: I would conclude, Steve, that he is coming 'round to that idea. And if you look at another answer that he gave during this press conference - he was asked, what's his message to Vladimir Putin, the Russian president? - and Trump said he shouldn't be doing it - shouldn't be doing the hacks.
INSKEEP: Shouldn't have done it, he even said. So...
KELLY: He said shouldn't have done it, shouldn't be doing it and that he won't be doing it once Trump assumes the office. So that suggests to me that Trump believes, at the moment, Putin is doing it.
INSKEEP: OK. So that's one thing. But then there are these allegations - this dossier, as it was said, a series of memos - that have been circulating, been reported on in recent days in which the president-elect was told about in an intelligence briefing. How forcefully did he deny the allegations there?
KELLY: Very forcefully. There was no wiggle room on this point. These are the allegations, as you say, this 35-page dossier that has been circulating in Washington. It was first actually reported by CNN and BuzzFeed, and it basically says that Russia has got the goods on Donald Trump - embarrassing personal and political material.
And these are allegations I should stress, that NPR and other news organizations have not verified. But we now have the president-elect out there responding to them. And his direct words were - he said, fake news, phony stuff - didn't happen. And reporters did press him on this. One of the other questions he got was - does Russia have any leverage over you? Here's his answer.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
TRUMP: I have no dealings with Russia. I have no deals in Russia. I have no deals that could happen in Russia because we've stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia.
KELLY: On a related note, reporters were also pressing Trump for his tax returns because that might shed some light on being able to verify whether this is in fact true that there are no dealings in Russia for the Trump business empire.
INSKEEP: So what kind of relationship does he have at this point with the CIA and the various other intelligence agencies that have been looking at this material?
KELLY: That was one of the most interesting threads, Steve, at this press conference yesterday. I think his relationship with the CIA and other spy agencies is a work in progress. And I say that even as yesterday it sounded as though Trump was moving toward embracing their views on Russia and that Russia has been behind recent hacks. He came out with a new beef with them, and it was he blames U.S. spy agencies for leaking this dossier of allegedly embarrassing material on Trump.
He returned to this point again and again in the press conference and so much so that last night it appears that the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, gave him a call. The two of them spoke. Afterward, Clapper put out a statement saying he had told the president-elect the profound dismay that he feels as the head of U.S. Intelligence that these leaks have been appearing and also assured Donald Trump we didn't do it. It's not U.S. Intelligence. Look to other corners of Washington.
INSKEEP: It is not at all clear that it did happen that way. We do know that Trump was told about this information circulating about him. Just somebody said - we want you to know this is out there. But what is unknown at this point?
KELLY: One of the big unanswered questions to me because Trump sidestepped it at the podium was - has there ever been - was there ever any contact between anyone with links to the Trump campaign and Russia? That question was asked. Trump didn't answer it. A reporter was shouting it at him again as he walked away from the podium. Let me let you listen to a little bit of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Sir, you did not answer whether any of your associates were in contact with the Russians. Sir?
KELLY: Trump had already moved away from the mic at that point. Reporters followed him. He said no, no contact - unlikely to be the end of questions on that subject.
INSKEEP: Questions on one other thing - what happens when he gets his own CIA director?
KELLY: Which we may get some insight into today. On Capitol Hill today, Mike Pompeo, his pick for director of the CIA, has his confirmation hearing in a very unusual situation, where he is auditioning for a job running an agency that has been criticized by the guy Pompeo would be working for.
INSKEEP: Mary Louise Kelly is NPR's intelligence correspondent - is that your formal job title?
KELLY: National security correspondent...
INSKEEP: National security correspondent.
KELLY: ...But I'll take it.
INSKEEP: I like intelligence correspondent better.
National security correspondent Mary Louise Kelly, thanks very much.
KELLY: You're welcome.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There's a manhunt underway in Orlando. Police there are looking for a person who shot and killed one of their own. Her name is Master Sergeant Debra Clayton. Her department is remembering her and another officer who died in a car crash connected to the incident. From member station WMFE, Abe Aboraya reports.
ABE ABORAYA, BYLINE: Larry Parzygnat, an officer with the Welaka Police Department, drove nearly two hours to a makeshift memorial at a Wal-Mart in Orlando. He laid a police badge near a white cross.
LARRY PARZYGNAT: It's a very dangerous job, and any moment, it could be over. You just don't know.
ABORAYA: What we do know, it started early Monday at this Wal-Mart. Markeith Loyd has been wanted by police since December for the alleged murder of his pregnant ex-girlfriend. Someone recognized Loyd at the Wal-Mart and told the nearest police officer. That was Master Sergeant Deborah Clayton. She radioed for backup and approach Loyd. Police say they exchanged gunfire, and Clayton died.
During the manhunt, Deputy Norman Lewis with the Orange County Sheriff's Office was killed during a traffic accident. He was an ex-University of Central Florida football player and described as a gentle giant.
The reward to find Loyd is up to $100,000. Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings says there have been more than 500 tips.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JERRY DEMINGS: In fact, there were times when we just missed him. But he has been able to avoid capture. He's not going to be able to do that for much longer.
ABORAYA: Funerals for the officers are planned for tomorrow and Saturday. Emotions have been raw, including at this vigil for Clayton recorded and posted on the Orlando Police Department's Twitter feed.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Singing) Let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine.
ABORAYA: Clayton was known for volunteering and mentoring to prevent youth violence. Her adult son, Johnny, spoke at the vigil, saying everything his mom worked for, she died for.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHNNY CLAYTON: We've just got to keep pushing forward. We can make it a better city.
ABORAYA: To do that, law enforcement say they need to find the person who led to the deaths of two of their own this week.
For NPR News, I'm Abe Aboraya in Orlando.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Going into yesterday's press conference with Donald Trump, there were all kinds of questions about the president-elect's potential conflicts of interest. This morning, there are still questions.
Trump made the official announcement that he's handing over management of his business to his adult sons and a longtime executive. But watchdogs say that does not go far enough. And the Office of Government Ethics agrees, saying the president-elect should do more.
We're going to talk through all this now with NPR's Scott Horsley. Good morning, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: This press conference was scheduled for a month ago. Then the Trump camp postponed it because they said they needed more time to come up with a plan to untangle all of these complex business interests. So what's the plan?
HORSLEY: Well, the president-elect, who's always a showman, piled up big stack of manila folders at Trump Tower yesterday. And he tried to dramatize the distance he says he's putting between himself and hundreds of Trump businesses that are spread across some 20 countries around the globe.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
DONALD TRUMP: These papers are just some of the many documents that I've signed turning over complete and total control to my sons.
HORSLEY: Reporters were told, with those documents, Trump is moving his investments into a trust which will be managed by his two elder sons. And Trump says he's not even going to talk to those young men about his businesses.
MARTIN: And what about Ivanka? This is the eldest daughter of Donald Trump. She's got her own complex business interests.
HORSLEY: Right. She's taking a leave of absence from her role in the Trump Organization, as well as her namesake fashion company. You know, she has two reasons to try to minimize conflicts. Ivanka not only is the daughter of the president-elect, but she's also the wife of Jared Kushner, who just took a job this week as a senior White House adviser.
MARTIN: We also heard yesterday - it was this kind of extraordinary moment where Donald Trump stepped away from the mic and introduced a woman named Sheri Dillon, who's one of his attorneys, to get into the kind of weeds of all of this. What did she lay out?
HORSLEY: Sheri Dillon says that the Trump Organization will not do any more deals in foreign countries, and any new deals that are struck here in the United States will have to be vetted by a new ethics adviser. She says Trump wants to show the American people he's working for their benefit, not the bottom line of the Trump Organization.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
SHERI DILLON: He instructed us to take all steps realistically possible to make it clear that he is not exploiting the office of the presidency for his personal benefit.
HORSLEY: And Dillon stressed that Trump is doing this voluntarily. And that's true. As the president, Trump will not be subject to the same kind of conflict-of-interest laws that, for example, his Cabinet secretaries are. One law that does apply to the president, though, is the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution, which bars officials from taking gifts from foreign governments.
Some have wondered if, for example, a foreign visitor were to rent a room at Trump's new hotel here in Washington, would that amount to an illegal gift? Dillon says, no, that's an over-reading of the Constitution. The founders didn't mean to outlaw ordinary arms-length business transactions. But as a precaution, she says, Trump will donate any profits from foreign bookings at his hotels to the U.S. Treasury.
MARTIN: All right. So they laid out a lot of different moves that Donald Trump is taking. Why aren't groups like the Office of Government Ethics satisfied with all this?
HORSLEY: Because all of these assets are still in the Trump family, and Donald Trump still knows what they are. So even if he's not exercising day-to-day control over the business, critics worry he could be making decisions as president to benefit the Trump Organization and his relatives.
What's more, they say people could try to curry favor with the president by striking sweetheart deals with the family business. In the past, other presidents have avoided this problem by putting their money into a blind trust where they don't know what assets are being held. Trump's lawyer Sheri Dillon, though, acknowledged there's nothing blind about this trust Donald Trump's setting up.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
DILLON: President Trump can't un-know he owns Trump Tower, and the press will make sure that any new developments at the Trump Organization are well-publicized.
HORSLEY: And so long as that's the case, the shadow of potential conflicts will hang over the Trump White House.
MARTIN: But she is right on that score, right? He can't un-know what he owns. So what do ethics watchdogs want to see instead?
HORSLEY: The consistent recommendation from a whole array of ethics groups is that Trump should sell his assets and put the proceeds into something plain vanilla, like government bonds. The challenge, of course, is that Trump has more assets than most previous presidents have. And secondly, a big part of the value of the Trump Organization is the Trump brand itself. These aren't just hotels or golf courses. They're Trump hotels and Trump golf courses. And that's part of what guests are paying for.
So if he tried to sell the assets with the Trump name and collect royalties, for example, he wouldn't really be walling himself off from the properties and potential conflicts. If he tried to sell the assets without the Trump name, his attorney Sheri Dillon says those assets would be worth a lot less.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
DILLON: Selling his assets without the rights to the brand would greatly diminish the value of the assets and create a fire sale. President-elect Trump should not be expected to destroy the company he built.
HORSLEY: Now, watchdog groups aren't terribly moved by that argument. They say Trump didn't have to run for president, but since he did, he should put the public's interest ahead of his own.
MARTIN: But Trump doesn't seem to be moved by the concerns of these ethics groups. That's not what's motivating him to make these changes.
HORSLEY: No, and you saw a similar pattern, really, with pressure from ethics groups and the media that he should release his tax returns. Polls say 60 percent of the public think he should do so. But so far, Trump has shown no signs of giving in.
MARTIN: NPR's Scott Horsley. Thanks so much, Scott.
HORSLEY: My pleasure, Rachel.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now, all the attention on shootings by police and, in some cases, the shootings of police officers make it easy to forget a basic reality. Most law enforcement is not about guns.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It's about talking to people, taking complaints, listening to witnesses, building relationships with sources or just managing an encounter on the street so it doesn't go wrong.
INSKEEP: Some police trainers say that part of the job has been neglected. The trainers say younger officers of the millennial generation need help with their people skills.
MARTIN: NPR's Martin Kaste spent time with officers who are working on them.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: If you happened to walk through the River Park Square Mall in Spokane, Wash., last week, you might have been approached by a clean-cut, young man who seemed a little nervous.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: How are you doing today, sir? How are you doing today?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Good. You?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Good. I was wondering if you had a couple of minutes that I could talk to you, ask you a couple of questions about law enforcement in the community.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Got to go. Sorry.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: All right. Have a nice day.
KASTE: The fellow trying to start a conversation there, he's a cop, a Spokane County Sheriff's deputy, to be exact. And he's not the only one. Seven newly hired deputies were roaming the mall, all in plainclothes with instructions to chat people up.
ALEX VELIKODNYY: My third contact, she was hesitating talking to me.
KASTE: This is Deputy Alex Velikodnyy, reporting back to Tony Anderman. Anderman's the one who set up the exercise. They're reviewing the deputies' ability to recognize body language - other people's and his.
VELIKODNYY: Yesterday, you pointed out some things I was doing, like messing with the ring, shifting body. So I've been watching that and working on that.
TONY ANDERMAN: Right. You do a lot of the rocking of the foot. So when - again, it goes back to sincere conversations. How do you establish that trust within the first 30 seconds with a sincere greeting?
KASTE: You might think that this kind of thing doesn't need to be taught. But Sergeant Marty Tucker says you'd be surprised.
MARTY TUCKER: These young people, they have no idea.
KASTE: Tucker runs the training of new deputies, and he's convinced that the new generation's dependence on social media means they have less practice with face-to-face communication.
TUCKER: We are finding and talking with these guys and seeing them, they're so stressed out about making contact that they don't think about anything else. So they get up there, and then they'll freeze up. They'll just go - oh.
KASTE: And that just won't work, Tucker says, not in a job that's all about talking to strangers. You hear this kind of complaint all the time from police chiefs and trainers, that millennials just don't know how to talk to people.
RUSSELL ALDRICH: I can see it a little. I see the millennial thing a little bit.
KASTE: Russell Aldrich is another one of the young deputies roaming this mall. He thinks he has better people skills because he didn't get a cellphone until college. But when he looks around at the others his age, he does see technology replacing conversation.
ALDRICH: Even through the academy, watching some of our classmates, how they interacted with other people. Like, some of them were interacting through, like, Snapchat. And that is how they communicate with each other.
KASTE: But is it really fair to call this a generational problem and to blame it on social media?
SHAWN WEIL: I don't know if I completely buy into that particular assessment.
KASTE: Shawn Weil is a cognitive scientist with Aptima. That's a company that's done research for the Pentagon on how to strengthen the conversational skills of soldiers and Marines. That research is the basis for the training that's now being given to the deputies in Spokane.
WEIL: I've met plenty of folks who are millennial in their generation who have fine social interaction skills and certainly plenty of people who are Gen X or baby boomers who can't give me eye contact.
KASTE: He says, for some people, these skills come with experience. Other people need to be taught. The skills are familiar to anyone in a social job, like sales or journalism.
WEIL: You want to develop rapport, and you want to develop effective engagement and have the right demeanor. The difference really comes in power.
KASTE: Because soldiers and cops carry guns and wear uniforms. In fact, in Spokane, the trainers have the deputies approach people first in plainclothes and then in uniform so they can see how it changes things. Cops also have to try to seem approachable, while at the same time staying alert for possible threats. And that makes the body language that much more complicated.
ANDERMAN: He still has his hands in his pockets. He's bringing it out, kind of talking.
KASTE: Back at the mall, Tony Anderman is still watching his deputies, critiquing their performance.
ANDERMAN: He's relaxed. Now the pedestrian's starting to talk with her hands.
KASTE: It's a small thing, someone mirroring someone else's hand gestures. But to Anderman's trained eye, it's the sign of a respectful, informative interaction. And regardless of generation gaps, he thinks it's the kind of small thing that all cops should understand. Martin Kaste, NPR News, Spokane.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHRIS JOSS SONG, "TUNE DOWN")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It was a long day for Rex Tillerson. He spent all day yesterday answering questions from lawmakers who are trying to figure out if the Texas oil man should be the next U.S. secretary of state.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now, as the former CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson has close business ties with Russia and Vladimir Putin, which provoked an aggressive line of questioning from Republican Senator Marco Rubio.
MARTIN: We've got that rather pointed exchange here. Let's take a listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARCO RUBIO: Is Vladimir Putin a war criminal?
REX TILLERSON: I would not use that term.
RUBIO: Well, let me describe the situation in Aleppo, and perhaps that will help you reach that conclusion. In Aleppo, Mr. Putin has directed his military to conduct a devastating campaign. He's targeted, schools, markets and other civilian infrastructure. It's resulted in the death of thousands of civilians.
So based on all this information and what's publicly in the record about what's happened in Aleppo and the Russian military, you are still not prepared to say that Vladimir Putin, his military, have violated the rules of war and have conducted war crimes in Aleppo.
TILLERSON: Now, those are very, very serious charges to make. And I would want to have much more information before reaching a conclusion. I understand there is a body of record in the public domain. I'm sure there's a body of record in the classified domain. And I think in order to deal with a serious question like this...
RUBIO: Mr. Tillerson, what's happened in Aleppo is in the public domain.
TILLERSON: ...I would want to be...
RUBIO: The videos and the pictures are there.
TILLERSON: ...Fully informed before advising the president.
INSKEEP: Here's one of the reasons we played you a lot of that recording. Senator Rubio hasn't said how he's going to vote on Tillerson, and since there are 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, his support would be crucial.
MARTIN: Democrat Jeff Merkley also has a say on that committee. And he joins us in the studio this morning. Senator, welcome back to the program.
JEFF MERKLEY: Well, good morning, Rachel. Great to be with you.
MARTIN: What do you make of Rex Tillerson after listening to his testimony?
MERKLEY: Well, I came away with a tremendous amount of concern about his answers. I thought starting right off with what Marco Rubio was asking, Aleppo is one of the most tragic circumstances in the world. He wasn't prepared to answer it, and I raised a number of issues myself that - about Exxon's conduct when he was CEO. And there are - there, too, I found his answers insufficient.
INSKEEP: Can I just ask, though, Senator Merkley - he didn't denounce Vladimir Putin necessarily. He didn't denounce Duterte, the president of the Philippines who's in the middle of this violent anti-drug campaign. But is that just diplomacy, being diplomatic? The United States doesn't always criticize every horrible thing that happens in Saudi Arabia, for example.
MERKLEY: Well, take, for example, when he was asked about the Philippines, he said, I just need more information. It was as if he hadn't heard about this extensive strategy of just shooting down young men on the street without any type of due process. Our nation stands for due process.
At the beginning of his conversation with me in my office, he talked about the need to have policy based on moral clarity. But as instance after incident after incident was presented to him about the issues, there was no moral clarity. It was, I need more information, I'm not sure about that and so forth.
MARTIN: Although, Russia was a huge throughline in the hearing. And, you know, he took a different stance than the president-elect has taken, to some degree. I mean, at one point, he said he would have advocated for a more proportional response, a more aggressive response to Russia annexing Crimea. That seemed to please some of your Democratic colleagues.
MERKLEY: Yes, no, that's a point. He put that out there, and it was, in a way, important that he comment on this because we have a situation where our president-elect has placed himself in a very warm relationship with Russia. And he's nominated as secretary of state who, by all accounts, has had an extremely warm relationship with Russia.
And so for him to lay out a position, as he did, saying that he might be more aggressive when Russia violates the boundaries of a neighbor as they did then - but here's the thing. In that situation, we had extensive sanctions against Russia, and his company lobbied against them. And that's documented in the record. It's documented in the press reports. And then he said in front of...
MARTIN: We should say, he said that there is no evidence, to his understanding, that Exxon ever aggressively lobbied against sanctions.
MERKLEY: Well, that's exactly - that was the point I was going to make. He stood there and said, no, I never lobbied on it. My company didn't lobby. And yet the reports to Congress show that they spent millions of dollars lobbying on this issue.
INSKEEP: Senator, obviously you're not in a position to say whether the dossier containing alleged information about President-elect Trump is true or false, the thing that has so dominated discussion over the last couple of days. But let me back away from that.
You mentioned the president-elect's warm relations, as you described it, or effort to have warm relations with Russia. To what extent do you have confidence that this secretary of state, working for this president-elect would follow what you see as the interests of the United States and act independently?
MERKLEY: Well, I have a lot of concern about that. And that's partly why I was asking him about the circumstances in which his company had operated in the world. And we were trying to see if he could find a path and separate himself from that vision.
For example, I asked him about the treatment that Exxon had done in the country of Equatorial Guinea, in which they had channeled enormous amounts of money to the president's family instead of back to the people of the country. And the State Department has reported on this. And it was a perfect opportunity for him to be able to step in and make the case that we need to have a much stronger set of strategy for dealing with corruption in such nations. And I expected him actually to make a much stronger defense of the way the company had behaved. But I didn't hear it.
INSKEEP: This is a company that has a reputation for following whatever laws of whatever countries it is in around the world. You didn't find that too credible?
MERKLEY: Well, he did make the point. He said, we've been investigated, and we haven't been charged. We haven't been convicted. And yet he framed that after he had talked about the need for moral clarity, and there's so much more than just winning a lawsuit in terms of managing foreign policy.
MARTIN: Is there anything Rex Tillerson could say to sway you? Will you vote for him?
MERKLEY: I will not vote for him. This was his opportunity. I talked to him in my office. We spent all day yesterday talking with him, and what comes out of that is an individual who is lacking the breadth of perspectives and certainly the sense of moral kind of insight necessary to lead America on foreign policy in these troubled times.
MARTIN: U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from the state of Oregon. Senator Merkley, thank you so much for making the time.
MERKLEY: Oh, you're very welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIXIGA 70 SONG, "VENTANIA")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. Some people try to bargain through prayer. God, if you'll just let this one thing happen, I will quit smoking, quit drinking, whatever. The sport site SB Nation reports a church in South Carolina followed up. Clemson won the national football title on a last-second play, and a sign at the church says, if you made any promises on Clemson's last drive, service starts at 10. We don't know if God makes bargains, but the pastor is ready to collect. It's MORNING EDITION
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's hear a critique of President-elect Trump's plan to manage his business conflicts of interest. Now our colleague Scott Horsley reports on the plan elsewhere this morning, the details of it. Let's bring back the former White House ethics lawyers we heard from yesterday who've been talking us through the situation. Richard Painter served President George W. Bush. He's on the line from Minneapolis. Good morning, Mr. Painter.
RICHARD PAINTER: Good morning.
INSKEEP: And, of course, Norman Eisen is here again in our studios, he worked for President Obama. Thanks to you for coming by.
NORMAN EISEN: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: And let's hear the president-elect's basic assumption - federal ethics law excludes the president.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: So I could actually run my business. I could actually run my business and run government at the same time. I don't like the way that looks, but I would be able to do that if I wanted to. I'd be the only one that'd be able to do that.
INSKEEP: OK, that's true, so why shouldn't we be pleased that at least he's turning it over to his sons? Mr. Painter, you go first.
PAINTER: Well, actually it's not true. There's one specific statute that doesn't apply to the president. That's the criminal conflict of interest prohibition in 18 U.S.C. 208. But the Constitution has a conflict of interest provision called the Emoluments Clause that prohibits profits from dealings with foreign governments, and that applies to every person holding a position of trust with the United States government including the president. So right there...
INSKEEP: And I want to refine this because you've talked about this on the program before. I know you've also mentioned there are bribery statutes and other statutes that would apply. I guess what we're saying here is the ethics law requires you to do something in advance. He's not required to do something in advance, but if whatever arrangement he has goes wrong, then all these other laws apply. Is that right, Norm Eisen?
EISEN: Well, Steve, I hate to be disagreeable so early in the day...
INSKEEP: Please, go right ahead, it's fine.
EISEN: ...But no, it's much broader than that. And we mustn't fall for another one of Mr. Trump's half-truths, as there is a big body of federal ethics law starting with the Constitution. As Richard says, the Constitution prohibits the president, once he takes office on January 20, from accepting any foreign government benefit of any kind. That includes profits, as Richard pointed out, but it's much broader than that - encompasses gifts, revenues of any kind, permitting, trademarks. And then there's a whole body of federal law, so what Mr. Trump announced yesterday is totally deficient and it's based on a distorted understanding. Either he's been fed a bad understanding of the Constitution American law by his counsel or he came to it naturally.
INSKEEP: Well, let's just remind people what he is doing. He's turning over management of his company to his two adult sons along with a corporate executive. They're supposed to make decisions, they're not supposed to tell them what they're doing, but he retains ownership of the company. Obviously, this is not selling all your assets which you guys have advised, it's not a blind trust which you guys have advised. But let's listen to Sheri Dillon, this is Mr. Trump's lawyer, she spoke yesterday. We heard this earlier. Let's hear it again. She explains why selling the assets would not make sense.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SHERI DILLON: Selling his assets without the rights to the brand would greatly diminish the value of the assets and create a fire sale. President-elect Trump should not be expected to destroy the company he built.
INSKEEP: Richard Painter, why should he be expected to do that?
PAINTER: Well, because he has chosen to run for president, and he won. And he has a job to do, which he has to do in accordance with the Constitution and the laws of the United States. And he can sell his assets, and he can make a lot of money doing that. His branding and putting his name up on buildings all over the world, of course that's going to have to stop while he is president. We don't put the president's name up on the top of a building in Nairobi or in Paris or in the, you know, in the Middle East where there could be a terrorist attack on a building because the president's name is on it. This is the type of thing that not only creates ethics problems but a strategic problem for the United States. It could endanger people's lives. He needs to focus on being president, not on just making more money.
INSKEEP: Norm Eisen...
PAINTER: He has enough money. His family has enough money. It's time to do the job he asked the American people to elect him to do.
EISEN: The argument that Ms. Dillon made is a red herring. All Painter and I - and by the way, this is bipartisan. It's been endorsed by The Wall Street Journal editorial page by their columnist Peggy Noonan, by Trump's own favorite conservative editorial morning read the New York Post, many other Republicans have endorsed it, conservatives. All we're asking Mr. Trump to do - it's very simple - sign a piece of paper, turn the properties over to a trustee to figure out what to do with them. Let the trustee have the headache while Trump does the job he was elected to do. It's hard enough already, president of the United States.
INSKEEP: Richard Painter, I want to give you the last word here. We've got about a minute left. When you look at surveys, you find overwhelming majorities of Democrats are concerned about the president-elect's ethics. Some Republicans are also concerned but many Republicans are not. And when I talk with Trump voters, they basically trust the guy. I was talking with someone who voted for Trump a couple of weeks ago who said, I don't think he's the monster people keep saying that he is. They basically trust him to try to do the right thing. So let me give you an opportunity, Richard Painter. What would you say to people who just think this guy's a businessman, he's doing the best that he can and they trust him?
PAINTER: Well, I think that a lot of that's true. He is a good businessman. And I don't think he's going to do a lot of the things he said he would do during the campaign, and that's actually going to be a very good thing for the country. But he does need to make sure that he is complying with the ethics laws and with the Constitution, and he needs to take these steps to sell his businesses. He will make a lot of money doing that. He's been very successful in business, and now it's time for him to be successful as a president. And he's not going to be able to do that...
INSKEEP: Norm Eisen, you get the last, last word.
EISEN: Poll after poll shows that a supermajority - 60, 70 percent or more of Americans - want him to divest.
INSKEEP: OK. And so now I get the last, last, last word which is simply saying thank you very much gentlemen for coming by, really appreciate it, both of you.
EISEN: Thanks, Steve.
INSKEEP: That's Norm Eisen, who was the top ethics lawyer for President Obama. We also heard from Richard Painter, who was the top ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, talking about President-elect Trump's plan announced yesterday to manage his ethical concerns arising from his business interests around the world.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Diplomacy can be its own kind of tricky knot. But tying a literal knot can be really difficult - just ask any kid who's struggling with shoelaces. Now imagine how much harder it would be to make a knot in a molecule. That's what some scientists have been trying to do. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports on the tightest knot ever tied.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: Knots may not seem high-tech. But once our prehistoric ancestors figured out knots, it led to all kinds of innovation.
DAVID LEIGH: Like fishing nets and axes with blades tied to the handles.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: David Leigh is a chemist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. And he says knots could be just as revolutionary at the molecular level.
LEIGH: But we can't exploit that until we learn how to make them.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The first molecular knot made by a chemist had three loops. It looked a bit like a three-leaf clover. Leigh says that's the simplest kind of knot possible.
LEIGH: And then, for the next 25 years, chemists weren't able to make any more complicated knots than that.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Which is surprising considering that mathematicians have come up with billions of possible knots. Well, just in the last few years, scientists have managed to produce a couple of more complex knots. And now, in the journal Science, Leigh and his colleagues have unveiled the most intricate one yet. It looks a lot like a Celtic knot, and making this out of molecules wasn't easy.
LEIGH: You can't tie the knots by grabbing the ends and mechanically tying them like you would a shoelace in our everyday world. Instead, you have to use chemistry.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Leigh's team designed strands of atoms that could effectively braid themselves together in a test tube.
LEIGH: And being able to braid, like you braid a girl's hair in elementary school, allows you to make much, much more complicated knots and ultimately opens the door for weaving as well, which will be very exciting.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Because molecular weaving could produce materials with interesting new properties.
Edward Fenlon is a chemist at Franklin & Marshall College who has a special interest in knots. He says this new one is fantastic.
EDWARD FENLON: It's really impressive that they've been able to go beyond some of the more simple knots with just three crossings.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He says this knot has eight crossings, and that makes it the tightest knot ever. Here's how he assesses tightness.
FENLON: So it's just the length of the rope and then how complex the knot is, how many crossings you have.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: In this case, the rope, if you will, is very short - just 192 atoms long, 500 times smaller than a red blood cell.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
If you're scared of mice, this next story is not going to help you get over that fear. We're going to hear about how lab mice can be turned into predatory killers with just the flip of a switch. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on an experiment that let researchers take control of brain circuits that tell animals to hunt.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Mice are often portrayed as meek creatures nibbling on crumbs, but Ivan de Araujo of Yale University says they have a dark side.
IVAN DE ARAUJO: There is, for example, one species of mouse that is known as the killer mouse that basically feeds on live prey including sometimes even other mice.
HAMILTON: And many mice kill and eat insects when they get the chance. De Araujo and a team of scientists found evidence that this hunting behavior was controlled by neurons in a part of the brain called the amygdala. De Araujo says the team used a technique called optogenetics to control the brain cells. The cells were triggered by light from a laser.
DE ARAUJO: When we stimulate these neurons, it is as if we were telling these neurons that there is a prey in front of the animal.
HAMILTON: The scientists put mice in a cage with a live cricket. Even without stimulation, the mice would eventually hunt and kill the insect. But De Araujo says when the laser went on, the rodents got serious.
DE ARAUJO: The animals become very efficient in hunting, so they pursue the prey faster, and they are more capable of capturing and killing the insects.
HAMILTON: Even more dramatic, though, is what happened when the scientists put an insect-like toy in the cage. When the laser was off, the mice would move away from the toy.
DE ARAUJO: But when the circuit is activated, then the animals intensively bite it and use their forepaws in an attempt to kill it.
HAMILTON: This behavior was just about hunting, the mice never attacked each other. De Araujo says the research helps explain how the brain evolved to hunt. The team located the hunting circuit in two sets of neurons - one that controlled muscles involved in pursuing prey, the other controlled jaw muscles. He says these circuits probably began evolving hundreds of millions of years ago, when the first animals with jaws started to appear.
DE ARAUJO: It must have influenced the way the brain is wired up in a major way.
HAMILTON: And now, De Araujo says, these hunting circuits exist in a wide range of animals including humans. The research appears in the journal Cell. Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF KID LOCO'S "FLYIN' ON 747")
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Time again for StoryCorps. And today, we're remembering a man who fought for the right to vote in Mississippi and was murdered for it. His name is Vernon Dahmer, and he was a civil rights leader in the mid-1960s. At the time, people were still required to pay a poll tax in Mississippi when they registered to vote. Dahmer, who was a successful farmer and businessman, publicly offered to pay that tax for black Americans who couldn't afford it. When Dahmer's house was firebombed by the KKK, his wife and three of his children were inside. His widow, Ellie Dahmer, and their daughter, Bettie Dahmer, who was just 10 at the time, came to StoryCorps to remember that night.
ELLIE DAHMER: We didn't think anybody would bother the children, but we were wrong. They intended to get all of us January the 10, 1966. That night, when I waked up, the house was on fire and it was so bright and so hot. You was screaming to the top of your voice, Lord have mercy, we going to get burned up in this house alive. I raised the windows up and then your father was handing you out the window to me.
BETTIE DAHMER: We escaped to the barn to hide, and I can remember us sitting on the bales of hay. I had burns over a good portion of my body, and I was screaming and crying because I was in pain. Daddy was burned so much worse than I was. When he held up his arm, the skin just hung down. But daddy never did complain, he was just concerned about me. I remember us going to the hospital.
DAHMER: You was in the room with your father. I was sitting between the two beds. And he yelled my name real loud, and then he was gone. He knew that he might get killed, and he was willing to take the risks, but it was not worth it to me. I miss him so much.
DAHMER: Daddy wasn't a man that wore a suit, he wore overalls. In daddy's world, everybody had a job to do. Black people couldn't vote, so I do understand why he did what he did. It meant a lot to him.
DAHMER: Some of the last words he said was, if you don't vote, you don't count. That's on his tombstone. We made a tremendous sacrifice, Bettie. I try to go on and live my life without thinking about it, but it's a night I can never forget. It's been over 50 years and seems like it were yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: The voice of Ellie Dahmer remembering her husband Vernon Dahmer with their daughter Bettie at StoryCorps in Mississippi. More than 30 years later, the KKK leader who ordered Vernon's killing was convicted of his murder. Ellie went on to serve as an election commissioner in Hattiesburg. Their interview is part of the StoryCorps archive at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
(SOUNDBITE OF MAX RICHTER'S "HORIZON VARIATIONS")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
When President Obama gave his goodbye speech this week, one of hip-hop's most politically active stars was watching. Killer Mike is a rapper who actively campaigned for the man he calls that old crazy haircutted (ph) white guy from Vermont. He gave him a shout out at the Democratic National Convention.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KILLER MIKE: His name is Sen. Bernard Sanders, and we've all been on a journey with him. If you've been pro-Bernie, let me hear you make some noise.
(CHEERING)
KILLER MIKE: If you feel the Bern, let me hear you make some noise.
MARTIN: Killer Mike really did feel the Bern. So when he and another rapper named El-P joined us to talk about some new music from their band Run The Jewels, we also got their take on the president's farewell. Killer Mike says he did like it when President Obama urged Americans to get more involved.
KILLER MIKE: When he started talking about activism, lacing up your boots, hitting the streets, you know, I tweeted it sounds like someone's been listening to the OG - the old guy - Bernie.
MARTIN: Clearly neither of these guys are Trump supporters, but they say they also aren't dreading the transition.
KILLER MIKE: I don't have a sense of dread, to be honest. And the older black people I talk to don't have a sense of dread, who've lived under Nixon and who've lived under duplicitous presidents and governors before. So, no, what I have is a sense of what's next and what can we do to take care of ourselves.
MARTIN: At this point, El-P chimes in.
EL-P: I think that it's a mistake to let our history off the hook so much so to say that Trump is introducing the idea of dread into American culture.
MARTIN: Scathing social commentary, it's a big part of what these artists do musically as Run the Jewels.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A REPORT TO THE SHAREHOLDERS / KILL YOUR MASTERS")
EL-P: (Rapping) Beware of horses. I mean, a horse is a horse of course, but who rides is important. Sitting high with a uniform, barking orders, demanding order. And I'm scared that I talk too much about what I think's going on. I got a way with this, they might drag me away for this.
MARTIN: The duo takes its inspiration from the rap they grew up hearing in the '80s and '90s, at a time when the war on drugs and cocaine were ravaging American cities. Killer Mike had a front row seat from his neighborhood in Atlanta.
KILLER MIKE: I saw the world change, I saw it go upside down. And the irony of it is the only people who were telling the truth about what was happening at that time was rappers.
MARTIN: Today, they hope to carry the mantle. 2016 provided a lot of material, not least the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by several high-profile shooting deaths of African-Americans by police.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THIEVES! SCREAMED THE GHOST")
KILLER MIKE: (Rapping) Conversing with a ghost, conversing with a ghost. He just leaving and he screaming Jesus. He had the highest hopes, the had the highest hopes. People yelling, screaming at polices. Riots tonight, riots tonight. Burning, looting, shooting, taking, thieving.
EL-P: We unfolded a narrative in this one that we knew was important to get right. We wanted to make it an anatomy of a riot.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THIEVES! SCREAMED THE GHOST")
KILLER MIKE: (Rapping) But they know his problems and feel his pain. She's still the same, she's still the same. We just prey off in they deadly game.
MARTIN: It's called "Thieves! (Screamed The Ghost)." It's about how these shooting victims don't just go away. Again, Killer Mike.
KILLER MIKE: I think that there is a pound of flesh owed in terms of this country making sure all of its citizens enjoy the constitutional rights that are promised. And because we don't, we keep resetting to the same place of anger and fear and angst and explosions of that. The dead don't rest. The soul's going to speak based on the fact that this country's still not offering full justice.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THIEVES! SCREAMED THE GHOST")
EL-P: (Rapping) Nobody gets no more sleep 'till we teach them remembering.
TUNDE ADEBIMPE: (Singing) Thieves.
MARTIN: That's Killer Mike and El-P of Run The Jewels.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THIEVES! SCREAMED THE GHOST")
TUNDE ADEBIMPE: (Singing) Thieves.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Donald Trump has taken aim at the intelligence community. He's also targeted immigrants. Protesters are going to converge on Washington D.C. this weekend for a rally about immigrants' rights. Trump has pledged to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally, and that's created in uncertainty for thousands of families. We'll hear from one of those families today and again over the coming weeks as part of our Kitchen Table Conversations series. NPR's Joel Rose has their story.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: In some ways, Desiree Armas is your typical high-school senior. She's getting ready to take the test for her driver's license. And she's applying to colleges.
DESIREE ARMAS: I do have my sights set on Yale, on, you know, engineering. It's just a dream. But I do like the school.
ROSE: But Desiree has a big secret. She rides the bus an hour each way to a magnet school miles away from her family's apartment. And her friends don't know that Desiree and her parents are living in the country illegally.
D. ARMAS: Only my best friend knows. No one else in school - and besides my counselors. Yeah. That's something I don't tell anyone because...
ROSE: Why?
D. ARMAS: ...You never know.
ROSE: Desiree left Peru with her parents when she was 3. Today, the family lives in a small, tidy apartment in working-class Elizabeth, N.J.
OLGA ARMAS: (Speaking Spanish). Recipe is my grandmother's.
ROSE: Desiree's mother, Olga Armas, is a gracious host, quick to offer hot chocolate. Olga says the family first arrived in the U.S. in 2002 and stayed to seek a better future for their daughter.
O. ARMAS: (Through interpreter) The beginning was very hard. It was difficult to come. We arrived here with nothing to a lot of uncertainty - no pans and pots or even a spoon.
ROSE: In Peru, Olga's college-educated husband, Carlos, had a white-collar job for an airline. In New Jersey, he gets up at 4 in the morning to load pallets at a paper warehouse. When his parents died, Carlos couldn't go back for their funerals.
CARLOS ARMAS: (Speaking Spanish).
ROSE: "I withstood that," Carlos says, "because I wanted my daughters to stay in school and my family to stay together here - that they continue to study."
Desiree is a straight-A student. So the family was thrilled when President Obama introduced a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA, allowing immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as kids to work and attend college. Olga says as soon as Desiree was old enough to apply, the whole family went to the lawyer's office together to fill out the paperwork.
O. ARMAS: (Through interpreter) My daughter was so happy, she cried. We cried because my daughter will come out of the dark. She'll be able to continue studying. We always worried, how will Desiree stay in school? I'm always worried about that because she's always liked school.
ROSE: Desiree says getting DACA made a huge difference. Her younger sister Kimberly, who was born in Florida, is a citizen. And Desiree admits she's a little jealous.
D. ARMAS: I see my sister's passport. And, like, I don't know. Something about it just gets me all, like, sappy - I don't know for some reason - that I can't have one. But when I got my Social Security, it felt, like, so official. Like, I was way more positive. I was more hopeful.
ROSE: But Desiree's hopes may have suffered a setback on election night. President-elect Trump has pledged to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally, although he has also said he doesn't want to break up families. And Trump has committed to rolling back President Obama's immigration policies, including DACA. Olga Armas says, once again, her family is facing an uncertain future.
O. ARMAS: (Through interpreter) Yes. The truth is people are in limbo. We don't know what will come from Trump's words. But everybody's talking about it. There's lots of fear.
ROSE: For Olga, the fear is that what her family has gained could all go away. She's volunteering with an immigrant activist group. And the whole family is traveling to Washington this weekend to protest for immigrants' rights. Without DACA, Desiree can still get accepted to college. But losing her status would make it hard to find money for school or to work, once she gets there. She says kids with DACA want the same thing Immigrants to this country have always wanted.
D. ARMAS: What you have now - you know, your parents had to fight for it. And that's what our parents are doing. That's what we're doing. Not just me - just so many other students that are hard-working - and that we deserve a chance to show what we've got. And, you know, if you take that away from us, you probably will yank the dreams of, you know, future doctors and engineers and lawyers.
ROSE: So Desiree Armas is anxiously watching her mailbox for two reasons, acceptance letters from the colleges she's applied to and news about her future in this country. Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
One week from today, Donald Trump will become the 45th president of the United States. We're going to take a look now at one group who will play a feature role during his swearing-in ceremony. The six members of the clergy will offer prayers and readings that day for him and for the country. NPR's religion correspondent, Tom Gjelten, says Mr. Trump's choice of these particular six faith leaders may offer hints about the president-elect's own values and beliefs. And Tom is in the studio to talk with us about that. Hi, Tom.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel.
MARTIN: Six is a lot - right? - traditionally for an inauguration?
GJELTEN: Yeah. We've usually seen three or four at the most. This time we'll have five Christian leaders and a rabbi.
MARTIN: No Muslim.
GJELTEN: No, but that's not unusual at a swearing-in.
MARTIN: All right. So let's go through these people. Who are they?
GJELTEN: First, Bishop Wayne T. Jackson of Detroit. He's a prominent African-American minister, leads a big church conglomerate there with a television network. He played an important role in the presidential campaign. Remember, he's the minister who invited Donald Trump to his church, one of the very few black churches that Trump visited.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WAYNE T JACKSON: Mr. Trump, will you come, and would you stand? Would you stand, Mr. Trump?
(APPLAUSE)
DONALD TRUMP: Thank you. Thank you very much.
GJELTEN: So now, as president-elect, Trump has invited Bishop Jackson to pray at his swearing-in next week, returning the favor. But there is something else. Jackson is a very wealthy preacher, lives in a multimillion-dollar mansion, drives luxury cars and famously preaches that wealth is not a bad thing, that Donald Trump's wealth is a sign he's been blessed by God.
MARTIN: This is the prosperity gospel, right? - like, the idea that if you pray hard enough, you'll be rewarded or that your wealth is a sign that you have been blessed.
GJELTEN: Right. And that brings us to a second faith leader who will be at Trump's inauguration, Paula White from the New Destiny Christian Center in Florida. She's perhaps the best-known example of a prosperity preacher. Listen here to part of one of her sermons, where she talks about how what you have in life is what God has given you.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PAULA WHITE: You're either in a position of abundance or you're in a position of poverty. Now, that's every area of your life. That's not just financially.
GJELTEN: Now, if you're wealthy like Donald Trump is, and you have a preacher who says your wealth is a sign God approves of you, you're probably going to like that preacher. And if there is one major element in Donald Trump's religious beliefs, it would be this prosperity gospel. Paula White has her critics among other evangelical leaders. But Trump has called her his spiritual adviser. And she endorsed his candidacy.
MARTIN: OK. So then we have Franklin Graham, a name that will be familiar to a lot of people, the son of Billy Graham, who himself prayed at several presidential inaugurations.
GJELTEN: Several, beginning with Richard Nixon on up through Bill Clinton. And Franklin himself prayed at the inauguration of George W. Bush. So his appearance here is hardly unprecedented. But he has something in common with Paula White. He, too, was a big supporter of Donald Trump during the campaign. Listen to what he said just last week about Trump's election in an interview with Lou Dobbs on the Fox Business Network.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LOU DOBBS TONIGHT")
FRANKLIN GRAHAM: Everybody predicted that he was going to lose. And I just think it was the hand of God. I think God intervened and put his hand on Donald Trump for some reason. It's obvious that there was something behind this. And it was more than people understand. And I just think it was God.
MARTIN: Divine intervention is tough to argue with.
GJELTEN: Boy, you can't ask for a better endorsement than that. And, politically, Franklin Graham stands with Donald Trump on a number of issues. Trump, during his campaign, focused a lot of attention on what he said was the threat from radical Islam. And that's a theme Franklin Graham has hit over and over.
MARTIN: All right. You said there was going to be a rabbi there. What can you tell us about him?
GJELTEN: Right. Rabbi Marvin Hier, president of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles - the first rabbi to take part in a presidential swearing-in since 1985.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARVIN HIER: I'm delivering a prayer. I will hit modern themes. It'll be a short prayer. But it will reflect on the 21st century.
GJELTEN: That's a clip from a TV interview on Fox News. And one other point here - Rabbi Hier has ties to Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law now set to be a close White House adviser. Kushner's parents and Rabbi Hier and his wife are old friends.
MARTIN: Kushner is Jewish himself. And Ivanka Trump has converted.
GJELTEN: Indeed.
MARTIN: So we have two more to go through. First, Rev. Samuel Rodriguez - what can you tell us about him?
GJELTEN: Well, Rev. Rodriguez is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. And, you know, Hispanics are the fastest-growing evangelical group in the country right now, an important constituency. But Trump's views, especially his views on immigration, did not exactly go over well with this faith constituency. Rev. Rodriguez told me that Trump's invitation created something of a stir in his world.
SAMUEL RODRIGUEZ: Of course, there was a bit of angst due to the fact that, throughout the course of his campaign, the rhetoric and the tone as it pertains to, particularly, the immigrant community did not line up with the ethos or the values of the NHCLC.
GJELTEN: Remember, that's his church group. But Rodriguez told me, in the end, he could not pass up the opportunity to pray on what he called the quintessential political platform on the planet. But there's more to this invitation. Rev. Rodriguez is one of the more conservative faith leaders in the Hispanic world. And while he did not endorse Trump, he told me he's heard a change of tone from Trump in the last few weeks and now has high hopes for better relations between Hispanics and the Trump administration.
RODRIGUEZ: Thirty percent of Latinos voted for Donald Trump. There's a great possibility that the president-elect and his team have come to the realization that this constituency can be engaged successfully.
MARTIN: All right. So we've got one more faith leader to be introduced to. Cardinal Timothy Dolan doesn't need an introduction to many because he's the archbishop of New York, a prominent Catholic.
GJELTEN: And, Rachel, in many ways, the least surprising of these faith leaders. President after president has asked a prominent Catholic bishop or theologian to do an inauguration prayer. And being New Yorkers, Cardinal Dolan and Donald Trump have known each other a long time.
MARTIN: All right. Looking across the scope here, these six faith leaders - what can we learn, if anything, about Donald Trump, his philosophy, the way he sees the world? Can we draw any conclusions?
GJELTEN: I'd say two big points, Rachel. With the exception of Cardinal Dolan, these are somewhat unorthodox choices starting with the prosperity preachers. There's no representative here of mainline Protestantism. And being out of the mainstream is entirely consistent with the way Donald Trump is approaching his presidency. The other thing is these choices reflect the importance he puts on loyalty. He's rewarding people who have supported him politically or endorsed his views or even offered a religious approval of his great wealth, a reminder that Donald Trump seems to prefer people he sees as being on his side.
MARTIN: NPR's Tom Gjelten - he covers religion for us. Tom, thanks so much.
GJELTEN: Of course.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now to politics across the Pacific, where the minority party in Japan's parliament is also led by a woman. NPR's Elise Hu in Tokyo reports on the political rise of women in Japan.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: At this monthly Tokyo networking lunch, anyone with a $30 entry fee can show up to meet potential clients, trade business cards and enjoy a big meal.
YUKARI NAKAYAMA: (Speaking Japanese).
HU: "I got certified recently as a closet organizer," Yukari Nakayama says. "So here, I'm trying to look for clients and to expand my business." Nakayama left the workforce after her son was born nearly 20 years ago. Now she's trying to break back in using the skills she learned from all those years at home.
NAKAYAMA: (Speaking Japanese).
HU: "Closet organizing works well because I've had so much experience being a housewife," she says. Nakayama's path is common. Labor force participation among Japanese women is 4 out of 10, far below the U.S. Lack of child care options in Japan and cultural pressure for women to take on household duties means it's the moms here who drop out of work. It touches every part of society, including politics, as Kyoto University diplomacy professor Nancy Snow explains.
NANCY SNOW: Women have not really been coached or mentored or encouraged to take on leadership roles. Also, women aren't allowed to often show ambition, to sort of telegraph that. I was...
HU: Culturally?
SNOW: Yeah, culturally.
HU: In official registries, married women, to this day, are listed along with children as part of a man's household. If they're single, that of their parents.
SNOW: I think it really goes back to the social hierarchy, the way that it's been for decades.
HU: But signs of change are showing up in politics. Tokyo is now led by its first-ever female governor, Yuriko Koike. Japan's new defense minister, Tomomi Inada, is only the second woman to ever hold the role. And Japan's opposition Democratic Party is, for the first time, led by a woman. She's a former journalist named Renho Murata.
RENHO MURATA: (Through interpreter) Twenty-three years ago, when I was a newscaster, I interviewed an important member of the ruling party. He said to me frankly that he doesn't think wives should even speak about politics.
HU: More than two decades have passed since that conversation, but today women still represent fewer than 15 percent of all seats in Japan's Parliament. That's compared to 20 percent in the U.S. Congress. Renho says she's hoping to use her position to help get more women elected.
MURATA: (Through interpreter) We don't have enough women to raise their hands.
HU: What was it in your personality that made you raise your hand?
MURATA: (Through interpreter) It all began for me when I was raising two children. In a society that complains about not having enough children, the government wasn't offering any support. That made me want to become a politician.
HU: But cultural biases persist. Renho's bra size was listed on her Wikipedia page. Mayor Koike was criticized during her race for wearing too much makeup. And top-down efforts to increase participation of women in higher levels have fallen short. Japan's government conceded last year it wouldn't reach its goal of getting women into 30 percent of management roles by 2020. Women are so outnumbered in business that the fact they're working at all is a story. Nancy Snow calls it discouraging.
SNOW: And I look forward, in this century - and it may take a while - for it to be just the case that a woman is in power in government here or in industry and she just happens to be a woman.
HU: For now, the few women in power are proving to be rather fearless.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRIME MINISTER SHINZO ABE: (Speaking Japanese).
(APPLAUSE)
HU: In a notable exchange with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last month, Renho stood up against casino legislation that was rushed through Parliament. Facing the prime minister on the floor, Renho said...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MURATA: (Speaking Japanese).
HU: "...You seem to lie as often as you breathe." Abe chuckled but didn't bother to respond.
Back at the networking lunch, The former stay-at-home mom, Nakayama, says seeing the election of these women is a step forward.
NAKAYAMA: (Speaking Japanese).
HU: "But until we see what they're actually going to do," she says, "it's hard to say what this means for Japanese women overall."
Elise Hu, NPR News, Tokyo.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Donald Trump has had more than a few choice words for members of the intelligence community, so there is undoubtedly going to be a lot of pressure on his next director of the CIA to try to repair that relationship. He has tapped Congressman Mike Pompeo for the job, and Pompeo had his confirmation hearing yesterday. Sen. Jim Risch, a Republican from Idaho, was at that hearing, he's a member of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence.
Senator, thank you so much for talking with us.
JIM RISCH: Glad to be here.
MARTIN: Congressman Pompeo appears to share the same adversarial view of Russia as the U.S. intelligence community, which is different than what Donald Trump has characterized it as. They clearly disagree, where do you stand? Do you see Russia as a threat?
RISCH: I would say this. Knowing the president-elect and Mike Pompeo and for that matter the new secretary of state, I hope that the Russians get to know them. When he does - when Putin does, he is going to understand that he is not dealing with Barack Obama. He's dealing with a person that is much stronger, and in that part of the world strength is greatly respected. I suspect that that is going to cause some change in the relationship between the United States and Russia.
MARTIN: Congressman Pompeo said he accepts the U.S. intelligence report on Russian hacking and Russia's responsibility in that, do you?
RISCH: Yes.
MARTIN: Do you think the United States has done enough to secure the country from similar cyberattacks moving forward?
RISCH: Well, you know, the question, have you done enough? The question is can you ever do enough? All this upheaval that's come over this Russian infiltration with the Democratic Party, this is ubiquitous. I mean, as we're having this conversation, there are thousands of people sitting at computers attempting to enter United States entities. These are people from all over the world, from all different countries attempting to enter each other's portals and that's going to continue. And your best defense against that is creating a defensive posture in cyberspace.
MARTIN: Do you think there should be more repercussions for Russia? Do you think that Donald Trump should impose more sanctions once he comes into office?
RISCH: Well, one has to be very careful about this. I thought James Clapper, who's head of the DNI right now, was...
MARTIN: The director of national intelligence, yeah.
RISCH: Excuse me, yeah. If countries are going to start disciplining other countries for espionage, this is a huge change from the way things have been done in the past and going to cause some real upheaval because everybody is engaged in espionage, as James Clapper said...
MARTIN: Does not mean you think there should not have been repercussions?
RISCH: No, I didn't say that at all. I think that there are going to be repercussions and a lot of them are - obviously I can't talk about in an open setting like this.
MARTIN: Just this week, Donald Trump suggested that the intelligence community might have itself leaked these unverified documents suggesting that Russia had compromising information on him. Do you think it's a problem that the president-elect appears not to trust his own intelligence community?
RISCH: It isn't his intelligence community. On January 20 at noon it will be, and I think there's going to be some changes. You had a mixture of the political system here in America and the intelligence community, that is not a good mixture. When that happens, political matters are handled entirely differently than intelligence matters are. And when you start mixing them and particularly when part of it's in a public setting, part of it's in a classified setting, it becomes very difficult.
MARTIN: Are you indicating that on January 20 when Donald Trump becomes president and he gets his own person inside the intelligence community that somehow he would then own it and would be less likely to criticize it?
RISCH: I wouldn't use the word owned, but certainly it will be part of his administration and he will be responsible for it. And his designee - Mike Pompeo, who I have great confidence in - will be responsible for it, and I think things are going to change.
MARTIN: During the confirmation hearing for Mike Pompeo, a couple of different senators brought up enhanced interrogations. This of course was the highly controversial program that the CIA engaged in that included waterboarding. Donald Trump has said in the past that waterboarding could be something intelligence agencies could use as one of their tools. Are you concerned about the president-elect's position on torture?
RISCH: Well, I suspect that he's going to be operating when you get into these very sensitive areas - and the president has to deal with it on a regular basis. And we have a long history of consultation with legal counsel on how these things are carried out. I have every confidence that the president-elect will follow the same route, and he's not going to be going off on his own and ordering the kinds of things that are prohibited by U.S. law.
MARTIN: Do you think that Mike Pompeo will have the next president's ear? I mean, it came up in the hearing.
RISCH: He already has.
MARTIN: You trust that he would stand up to the president-elect if he wanted to bring those techniques back?
RISCH: OK, now, when you talk about standing up to the president, he works for the president. He works at the direction of the president. I know Mike Pompeo very well. If he's told to do something illegal by the president of the United States, he would resign, and I think that would be true with most people.
MARTIN: Sen. Jim Risch, Republican from Idaho, thank you so much for talking with us.
RISCH: Nice to talk to you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. We've got Floridians and Californians, Alabamians and Idahoans. But Indianians? Nah, they're Hoosiers. And now the feds have made it official, updating the government stylebook to say so. No one knows where the name Hoosier comes from, but tall tales abound, including one that says it's from the olden days after brutal fights among settlers when people would pick up the body part and then ask - whose ear? Hoosier - get it? It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Obama's ambassadors - the political appointees, not career diplomats - they have until next Friday, Inauguration Day, to clear out of their embassies. This is one of the many ways President-elect Donald Trump is trying to mark a break with the outgoing administration. Among those coming home next week is Max Baucus, the U.S. ambassador to China since 2014, and before that, a longtime senator representing the state of Montana. Trump is nominating Iowa Governor Terry Branstad to succeed Baucus.
Ambassador Baucus joins us now on the line from Beijing. Thank you so much for being with us.
MAX BAUCUS: You bet, Rachel. Good hearing you.
MARTIN: In your dealings with Chinese officials since the election, how do they view Donald Trump's victory?
BAUCUS: They're a little uncertain. They find him unpredictable. Of course, many people find him unpredictable. They're kind of laying low, assessing what seems to make the most sense for China. My advice to them is to try to find ways to look for opportunities where they, the Chinese, can take some initiatives to show to the new administration that they very much want to work with and are - want to partner with the United States.
MARTIN: You've said the U.S. needs to stand up for itself in its relationship with China. And since his election, Trump has rattled China by speaking with the president of Taiwan and talking about raising tariffs on Chinese imports. Is that the kind of thing you had in mind when you said stand up in its relationship?
BAUCUS: No, no. I think basically that, although we have a quite good relationship with China, that the time has come for the United States to be a little bit more firm in some areas, especially economic. I think that the level playing field is so unlevel - it is tilted so much in favor of Chinese companies - that it's time for the United States to do a little bit more, see.
You know, you've got to stop denying our investors' investment in China, stop denying access to our companies trying to enter Chinese markets. And then if they don't, then we're going to have to look for appropriate, solid ways to show to China that, I'm sorry, we just have to do something because we can't keep going on like this.
MARTIN: When you say do something, what does that mean?
BAUCUS: It means finding some reciprocal action. But first, if they don't stop, that we have no choice but to take a specified, or if not specified, make it clear it's going to be a very large reciprocal actions that gets their attention. We've done this in the past and it works.
MARTIN: I want to ask you about some comments that Rex Tillerson made earlier this week during his confirmation hearing. He's, of course, Trump's pick to become the next secretary of state. He was talking about the South China Sea. Let's listen to that clip.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
REX TILLERSON: We are going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island building stops and second, your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed.
MARTIN: Our correspondent in Shanghai, Rob Schmitz, is reporting this morning that those comments aren't going over so well in the Chinese press, that media there is filled with threats of retaliation, even talk of war with the U.S. How are you reacting to those comments?
BAUCUS: My basic advice to the Chinese, with respect to the South China Sea is, hey, guys, cool it. We have said that to the Chinese in the past, and it has worked. They have stopped. I don't know that it's wise to publicly and loudly and with a large megaphone make some of those statements. I think it's much wiser privately, as we have done, to say to the Chinese, no more. And 'cause if there is any more, there will be definite consequences.
MARTIN: You've been a staunch supporter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal, the TPP. It appears Trump is walking away from that. That was part and parcel of the Obama administration's big pivot to Asia. What happens with that policy now?
BAUCUS: Failure to pass TPP sends a big signal. The United States is backing off, backing away. That will create a huge void here. Politics abhors a vacuum. China will start to fill that vacuum by putting together its own trade deals, its own agreements, putting pressure on other countries in the region, and it's just going to be a problem for all of us.
And I very much hope that the Trump administration reconsiders and finds a way - it doesnt have to be exactly the same TPP - but finds a way to get - go back to the table, show up to the Chinese, hey, if you want to join, we'll try to find a way where you can join, too. It's critical. Since I've been here as ambassador, nothing has passed my desk which is more critical than this, nothing comes close, for our strategic long-term interests.
MARTIN: U.S. Ambassador to China Max Baucus, thank you so much.
BAUCUS: You bet.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The card game blackjack has been around a long time. But until Ed Thorp came along, no one had figured out how to beat it. Thorp has just written a book called "A Man For All Markets" about how he did just that. He beat blackjack and then he went on to transform the world of investing. Jacob Goldstein of our Planet Money podcast has the story.
JACOB GOLDSTEIN, BYLINE: For hundreds of years, really smart people have tried to figure out how to get an edge in casino games. And again and again, they've discovered that in the long run, the house always wins. But in 1959, when Ed Thorp was a math geek just out of grad school, he realized that blackjack is fundamentally different than other casino games.
EDWARD THORP: Most of the games, whatever happens on one trial or one play of the game doesn't have any influence on what's going to happen next.
GOLDSTEIN: If the roulette wheel comes up red on one spin, the odds of whether it's going to come up red on the next spin don't change. Thorp saw that blackjack, also known as 21, was different. At the time, the dealer dealt from the same deck for several hands in a row. That meant that if, say, you got an ace in the first hand, you were in fact less likely to get an ace in the next hand.
THORP: I realized that in a minute or two that if cards were used up during the play of the game, the odds would shift back and forth - sometimes for the casino, sometimes for me.
GOLDSTEIN: It took him about a year to do all the calculations, but he did it. He figured out how to win.
Ed Thorp, you're the first person to develop a scientific system to beat the casinos at blackjack. What are you going to do now?
THORP: I said - well, I'm going to publish this in a scientific journal of one sort or another.
GOLDSTEIN: Why were you more interested in publishing than in making money?
THORP: I wasn't money-oriented basically at all. I thought that teaching in the university would be a great life.
GOLDSTEIN: And did this seem like a step in that direction? Like...
THORP: Well, I didn't think of it that way. I just thought, here's something that's going to amaze you guys. You haven't...
GOLDSTEIN: (Laughter) It's like doing a magic trick or something.
THORP: Right, exactly.
GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, yeah.
The article was published in a scientific journal, and it became something of a popular sensation. And then one day, a blue Cadillac pulled up outside Thorp's apartment.
THORP: And then this white-haired, kind of short, elderly man in a long cashmere coat got out.
GOLDSTEIN: The man offered to bankroll a trip to the casinos. They flew to Reno, Nev., and more than doubled their money in a few days of gambling. Thorp made more trips, kept winning. And eventually, he thought - if I can beat the casinos, maybe I can go bigger. Maybe I can beat the stock market.
THORP: So I made a few investments, and they worked out terribly.
GOLDSTEIN: Then, Thorp discovered call options, which give an investor the right to buy a particular stock at a set price. As he did with blackjack, he thought about the math and did a lot of calculations, in this case, to figure out what the right price of an option should be.
THORP: And I got a really neat formula. So I said I like this formula. It looks right to me. I'm going to try it out.
GOLDSTEIN: It worked. Thorp started making consistent profits. A few years later, two economists came up with the same formula. Their work went on to win the Nobel Prize. Thorp started an investment firm. And for almost 20 years, it was one of the most consistently successful firms in the country. He says his investments were patterned on the approach he took to blackjack.
THORP: I'm looking at it in a new way. If you bring in more information, what seemed unbeatable may become beatable.
GOLDSTEIN: Thorp's firm shut down in the 1980s after a few people there got into legal trouble. Thorp himself was never charged. Thorp's out of the investing business now. But the investing business is now full of people who are trying to be like Ed Thorp, trying to use math and computers and to find new ways of looking at markets.
Jacob Goldstein, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., was etched into American history when Ku Klux Klansmen bombed that building in 1963, killing four girls. Visitors come to the church from around the world, and now they'll be visiting the newest national monument. President Barack Obama designated three national monuments on Thursday, all related to civil rights. From WBHM in Birmingham, Andrew Yeager reports.
ANDREW YEAGER, BYLINE: It's been more than 50 years, but the songs still flow from Myrna Jackson's lips.
MYRNA JACKSON: (Singing) Oh, freedom. Oh, freedom. Oh, freedom over me...
YEAGER: Jackson explained she learned those songs here at the 16th Street Baptist Church in the basement. She marched against segregation and in 1963 was arrested.
JACKSON: And in jail - oh, my God. Those officers would get on the intercom and say, (singing) oh, I wish I was in Dixie. You know, they would just aggravate us like.
YEAGER: She says some things in life are given to you. But this designation was earned - earned through the struggles of foot soldiers like her. The newly created Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument includes the church and a number of other sites - Kelly Ingram Park, where children marching for equal treatment were met with police dogs and fire hoses; the A.G. Gaston Hotel (ph), where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had his war room to plan the Birmingham campaign.
People around Birmingham were anticipating this announcement as President Obama approached the end of his term. Birmingham Mayor William Bell says there's special significance in the fact the first black president created the monument.
MAYOR WILLIAM BELL: Were it not for the struggles here in the city of Birmingham, none of us would be where we are this day, including the president of the United States of America.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Amen.
YEAGER: In addition to the Birmingham designation, Obama established two other monuments that will be part of the National Park Service. There's the Freedom Riders National Monument in Anniston, Ala. That's where a Greyhound bus was firebombed in 1961 as Freedom Riders tried to integrate interstate buses. There's also the Reconstruction Era National Monument in South Carolina, which includes sites related to freed slaves in the years after the Civil War.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLIPPERS BUZZING)
YEAGER: Several people are getting their hair cut at the Magic City Barber Shop. It's part of the Fourth Avenue Historic District in Birmingham. It was a hub of black business during segregation, and the area's part of a national monument, too. A.J. Johnson (ph) echoes the sentiment of many that this action should have happened long ago. When he thinks of the visitors the monument could attract, he hopes they'll see the Birmingham of today.
A J JOHNSON: It'll bring people here so they can actually see that we're not a country city. We're not kicking cans down here. We're not hanging people anymore.
YEAGER: These new civil rights monuments may represent that painful past. Johnson mentions how his mother couldn't walk into a popular hamburger restaurant because she was black. But he says if you walk into one of those restaurants today, there's a good chance someone black is running the place.
For NPR News, I'm Andrew Yeager in Birmingham.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Capitol Hill is abuzz with activity these days. Inauguration is just a week away. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is not in a celebratory mood. In fact, she's still a little bit in denial.
NANCY PELOSI: We were caught off guard that Hillary Clinton did not win. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton would win the White House. I still can't get used to the idea that she is not going to be the next president.
MARTIN: The twists and turns of the 2016 campaign came back into focus yesterday with news that the Justice Department will be investigating FBI director James Comey's public comments about the Hillary Clinton email probe. We sat down with the Democratic House leader yesterday right after that news broke, and Pelosi said the American people have a right to know the truth.
PELOSI: It was very unusual for the director of the FBI, so close to an election, to say that while it might not be significant, he was looking into some other matters relating to emails. It had a stunning effect on the election.
MARTIN: What do you expect to learn from the investigation?
PELOSI: Well, we'll find out about the internal decision-making about it. One question I would have is - why did Rudy Giuliani know about it two days in advance that some kind of an announcement was coming? So I do think that to protect the integrity of our democracy and our elections, we can't have that kind of interference in our own country or from a foreign power. And I'd like to know if the FBI is investigating some of the allegations related to the fact that the Russians interfered in our election.
MARTIN: I want to move now to the Affordable Care Act.
PELOSI: Yes.
MARTIN: This, obviously, was an incredibly important part of Barack Obama's legacy. Republicans, in particular Vice President-elect Mike Pence, has said it will be the first item on the agenda to repeal Obamacare. Can they do it?
PELOSI: Well, let me just say that it is part of the legacy of the Democratic Congress working with President Obama. We're very proud of the inspiration he was, his leadership, his signature. So again, the president, sadly, will be leaving us in a week or so. But we are here who fought the fight then and will fight the fight again.
MARTIN: Although, you know, in a variety of states, there are all kinds of people who are saying that their premiums have gone up. Their deductibles have gone up, and it feels onerous.
PELOSI: Well, you know what? That may be true. And I know that in some states it started very low, like Minnesota - I was there the day they announced that they were going up. But the fact is if we did not have the Affordable Care Act, the rate of growth of cost of health care and premiums was skyrocketing.
And the Affordable Care Act, while there are still increases, had slowed down those increases enormously. If they were to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the cost to the individuals, to families, to small businesses, to corporate America, to state, local and federal government will be just unaffordable.
MARTIN: A poll that came out just this last week said that half of all Americans didn't know that millions of Americans have gotten health care...
PELOSI: I know.
MARTIN: ...Through the Affordable Care Act. Did you have a messaging problem when it came to selling the public on this?
PELOSI: Well, I think so. I think so. I think that we could have had a better education of the American people as to what this would mean to them. They know it because they are living it now, but they don't know it about other people. They just know it about themselves. But I would say, in terms of the administration - because they have the bully pulpit - that they implemented the bill very well. And if you had asked me what's more important, the implementation of the law or the messaging of it - I'd like to do both, but if I had to choose one - it would be the implementation.
MARTIN: Although the messaging leads to people's public perceptions, which informs their votes...
PELOSI: That's right, but it's about 50-50.
MARTIN: ...On Election Day.
PELOSI: Well, no, I don't think we lost any elections on the basis of the Affordable Care Act. I really don't.
MARTIN: So what do you do now? I mean, is the Affordable Care Act a starting point? And here you have Republicans saying we need to repeal and replace. Do you work with them to come up with a new alternative?
PELOSI: I'll see what they have to say, see what their values are because repeal and replace is alliterative, but it's not a reality. And we'll see what they think they can pass in a replacement that does not do harm. We would be interested in talking about something that does not reduce the number of people who are covered, does not increase the cost to the public and does not diminish their benefits.
MARTIN: Last question and I'll let you go - the inauguration will be taking place in Washington, D.C., in one week.
PELOSI: Yes.
MARTIN: It's a historic moment anytime this happens.
PELOSI: Yes, it is.
MARTIN: How are you feeling about this moment? Is there...
PELOSI: Well, I certainly would wish the new president well. I'll listen very keenly to what the new president has to say.
MARTIN: You will be there.
PELOSI: I will be there. I'll be there for the inauguration, yes. That's my responsibility. And it is the wonderful thing about our country, the peaceful transfer of power - and in this case, from one party to the next. But you have to always hope that the president succeeds. We'll never have an attitude like Mitch McConnell did when President Obama was president and the Republicans took control and they said the most important thing we can do is to make sure he doesn't succeed. That's stunning, really stunning. That's not who we are. We're about our country.
MARTIN: You don't believe the Democratic Party's success depends on Donald Trump's failure?
PELOSI: Well, we'll have a debate on the issues. We have a responsibility for the American people to find common ground where we can. We will engage, whether it's on true infrastructure legislation, issues that relate to work and family balance. But if they come forward and say they're going to overturn Affordable Care Act, that they're going to make Medicare a voucher, that they're going to shrink Medicaid, that they're going to impede a woman's right to choose - well, then we will stand our ground, and we will fight.
So we'll try to find compromise where we can on issues where we have shared values. But where they try to take us back, we're not going back.
MARTIN: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, thank you so much.
PELOSI: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
With just one week to go in office, the Obama administration has ditched a policy that had favored Cubans over people from other countries trying to enter the U.S. The change comes as the U.S. is working to improve relations with the Cuban government. NPR's Carrie Kahn covers Cuba, and she joins us on the line from Mexico City.
Good morning, Carrie.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: Explain the change. What are the new rules for Cubans trying to reach the U.S.?
KAHN: Well, the new rules are that Cubans that come to the U.S. without a visa will now have to follow the same immigration procedures that all other migrants from all over the world have to follow. Since the 1990s, Cubans have had this special immigration privilege - it's known as that wet-foot, dry-foot policy. If a Cuban arrives on U.S. soil without a visa, they've been immediately admitted into the country and, in almost every case, can receive residency and other benefits after one year here. And Cubans caught trying to reach the U.S. by sea are returned. No other countries' migrants or refugees gets that fast track. But under this new change, Cubans can still apply for political asylum. They just have to do it like all other migrants from around the world have to do it.
MARTIN: But this is a huge change, right? What's been the reaction?
KAHN: Mixed, to say the least. The Obama administration, in a statement, said that by taking this step, we're treating Cuban migrants now the same way we treat migrants from all other countries. The Cuban government praised the change. They've long hated this policy, which they say entices people to take a dangerous trip to get to the U.S. They also praised another change in the policy which ended a provision that allows Cuban doctors working in Third World countries to ask for political asylum and come into the U.S. They say that's drained Cuba of its professionals.
So groups and U.S. lawmakers who favor the warmer relations between the U.S. and Cuba are happy, and those who have hated that change in policy are very unhappy. And Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat from New Jersey, said the announcement will only serve to tighten the noose the Castro regime continues to have around the neck of its own people.
MARTIN: So the Obama administration only has a week left in office. This is one of their last big policy decisions. Why is this happening now?
KAHN: Oh, this is the latest in a string of executive orders that President Obama has made since he surprised the world by normalizing relations back in 2014. But the big reason I think now, too, is that since re-establishment of those diplomatic ties, there's been a significant uptick in migration from Cuba to the U.S. More than 70,000 Cubans have come here in the past two years and many times walking right past immigrants from Central America and Africa that are fleeing horrific violence too back home. Many see the policy as just not being fair, especially since a lot of - in recent years, the Cuban migrants coming here are coming to the U.S. for economic reasons rather than political ones.
MARTIN: So now there's been this change. Will the change survive in the new Trump administration?
KAHN: That's the big question. Members of the transition team have said that they've been instructed by President-elect Trump to review all aspects of these executive orders President Obama has made with regard to Cuba. And in a statement last night, Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio said he discussed this particular policy change with vice president-elect, and he's waiting next week when the administration changes.
MARTIN: NPR's Carrie Kahn in Mexico City.
Thanks, Carrie.
KAHN: You're welcome.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. All that unexpected snow in Oregon has made one man rich. Joemel Panisa was snowed in and killing time by cleaning out his home office when he happened upon an envelope. He opened it and found a lottery ticket he bought almost a year ago and then totally had forgotten about. He remembered reports of an unclaimed ticket, quickly checked the numbers and, I'm guessing, then made some very quick phone calls to claim his million-dollar prize just eight days before it expired. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to turn now to that news out of the Justice Department that came down yesterday. The department announced that it will investigate FBI director James Comey for his handling of the probe of Hillary Clinton's email practices. That is a decision Hillary Clinton says cost her the election.
We don't yet know what we're going to learn from this investigation into the investigation. But the timing of all of it is awkward at best, coming just a week before Donald Trump's inauguration. With me now on the line is Senator Angus King. He's an independent senator who caucuses with the Democrats. He's on the line from his home state of Maine. Senator, welcome back to the program.
ANGUS KING: Rachel, good morning.
MARTIN: Let's take a minute to remember what happened last fall. This was 11 days before Election Day. Comey sent a letter to lawmakers telling them that investigators had uncovered relevant emails in their investigation of Hillary Clinton. And then he came back right before Election Day and said, yeah, we looked at them. They didn't turn up anything new. Critics say this was an unprecedented break with FBI policy. Did it concern you at the time?
KING: Yeah. The whole premise of FBI is we don't talk about investigations. In fact, Jim Comey was on Capitol Hill. I was interviewing him at an Intelligence-Committee meeting and asked him about what was going on with the FBI's investigation of all these allegations surrounding the Trump campaign. And he said, we don't talk about investigations. And I thought, wow. I hope I don't get struck by lightning here because...
MARTIN: Because that's what he had said in the fall about Clinton.
KING: Yeah. Well - because he talked about an investigation. So I think it's important, Rachel, people understand this is an inspector general's investigation, this so-called IG. Throughout the federal government are IGs who are independent of the bosses. They're independent of the chain of command. And their job is to investigate their own agencies, in effect.
And they have a pretty good record of being independent. That's what this is all about. And I think it is important from a historical point of view but also looking forward. So we know, and the FBI knows, and the federal law-enforcement people know. You know, what are the rules of the road here? When do you talk about investigations?
MARTIN: So what questions remain for you? I mean, as you mentioned, you were asking James Comey about the kind of unsubstantiated allegations against Donald Trump and his relationship with Russia and if the FBI was looking into that. But what questions do you have right now?
KING: On the prior - on the Clinton one or on the Trump one (laughter)?
MARTIN: Let's talk about Trump and Russia.
KING: Let's take our investigations one at a time.
MARTIN: One at a time - let's talk about Trump and Russia.
KING: Well, we've learned pretty definitively from the whole intelligence community that the Russians were trying to interfere in our elections. And their conclusions were pretty - were not pretty strong - were - I think the director of National Intelligence had high confidence that they intended to sway the election against Hillary Clinton and in favor of Donald Trump. So we need to understand what they did, how they did it.
Now, there are unsubstantiated charges that there were contacts between the Russians and the Trump campaign. Nobody knows if that's true. But it certainly is something that needs to be examined. And this is very serious stuff. And it - I don't even like to be talking about it. But it clearly is part of what we need to understand - was - we know what the Russians did. We need to understand whether they were connected with people in this country, as well.
MARTIN: Congressman Mike Pompeo is Trump's pick to be the next director of the CIA. In that hearing, his confirmation hearing, you asked him whether he would commit to giving the president unpleasant news that might be inconsistent with his policy preferences. Were you satisfied with his answer?
KING: Well I've asked him that question three or four times now in private settings and in public settings because I think it really is the key question to - you could almost say the job description of the CIA director is to tell the president unpleasant news. That's what they do day in and day out.
And if you look back over, you know, foreign policy mistakes of the last 30 or 40 years - 50 years - Vietnam, Bay of Pigs, the invasion of Iraq - all were based upon bad intelligence. All were based upon intelligence people telling the president what he wanted to hear. That leads to disaster every time. And that's why I was pressing Mr. Pompeo on that yesterday.
MARTIN: Real quick - can Pompeo help Trump heal his relationship with the intelligence community?
KING: Boy, I sure hope so. That's a high priority. And I think he can because he seems to have Mr. Trump's confidence.
MARTIN: Uh-huh.
KING: And he knows the intelligence community. And he knows that they're serious professionals who deserve respect. So I hope he can be that bridge.
MARTIN: Angus King, independent senator of Maine, thank you so much.
KING: Yes. And Rachel, nice to talk to you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Millions of people are flocking to movie theaters in India to see a film based on a true story, a story that is shattering records at the box office and stereotypes. From New Delhi, here's NPR's Julie McCarthy.
JULIE MCCARTHY, BYLINE: Bollywood megastar Aamir Khan grew a pot belly for this entertaining biopic about a former wrestling champion who had once chased dreams of gold-medal glory.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "DANGAL")
AAMIR KHAN: (Speaking Hindi).
MCCARTHY: "What I couldn't do our son will," he solemnly tells his pregnant wife. But Mahavir Singh Phogat ends up with a daughter and three more after that. The film "Dangal," or Wrestling, is the story of his first two girls, Geeta and Babita, who turn out to have hidden athletic gifts. When dad discovers they have beaten to a pulp two other boys, he thumbs taboos about girls competing in the sporting arena.
All of India knows the against-the-odds story. Coached by dad, the real life Geeta and Babita go on to win the gold and silver medals at international games in New Delhi in 2010. What intrigued the film's director, Nitesh Tiwari, is this. Why in India is there so much bias against having a girl child.
NITESH TIWARI: Why is there so much desperation only to want a boy? So the movie aims at trying to change this mindset - that a girl is as beautiful a gift of God as a boy.
MCCARTHY: Set in Haryana, where the sex ratio of newborns has historically skewed heavily towards boys, the film explodes myths about gender roles through the improbable sporting triumphs of two girls. It opened almost four years to the day after the fatal gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi ignited a national conversation about gender violence. Social commentator Anna M.M. Vetticad says Indians want to see women on the screen portrayed in a new light.
ANNA M M VETTICAD: The success of "Dangal" is excellent news for those who believe that the hero stalking the heroine, extremely abject objectification of women - all of these things which have been Hindi film staples so far - are not the only thing that the entire audience wants.
MCCARTHY: What the audience wants is to be inspired, says 27-year-old Babita Kumari Phogat, whose family is depicted on the screen. Babita has cinched a half a dozen international medals and credits her father for getting her out from under the veil that cloaks many girls in Haryana.
BABITA KUMARI: (Speaking Hindi).
MCCARTHY: "But our biggest victory," Babita says, "is that parents are now encouraging their girls to achieve something."
However, six-time national badminton champion Damayanti Tambay cautions that one movie and some sporting achievements won't reverse entrenched attitudes that limit girls.
DAMAYANTI TAMBAY: It could take a long time. But there has to be a beginning - that, yes, the girls should be given equal opportunity as boys. What's wrong with that?
MCCARTHY: Julie McCarthy, NPR News, New Delhi.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
During these first few weeks of the new year, we're meeting a series of people who are trying to pursue their American dream through the most basic part of life - food. Today, two young women who've struggled to leave their parents' home, find work, build a life of their own to be independent. They have developmental disabilities. And for them, as for many people with autism or cerebral palsy, this step into adulthood can be a monumental challenge. NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee says that working in the food service industry can be a path towards that dream of independence.
RHITU CHATTERJEE, BYLINE: I meet Victoria Reedy at her home in Schenectady, N.Y.
Hi, Vicky.
VICTORIA REEDY: Hi. How are you?
CHATTERJEE: Vicky's 23, lives with her parents and two sisters. She has long black hair and wears sparkly nail polish. And although she's of normal height now, as a child, she was very small. That's because she had problems with her pituitary gland. It didn't produce enough growth hormone.
REEDY: I was six years old and the same size as my little sister, who's four years younger than me.
CHATTERJEE: Her brain was slow to develop, too. It affected her speech and her ability to socialize, and school felt really hard.
REEDY: I struggled at just about everything but art, had a really hard time reading, writing and, like, learning things, in general.
CHATTERJEE: She got through school thanks to a program for developmentally disabled kids, and doctors fixed some of her growth issues with medication. But until about a year and a half ago, she depended on her parents for everything outside their home from getting around to handling money. Then she got a job at a bakery.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Unintelligible).
REEDY: OK. Now I...
CHATTERJEE: Puzzles Bakery and Cafe in downtown Schenectady is bright and spacious and packed with customers sitting down for lunch. Vicky stands behind the counter matching orders coming out of the kitchen, making sure her colleague serving customers takes the right order to the tables.
REEDY: These three are going to that table behind Dan (ph).
CHATTERJEE: As a senior cafe attendant, Vicky handles customers, trains interns, organizes food. And in between, she works in the kitchen, doing dishes or slicing meat and cheese. Today, she's been slicing a brick of provolone with an electric food slicer. It can take up to 20 minutes to go through a block of cheese, but Vicky says she finds it rewarding. Later during her lunch break, Vicky tells me how the job has helped her.
REEDY: I have better people skills at this job.
CHATTERJEE: She's even made new friends among her colleagues, and she says she's more confident and independent.
REEDY: I take the to bus just about every place I go if I'm not travelling with Mom or Dad or any of my friends.
CHATTERJEE: And her colleagues can see the difference in her. Sara Mae Pratt is Vicky's boss and the owner of the cafe. She says working with food is a good fit for someone like Vicky.
SARA MAE PRATT: Food is very forgiving. If you mess up, not a big deal. You can throw it away. Try again.
REEDY: And some of the work, she says, like slicing cheese, stacking dishes is structured and repetitive, which many people with intellectual disabilities enjoy and even excel at. And, Pratt says, for people with social anxiety, preparing and serving food can be really helpful.
PRATT: They actually get to take part in the creation of this food and bring it to the customer and see that smile on their face. So I think that's a really wonderful thing about food. It really connects people.
CHATTERJEE: This was one of the main reasons Pratt opened Puzzles Bakery and Cafe in April 2015. She wanted to find a way to employ people with developmental disabilities who otherwise struggled to find jobs. She knows this from her own personal experience. Her 23-year-old sister Emily has autism.
PRATT: I certainly struggled with - what will my sister be doing for the rest of her adult life? She has a very long life ahead of her.
CHATTERJEE: Her sister is to disabled to work, but Pratt saw a need to help those who can work.
PRATT: When an individual can find their sense of purpose and really feel like they're contributing in a meaningful way, that is just so special.
CHATTERJEE: More than 50 percent of her staff has a developmental disability. Madeline Hannon is 23 and has autism.
MADELINE HANNON: Order for Mary Ann (ph).
CHATTERJEE: She only works three hours a day and spends a lot of it serving customers.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Thank you so much.
M. HANNON: Have a good day.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: You, too.
CHATTERJEE: Later, Maddy tells me about her dreams for the future.
M. HANNON: I want to work at Disney World in a bakery.
CHATTERJEE: Why Disney World?
M. HANNON: They have more, like, gourmet stuff.
CHATTERJEE: But that would require you to move out of Schenectady, and would be OK with that?
M. HANNON: Definitely, yes.
CHATTERJEE: When Maddy's mother, Kathleen Hannon, stops by to pick her up at the end of a shift, she tells me the job has transformed her daughter.
KATHLEEN HANNON: The Maddy that walked in here probably the first day probably didn't say hello to people when they come in, where today I know she's out there. She will talk to the customers that come in. And we've seen a big difference in her, you know, at home. She's happy.
CHATTERJEE: Kathy says the job has given Maddy a sense of belonging.
K. HANNON: It's her job. It's her friends. It's her responsibilities. That's important.
CHATTERJEE: She says Maddy recognizes that she'll always need extra support, but the job has made her realize how much she can do on her own.
K. HANNON: She's wandering further and further away from us. She's looking for more independence.
CHATTERJEE: And, she says, it's at once scary and wonderful. Rhitu Chatterjee, NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Mention national parks, and most people think of snowcapped peaks or desert canyons. The new Manhattan Project National Historical Park will offer something different - a story of how scientists created the world's first atomic bomb. And as Megan Kamerick from member station KUNM in Albuquerque reports, how that story will be told is controversial.
MEGAN KAMERICK, BYLINE: In downtown Los Alamos, N.M., a group of tourists follow guide Jim Shipley through Fuller Lodge, which became a gathering place during the Manhattan Project.
JIM SHIPLEY: The likes of Oppenheimer, Fermi, Hans Bethe - those people spent a lot of time here in this room.
KAMERICK: These were the legendary scientists who built the first atomic bomb. A film from the Bradbury Science Museum shows them arriving from around the world.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRADBURY SCIENCE MUSEUM FILM)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Almost everyone realized that this was a great undertaking, and it might determine the outcome of the war.
KAMERICK: That idea of the atomic bomb as a great undertaking still holds powerful sway here. For instance, during formal ceremonies establishing the park, school children sang about Robert Oppenheimer.
(SOUNDBITE OF CEREMONY)
UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: We have a gadget we must make for the human race's sake 'cause he is Oppie on the hill.
KAMERICK: What was that part?
SHIPLEY: We have got a gadget to make for the human race's sake.
KAMERICK: Greg Mello heads the Los Alamos study group, which supports nuclear disarmament. The park was created in 2015 at three sites - Hanford, Wash., Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Los Alamos. Mello doubts the park's future interpretive center will be objective.
GREG MELLO: The Manhattan Project really is going on to this day at Los Alamos National Laboratory and in Oak Ridge, so there are massive conflicts of interest. There are booster organizations. Billions of dollars of contracts are involved.
KAMERICK: Mello says the National Park Service faces pressure to give the Manhattan Project a positive spin. The lab today is a huge part of Northern New Mexico's economy, and the park itself is a partnership between the Department of Energy, which runs the lab, and the park service.
TRACY ATKINS: I have no illusions that it's going to be easy or that it's going to be without conflict.
KAMERICK: Tracy Atkins used to be the park's interim superintendent. She's now the Department of Energy liaison to the park. Atkins points out the Park Service has already tackled controversial topics like slavery and Japanese internment in World War II.
ATKINS: So we're starting to grapple with some of the more challenging aspects of our national history, and the park service in a unique place to do that.
KAMERICK: Others worry some stories will continue to be left out. Tina Cordova grew up near the Trinity site in southern New Mexico, where scientists tested the bomb. She's been documenting cancer among the thousands of residents and their descendants who lived nearby. Cordova believes their stories will be lost in the park's future interpretive center.
TINA CORDOVA: We've put our family and our friends in the ground for this, and yet we are completely written out of the history of this.
KAMERICK: The park service has released an early draft of the story it wants to tell. It says the park will address how the bomb affected local communities. But a full interpretive plan will need more funding. So the National Park Service says final story of Los Alamos remains unwritten. For NPR News, I'm Megan Kamerick in Albuquerque.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
When did you start to write poetry?
HENRY MORGENTHAU III: It's a very delayed vocation, I would say. I was in my early 90s when I started.
SIMON: (Laughter).
MORGENTHAU: And now I'm - I've hit the three-digit line.
SIMON: Well - and so we're joined in the studio now by Henry Morgenthau III, who has had an extraordinarily full life. He has produced award-winning television and documentaries. He's raised children. He's written a memoir. And, yes, his father was that Henry Morgenthau Jr. who was secretary of treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. And now, at the age of 100, Henry Morgenthau III has released his first book of poetry. It is called "A Sunday In Purgatory." Thanks so much for being with us.
MORGENTHAU: Thank you.
SIMON: What made you start writing poetry?
MORGENTHAU: I think there were a number of reasons, maybe in a conflict. First of all, I wanted to establish my own identity - not simply to be a member of a distinguished family. And at the same time, I wanted to recall some of the events that I was privileged to observe in making history, like the - my poem "A Terrific Headache," which has to do with my father having dinner with Roosevelt the night before he died.
SIMON: Yeah. I don't get to talk to a lot of people who knew Franklin D. Roosevelt.
MORGENTHAU: Well, I was brought up on Roosevelt. My father's whole life was tied up with Roosevelt. And I remember that he would come to our house for dinner. And I remember leaning over the banisters from upstairs and hearing him talk and tell stories. And he was always a larger-than-life person.
SIMON: Yeah. I would like you to read one of your poems. What about the title poem, "Sunday In Purgatory?"
MORGENTHAU: (Reading) A voluntary inmate immured in a last resort for seniors - there are constant reminders the reaper is lurking around the corner. I'm at home - very much at home - here at Ingleside at Rock Creek, distant three miles from my caring daughter. At Ingleside, a faith-based community for vintage Presbyterians, I'm an old Jew. But that's another story.
I'm not complaining. With so much I want to do - doing it at my pace slowly. Anticipation of death is simply like looking for a new job. Then, suddenly, on a Sunday, talking recklessly while eating brunch, a gristly piece of meat lodged in my throat. I struggled for breath, too annoyed to be scared. Someone pounded my back to no avail.
Out of nowhere, an alert, pint-sized waiter performed the Heimlich maneuver. I don't believe it will work. It does. Uncorked, I'm freed. Looking up, I see the concerned visage and reverse color of a retired Navy chaplain, pinch-hitting as God's messenger for the day. Had he come to perform the last rites to ease my passage from this world to the hereafter? Don't jump to conclusions.
In World War II, on active duty, he learned the himmlisch as well as the Heimlich. Knowing it to be best administered to a standing victim, he rushed to intervene. On this day, I'm twice blessed with the kindness of strangers.
SIMON: Wow. What can a poem do that other forms of expression may not?
MORGENTHAU: Poems - most poems - my poems - are really metaphor. They're also song. The poetry of the Western world began in ancient Greece. A poet would recite his poem with an instrumental accompaniment. And that goes on to this day and into a world, actually, that I'm not familiar with, hip-hop, where they do just that. I think hip-hop is doing a lot to make poetry accessible and popular with a much wider audience that it has recently in this country.
SIMON: A lot of your poems are about looking over the ledge to whatever's next.
MORGENTHAU: About death, yes.
SIMON: Yeah - about death. Yeah.
MORGENTHAU: I do think about death. I live in a community where people are, as I said in this poem, kind of in a purgatory, a waiting place for the end - people passing away just about every week. So I think about it. But I've had more than my time. And it's not something that frightens me. And, actually, getting it out on paper is a relief.
SIMON: I feel moved to ask you this question, having read your poems. What's the key to a happy life?
MORGENTHAU: A key to a happy life is perhaps living long enough to look back on things that have happened because anticipating things that I'm going to do or want to do is always clouded with a lot of anxiety.
SIMON: What makes you happy now?
MORGENTHAU: I'm probably not happy most of that time. I think, maybe, the thing that makes me happy is actually getting these things out so that I can distance myself from them.
SIMON: Well, they're wonderful poems. Thank you.
MORGENTHAU: Thank you. It's my privilege.
SIMON: Henry Morgenthau III - he's the author, at the age of 100, of his first book of poetry, "A Sunday In Purgatory."
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Pennsylvania surprised a lot of people in November when voters turned around their recent history of electing Democrats and instead chose Donald Trump. We're checking in with Americans from all walks of life after the election, including a young mother near Wilkes-Barre, Pa. NPR's Jeff Brady reports that she switched parties and wants Donald Trump to get to work fulfilling his campaign promises.
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: We are meeting Jamie Ruppert at an exciting time in her life. Thirty-three years old, she has two toddlers and a baby due this summer. Her husband started a promising new job in the fossil fuel business, and they bought a house.
JAMIE RUPPERT: We're going to be opening this all up into the living room so there'll be an island here.
BRADY: With the kids down for a nap, she offers a tour that ends in the basement.
JAMIE RUPPERT: Watch your step. It's like an obstacle course.
BRADY: In the back of the basement, there's a newly installed furnace that burns a very old fuel.
JAMIE RUPPERT: That's good old Northeastern PA coal.
BRADY: Jamie's husband, Jesse, is lifting a 40-pound plastic bag of coal and pouring it in the top of the furnace.
JESSE RUPPERT: You just slice in open and drop it in.
BRADY: This is coal country, and furnaces like this are still common. Wilkes-Barre and surrounding Luzerne County is a place that values tradition. Politically, that meant voting for Democrats.
JAMIE RUPPERT: I was always raised in a Democratic house. Both my parents voted Democrat for a long time. I voted Democrat for both elections for Obama.
BRADY: But this time, Jamie Rupert and Luzerne County changed and picked Republican Donald Trump instead. We'll get back to Jamie in a minute, but first a bit more about this place. While coal furnaces are still common, the industry is just a shadow of its former self. The deadly Knox Mine disaster in 1959 effectively put an end to large-scale coal mining here, and the community has never really recovered. The economy is a frequent topic on local talk radio.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "THE SUE HENRY SHOW")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: She's like your own personal sounding board. It's "The Sue Henry Show" on WILK.
BRADY: Sue Henry has hosted this program for 14 years and says Donald Trump struck a chord here.
SUE HENRY: Make America Great Again is a very simplistic slogan. But for people who for the last 10 years cannot cope with the condition of the country and the economics of the country and they want to make it like it was, that message has a very strong appeal.
BRADY: It's not just the coal industry's decline. There used to be garment factories in this part of Pennsylvania, too, but they relocated in search of cheaper, nonunion labor in the south. For people without college degrees, the options are limited, says Wilkes University political science professor Tom Baldino.
TOM BALDINO: Distribution center jobs and service sector kinds of jobs that typically pay right now in the 12, 13, 14, maybe $15-an-hour range. There's a sense in the area of what I would call low self-esteem. People don't think that there's much to offer here.
BRADY: A lot of Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton heard the slogan Make America Great Again and recalled the country's history of racism, gender inequality and opposition to LGBT rights. But many in Luzerne County, including Jamie Ruppert, heard that slogan and imagined the return of blue-collar jobs that pay enough to support a family. Still, Ruppert worries about that different view. She doesn't want to be seen as a racist or a homophobe.
JAMIE RUPPERT: I've always been for gay rights and always will be. And I - you know, everything that Trump says - I don't support everything that he says. But the majority of the things that he wanted to do, as far as tax cuts and helping the failing middle class, is what kind of got me behind him.
BRADY: That term - failing middle class - what does that mean to you?
JAMIE RUPPERT: It just seems like the middle class is gone. Either you have nothing, or you have everything. There is no in-between anymore.
BRADY: And Ruppert thinks Trump can help bring back that in-between. Asked what that would look like, she holds up a plastic container for toys. On the bottom, it says Made in USA. She says it would mean that her neighbors make more of the products she uses. Ruppert will be watching for those labels after Trump becomes president. Jeff Brady, NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Veronica Roth wrote her first best-seller when she was 21 years old. "Divergent" for young adults was instantly and wildly popular. It was a best-selling trilogy and made into popular films. Veronica Roth has now written her first new series since "Divergent," and this first novel in that series is called "Carve The Mark." Veronica Roth joins us now from the studios of WBEZ in Chicago. Thanks so much for being with us.
VERONICA ROTH: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: Tell us about this world where "Carve The Mark" takes place.
ROTH: Well, it's a galaxy far, far away (laughter) and it's about a young man who's kidnapped with his brother and he's taken to this enemy country. And when he's there, he meets, like, the sister of the dictator there. And she's got plenty of struggles of her own. And they are trying to figure out if they can help each other or if their kind of culturally predisposed enmity, like, prohibits any friendship between them.
SIMON: Yeah. Akos and Seera (ph) - am I pronouncing that correctly?
ROTH: Cyra, yeah.
SIMON: I beg your pardon. Akos...
ROTH: It's OK.
SIMON: ...And Cyra, their families are kind of like the Capulets and Montagues.
ROTH: A little bit.
SIMON: What's - what is the conflict that ultimately divides them?
ROTH: Well, I think it's complex. So Akos is raised to believe that Cyra's people, the Shotet, are these kind of brutal people who are just, like, coming after Akos' people. And she was raised to believe that his people have a history of oppressing the Shotet and that they want to fight for their country's sovereignty.
SIMON: In this world you've laid out, everyone comes into a gift when they reach adolescence. Tell us about Cyra's.
ROTH: Well, Cyra's is that she experiences constant pain, and she can also give that pain to other people. So the theory is that the current, which is this kind of energy that is present in the galaxy, that it flows through each person and their personality is like a mold that shapes how it comes out. And for her, it would take a lot of psychoanalysis to figure out why she thinks that she's worthy of pain and that others are worthy of pain but - so she's basically experiencing, like, a supernatural form of chronic pain.
SIMON: Yeah. Well, I was struck by the - and maybe I'm getting carried away with the metaphor, but I - to me it meant that chronic pain I guess can be a gift. It makes us sensitive about the world despite our pain or because of it.
ROTH: Right. And for me, the importance of it came from I had several friends who experienced chronic pain over, you know, like, a decade and were - had their pain underestimated by doctors, which statistically is more likely if you're a woman by, like, a drastic degree. And they were eventually diagnosed with endometriosis. This is like a couple of people just in my immediate social circle. So I thought about them a lot, about how pain takes over your life and limits your potential and how difficult it can be to find someone who'll take it seriously. That's kind of Cyra's struggles. Her pain is being underestimated by the people around her, and she still finds a way to act in spite of it, which is a credit to her strength.
SIMON: I was struck by a line you have in the acknowledgments where you thank all the women you know who suffer from chronic pain.
ROTH: Yeah. I don't know, she - Cyra didn't start out as a really important character in the story, but she felt urgent to me and I think that's partly because of those women who have been such powerful examples in my life.
SIMON: Yeah. I'm pretty sure you know you have a blessed life, but...
ROTH: Yeah.
SIMON: ...Are there drawbacks or at least surprises that come with enormous success such as you've enjoyed?
ROTH: Well, you know, there are certainly new challenges, as with any job. One of them is that I have an anxiety disorder, so it's particularly provoked by social interaction (laughter) and I have to do a lot of that these days. I can't just hole up, which is what I would like to do. So I - it became particularly urgent when the "Divergent" series became popular to seek help for that. And I've done a lot of work to make my job doable for me, but it continues to be difficult.
SIMON: I didn't know that. When you say make your - continue to do your job, you don't mean the writing part. You mean the public relations part.
ROTH: Yeah. But, you know, the one kind of affects the other, so the awareness that people are going to read your work inevitably affects how you work and I try to create a safe space for myself to take risks, but it's difficult - more difficult than it used to be.
SIMON: So it's one thing if you think just a few people are reading your works and another when you know 30 million people are.
ROTH: (Laughter) Or might, yeah. Well, I mean, I never used to show my work to anyone, so it went from zero to a lot more than that very quickly (laughter).
SIMON: Why do you write about other worlds as opposed to what you see on Lincoln Avenue?
ROTH: Well, there was a couple of reasons. The first is I like the escape of it. I've always loved science fiction and fantasy since I was a kid, and I never had much interest in more realistic fiction, even, you know, when I was, like, 5 years old. But then I also think it's a kind of safe way to encounter challenging ideas without feeling overly stressed by them because, you know, you're in this fantasy world and so there's a layer of separation between you and whatever the issues are that are being discussed or explored through exaggeration. And you can encounter them in a new way, in a safe way, and that can be really important, especially in times like these, you know, where it's pretty terrifying out there. But it's a little bit easier to think about what you believe and what you want done and, you know, what you want to do to improve the world around you when you're kind of, like, living in space (laughter).
SIMON: Veronica Roth - her new book, "Carve The Mark." Thanks so much for being with us.
ROTH: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Mention Austria and music and a lot of people will think Haydn and Mozart. For others it's "The Sound Of Music" and the Von Trapp family. Then there's Wolfgang Muthspiel.
WOLFGANG MUTHSPIEL: I come from a family that would probably seem like a cliche of an Austrian family in the sense that we sang together a lot and we did climb mountains and sometimes we did both at the same time.
SIMON: He still climbs mountains, but he has also gone on to become one of the most respected jazz guitarists playing today. His most recent album is called "Rising Grace." NPR's Tom Cole has this profile.
TOM COLE, BYLINE: His father was a choir master, three of his siblings played instruments and he was on his way to becoming a classical violinist. Then, Wolfgang Muthspiel turned to guitar.
MUTHSPIEL: I think it was basically an act of rebellion against my parents.
COLE: He didn't pick up an electric and start shredding. He chose the classical guitar.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUITAR MUSIC)
COLE: He studied with famous teacher and author Karl Scheidt, won competitions and played recitals, but he was always interested in improvisation.
MUTHSPIEL: Pretty much after I could play anything on any instrument, I tried to, you know, make little pieces.
COLE: He jammed with his brother Christian, a trombonist and pianist, and they discovered jazz.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
COLE: Wolfgang decided to apply to the New England Conservatory because it offered programs in both classical and jazz guitar. He sent tapes to each and was so good he got into both. But once he got there, he felt he had to make a choice.
MUTHSPIEL: It was a hard decision to actually give up the classical path. But at that point, I had the feeling that I don't have enough time to really go deep in both worlds, so I had to choose and jazz offered me more freedom and more ways to define my own music.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
COLE: Defining himself and his music has been a recurring theme throughout his career - a violinist who picked up guitar, a classical musician who turned jazz. But Muthspiel's longtime collaborator, bassist Larry Grenadier, thinks the latter has worked to the guitarist's advantage.
LARRY GRENADIER: Somebody who's come from classical music typically has put in a lot of hours of practicing and really come to terms with being able to take control of their instrument and make it do what they'd like it to do. And that to me is the perfect entry into jazz because once you have that stuff together, then you can make the music happen. And I think Wolfgang's a beautiful example of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOLFGANG MUTHSPIEL AND LARRY GRENADIER AND BRIAN BLADE'S "UPTOWN")
COLE: Wolfgang Muthspiel is also a European tackling an American-born art form.
MUTHSPIEL: After all this classical education, I really wanted to go to America to see how the music sounds in the place where it comes from. And when I came to the states, I was met with so much openness and encouragement in the states, I must say, in general. So this recent election, you know, kind of breaks my heart because my experience in the states was a one of welcome. I was really welcomed.
COLE: One of his supporters and collaborators is the world-renowned guitarist Ralph Towner who says Muthspiel has managed to define himself.
RALPH TOWNER: In hearing Wolfgang, I mean, he sounds like Wolfgang. My favorite players actually sound like they're speaking. It's more speech-like. Miles Davis was - when you heard the music, that's what you're drawn into. You never hear people say, oh, what a good trumpet player. And Wolfgang has achieved that.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOLFGANG MUTHSPIEL AND AMBROSE AKINMUSIRE AND BRAD MEHLDAU AND LARRY GRENADIER AND BRIAN BLADE'S "FATHER AND SUN")
COLE: Wolfgang Muthspiel spent 15 years living and working in the United States. He's returned to his native Austria, but jazz has become a global music, so he doesn't really feel like a jazz outsider living there.
MUTHSPIEL: As an artist, you are kind of always an outsider. You know, maybe you're an insider in your little scene but hopefully not. It's better to be an outsider because it challenges the expectation of how things are supposed to be. So I think that that kind of perspective of the outsider is one that has informed me, not only my being from Europe and going to the states and making jazz music. So I'm always an outsider. At this point, I embrace that. I'm happy about it.
COLE: He's also happy he chose jazz.
MUTHSPIEL: Jazz stands for listening and jazz stands for including over any kind of borders of countries. So jazz is sort of a symbol for being interested in each other's story. So in that way, I think it couldn't be of more importance now.
COLE: Amen. Tom Cole, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOLFGANG MUTHSPIEL'S "WOLFGANG'S WALTZ")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
President-elect Trump told a press conference this week that he would step back from running his company to prevent possible conflicts of interest once he's in office. And to demonstrate that, he said he'd just rejected a deal to develop a golf course.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: I was offered $2 billion to do a deal in Dubai - a number of deals. And I turned it down. I didn't have to turn it down.
SIMON: Trump may have turned down that deal. But he has two other golf courses being developed in Dubai. NPR's Jackie Northam reports.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: The Trump International Golf Course in Dubai is being built in a development of luxury villas and apartments in the desert. Joe Passov, a senior editor at golf.com, says it's expected to be an upscale course and clubhouse.
JOE PASSOV: The golf course is intended to be a private club. But they will allow some outside play while the membership is being built. It's expected to be a world-class golf course.
NORTHAM: The second Dubai course is being designed by golf legend Tiger Woods. Behind both projects is a Dubai-based company called DAMAC. It's run by a billionaire named Hussain Sajwani, who has done business with Trump for almost a decade. He flew into Florida for Trump's New Year's party. A video posted online shows the president-elect praising Sajwani.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: Hussain and the whole family from - those beautiful people from Dubai are here tonight. And they're seeing it, and they love it.
NORTHAM: Sajwani recently told NBC News that he's very happy that Trump has become president.
HUSSAIN SAJWANI: Oh, definitely. We think it's good news. We appreciate - in the last 12 months, his brand has become much, much bigger, more global.
NORTHAM: Golf.com's Passov says the Trump name can be a draw. But it could also backfire for the golf courses. Passov points to when Trump made disparaging remarks about Muslims and Mexicans.
PASSOV: Obviously, some people took exception to - including the organizations of golf. There were a few events in 2016 that left Trump properties - were either pulled, or a new sponsor came in.
NORTHAM: Trump's financial-disclosure filings showed he was paid up to $10 million for branding rights on the Dubai golf courses. Robert Gordon, a law professor at Stanford University, says Trump's relationship with the Dubai developer raises concerns about a clause in the U.S. Constitution which, he says, bars a president from accepting gifts from foreign governments and companies like Sajwani's.
ROBERT GORDON: It's a private-profit-making enterprise. But, also, it's one that's sponsored and, in many ways, supported by the government of Dubai. So it's tied up enough with a foreign government to make it problematic.
NORTHAM: Trump has said he will hand over the operation of his business to his adult children in order to prevent a possible conflict of interest. Gordon says that doesn't cut it.
GORDON: The problem's not so much who's running it as who benefits from the management and how. And a benefit to his sons is a benefit to him.
NORTHAM: Trump's first Dubai golf course is due to open in mid-February, just a few short weeks after he takes office. Jackie Northam, NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There is a funeral service for Ashley Theriot in Pensacola, Fla., today. She was just 32 and a gifted freelance writer. The death of a vibrant young person is a tragedy in all ways, but the person who dies can leave a gift for someone else to go on. That can be a flesh and blood blessing. Ashley Theriot returned from Colombia on January 1 and began to have seizures. She turned out to have a rare tear in the artery of her brain stem. She'd served in the Peace Corps 10 years ago in Ukraine and was still pals with two friends she made there, Lea Kumayama and Maggie Saalfield. They now live in Brooklyn. When she heard this terrible news, Lea Kumayama came to Ashley's side in a hospital in Alexandria, Va. She was with Ashley and her family when she died.
Lea called their friend Maggie back in Brooklyn to tell her the tragic news and Maggie Saalfield steeled herself to ask what sounds like a pretty nervy question, especially over the phone - would Ashley's family donate a kidney to someone Maggie knew needed one? Maggie Saalfield's husband, Peter, was high school friends with a man named James Driscoll of New Hampshire. He was 33 and his kidneys were beginning to shut down because of Berger's disease. Ashley Theriot's family was not upset by the question, even - or especially - at their deepest moment of loss. It wasn't awkward or off-putting at all, Ashley's sister told the New York Post. She would have wanted to help anyone. The family signed papers for their daughter to become a donor. James Driscoll's doctors gave his medical information to doctors in Virginia. Their organs turned out to be a match. And this week, doctors in Boston put Ashley Theriot's kidney into James Driscoll. So far, the transplant seems to work. James Driscoll has a new life through the kindness of the family of a stranger.
More than 30,000 transplants were performed in the United States in 2015. Even more lives could be saved if more people made arrangements to be donors when they die as routinely as they provide for their insurance, funeral or the inscription on a cemetery stone. Eight of Ashley's organs have been donated. In her short, brilliant life, she traveled to Europe, Poland, Thailand, Turkey and many more places. We've been joking that he has the most well-traveled kidney ever, said Ashley sister. We just hope he's going to be able to live his life to the fullest and maybe even travel the way she would have.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: You're listening to NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The Obama administration has ended the so-called wet foot, dry foot policy which allowed migrants fleeing Cuba without a visa to automatically stay in the United States. The White House said the change was an important step toward continuing to, quote, "normalize" relations with Cuba, a process that began when diplomatic relations were restored in 2014. More than a million Cubans have come to the United States since the Cuban revolution in 1959. Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba. In 1962, he wrote of course the National Book Award-winning memoir of his boyhood "Waiting For Snow In Havana." He's now a professor of history and religious studies at Yale and joins us from Guilford, Conn. Carlos, thanks so much for being with us.
CARLOS EIRE: Oh, thanks for inviting me to be on your show, Scott. It's always nice to talk to you.
SIMON: How do you feel about the policy change?
EIRE: Well, you know, it's a complicated issue because the wet foot, dry foot policy always had an element of unfairness about it, but it fits in with President Obama's plan for so - normalizing. I'll put quotation marks around normalizing. What he had done previously is basically announced to the world that he didn't care about human rights in Cuba. So now he's made it clear that no Cuban who arrives in the United States can be considered a refugee. That is, somebody who's fleeing an oppressive regime or fears for their life. So it's part and parcel of his policy. And I can kind of see why he waited till the last minute to put this policy into effect because there would have been a lot of pushback from some quarters.
SIMON: Well, let me ask this - should Cubans be afforded a special status that is not given people who flee crime or violence, say from Mexico or El Salvador in the hemisphere, or desperation and tyranny, as in present day Venezuela?
EIRE: Right. Well, this is a - it's - again, it's a very complicated issue because not everyone who flees Cuba is fleeing political repression. There are individuals in Cuba involved in the opposition to the Castro regime, and they are really having a very difficult time right now because repression has increased since normalization. It's gone - it's really spiked and skyrocketed and the number of arrests have just gone through the roof. So there are people who are under duress. They're generally not the ones who flee in rafts and boats. And to further complicate the issue, a lot of the individuals who've been coming for the past 20 years or so, most people don't realize is they have permission to travel back to Cuba. And some of them travel back twice a year, and they go loaded with presents for their families, gifts, things they can't get in Cuba.
So the net result is that for the past few years thousands of these so-called refugees have been traveling back to Cuba. And some of them actually end up - you know, because they have good jobs in the U.S., some of them end up taking their whole family to a beach resort, so they basically go on vacation in Cuba. So that further complicates the whole issue of whether they're political refugees or not. It's been messy for a while, and now it's kind of been cleared up, but it remains to be seen whether the policy can stay in effect under Donald Trump.
SIMON: Well, that would be my - would you want to see it undone by a President Trump?
EIRE: I'm not sure. I've always had mixed feelings about this. And so have most other Cuban refugees who came in the '60s, '70s and '80s when the situation was totally different because wet foot, dry foot has been in effect since the Clinton administration. By that time, things had changed because part of the deal was this going back to Cuba to visit family. Twice a year you can go. And that began to complicate matters. And there's resentment in the Cuban exile community from those who came and really feared for their lives and feared for their welfare under a repressive regime. There's been resentment for these Cubans who go back. And I have a special name for them. I call them YoYos 'cause they keep going back and forth.
SIMON: Well, thank - Carlos Eire, we have to go. Professor of history and religious studies at Yale, thanks so much for being with us.
EIRE: Thanks, Scott.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The U.S. Justice Department has released a scathing report that accuses the Chicago police of systematic use of excessive force. The report is the Obama administration's final significant action in its campaign for police reform. NPR's law enforcement correspondent Martin Kaste joins us now. Martin, thanks so much for being with us.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: You're welcome.
SIMON: Let's remember the background. What exactly has the Justice Department said about Chicago police?
KASTE: Well, this report comes after that really controversial shooting of the young black man named Laquan McDonald. He was shot back in 2014. When the video finally came out, it looked as though he was fleeing police at the moment he was shot. And the outrage caused by that video triggered the Justice Department to do this investigation. And after about a year of investigating, the DOJ is now saying that excessive force happens too much, that the Chicago Police Department uses deadly force and other kinds of force, such as the use of Tasers, too frequently in cases often where it's not justified. And they say the police department doesn't do an adequate job investigating those uses of force, disciplining officers or training them.
SIMON: What concrete effect could a report like this have on the everyday function of the police department?
KASTE: Well, that's where the whole question of the timing of this report really becomes important because normally, at least over the last eight years or so, a report like this would have been the first step in the Justice Department's pressure on a local police department to reform. The report would be sort of a public shaming, which would then set things up for the city to enter into negotiations to set up what's called a consent decree. And what a consent decree is is basically a legally binding plan for reform with a federal judge monitoring the process. They don't have one of those yet in Chicago. They basically ran out of time. And it's not clear right now whether the new administration when President Trump takes office will be interested in having one. The nominee to run the Justice Department, Jeff Sessions, has expressed some skepticism over the past about consent decrees. He says sometimes they could, in his words, smear a whole police department because of the misdeeds of a few officers.
SIMON: Chicago's Mayor Emanuel has made a point of starting reforms in training and police oversight. Do they really need a consent decree with the federal government?
KASTE: Well, reformers say that historically those noble intentions in many big cities that have had these problems - those noble intentions kind of fade away over time, that the pressure against reform is pretty intense. This is how the U.S. attorney in Chicago, Zach Fardon, put it yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ZACH FARDON: The problems that we discovered are long-standing, in some cases decades old, and prior efforts at reform in Chicago's history, there have been many. They have not gotten the job done.
KASTE: So reformers would say without that extra pressure from a federally enforced consent decree reforms don't happen. I should point out that the mayor, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has said he wants to enter into a binding consent decree, but he says he can't negotiate the Trump administration side of that. If they're not interested, it may not happen.
SIMON: Yeah. What's been the reaction from the Chicago Police Department, especially when we take a look at the enormous increase in shootings and murders over the last year and the accusation against the police that they haven't been patrolling as vigorously as they used to?
KASTE: Well, Chicago cops have really low morale right now, and that's something even this report talks about. And when you talk to regular cops, many of them say they think that surge in violence is in part because of all the criticism they've been undergoing for the last few years, that they've been told to basically hold off on some basic kinds of street enforcement because they're worried about the backlash. And they say that that's emboldened those young people who carry guns to go ahead and shoot each other. That's not a narrative that the current Justice Department buys into, but there's a chance that the next administration would see their point.
SIMON: NPR's Martin Kaste, thanks so much.
KASTE: You're welcome.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Much of the news this week was about Senate confirmation hearings for nominees to President-elect Trump's administration. But there are also more than 1,000 other federal jobs that require Senate approval, Supreme Court justices, marine mammal commissioner, board members and trustees for various government funds, trusts and agencies.
Doug Wilson is in our studios. He is chairman of the board of advisors for the Truman National Security Project. And his story might give us some insight into ways the confirmation process is broken down. Mr. Wilson, thanks so much for joining us.
DOUG WILSON: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: You were nominated in 2013 for a government post, right?
WILSON: I was. Previously, I'd been nominated to be assistant secretary of defense for public affairs...
SIMON: In 2008, yeah.
WILSON: ...In 2008. And so this was a second one. I left the Pentagon, finished my work there in 2012.
SIMON: Now, that's three, four years ago. What happened?
WILSON: I was asked if I was interested in being part of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. This is a small commission, six people, three Democrats, three Republicans by statute. It's an unpaid position. It's slotted for a Democrat. And I'm a Democrat. And I had already been confirmed only a few years earlier. So I said, yes, I'd be interested. And I thought that I had both the qualifications and the experience to be able to contribute.
SIMON: Can you give us for instances of what struck you as unnecessary or even dotty?
WILSON: The first thing that struck me is as a little dotty was the fact that I had gone through this process at great length for a position that was much larger only a few years earlier. That was a relatively simpler process in part, I believe, because the administration and the legislative branch, the Senate, were controlled by the same party. So I went through fairly quickly.
This time it was different. And in the interim, what had happened was an increasingly partisan bitterness between a Democratic administration and a Republican-led Senate. Those of us who thought we were going to be participants in government, in fact, were becoming pawns of the process.
SIMON: What you're charging is that Republicans in Congress held up not just your nomination but the nomination of a lot of other people.
WILSON: They did. But I will also say that, to get to that point, it took an extraordinarily long time with some very odd things being asked as my paperwork was going through. People I had known in various places I'd lived were asked again to do - to sit for interviews. A friend of mine in California called me after she'd been interviewed and said, it's really funny. They asked me all about your being a Democrat. And the interviewer said, I don't really like Democrats.
I'll also say I used to work for former Senator Gary Hart. I was his foreign policy adviser. Hart has been out of the Senate for 30 years. But the interviewer asked my D.C. friend, when Mr. Wilson is done with this position, will he be returning to work for Senator Hart?
SIMON: (Laughter).
WILSON: You start to wonder the kinds of questions that are being asked. By the time my paperwork got to the White House for final vetting, it had been well over a year since I had been asked to serve.
SIMON: So here we are now in 2017. And, interestingly, the nonpartisan Office of Government Ethics warns that the Senate confirmation process - this is for Mr. Trump's cabinet nominees - is going too quickly.
WILSON: It's not a zero-sum choice. People need to be vetted. But there is a difference between being secretary of state or secretary of the Treasury and being in an unpaid position. The idea that it would take over a year for a small position like this to be completely vetted to me is an obstacle - a big obstacle - to public service.
SIMON: Doug Wilson, chairman of the board of advisors for the Truman National Security Project, thanks so much for being with us.
WILSON: Thank you.
SIMON: And good luck in your future endeavors.
WILSON: Thank you very much.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The House and Senate have taken the first steps to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. It's not clear whether lawmakers will have a replacement for the law before it's repealed. The Affordable Care Act has allowed millions of Americans to buy health insurance for the first time. But it has been controversial. We don't know the impact on hospitals. We're joined now by Maggie Elehwany. She's a lobbyist with the National Rural Health Association. They represent nearly 2,000 hospitals in rural America. Thanks for joining us.
MAGGIE ELEHWANY: Thank you.
SIMON: Recognizing that there's no one answer, how has the Affordable Care Act affected rural hospitals?
ELEHWANY: Well, let's talk about kind of the overview. So the goal of the ACA was to help the 37 million uninsured out there. And, yes, uninsurance rates have gone down dramatically or at historic lows. But I think a lot of things were unforeseen.
And the way some of the regulations were implemented are actually harming rural America and not fulfilling the ultimate goals of the ACA. And what I mean by that is half of those 37 million - the goal was to expand Medicaid and get those folks into a Medicaid program. We know that a lot of states have taken the Supreme Court up on its option of opting out of Medicaid. That has predominantly hurt rural America.
In fact, if you're a rural state, if you're a poor state, more likely than not, you have not expanded Medicaid. So we're seeing millions of folks left behind at that. Our concern is that since the ACA was passed, we've had an escalation of rural hospitals close. We've had 80 rural hospitals close since 2010. If this rate continues, in less than 10 years' time, we're going to have 25 percent of rural hospitals close within less than a decade.
SIMON: Do you have any concern about the Congress repealing the Affordable Care Act - what's called Obamacare - without a replacement?
ELEHWANY: We certainly do. I do not want to take away, by any means, the good that it has done in rural America. I said it's brought uninsured rates down by 8 percent. It's allowed families to keep their children on their plan until they're age 26. It's helped people buy insurance if they've had preexisting conditions.
We do not want to see rural Americans lose one lapse in the benefits that they have. We are not mad at Republicans or Democrats. We're mad at Republicans and Democrats. We want to make sure that they understand that the well intentions of the ACA have really fallen short and may actually be exacerbating the hospital-closure crisis.
SIMON: We've done a little reporting. I've done some stories in rural hospitals and health care over the years. It can be hard to get doctors to some locations, can't it?
ELEHWANY: Yes, absolutely.
SIMON: Because they spend a long time in medical school. And there just aren't necessarily the opportunities for economic success in a rural environment that they would have in a big city.
ELEHWANY: That's absolutely true. Recruitment and retention of physicians remains one of the top problems in rural-health-care delivery. And I talked about - to bring it back to the Affordable Care Act, there was some other positive provisions in the Affordable Care Act that, sadly, were never funded by Congress through the appropriations process that we think really could've helped recruitment and retention of physicians. There were some specific programs targeted to help workforce issues in rural America. We would love to see, when we address building upon the ACA, reforming it, those programs.
SIMON: What do you hope Congress does?
ELEHWANY: I'm not speaking in one political aisle or the other.
SIMON: Yeah.
ELEHWANY: But rural America spoke very loudly. On a 3-to-1 basis, they voted for Donald Trump. They were voting for a concept. I believe that they feel that they have been left behind. And if you think about it, it's not just health care, where they see their hospitals closing. And one hospital CEO described it as a three-pronged stool. It's the churches, the hospitals and the schools. If you lose one of those legs of that stool, the whole community collapses.
So these towns with their hospital closing are seeing elements of their community go away. Their physicians may leave 'cause they're hospital-based. The nurses leave. The pharmacists leave. These medical deserts are forming. You know, there's studies that show even housing values drop after a hospital closes. So what business wants to relocate to these communities?
There's just not the vitality, the job growth in rural communities. And I think there's a lot of frustration out there that these are hardworking folks who sometimes feel that, inside the beltway, the people in Washington D.C. have forgotten about them.
SIMON: Maggie Elehwany is vice president of government affairs and policy and chief lobbyist for the National Rural Health Association. You represent rural hospitals. Thanks very much for being with us.
ELEHWANY: Thank you so much.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
William Peter Blatty has died at the age of 89. He wrote "The Exorcist" and a number of other books, but knew he'd be remembered as the author of that 1971 novel about a little girl possessed by the devil. It brought him controversy, fame and fortune. William Peter Blatty started out writing comedic novels and wrote the screenplay for the Peter Sellers film "A Shot In The Dark."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A SHOT IN THE DARK")
PETER SELLERS: (As Jacques Clouseau) You idiot. You fool. It's a good job I was able to check my reflexes. I might have killed you with a karate chop.
SIMON: But he had thought about the themes of "The Exorcist" ever since he'd been a student at Georgetown University, where the story is set. We spoke to Mr. Blatty in 2011 to mark the release of the 40th anniversary edition of his novel. He said he never meant to scare anyone.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
WILLIAM PETER BLATTY: I have no recollection of intending to frighten anyone at any point in time. Now to be the, you know - the terror - that's Stephen King. He is the master of terror.
SIMON: So you believe in the devil - the devil incarnate?
BLATTY: Dick Cavett asked me that. He is the reason the book is not in the trash bin of history.
SIMON: Yeah.
BLATTY: I must, therefore, tell you the story. "The Exorcist," when originally published, was a disaster. Nice reviews - lovely.
SELLERS: I didn't know that.
BLATTY: Oh, yeah. Really - I am not exaggerating. It was a disaster. Harper treated me to a farewell lunch.
SIMON: (Laughter).
BLATTY: They sent one rep, and we lunched at the Four Seasons. And, well, the phone is brought over to the table. They want to know if you can get there in 10 minutes. It was "The Dick Cavett Show." They had lost the guest at the last minute. They were ready to go. I threw down my napkin, and I tore over to the studio. So I came out on stage, and Dick Cavett said, well, Mr. Blatty, I haven't read your book. I said, well, that's OK. Shall I tell you about it? He said, oh, please. I got to do a 41-minute monologue. That was it. The airport the next week - I picked up a copy of Time magazine and looked at the bestseller list - fiction. What? What? (Laughter) This is a mistake. It was number four. Two weeks later, it was number one on the Times list, stayed at number one for over four months. It was all an accident. I still didn't plan on frightening anyone (laughter). I sleep with a nightlight. Please.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: William Peter Blatty has just brought out a new and expanded revised version of his mammoth bestseller "The Exorcist," the 40th anniversary edition. Thanks so much.
BLATTY: Oh, my. Thank you very much, Scott. My pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE EXORCIST")
JASON MILLER: (As Father Damien Karras) Let's introduce ourselves. I'm Damien Karras.
MERCEDES MCCAMBRIDGE: (As Demon) And I'm the devil. Now kindly undo these straps.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: William Peter Blatty, who died this week, speaking with us in 2011.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This isn't science fiction, you know. Spider silk is stronger than steel. Scientists in Sweden have come up with a more efficient way to produce artificial spider silk in labs. It might soon be used in hospitals. The authors of this study are Dr. Anna Rising and Jan Johansson. They're researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Dr. Rising joins us now. Thanks very much for being with us.
ANNA RISING: Thank you.
SIMON: And how do spiders do it? What makes it stronger than steel?
RISING: Well, spider silk is made up of proteins, and these proteins are then assembled into a fiber, and it is the binding between the proteins that makes the silk so tough.
SIMON: Now, by making artificial spider silk, are you are you putting hard-working spiders out of business?
RISING: (Laughter) No, I don't think so anyway because it's really, really laborious to reel the silk from spiders. They are territorial, and they are cannibalistic, so you can't really house them. So what you have to do is to produce the silk artificially using bacteria to produce the proteins for you.
SIMON: I'm sorry. Until this moment, I had no idea spiders were cannibalistic.
RISING: Oh, they are (laughter).
SIMON: Well, yuck. What would you use the artificial spider silk for?
RISING: We want to use it for medical applications. But there is also a large interest in using it for doing high-performance textiles, for example.
SIMON: Have you used it for anything at the moment or this is all envisioned?
RISING: No, we are currently using it to see if we can enable nerve regeneration. So you may know that if you have a nerve injury, the nerve endings try to find each other, but they can only reach for a few millimeters. But there is a German group that has taken silk from a spider and put it into a 6 centimeter-long gap. And they could show that the nerve could regenerate if the silk was there. So the silk works as a guidance for the nerves when they try to regenerate, so that is what we want to do with our fibers now.
SIMON: Oh, that could be huge. And how far along is this work?
RISING: It's just started. So we just figured out how to spin the fibers. And now we would like to put this spinning device that we developed into a 3-D printer to make the fine three-dimensional structures on the silk fibers. And these we think we can use them for these some medical applications.
SIMON: Yeah. And it sounds like you can do all this without having to worry about dealing with spiders.
RISING: Yes, yes, we can. So we have made actually a hybrid protein, so we took parts of the genes from two different spider species and fused these and then we make bacteria produce this hybrid silk protein for us.
SIMON: Dr. Rising, I'm sorry to ask this, but have you ever seen a "Spider-Man" movie?
RISING: Yes, I have?
SIMON: And do you ever turn to the people you're with and say, you know, anyone can do that if they just get enough help from my lab?
RISING: Exactly. That's what I say all the time.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: All right, I deserved. Dr. Anna Rising is a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the Karolinska Institutet. Thanks for being with us.
RISING: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEOFF LOVE AND HIS ORCHESTRA'S "THEME FROM SPIDERMAN")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Finally, in inauguration news, the AP reports a cover-up. Workers preparing the Capitol grounds have taped over the company name on the front of dozens of portable potties. This company has provided portable toilets for many ceremonies, but this is the inauguration of Donald John Trump. The porta-potty company is called Don Johns. Well, maybe something will turn up on WikiLeaks. This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. BJ Leiderman does our theme music. I'm Scott Simon.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Washington, D.C., is preparing for huge crowds next week. Donald Trump will be inaugurated on Friday. And that day and the weekend that follows, there will be tons of demonstrations, including the Women's March on Washington and Bikers for Trump.
Todd Gitlin is a professor at Columbia University, where he's studied and written widely about protest movements. He was also once president of students for a democratic society and organized some of the first demonstrations against the War in Vietnam and many other causes. His books include "Occupy Nation" and "Letters To A Young Activist." Todd Gitlin joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
TODD GITLIN: It's a pleasure, Scott.
SIMON: In these days of hashtags and trolling, what forms of protest work best?
GITLIN: Well, working best is a trick question. I don't know if you (laughter) meant it that way. But it's very easy to get people to gather together to impress themselves with their numbers and to feel moralized or remoralized, having been demoralized. You can bring together a lot of people pretty quickly with a hashtag.
What is harder to do is to create some ongoing organization that can actually make big changes in the middle and longer runs. To my mind, the striking contrast is between the current protest movements and the Tea Party. The Tea Party had tons of money. It had tons of media support. And it also had a strategy of winning local power, electing members of Congress and local officials. That is an example of a social movement that becomes a political force because it makes the transition successfully from protest to power. The movements on the left, with some exceptions, have failed to turn that corner.
So there are some things you can do with mass demonstrations. You can, for example, I think, do a lot to raise the minimum wage in a city or state. That's been done at fast-food places. You can probably win changes in police practices in a given city. What you can't do is to create political power that can exercise the sort of clout, to use an old Chicago term, that the Tea Party and its successor movement have demonstrated they can have.
SIMON: What kind of lesson do you take from the recent Dakota Pipeline demonstrations, for example?
GITLIN: On the face of it, the Dakota Pipeline demonstration was enormously successful. It brought together people of very different kinds, people - native peoples and others coming in. Veterans and others came in from around the country. And because of who was in the White House then, they actually won a victory.
Would they be able to win the same victory in a week? (Laughter) I very much doubt it. And I think that anybody who's trying to win specific victories is now confronting the question. What do you do when all the political powers are arrayed against you?
So it's not just the localities, not just the state. It's Congress, and it'll be the Supreme Court if it isn't already. And it'll certainly be the White House. Then what? And I think that's a conundrum that all the protest movements are going to face now and have already begun to think about. But it's not clear how they'll adapt.
SIMON: So the people coming to Washington, D.C., around the time of the inauguration benefit from looking at each other and knowing something about each other.
GITLIN: Well, that'll be an encouragement to them. Then the question is, do there emerge out of that pleasure, out of that satisfaction - do there emerge networks of trust that can be built upon while people decide what to do next? Because I don't think anybody believes they're going to get any immediate results out of that congregation in Washington.
In order to win whatever it is they want to win, whether it's getting judges appointed or getting legislation passed, you have to build a network of power. And that requires ongoing work, discipline work over a long period of time at least on the part of a core of several millions of people.
SIMON: Todd Gitlin, thanks so much for being with us.
GITLIN: You're very welcome.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The day of Donald Trump's inauguration is also the last day for the midnight shift at the General Motors assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio. About 1,200 people will lose their jobs. Trump blames GM production in Mexico. As M.L. Schultze of member station WKSU reports, the reality and reaction in Lordstown is more complicated.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARCHING BAND)
M L SCHULTZE, BYLINE: When the Chevy Cruze officially rolled off the Lordstown assembly line in 2010, the high-school band played. Politicians cut ribbons. And some of the hardest times for the U.S. auto industry seemed to be over. Contrast that with GM's announcement of the layoffs. It came at the end of a press release, saying it needed to, quote, "align production output." GM blames cheap gas for lagging small-car sales. So does Glenn Johnson, who heads one of two unions at the GM complex.
GLENN JOHNSON: Ford is feeling it. Honda's feeling it. Toyota's feeling it. Everybody's feeling the shift away from small car.
SCHULTZE: Johnson has worked here for 40 of the 50 years since GM turned open fields near Youngstown into 6 million square feet of assembly lines, metal and paint shops. Except for bankruptcy in 2009, work here has been steady.
JOHNSON: It's really hard to look team members in the face and know that they're not going to be able to provide for their family in the manner that they've been accustomed to.
SCHULTZE: Preparing for the layoffs, Lordstown schools are waiving student fees and starting a food pantry. Amy Domino, who's taught here for 11 years, says some fear the layoffs are the first - not the last - for GM. And she notes they're playing out against a history of economic uncertainty in the region.
AMY DOMINO: I know that there, since the moment I was hired here, has always been kind of the idea of, oh, this school's going to close at any moment based off of, you know, what happens with GM, another industry in the town.
SCHULTZE: Donald Trump addressed and channeled that anxiety in his campaign and directly to Lordstown afterwards. In a January 3 tweet, he accused GM of shipping the Cruze's Mexican-made hatchback to the U.S. duty-free. It warned, make in USA, or pay border tax. But fellow Republican mayor Arno Hill says few here are pointing fingers across the border.
ARNO HILL: I don't think anybody blames the Mexican-built Cruze hatchback for what's going on.
SCHULTZE: GM did make 29,000 hatchbacks in Mexico and shipped 4,500 of them tax-free under NAFTA to the U.S. But Hill notes that Lordstown turned out nearly 190,000 Cruze sedans last year. He does some quick math on the hatchback.
HILL: They can do that in two shifts - maybe a little bit overtime, you know, depending on how things are rolling.
SCHULTZE: Union president Johnson says he'd welcome any additional work. But Lordstown had no room when GM introduced the hatchback. And retooling for a sliver of the market didn't make sense. Johnson still has a Hillary Clinton magnet on his office door. Like most union leaders, he campaigned for her. But a lot of his members went for Trump. People like James Moyers, who works in the wheel room.
JAMES MOYERS: We build 400 cars a shift. So we throw about 1,600 tires a night.
SCHULTZE: Moyers has been here for more than a decade. So he's among the roughly 2,400 workers whose jobs are likely safe. He's seen the impact of automation and of outsourcing. The specifics of these layoffs aren't as important to him as the decades of decline in manufacturing. He likes that Trump took on Carrier and Ford over foreign outsourcing.
MOYERS: Well, he's going to make it a fair playing field. That's what he's promised. And I think - from what's already been accomplished, I think he's going to attempt to do that.
SCHULTZE: But Lordstown is not waiting for Donald Trump to act.
DAN CROUSE: I'm with the commerce center. I'm just giving her a tour, OK?
SCHULTZE: Dan Crouse markets the Ohio Commerce Park, a former Army depot. These days, it includes a new restaurant-distributor company and an aluminum processor. Behind them - hundreds of acres of railcars, pipe, locomotives and the massive parts for a nearly $900 million high-tech power plant under construction nearby. Crouse acknowledges, though, that the number of new jobs in Lordstown pales in comparison to those lost in a single shift at GM. That's one reason he's glad Donald Trump is taking office.
CROUSE: The fact that somebody is looking at Middle America and not news America, not Hollywood America, not Florida America - they're looking at the nuts and bolts, mom-and-pop America - I'm actually thrilled.
SCHULTZE: But as Lordstown demonstrates, the story of what's happening with American manufacturers is often more complex than can be summed up in a tweet. For NPR News, I'm M.L. Schultze.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A group of guys are riding in a boat down a river when an orangutan jumped in. No, seriously, you can see the encounter between the two cultures, guys and orangutan, on YouTube, where it's been posted by a user named RailGod. The young men are on a boat with guides, traveling down a river in the Borneo Jungle.
We came across a wild orangutan hanging over the river on our way to Camp Leakey who joined us in the boat, wrote RailGod. The orangutan looks at ease in the video - his jungle, after all. The guys hold out some small snacks. And the orangutan takes them in his hands to eat them.
But then one of the men begins to pose for a selfie with the orangutan. And the great ape slaps him not hard but emphatically. As you can hear, the man on the video says, he just slapped me, like, right on the nose. Orangutans share about 97 percent of the same DNA as human beings. The 3 percent we don't share is the nerve the orangutan had to do what a lot of people just dream about.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Now it's time for sports.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: Football playoffs, the Australian Open opens - we're joined by Howard Bryant of espn.com and ESPN, the magazine. Good morning, Howard.
HOWARD BRYANT: Good morning, Scott.
SIMON: Let's begin with the marquee game this weekend. I hope I offend no other markets from referring to it that way, but the Dallas Cowboys versus the Green Bay Packers. But this time, no ice bowl, is it? It'll be...
BRYANT: No, no, no ice bowl.
SIMON: ...Sixty degrees in Dallas.
BRYANT: And it's great. This is exactly what the - what the NFL needs. You have two iconic franchises. All you need now is the great John Facenda in the background with the - with NFL Films because this is what football is - Packers, Cowboys. And I think it's going to be great. You've got the Dallas Cowboys 13-3 this season. They have not been to the Super Bowl in 21 years. You're looking at a franchise that has never gone this long without appearing and playing for a championship.
And then on the other hand, you've got the Packers, who, of course, are the signature franchise, as well. And this is what, I mean, when you think about sports, I always talk about dynasties and how much I loved dynasties and circling games. This is a game to circle, especially because the Cowboys need this game. They went out this season. They were supposed to be a good team, and they ended up being a great team. And to go out in their first playoff game would be devastating. And on the other hand, you've got the Packers. And everyone talks about how great Aaron Rodgers is and how tremendous a quarterback he is.
SIMON: Yeah.
BRYANT: And he is a superstar, but here's the thing. The Green Bay Packers have only been to one Super Bowl under Aaron Rodgers, so I understand why the coach Mike McCarthy has gotten so much grief. They're too good a team for that quarterback to only have played for one championship. Tom Brady's been to six championships - six Super Bowls. He's won four championships.
SIMON: Yeah. So they haven't surrounded him in Green Bay? Is that with the charge is?
BRYANT: That's the charge, and it's also that the coach hasn't called the right plays and that they're underachieving. And I think that when they killed the Giants last week, which was a tremendous game. They should have gotten blown out, and Aaron Rodgers just showed up and was amazing. This is the kind of performance where you look and say wow.
SIMON: Yeah.
BRYANT: This team...
SIMON: When Aaron Rodgers throws a long pass, it's not a Hail Mary.
BRYANT: No, it's not a Hail Mary. It's a Hail Mary for the defense. And I think that when you watch him play, you're looking at this guy, and you're saying he should be in the Super Bowl. The Packers should be the best team in the NFC, and they really haven't been.
SIMON: Yeah. Quick question - do the Houston Texans have any chance against the New England Patriots.
BRYANT: No.
SIMON: Well, I thought I'd ask.
BRYANT: No.
SIMON: OK. I know they're, like, 116 points down, but Seahawks - yeah, OK. Yeah.
BRYANT: Well, let's put it this way, Scott. Let's just put it this way. They've played the Patriots twice. They've scored six points in the last two games. And Tom Brady, once again, home game - first playoff game. I don't see it. Sixteen points is an insult in terms of - if you're Texans defense - but I don't see it.
SIMON: Seahawks Falcons?
BRYANT: I like the Seahawks. I like the Seahawks just because when it's go time, I believe in defense. And I - and you look at the Seahawks. They've been that team for the past four years. I have a feeling that - no disrespect to the Atlanta Falcons - but - OK, yeah, a lot of disrespect to the Atlanta Falcons. Prove it.
SIMON: Yeah, I was about to say. Yeah.
BRYANT: Go ahead and - go ahead and prove it. Every time they get this close, they haven't proven it, so I'd rather see it. I'm going with the Seahawks.
SIMON: Yeah. WABE and Georgia Public Radio listeners, please stay with us.
BRYANT: (Laughter).
SIMON: Mr. Bryant doesn't know what he's saying. Let me ask about the Australian Open coming up this week. I got one question for you - Serena? - three question marks.
BRYANT: Well, good question. Serena is 35 years old. Serena just got engaged. Serena is no longer the number one player in the world. Serena lost the Australian Open final last year to Angelique Kerber, who is now the new number one. On the other hand, Serena did go to three finals last year, and she's still Serena Williams, but it would not surprise me. This is going to be a tough haul for her. You're starting to look at that second chapter in her life. She's about to get married, and she's 35, but once again - crazy to bet against Serena Williams, isn't it? It's not a way to make a living.
SIMON: Yeah. Howard Bryant, thanks so much. Talk to you soon.
BRYANT: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
And one more sports story left. The NBA champion Cleveland Cavaliers and the Portland Trail Blazers played a midseason game this week. January games are not usually considered momentous. But for our friend and Portland-based NPR's sports correspondent, Tom Goldman, and his son, this game was.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Like zillions of kids who play basketball, my son Max loves LeBron James - always has. Even when Steph Curry became the NBA's it guy, Max stayed true to LeBron. But he never saw him play in person. So for Max's recent 18th birthday, I bought two tickets to see LeBron and the Cavaliers this week.
As the day approached, his excitement was mixed with apprehension. Fans in Memphis recently were furious when James didn't play in a game there. Resting your superstars has become more common and a point of contention in the NBA. But Max and I decided to stay positive, believing LeBron would play. The big day finally came. And so did the snow.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR #1: And there's the cars just littering the roadway that were left last night.
UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR #2: And those abandoned cars still - yes. Just by the dozens...
GOLDMAN: News stations heralded Portland's biggest snowstorm in 20 years. It brought the city to a screeching halt. But the game was on. And the latest word was everyone would play, including you know who. One problem - our 20 to 30-minute car trip to the arena now was impossible. The light-rail train was an option. But the nearest station was a two to three-hour hike. Who would be crazy enough to do that in the freezing cold and snow?
Boots?
MAX: Check.
GOLDMAN: Warm socks?
MAX: Two pairs of socks - check.
GOLDMAN: Gloves?
MAX: Check.
GOLDMAN: Tickets?
MAX: Check.
GOLDMAN: Tickets right there. It's 2:30. Game's at 7:30.
MAX: 7:30?
GOLDMAN: We'll try to make it.
We set out. And, soon, it started snowing again. But with visions of LeBron pulling him forward, Max set a ferocious pace.
Max, hold on up there. He's a full hundred yards ahead of me. He's actually been jogging a few times uphill.
The whole first part of the trip had been uphill. We got to the top after an hour and 40 minutes.
How you feel?
MAX: Better than ever.
GOLDMAN: Better than ever? How are your feet? How are your feet?
MAX: My feet are fine. My legs are kind of sore.
GOLDMAN: Right. Yeah, but you were running a little bit up there.
MAX: Yeah. Well, I wanted to get to the top.
GOLDMAN: Well, hold on. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. One more thing - we can still go back.
MAX: Never.
GOLDMAN: We pressed on and got to the train stop at 4:30, two hours after we set out. The train traveled exactly one block and stopped. A tree had fallen on the tracks. So we got out, walked another 10 city blocks, got on another train. And sooner than you can say frostbite, we were in.
(CHEERING)
GOLDMAN: About 40 minutes before gametime, fans cheered as LeBron James stepped onto the court to warm up. Max opened his mouth but could only muster sounds.
MAX: Uh, uh, hey.
GOLDMAN: After 10 minutes of gawking and Instagramming from courtside, we headed up to our seats and watched the hometown Blazers pound the Cavaliers, 102-86. Normally, Max would be ecstatic. But on this night, anything Portland did was secondary. LeBron was good, not great - twenty points, 11 rebounds. But he also had five turnovers. No matter - he was there. So was Max. Mission finally accomplished. Tom Goldman, NPR News, Portland.
(SOUNDBITE OF LALO SCHIFRIN COMPOSITION, "MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Sam Barsky of Pikesville, Md., has turned sweaters into a statement. For the past 17 years, he's knit sweaters that show places that he's seen around the world, including the Golden Gate Bridge, Stonehenge and Jerusalem's Wailing Wall or a field of electrical pylons. But what's made Mr. Barsky an internet phenomenon with well over a million hits on various websites are photos of the knitter, the artist himself, posed in front of a scene wearing the sweater that he's knitted. Sam Barsky joins us now from member station WYPR in Baltimore. Thanks so much for being with us.
SAM BARSKY: Hi.
SIMON: Why do you do this?
BARSKY: This is what I enjoy doing. I like creating. I like replicating what I see in life and what I anticipate seeing.
SIMON: I'm told you've done a 103 sweaters.
BARSKY: Yes. That's correct.
SIMON: That's a lot of wool, a lot of stitches, isn't it?
BARSKY: Yes, probably millions by now.
SIMON: Do you know what you're going to knit next?
BARSKY: Yes because Groundhog Day is coming up in early February, I'm thinking of making a sweater with a groundhog on it.
SIMON: Oh, that sounds adorable. You must get requests at this point. You've become pretty famous.
BARSKY: Yes. I'm flooded with requests, so many I can't even see all of them.
SIMON: Yeah. Do you ever fulfill any?
BARSKY: I've thought about it before, but I've realized early on a long time ago that it's not practical for me to be a human sweater mill.
SIMON: (Laughter) Yeah. All right. I understand that. Well, what are some of your favorite sweaters, sweater scenes?
BARSKY: I can't say which one is my number one favorite, but some of the ones that are getting attention a lot are, like, Times Square. The Tower Bridge of London is very popular. I've done Venice, I've done Niagara Falls, just to name a few. I did one with tigers on it, and I wore it while holding a real live tiger in Thailand one time.
SIMON: Oh, my gosh. A lot of people must ask you about the electrical pylons sweater.
BARSKY: Yes. And as a matter of fact, it's the one I'm wearing right now.
SIMON: All right. Well, maybe we can get a picture of it and we can post it on our website if that's all right with you.
BARSKY: Yeah. That's fine.
SIMON: What was your artistic inspiration for that? A lot of people would see a field of electrical pylons and think we ought to put a sweater over that.
BARSKY: Yes. I see them all the time in all my routine travels around the local area. They're everywhere. So pretty much anything that crosses my eyes is a potential sweater, and the pylons are no exception.
SIMON: Yeah. Is there a sweater of your dreams you'd like to do you just haven't gotten to yet?
BARSKY: Pretty much any kind of iconic landmark or natural scene. It's like anything possibly - could be in my dreams. The only limitation I have is that it takes a month to make one.
SIMON: Do you ever put people's faces on a sweater, of friends maybe?
BARSKY: Doing a face of a specific person is not something I've ever attempted to do before. It's one of the things I'm working hard on figuring out how to do now as I'm working on a Martin Luther King Day sweater. I'm having a picture of the I Have A Dream speech with a picture of Dr. King standing in front of the crowd.
SIMON: Well, that sounds like a very ambitious piece of art, Mr. Barsky. It really does.
BARSKY: Yeah.
SIMON: Well, Mr. Barsky, you've given a lot of people pleasure. Thank you very much for your art work and letting people see it.
BARSKY: Yes, it's my pleasure. It's my goal to share it with the world.
SIMON: Sam Barsky talking about his sweaters.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The timing of contacts between the top adviser to Donald Trump and the Russian ambassador to the United States has raised questions about what they discussed and whether that affected policy. At least one phone conversation happened on the same day the Obama administration announced the sanctions and other retaliations for Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. NPR's White House correspondent Tamara Keith joins us now. Tam, thanks so much for being with us.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Good to be with you.
SIMON: I'm sorry to get your name reversed (laughter). This adviser, of course, is Michael Flynn. And what do we know about this conversation?
KEITH: Yeah. So he is Trump's pick for national security adviser. We've learned from two sources on the presidential transition team that he spoke by phone with Sergey Kislyak - he's the Russian ambassador to the U.S. - on December 29. We learned that late last night after, all day yesterday, Trump's team insisted that the conversation had actually happened the day before. And, thus, there was no way that they could've discussed the sanctions.
Then the transition team changed their story. This all first came to light when David Ignatius at The Washington Post wrote that a senior U.S. government official told him that Flynn had called Kislyak multiple times on the day that the Obama administration announced it was imposing sanctions and expelling 35 Russian diplomats from the U.S.
SIMON: I think I can guess. But let's make this explicit. What does it matter whether Flynn spoke to the ambassador or not?
KEITH: If Flynn had been negotiating foreign policy with Russia as a private citizen, that could be a violation of the Logan Act, which has never, ever been prosecuted. Contact between ambassadors and incoming administrations isn't out of the ordinary. But the timing is prompting these questions about whether Flynn was trying to influence how Russia responded to the U.S. actions.
Sean Spicer, who's set to become the White House communications director, told NPR last night that, despite the timing, it is, quote, "doubtful" that Flynn and the ambassador discussed the sanctions. He says it was a call about post-inaugural logistics. Another official says that there was also an invitation extended to a conference about Syria that Russia is organizing. It's really impossible - like, completely impossible - to know what they actually talked about.
But the day after that phone call, in a surprise move, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he wouldn't retaliate until he saw what Trump did once in office. Trump then tweeted, great move on delay by V. Putin. I always knew he was very smart.
SIMON: Yeah. A lot of people were surprised by the moderate tone of the Russian reaction.
KEITH: Absolutely.
SIMON: This is coming, of course, in a week with - Russia's really in the news about alleged hacking and meddling in the 2016 election. Late yesterday, word that the Senate Intelligence Committee is going to investigate possible links between Russia and the presidential campaigns - what more do we need to know? Where does this fit in?
KEITH: Yeah. This was a reversal for the committee's Republican chairman, Richard Burr, who, earlier in the week, said it wasn't the committee's role to look at those things. Now both Burr and the committee's Democratic leader say that they will be looking into, quote, "links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns."
SIMON: Tamara Keith, thanks so much.
KEITH: You're welcome.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Now we're going to take a close look at a city in Syria that has been ravaged by war. Homs was at the center of opposition to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Fighting raged there until government forces retook control. NPR's Alice Fordham has now gained rare access to that city, and she met a local architect who dreams of how the city will rise again.
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: The first thing you notice about the old city of Homs is the destruction. For two years, this place was a bastion of rebel fighters besieged by government forces, and every building has holes ripped in it by shells, air strikes, bullets. The second thing you notice is the construction. People are turning these wounded buildings back into homes and shops. Some are on their own, sweeping out debris from storefronts. Others, like these guys mixing cement, are working on a United Nations rehabilitation project of the downtown's old city.
My guide here is architect Marwa al-Sabouni, who's written a book about how the war relates to the way the city developed. She is passionate about the layers of history here. She takes me to the main mosque.
MARWA AL-SABOUNI: (Foreign language spoken) The grand mosque, OK? Because the biggest mosque at the area here, it was originally a temple for the sun, then a church. Then half of it was sold to the Muslims, and the church and the mosque shared one building.
FORDHAM: She points out Roman columns that were re-used in the construction of the mosque.
SABOUNI: This is an amazing thing about the older architecture there. They didn't, you know - any one didn't cancel the other. This is a harmony that was built and it was lived.
FORDHAM: Sabouni is a small, energetic woman who stops now to pray. For her, this old part of Homs, with its mix of churches and mosques, mansions and apartments, orange trees and squares, is a kind of architectural embodiment of peace and co-existence, of calm.
SABOUNI: Everything is so studied in a way that will give you calmness to your eye and to your mind and, consequently, to your spirits. You will enter there and you just have a calming experience.
FORDHAM: But elsewhere in Homs, there's an opposite of this - basically, slums. Now, the decades of repression by the Assad regime are well-known. But to Sabouni, these slums are also a key to understanding why war eventually broke out here. In the last hundred years, Homs expanded fast, as did other cities in Syria. Rural people became the new industrial working class and lived on the fringes of the city.
SABOUNI: Afterwards, you know, it just snowballed into what we have now. We have just slums around the cities where 40 percent of the people - population were living prior to the war.
FORDHAM: And there wasn't just a gap between rich and poor. Because the new arrivals tended to live with their family or friends from their old villages, the slums were ghettoized.
SABOUNI: People were just categorized into one corner or into one group or into one slum.
FORDHAM: Geographical origins?
SABOUNI: Yeah, geographical origin, social class, religion. All these categorizations are evident in the slumming around the cities.
FORDHAM: As we sit in a small English bookstore Sabouni runs, we talk about her book, "The Battle For Home." In it, she contends these divisions fueled sectarianism and they eroded social cohesion, so people were unwilling to find peaceful solutions when unrest began.
SABOUNI: When you have something that is strong and cohesive among people, when you have something to preserve, when you have something to care about, not to lose, you - people may find alternative ways of, you know, expressing or alternative ways to solve their problems.
FORDHAM: War erupted, and it did ravage Homs. Sabouni says 60 percent of the buildings here are uninhabitable. And just as she traces the roots of the conflict into those badly-planned slums, she sees careful, inclusive reconstruction as essential to a peaceful future.
For more context on this, I turn to a man who crafted the economic policy of Assad before the war. His name is Abdullah al-Dardari, now working with the United Nations.
ABDULLAH AL-DARDARI: Yes, of course there was a - dramatic errors, actually.
FORDHAM: And Dardari gets to a question that is crucial now to the future of Syria. Assuming Assad wins the war - and he seems to have the upper hand - can the Syrian state rebuild its relationship with people from rebellious areas like Homs? Dardari says that depends as much on inclusive reconstruction as it does on the trappings of democracy.
DARDARI: So we talk about the need for very good elections, but actually - that is important. But more important is the sense of safety and security in returning and the equity and equitability of this reconstruction program. I need to feel that I am equal to everyone else and my chances are equal to everyone else.
FORDHAM: And is that going to happen? Dardari won't answer that, so let's go back to Homs. Sure, there's reconstruction in the famous old city. But in other neighborhoods which were held by the opposition not a brick has been laid, not a soul has been allowed back, and the destruction goes on as far as the eye can see, block after brutalized block. Officials in Homs won't give an interview, but regular people here are happy to talk.
And they say poignant things. They speak of a pervasive melancholy here, of relationships severed as people chose sides in the war, of skepticism of reconciliation efforts and also of rebuilding the city. Rasha al-Mustafa is a recent graduate working in a drugstore.
RASHA AL-MUSTAFA: (Speaking Arabic).
FORDHAM: "Of course Homs is not like before," she says.
MUSTAFA: (Speaking Arabic).
FORDHAM: "And yes," she says, "thank God there is reconstruction in the old city. But there needs to be so much more - hospitals, schools, housing for everyone."
Alice Fordham, NPR News, Homs.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
A good special education teacher is hard to find and even harder to hang on to. Rigorous teaching schedules combined with mounds of paperwork can lead to burnout. For one Utah teacher, it was almost too much. Lee Hale from member station KUER has more.
LEE HALE, BYLINE: This time last year, I brought you the story of Stephanie Johnson, an extremely qualified special ed teacher who was struggling. In fact, she was miserable. Here is what she sounded like a year ago.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
STEPHANIE JOHNSON: I don't know how to describe it. It's just so much work. Like, I just feel like I cannot do it.
HALE: Stephanie was in her third year teaching at a junior high school in Lindon, Utah, about 40 minutes south of Salt Lake City. And on the outside, it looked like she was doing great. Her classes ran smoothly. Students loved her. Parents loved her. But like many special ed teachers, she was drowning because this job requires a lot.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
JOHNSON: Compliance and laws and paperwork and, oh, my gosh, it's so much.
HALE: But it's a very different Stephanie I find this year. She's now teaching at Renaissance Academy, a charter school in a nearby city.
It's Friday. It's regular school day hours. But tell me, who's in the classroom right now?
JOHNSON: Just me and you and Karen Sue. Oh, that's a rhyme (laughter).
HALE: Karen Sue Nielson shares a classroom with Stephanie, and together they teach all the special ed students at the school. But on Fridays, for most of the day, they have the classroom to themselves.
JOHNSON: There's piles of work on our desk that we're getting done. There's things that need to be corrected. There's progress monitoring that needs to be, yeah, completed. There's meetings. There's paperwork. There's still a lot of work to do, and I love that we have Fridays to get that done.
HALE: Stephanie loves Fridays. In fact, there are a lot of things she loves about her new job.
JOHNSON: OK, this is my progress monitoring folder. It says progress monitoring. It said progress monitoring last year. It's the same folder I used (laughter), only this year it's full with actual progress monitoring.
HALE: And the person behind the scenes helping to make this progress happen is Kim Beck, the school's special ed director.
KIM BECK: So I have four full filing cabinets of student files.
HALE: Kim works out of a cramped office down the hall. And all these files are proof that the students at the school are receiving the help they need because special education services are guaranteed by law. It's a lot of upkeep, and so the words she's about to say will be music to any special ed teacher's ears.
BECK: I try and take most of that paperwork load off of the teachers so it allows them to teach during the day.
HALE: Kim also tests students in the school to see if they need special education services or if they're ready to move on, and she schedules meetings with parents.
BECK: So I don't think the paperwork in and of itself is too cumbersome. Where it becomes cumbersome is the teacher that's teaching all day is now having to do that amount of paperwork.
HALE: I know this from personal experience. I used to be a special ed teacher here in Utah, and the reason I'm not anymore is because I was overwhelmed. So this approach Kim and Stephanie have, dividing and conquering, it honestly makes me a little jealous. And it's unique. It wasn't a directive from any school administrators. They just made it happen with the right mix of people.
BECK: Well, I think, first of all, you have to find a special ed person that likes paperwork, and those are few and far between. So I do love paperwork, so that setting works here.
JOHNSON: Which one is bigger - 92, 96, or 30?
HALE: When the students are back in Stephanie's room, it's obvious she's enjoying herself. There's a smile on her face.
JOHNSON: Awesome job. You did so good on that. I am going to pass you off...
HALE: And that smile isn't because she's doing less work this year. Stephanie admits she still stays late and comes in early. But the difference is that she gets to focus on teaching her students, and it really has made a difference. Recently, at a party, a friend approached Stephanie and said...
JOHNSON: Stephanie, have you been losing weight? You look so good. I don't know, you just look so good. And I said, oh, that's my new job. That's what you're seeing in my face. It's my new job.
HALE: So for now, Stephanie is here to stay because she's happy.
Lee Hale, NPR News, Salt Lake City.
(SOUNDBITE OF VISIONEERS SONG, "RUNNIN'")
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
If you're familiar with the band Disturbed, you're probably used to hearing them sound like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF DISTURBED SONG, "INSIDE THE FIRE")
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But last year, the band softened its sound when they covered Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound Of Silence." Now Disturbed has been nominated for a Grammy for its version. David Draiman fronts the band, and he told us why they wanted to go in a new direction.
DAVID DRAIMAN: When we originally were going to approach it, I thought that we'd approach covering the song in the manner that we had done most of our songs - make it more upbeat, more aggressive, more stylistically Disturbed. But it was actually our guitar player, Dan, who made the very strong suggestion to not do that but to stick with it being acoustic and ambient and ethereal. And I'm very, very glad that we followed his intuition.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SOUND OF SILENCE")
DISTURBED: (Singing) Hello, darkness, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again.
DRAIMAN: I hadn't attempted to go to that spot of my vocal ability for very many years. I was so overwhelmed with emotion listening to the way my vocals sounded in that beautiful bed of music. And not having heard my voice in that way for so long, it was really just very, very overwhelming.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SOUND OF SILENCE")
DISTURBED: (Singing) In restless dreams I walked alone, narrow streets of cobblestone.
DRAIMAN: I was trained to be a cantor, which is someone that leads the Jewish congregation in prayer. So I learned classical vocal technique from a very young age. And when you start venturing into the world of rock 'n' roll, it required a little bit more aggression, a little bit more grit. And it took time to be able to master that delivery as well.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SOUND OF SILENCE")
DISTURBED: (Singing) And in the naked light I saw 10,000 people, maybe more.
DRAIMAN: My religious upbringing was always something that was difficult for me to swallow willingly. But the intellectual aspect of it, the academic aspect of it, was very, very appealing to me. Studying to become a rabbi or heading down that path is really all about becoming very, very engrossed and very adept at interpretation of Jewish law, of the Talmud.
And I had to learn to find my own truths. And little by little, as they say in Judaism, I left the path. And just - since then really, I've been very secular. I'm not a religious person by any means, but I am intensely spiritual.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SOUND OF SILENCE")
DISTURBED: (Singing) And the sign flashed out its warning in the words that it was forming.
DRAIMAN: If we are blessed with winning the Grammy this time, I would have to dedicate it to the original songwriter himself, to Paul Simon. No one can really take away the sheer, utter brilliance of the composition of that song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SOUND OF SILENCE")
SIMON AND GARFUNKEL: (Singing) And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: David Draiman from the band Disturbed.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE")
SIMON AND GARFUNKEL: (Singing) Whispered in the sounds of silence.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Thirty years ago this month, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted its first woman, Aretha Franklin; astronomers at the University of California observed the birth of a distant galaxy for the first time; and perhaps, I think, even more amazing, NPR aired the first ever WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY Puzzle with Will Shortz.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Will is, of course, the puzzle editor of The New York Times, as well as WEEKEND EDITION's puzzlemaster. Will, happy 30th anniversary to you.
WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Thank you, Lulu. Happy 30th anniversary to you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) It is amazing that you have been on this long. We dug up from our archives that very first show. Susan Stamberg - she was the host back then. And here you are on your debut puzzle broadcast, which was all about oxymorons.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
SHORTZ: A particular military officer.
SUSAN STAMBERG, BYLINE: A particular military - general...
SHORTZ: Yes.
STAMBERG: A specific general.
SHORTZ: That's right.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I guess, what, back then the host used to be the only person playing?
SHORTZ: That's right. It was - Susan's idea was that this program, WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY, would be the Sunday equivalent on the radio of a newspaper. And originally I just puzzled Susan.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm so glad we're not just doing it with me, let me just tell you.
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Before we get to last week's puzzle, I want to introduce a very special guest who's with us in the studio today. It's someone who also celebrated her own 30th anniversary at NPR, former Morning Edition host Renee Montagne. Hey, Renee.
RENEE MONTAGNE, BYLINE: Lulu, hello.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Are you a puzzle fan?
MONTAGNE: I am a puzzle fan. As a listener, which - I listened to this program virtually every Sunday for probably the last 30 years unless I was out of the country - you know, it's very exciting when I hit it before the guest hits it.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK, let's turn now to last week's puzzle. Will, can you remind us what it was?
SHORTZ: Yeah. The challenge came from Mike Reiss, who's a writer and producer for "The Simpsons." I said think of a two-word phrase you might see on a clothing label, add two letters to the end of the first word and one letter to the end of the second word, and the result is the name of a famous writer. Who is it? Well, the answer was virgin wool. And you add those letters, you get Virginia Woolf.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Ah. We received nearly 500 responses. And this week's winner is Mark Palmere of Sacramento, Calif. Congratulations, Mark.
MARK PALMERE: Thank you, Lulu. It's really great to be here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you are one lucky contestant because Renee is here to help you this week.
MONTAGNE: That's right. I won't be just talking to my cat (laughter).
PALMERE: Oh, good. I need all the help I can get.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK, are you both ready to play The Puzzle?
PALMERE: I am.
MONTAGNE: I'm ready.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Take it away.
SHORTZ: All right. Here we go, Mark, Renee and Lulu. Every answer today is a familiar phrase in the form blank in the blank, in which the words that go in the blanks have been replaced by their sometimes complicated-sounding dictionary definitions. You identify the phrases. For example, if I said an extremely young child in the dense growth of trees, you would say babe in the woods.
PALMERE: OK.
MONTAGNE: OK.
SHORTZ: Number one - a bipedal primate mammal related to the great apes in the Earth's only known natural satellite.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Huh.
SHORTZ: Here it is again - bipedal primate...
PALMERE: Oh, oh, oh.
SHORTZ: Yeah?
PALMERE: Man on the - man in the moon?
SHORTZ: Man in the moon is right.
MONTAGNE: Yes.
SHORTZ: Number two - food consisting of fruit or meat baked under dough in the expanse of space surrounding the Earth.
PALMERE: Pie in the sky.
SHORTZ: That's it. Sensation caused by a stimulus that injures the tissues in the constricted part of an animal that connects the head with the body.
PALMERE: Pain in the neck.
MONTAGNE: Pain in the neck.
SHORTZ: There you go. Good.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Good.
SHORTZ: Phenomenon of combustion as manifested by light, flame or heat in the part of the human body enclosing the abdominal viscera.
PALMERE: Fire in the belly?
SHORTZ: That's it, yes.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: A lot of big words here today, Will.
MONTAGNE: I knew that one.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Viscera - I mean, this is a lot of big words.
(LAUGHTER)
SHORTZ: And your last one - flying mammals of the order Chiroptera in the tower surmounting a building that contains a metallic device that gives forth a ringing sound when struck.
MONTAGNE: Bats in the belfry?
SHORTZ: Bats in the belfry. Good job.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah.
MONTAGNE: I had to get one (laughter).
PALMERE: Nice.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right, great job, both of you. For playing our puzzle today, you'll get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin, as well as puzzle books and games. You can read all about it at npr.org/puzzle. And, Mark, what member station do you listen to?
PALMERE: KQEI 89.3.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Mark Palmere of Sacramento, Calif., thank you so much for playing The Puzzle.
PALMERE: OK, thank you, Lulu, and thanks, Will. It was a lot of fun.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And thank you, Renee, for playing The Puzzle this week on this very special 30th anniversary.
MONTAGNE: And thank you for having me, Lulu. Welcome to the program.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right, Will, what's the challenge for next week?
SHORTZ: Yes, it comes from listener Peter Collins of Ann Arbor, Mich. Take the first and last names of a famous comedian. The first three letters of the first name plus the first letter of the last name, in order, spell the name of a god in mythology, and the fourth letter of the first name plus the second through fourth letters of the last name, in order, spell the name of another god. Who's the comedian and what gods are these?
So again, the first and last names of a famous comedian, first three letters of the first name plus the first letter of the last name spell the name of a god, and the fourth letter of the first name plus the second through fourth letters of the last name spell another god. Who's the comedian and what gods are these?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you have 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 19 at 3 p.m. Eastern, so include a phone number where we can reach you at about that time. 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 WEEKEND EDITION's puzzlemaster, Will Shortz. Thanks so much, Will. Here's to 30 more years.
SHORTZ: Thanks a lot, Lulu.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
President Obama has granted clemency to more than a thousand prisoners. Now in his final days in office, some activists, celebrities and politicians are asking him for one more pardon. Oscar Lopez Rivera has been in federal prison since 1981. He was convicted of trying to overthrow the U.S. government in a bid for independence for Puerto Rico. Maria Hinojosa, host of the public radio program Latino USA, has more.
MARIA HINOJOSA, BYLINE: In the mid-1970s, a mysterious series of protest bombings shook cities across the country.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Nine buildings in Washington, New York and Chicago were bombed early today within a 45-minute span in a carefully coordinated attack.
HINOJOSA: Responsibility was claimed by a group called Las Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional, or the FALN.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: By the FALN, the Puerto Rican terrorist group which claims to be pushing for the island's independence from the United States.
HINOJOSA: Between 1974 and 1983, the FALN set off over 70 such bombs. Most of the bombs only damaged property, but there were dozens of injuries and five deaths. Most of the group's members have served long prison sentences and have since been released, except for one.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BERNIE SANDERS: Oscar Lopez Rivera has been in jail 34 years.
HINOJOSA: Public figures, from Bernie Sanders to "Hamilton" creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, are calling for his release.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SANDERS: Free Oscar Lopez Rivera.
HINOJOSA: His supporters say he's a political prisoner serving an unjust sentence. His opponents say he's an unrepentant terrorist. In the 1960s, Oscar Lopez Rivera was a young Puerto Rican living in Chicago and working as a community organizer. He fought in Vietnam where he earned a Bronze Star, but he became disillusioned by the war and what he saw as U.S. imperialism.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
OSCAR LOPEZ RIVERA: When I came back, there were young people that were saying, we want to be heard. We want our community to have a voice.
HINOJOSA: That's Oscar Lopez Rivera himself. He spoke with us in October from the Terre Haute federal prison in Indiana. After Vietnam, Lopez Rivera began to research Puerto Rican history. And the more he learned, the more he concluded that Puerto Rico was a colony of the United States.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
LOPEZ RIVERA: There were resolutions of the United Nations pointing out very, very clearly that colonialism was a crime against humanity and that colonialized people have the right to self-determination and to achieve it by any means necessary, including the use of force.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: When a bomb went off in a crowded financial district in the middle of the lunch hour. The explosion did a lot of damage, and it was felt on the upper floors of nearby skyscrapers.
HINOJOSA: The FALN's deadliest attack happened in January of 1975, the bombing of a crowded Wall Street restaurant called Fraunces Tavern. The bomb killed four and injured 60. In 1976, the FBI located an apartment linked to Lopez Rivera where they found dynamite and FALN documents. Lopez Rivera then went into hiding and wasn't caught by police until five years later. By then, the FBI had also caught 11 other members of the group.
They were tried under a rarely used statute, seditious conspiracy, which means to oppose and attempt to overthrow by force the power of the United States government. Lopez Rivera was sentenced to 55 years and later was given an additional 15 after being convicted for conspiracy to escape. Jan Susler is the lawyer for Lopez Rivera and his co-defendants.
JAN SUSLER: They were sentenced not because of what they did but because of who they were politically. Seditious conspiracy is really a thought crime. It's agreeing to be part of challenging the United States government. And in this case, it was agreeing to be part of the FALN.
HINOJOSA: In 1999, President Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of most of the imprisoned FALN members, 16 in all. Lopez Rivera was offered a deal, but he refused it because he says not all of his co-defendants were included.
Now, after almost 36 years in prison, supporters are hoping that Obama will use his pardon powers to let Lopez Rivera go. They note that he wasn't actually convicted of a crime that killed anyone, and they compare him to Nelson Mandela, who was also involved in an armed political movement and served a lengthy prison term. But not everyone agrees.
JOE CONNOR: I would love to ask people who support his release and say, if not a terrorist, what has Oscar Lopez done to help the Puerto Rican people?
HINOJOSA: Joe Connor was 9 years old when his father, a 33-year-old banker at J.P. Morgan, was killed in the Fraunces Tavern bombing.
CONNOR: I'm hearing he's a freedom fighter, he's done all these things, he's not violent, but what did he do if not be a terrorist? There's no answer to it because he was a terrorist.
HINOJOSA: Oscar Lopez Rivera was never convicted of the Fraunces Tavern bombing and he's denied involvement in its execution or planning. A petition to release him has over 100,000 signatures, but organizers say they've gotten no indications from the president.
The White House said it does not comment on individual pardon applications. Lopez Rivera has said he no longer condones violence in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. But, he says, if he walks out of prison one day, he'll walk out with his head high.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
LOPEZ RIVERA: I have made a decision, and it was a decision dealing with finding meaning and purpose in life, you know, and not living a life just to exist, you know? And the struggle for me is where I found meaning in life. And I knew that that would keep me strong. And it has.
HINOJOSA: If Obama leaves him in prison, Lopez Rivera is projected for release in 2023, when he'll be 80 years old.
For NPR News, I'm Maria Hinojosa.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Maria Hinojosa is the host of NPR's Latino USA, which will air an hour-long documentary on Oscar Lopez Rivera later this month.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
This week, Donald Trump will become the nation's 45th president. The transition has been rife with controversy over conflicts of interest, ties with Russia and other issues. To hear one view from Capitol Hill, we reached Congressman Tom Emmer. He's a Republican from Minnesota, and he was an early supporter of Donald Trump's.
Congressman Emmer, thank you so much for coming onto the program.
TOM EMMER: Good morning, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Good morning. Let's start with the Affordable Care Act. This week, the House and the Senate took an important first step towards dismantling the health care law. How long do you think it'll take for you and your colleagues to come up with an alternative?
EMMER: Well, the incoming administration and the president-elect have committed to unwind this law, this very unsuccessful law within the first 100 days, Lulu. And it's especially important in my state of Minnesota where people have seen an increase in premiums just this year of somewhere between 50 and 67 percent. We are the fourth-highest premium increase state in the country. And it's costing people the opportunity to gain access to the best health care in the world.
So they've committed that within the first hundred days, we're going to unwind this law and start to give Americans - return the decision-making authority back to the states and give Americans the ability to make the choices that they need and access the health care that they need.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Are you willing, though, to repeal it without a replacement, leaving millions of people potentially uninsured?
EMMER: Well, I think what we're on our way to doing - people are making a big deal out of words. I think we're going to repeal and restore. And that will happen almost simultaneously. We're going to repeal this failed law, this misguided law. And we're going to restore the ability of states to craft the solutions that are most important to their populations.
And how can that happen? Well, the incoming Health and Human Services secretary - my state is requesting waivers to be able to design the products necessary to service our population. And once we have the administration in place and the new secretary and those waivers can be granted, we can do these things simultaneously.
As for the federal policy, you know, Minnesota was a leader, Lulu, before this law was enacted. We had 94 percent of our citizens who were insured. And those who didn't have insurance had access if they chose, the vast majority of them, under an available program. We had a pre-existing pool called MCHA, so if you had been denied because of a pre-existing condition, there was a option for you. We need to be able to go back and do those things. And the - as we move forward, I think, for the rest of the states, the federal solution might be just laying out criteria that the states must meet for their populations. They can...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But sir, there seems to be...
EMMER: ...Design the program but lay out the criteria.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sorry to interrupt - but there seems to be a lack of a clear plan, a clear way forward. The Democrats are saying - why completely scrap something that you don't have a plan to replace it with?
EMMER: To the contrary, Lulu - I think that's the media's interpretation of the Democrats' agenda. I mean, this thing is a complete failure. It's denying Americans access to the health care that they need. What we're going to do is repeal this failed law and restore the decision-making authority to the states simultaneously through these waivers that will allow the states to do what they need to do to service their population.
And then for the long term, you need to get Democrats and Republicans on board together to pass policies that will set criteria for the states that they must meet, whether that's a pre-existing pool or allowing your adult children to remain on your policy or other things. But you got to stop this one-size, top-down, fits-all solution from Washington, D.C., because it doesn't work.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Just briefly, sir - we only have a few seconds left - are you willing to work with the Democrats, though, to come up with a comprehensive plan?
EMMER: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we aren't going to do this the way the Democrats did it - with no Republican input, with no Republican votes. You can't get something that lasts. You're going to have to have both Republicans and Democrats and everybody across this country finding solutions that work for the vast majority - for everyone in the country. And...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Congressman Tom Emmer of Minnesota, that's all we have time for. Thank you so much.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Elsewhere in the show, we're going to hear from people who are here in D.C. to celebrate Donald Trump's inauguration. Now though, we're going to meet someone who is joining the giant protest planned for the day after Donald Trump takes office. It's called the Women's March on Washington, and it is expected to draw at least 100,000 people. The organizers say they want everyone to attend. Some women, though, say they have felt excluded. We're joined in our studios by Lena Gardner. She's from Minneapolis, Minn., and she is attending the march next week. She's a co-founder of the Unitarian Universalist Black Lives Matter group in her home city.
Thanks so much for being with us.
LENA GARDNER: Thank you so much for having me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you were skeptical at first about going. Tell me why.
GARDNER: I was skeptical because a lot of the stuff I was seeing on social media was really centered around white women being upset that they didn't get their way. And to me, you know, as a black queer woman navigating the world, it was really clear to me post-election that black folks, immigrants, LGBTQ folks like myself included, are at a higher risk of violence of targeted policies that are meant to take away our rights.
And I really wasn't hearing those sorts of things from a lot of white women. Some were articulating that. And some were just like - it was almost like a temper tantrum. And I think, in and of itself, attending a march doesn't do that much. It does something. But if that's all you do and you're also not willing to accept criticisms from people and integrate and respond to their criticisms and pivot, then I think that that's unhelpful to what we're facing in the next four years under a Trump administration.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I mean, that - you weren't alone, obviously...
GARDNER: Right.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...In expressing those concerns. This was - a lot of people were expressing these doubts. What made you change your mind?
GARDNER: What made me change my mind is a colleague and co-founder of the Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism group. She has done work with Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour. They joined the national organizing team effort. And I - honestly, I saw a Facebook Live video where they said, point-blank, if you feel like your voice isn't being heard as a woman of color or as an immigrant or as part of the LGBTQ community - come, speak up, work through that and use your voice.
And I really heard that. And I said, you know, I think they're right. I think that if I feel like my voice isn't at the table and I feel like there's room for me to be heard, it's kind of my duty to show up.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So they did a lot of work. They acknowledged some of their mistakes.
GARDNER: Yeah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In your view, did they go far enough?
GARDNER: You know, my father taught me that you have to meet people halfway where they're at and you have to extend people grace. I think that's something, in our modern times, we're not very good at. And for me, the fact that they are acknowledging, you know, people's critiques and criticisms - I guess, for me, that is enough.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It strikes me, this conversation that's that's happening around this march, is happening at just such a wider level across the United States when we talk about issues of race and and people working together and trying to sort of navigate the very complicated scenarios right now. Do you think this could be a model going forward?
GARDNER: Yeah, I hope it's a model.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Or are you still skeptical?
GARDNER: Yes, both. Both-and, right? I think the bittersweet edge of all of this is that, you know, Black Lives Matter movement, which is the movement that has nurtured me, that I've come into organizing through really. We've been out in the streets marching for years. And a lot of white people haven't been there with us. And now, suddenly, they feel like it's really important that they come out. So are you marching because you're upset because you didn't get your way, or are you marching because you recognize that your life and your liberation is connected to mine now?
And I think there's a long way to go between those gaps. But in my work in the past two years, I've seen it happen. So I have hope that it'll happen for some people. I know it's not going to happen for everyone. But all I can do, again, is meet people halfway and say welcome to this work. It's really hard. It's really difficult, and there are no certain answers.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lena Gardner, thank you so much for joining us.
GARDNER: Thank you for having me.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Do you judge people who swear?
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE GOOD PLACE")
KRISTEN BELL: (As Eleanor) Somebody royally forked up.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In her latest show, "The Good Place," actress Kristen Bell wants to curse but can't. You see, she's in heaven, and swearing's not allowed.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE GOOD PLACE")
BELL: (As Eleanor) Why can't I say fork?
WILLIAM JACKSON HARPER: (As Chidi) If you're trying to curse, you can't here.
BELL: (As Eleanor) That's bull-shirt.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But a recent study suggests, maybe we should think better of bad language. It was published in the journal - and this is a real mouthful - Social Psychological and Personality Science. And it found, I'll quote them here, "a consistent positive relationship between profanity and honesty."
So basically, if you swear, you're likely telling the truth. FYI, I swear a lot - in private, though. We at NPR would face steep fines if we actually cursed on-air. So we asked around for alternative swear words. What do you say in polite company or around kids? When Jordan Weiner of Pennsylvania gets mad...
JORDAN WEINER: Embarrassingly enough, I say slug in the ditch.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Slug in a ditch?
WEINER: Yup. Like the slug, the yucky garden thing - yup.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Weiner says it's a good substitute for son-of-something when he's around his young daughter.
For Nancy Strand of Arizona, her swearing years have come and gone.
NANCY STRAND: I'm too old to like the F-bomb. I don't like that one at all.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Luckily, she's got her dad's old saying.
STRAND: Dirty pup.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's dirty pup.
(SOUNDBITE OF CEELO GREEN SONG, "FORGET YOU")
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We got this one from Sarah Ricard in Little Rock.
SARAH RICARD: Flap-doodle.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Flap-doodle.
RICARD: It sounds really silly, but it makes me feel better.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Dave Honnecker of North Carolina has the Coen brothers to thank for his go-to G-rated curse.
DAVE HONNECKER: If I'm really, really mad, I'll be (imitating anger) mother-scratcher. But if it's something that's just a minor annoyance, it's more like - oh, mother-scratcher.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And whether you've just stubbed your toe or you're giving some mother-scratcher a piece of your mind, Jordan Weiner thinks that study may have some truth to it.
WEINER: It makes complete sense to me. Being someone that's more honest - yeah, you're going to say whatever's on your mind, whether it's clean or not.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, then, fudge this - I'm just going to say it - (expletive).
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FORGET YOU")
CEELO GREEN: (Singing) See you driving 'round town with the girl I love, and I'm like forget you. Oh, oh, oh. I guess the change in my pocket wasn't enough. I'm like forget you, and forget her, too.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
We are now just five days away from the swearing in of a new president, Donald Trump, who will take the oath on this coming Friday. An enormous crowd is expected to throng the west front of the United States Capitol here in Washington, just as an estimated 2 million did for President Obama's first inauguration eight years ago. Not everything went smoothly on that day, though. And in fact, there is a history of inaugural snafus, some that date all the way back to the 19th century.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOURET'S "SINFONIES DE FANFARE IN D MAJOR-1. RONDEAU (1ST MOVEMENT OF SUITE NO. 1)")
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Our own Ron Elving, NPR's senior politics correspondent, of course, does not go back quite that far, but his knowledge is deep. We like to call him Professor Ron. So sit back, relax and let Professor Ron take you on a tour of inaugurations past.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Inaugurations are a lot like weddings. Both are public celebrations of decisions usually made months earlier. Both tend to attract a lot of family friends and curious onlookers. Both are also fraught with opportunities for messing up, and no one lets you forget when you do. Let's start with a case we all remember. Just eight years ago, holding his right hand in the air, President Obama took the presidential oath for the first time - or tried to.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHN ROBERTS: I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear...
US PRES BARACK OBAMA: I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear...
ROBERTS: That I will execute the office of President to the United States faithfully.
OBAMA: That I will execute...
ROBERTS: The - faithfully the president - the office of president of the United States.
OBAMA: The office of president of the United States faithfully.
ELVING: The other voice you hear putting the word faithfully in the wrong place is that of Chief Justice John Roberts, who was himself administering this particular oath for the first time and with no visible crib sheet. A harmless flub, perhaps, but there were those who took it seriously. And in fact, the chief justice made a special trip to the White House the following day to re-administer the oath.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
OBAMA: I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear...
ROBERTS: That I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.
OBAMA: That I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.
ELVING: Just because there were those who thought the first take wasn't official.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Hogwash. First of all, the 20th Amendment to the Constitution specifies that the new president's term begins at noon on January 20. And secondly, a number of presidents have simply said I do to the oath. They haven't repeated it at all.
ELVING: That's NPR's own legal expert on the matter. Some say it's enough - clearly Nina agrees - that the new president hear the oath and respond, I do, much as the bride and groom do at a wedding. But if you prefer the repeat after me routine, you'd better get it right.
LBJ muffed his lines as vice president in 1961. Instead of saying he had no mental reservation or purpose of evasion, Johnson said he had no mental reservation whatever. Well, close enough. Whatever. A more serious misreading happened at the inauguration of Herbert Hoover in 1929. Instead of promising to protect the United States, the ill-fated new chief executive swore to maintain it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT: That you will preserve, maintain and defend the Constitution of the United States?
HERBERT HOOVER: I do.
ELVING: It's a nice thought, but not really the point the framers meant to make. Once again, it wasn't the new president's fault, but the chief justice who had led him astray. On this occasion the chief justice was William Howard Taft, who should have known better. He had taken the oath as president himself 20 years earlier.
The 19th century had its share of uncomfortable inaugurals as well. In 1873, President Ulysses S. Grant tried to liven things up with the songs of caged canaries. More than 100 of them died when temperatures plunged to record lows. The weather was also foul in 1841. The new president, William Henry Harrison, took the stand at the Capitol in a blustery wind without hat or coat, perhaps to burnish his image as a rugged frontiersman and military hero.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Called from a retirement, which I had supposed was...
ELVING: He also had a speech designed to impress his hearers with its erudition.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: It was the remark of a Roman consul...
ELVING: It lasted one hour and 40 minutes as the crowd shivered below.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I proceed to state in, as summary, a manner as - in the want of limit to the continuance of the executive power in this - upon on another occasion, I have given my opinion at some length.
ELVING: Legend has it the president caught a chill that day. And in any event, he died of pneumonia one month later.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I now take an affectionate leave of you with entire confidence and the support of a just and generous people.
ELVING: That story has made quite a few new presidents reconsider the length of their addresses. Likewise, the first warning about excessive inaugural celebrating dates to Andrew Jackson's first swearing in back in 1829. Jackson, the prototypical populist, flung wide the doors of the White House to welcome all comers. That gave rise to many tales of frontiersmen standing on the furniture in muddy boots, tearing down curtains and drinking whiskey on the front lawn. Now that was a party. And so we await the creation of new legends as this, our latest inaugural week, dawns in the nation's capital.
I'm Ron Elving, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOURET'S "SINFONIES DE FANFARE IN D MAJOR-1. RONDEAU (1ST MOVEMENT OF SUITE NO. 1)")
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
An open Senate seat in Alabama may provoke questions about a sex scandal involving the governor there. Here's the situation. You may have seen Senator Jeff Sessions answering pointed questions from his Senate colleagues this past week during confirmation hearings for attorney general. Sessions is President-elect Trump's choice for the post. And if he's confirmed, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley will appoint a new senator to fill his seat. Business as usual, right? Well, not so fast.
To talk more about this, we're joined by John Sharp. He is in Mobile, Ala., and he's a reporter for AL.com. Thanks so much for being with us.
JOHN SHARP: Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So fill us in, for those of us who may not know, the situation with Governor Bentley. He's been under a lot of scrutiny for the last year due to some, let's say, salacious allegations. What's the story?
SHARP: Yeah. The allegations surfaced about 10 months ago. And essentially, what had happened is that a recording of him making some less-than-noble comments toward his top campaign adviser came out and some salacious sayings involved. And it generated quite a scandal here in Alabama that has continued on to this day, even though some of the interest and intrigue in this particular scandal has died off a little bit as the months have worn on.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But the problem became actually political and legal. In 2016, the state legislature was trying to impeach Governor Bentley after this scandal, right?
SHARP: Oh, yes. Yes. You know, there was enough lawmakers, state lawmakers, signed on to pursue with the impeachment process, and therefore a committee was established to look into the possibility of impeaching the governor. But as of November 3, that process was suspended. And that's kind of where we're at right now.
There's a little dispute going on in the legislature whether or not they can continue on with these proceedings or if the Alabama attorney general's office is going to look into it further, whether or not they're going to investigate. We're at kind of a standstill in the process.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm glad you mentioned that. Attorney General Luther Strange - what's his role in this?
SHARP: Well, right now, it could potentially be a very intriguing situation because the Alabama attorney general is interested in Jeff Sessions' seat. And Governor Robert Bentley has that authority to pick who will be the replacement for Jeff Sessions if Jeff Sessions is confirmed, as we all think he will be. But Luther Strange - his name has popped up as a possible and probably a likely replacement.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So let me get this straight. Attorney General Luther Strange, tasked with investigating criminal activity of the governor, is now angling for possibly the vacant Senate seat, which the subject of his investigation appoints, the governor. Is there any evidence that they're colluding, that there's - that he's decided to possibly mothball this investigation in order to get this Senate appointment?
SHARP: Well, there's no evidence of an actual collusion going on. You know, the governor himself has admitted to interviewing 20 different people for Jeff Sessions' seat.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: How do people in Alabama feel about having their governor, who I imagine a lot of folks want to see impeached, picking their new senator?
SHARP: Well, I think there are some mixed views on that. Right now, the governor has indicated he has a choice to call a special election before 2018 to give the public the ability to vote on the new senator. But he has chosen, as of about two weeks ago, that he is going to forego the election process in order to save the state money. And there are some mixed views about that right now.
You know, the governor's pick will be in office for about 18 months. People will know him more and give that person the opportunity to do some things in that Senate seat that probably would not have been able to do if that he or she had to run for election in 2017.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: John Sharp is a reporter for AL.com following all the things going on down there in Mobile, Ala. Thanks so much for being with us.
SHARP: Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
The owner of the San Diego Chargers has confirmed after much speculation that he's moving his team to LA. Chargers fans did not take it well. At least one fan lobbed eggs at the team's headquarters. Others burned memorabilia.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: I just took my Charger gear off and put it in the pile with the rest of them like the garbage that the Chargers are.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I've spent a lot of money. I'm a season ticket holder. And it just makes me sad that I can't be anymore.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: My mom and my uncle, they're probably turning over in their grave right now 'cause they're the reason that I'm a Charger fan right now.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We're going to talk about the agony of abandonment on this week's Sunday sport chat, our weekly conversation about sports and culture on and off the field. Joining us today is Juliet Litman. She's managing editor of the sports website The Ringer. Thanks so much for being with us.
JULIET LITMAN: Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let's talk about the Chargers particularly. What do they mean to their fans? We just heard there one man talking about a family legacy, real grief.
LITMAN: Well, I think NFL teams in general inspire so much connection between the fans and the players and the organization. And I think that the most sort of dramatic examples of fan abandonment, as you put it, really come from NFL teams. And that, of course, includes the Chargers. I think it's also a little bit trickier here opposed to a move like the Rams last year where they're not really moving that far.
So it's almost like adding insult to injury where the Chargers are so important to their fans and the sense of, like, what the city is. You know, they're a city with two teams, or they were - the Padres and the Chargers - and now they've lost the Chargers. But it's not like they've moved across the country. They've just moved 90 minutes away, essentially.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do fans continue to follow a team like the Chargers when it's skipped town, or is it like a spurned lover type of thing? You know, I never want to hear their name again. They've left me.
LITMAN: Sure. I think it's definitely more of the latter, of the spurned lover. A lot of - if you read the literature of teams moving, a lot of times it's compared to a divorce. And the feelings are really quite intense. And I think the divorce metaphor actually works well here because if you care about football, it's not like you can just kind of block out the team if you want to remain invested in the NFL. You know, there's a limited number of teams, and they'll be coming across your news transom. But a lot of the fans that stay invested in the sport move on from the team.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: To keep on with this metaphor, belabor it, if you will...
LITMAN: Sure.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...Do they fall in love again? Do they - you know, do they find another team to root for?
LITMAN: I don't know in the case of the Chargers. It seems unlikely there'll be another team in San Diego any time soon. So I think that you direct your passions towards a different sport or a different team. I remember when the Nets moved to Brooklyn from New Jersey there was a conversation of do Nets fans go with them, or is that a time where when your team is leaving you can just jump on a different ship? And I think that often jumping on a different ship is more satisfying. I think with the Chargers, they'll keep some of their fans. But I think that it will be a lot of resentment towards Dean Spanos, the owner.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So team leaves, bereft fans on the one side, and then the Chargers are moving to LA. Let's use them as an example. That's a town with a lot of sports teams. Is there room in the heart of, you know, Los Angelenos for a new team? I mean, will the Chargers find a new fan base?
LITMAN: I think it's going to be tough. I live in Los Angeles, and we're just coming off of the first Rams season in over 20 years. And, you know, they were playing at the Coliseum. They don't have their stadium yet. But they were not filling the stadium yet, and that has been a big narrative around them. The Lakers and the Dodgers are so popular here.
And even the Clippers, who have been here a long time, also having moved from San Diego, have yet to find that same dedicated fan base despite the fact they've actually been much better than the Lakers for the last few years and they have two legitimate stars in Chris Paul and Blake Griffin. So if that's any indication of a San Diego team moving up the coast, it doesn't bode well for the Chargers, particularly since the Rams are still trying to find - like, re-find their footing as a Los Angeles team.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Juliet Litman of The Ringer. Really enjoyed having you on. Thanks.
LITMAN: Thanks so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRIBECA SONG, "GET LARGE")
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
We were noodling around on the internet this week when we came across a welcome message from Coventry Cathedral in England, and we thought you might like to hear it. When visitors arrive, they'll see a sign on the door and it says this.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We extend a special welcome to those who are single, married, divorced, widowed, straight, gay, confused, well-heeled or down-at-heel. We especially welcome wailing babies and excited toddlers. We welcome you whether you can sing like Pavarotti or just growl quietly to yourself. You're welcome here if you're just browsing, just woken up or just got out of prison. We don't care if you're more Christian than the Archbishop of Canterbury or haven't been to church since Christmas 10 years ago. We extend a special welcome to those who are over 60 but not grown up yet and to teenagers who are growing up too fast.
We welcome keep-fit moms, football dads, starving artists, tree huggers, latte sippers, vegetarians, junk food eaters. We welcome those who are in recovery or still addicted. We welcome you if you're having problems, are down in the dumps or don't like organized religion. We're not that keen on it either. We offer welcome to those who think the Earth is flat, work too hard, don't work, can't spell, or are here because Granny is visiting and wanted to come to the cathedral. We welcome those who are inked, pierced, both or neither.
We offer a special welcome to those who could use a prayer right now, had religion shoved down their throats as kids or got lost on the Ring Road and wound up here by mistake. We welcome pilgrims, tourists, seekers, doubters and you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Now, we thought that was really rather lovely and self-deprecating for a venerable old cathedral such as this one, so we rang up the Reverend Kathryn Fleming in Coventry to find out why it's there and where it came from.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
KATHRYN FLEMING: It's a pleasure.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So please tell us, how did this welcome message wind up on your front door?
FLEMING: Well, it's a slightly convoluted story, to be honest, because a few years ago, long before I came to Coventry, somebody sent it to me from - a friend in the States - and said, this sounds like you, Kathryn. And I kept it and included it in a sermon in 2015 as a kind of this is where I'd like us to be heading kind of aspirational goal.
And people liked it, so we put it on the front cover of our service booklet. And it then went slightly mad. Lots of people picked it up and were excited by it, and it became a thing. But of course, it wasn't mine originally at all.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you have any idea where it came from?
FLEMING: Well, I received it first from a friend in the States. But in its last kind of flurry of activity on the internet, somebody contacted me and said they thought it came from a little church in Wales who had asked that whenever it was used people would just thank God for the writer.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Obviously right now in the United Kingdom, in the United States, really in so many places in the world, there are so many divisions. It's a time of great worry and consternation, also hope. How do you think this message fits into that?
FLEMING: Well, for us at Coventry, our core calling is reconciliation. Our cathedral was bombed in 1940, and a new cathedral was built around the premise that we would work for peace and reconciliation. But our core message was not Father forgive them, but Father forgive all of us who mess up day by day. So it's about being a place where people can leave their differences at the door and come into conversation with one another and with God.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So if anyone knows where this originally came from and you want to help us find out, you have any clues, you can go to WEEKEND EDITION's Facebook page and read it there. And please leave your comments. The Reverend Kathryn Fleming. She is canon pastor at Coventry Cathedral in England. Thank you so much.
FLEMING: Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
On the first day of 2017, Richmond, Va., welcomed a new mayor. He's only 35 years old, a millennial. His name is Levar Stoney, and he is the youngest person ever to hold that office. Two hours south of Washington, D.C., Richmond is a city of 200,000 people, and it's rapidly changing. Economic growth has revitalized its downtown and riverfront. But 1 in 4 residents still lives in poverty.
Over the next year, we'll be checking in with Mayor Stoney to hear how he's dealing with Richmond's challenges. Mayor Stoney joins us from city hall in Richmond, Va.
Welcome to the program, sir.
MAYOR LEVAR STONEY: Hey Lulu. How are you?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm very well. Thank you.
Just to get a sense of your priorities coming in - this is obviously the first time that you're mayor. You're young. You're a Democrat. You have an agenda. What is it briefly?
STONEY: Well, you know, I ran on improving the quality of life of children in this city. Forty percent of our children live in poverty - 40 percent. I knew I could use my role to be what I call the grand convener, bringing all our partners around the table, whether it's the city council or the school board, to focus on doing our part in improving the quality of life of the child. So that was one of my priorities. But No. 2, ensuring that kids have a place to go after school that was going to provide a high-quality enrichment - helping with your homework and tutoring, access to arts and recreation - but also a place where they can get a healthy meal after school.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I mean, this is personal for you. I read that, as a kid, your dad used to tell you that you were one paycheck away from being on the street.
STONEY: Yeah, I remember vividly, you know. And I never believed it because, you know, as a kid, you're living in your own little world. And when I got to college, I used to fill out my own FAFSA forms to ask for student loans and grants and scholarships. And I would actually take a look at my dad's W-2s, and he only made, you know, between $30,000 and $35,000 a year. And he was right - one paycheck away from being on the streets.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Delving into some of the statistics of Richmond has been interesting. Like many cities across America, you are seeing an increase in violent crime, 17 percent increase from 2015 to 2016. Why are those numbers going up?
STONEY: Well, you know, for many years, crime has been very low here in Richmond. I think in those lean years, unfortunately, though, we took our foot off the gas and did not provide our police department with the proper staffing levels but also with the proper pay to get the job done. But additionally, I think we have to redouble our efforts in community policing. That means putting more people back on the beat connecting with their communities but also investing in leveraging technology out there as well, like a lot of other cities.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'd like to talk to you about race. Obviously, you're an African-American mayor in a city that's half black. But it was also the capital of the Confederacy. What does the conversation around race look like in Richmond right now?
STONEY: You know what? During the campaign, someone asked me if my campaign was about race. And I told them I never thought so. I think my generation, millennials, we don't see race the same way that preceding generations before us, baby boomers and others. We see this as - this is something we have to fight together. And so yes, we have a - we have a horrible history, you can say. And you look at our segregated schools or our concentrated poverty - those, to me, are relics of that Confederate culture from years and years ago. That's what we want to work on together as one Richmond. We want to write that next great chapter.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Your election was one of the bright spots, let's face it, for the Democratic Party this past election.
STONEY: (Laughter) I've heard that so many times, Lulu (laughter).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It did not go well.
STONEY: Every text message, every Facebook message starts the same way - your election was a bright spot on November 8.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: There's been a lot of debate about how Democratic mayors of cities will deal with this incoming administration, the Republican-led Congress. Do you see your role as basically being a haven for certain progressive ideals? Will you make Richmond into a sanctuary city, for example, for immigrants?
STONEY: Yeah, I think the election of Donald Trump makes a job as mayor more important than it has ever been before. I see myself as a guardian of progressive values. I've seen what fellow cities, like Seattle, have done in institutionalizing the fact that this is a city that's open to everyone. You know, that's a commitment I made, and that's a commitment I plan on following through on.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Are you worried about the consequences? You could have federal funding taken away.
STONEY: You know, as a mayor and as a chief executive, you always have to basically do a cost-benefit analysis. But I got into politics and public service to right the wrongs and to give the voice to a voiceless. I think if Richmonders are on the menu, I'm going to damn sure stand up for them.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Mayor Levar Stoney of Richmond, Va. - we'll be checking back in with him throughout his first year in office.
Thanks so very much for being with us.
STONEY: Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Washington, D.C., is getting ready for the inauguration. There are risers, bunting and security fences popping up around the National Mall. And there is the arrival, of course, of many people who voted for Donald Trump. They're excited about the inauguration of a new president.
It was cold and drizzling yesterday afternoon outside the White House. But that didn't stop the Murano family from doing a little sightseeing. They're from Chicago. And Jennifer Murano said she's been tuned into this election for a long time.
JENNIFER MURANO: I've watched it from the first primary all the way through, never missed a beat. So it's been awesome - and especially liked educating my children about everything that's going on.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Her seventh-grade son was ready to pay attention.
JOEY MURANO: My parents just told me to start watching the debates, so I started watching and then started getting, like, interested in it. And then it was just amazing to see, like, all these politics compete to try a president. And then Trump was just outstanding.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Joey Murano was wearing a make America great again hat he'd just picked up from a street vendor. In this campaign, you couldn't escape politics, even in the classroom.
JOEY: Yeah. Kids were screaming, like, go Hillary. And then I was trying to tell them, like, you don't know what you're talking about.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Friday's parade route will take President Trump's motorcade right past the new Trump International Hotel. It's already become an attraction here. We found one Trump supporter, Andy McDermott, looking through a window. It seems that's as close as he'll get to the celebrations.
ANDY MCDERMOTT: Yeah, I would like to be here for the inauguration, but I don't have tickets for it. I was too late.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But for the moment, before the crowds arrive...
MCDERMOTT: We're probably going to go around and see if we can get in and have a coffee.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: A group of college students was taking pictures outside the hotel. They've just arrived in Washington for a semester-long internship. This will be Jason Summers' first time at an inauguration, and he's got a personal reason to look forward to the incoming Trump administration.
JASON SUMMERS: I'm actually a business and accounting major, so I'm pretty excited to see, actually, more of a businessman being in power and kind of seeing what happens there.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Fellow intern Keera Soofel knows that not everyone in D.C. is as enthusiastic as they are.
KEERA SOOFEL: I'm excited to just see how everything plays out, especially since D.C. is mostly liberal. So I think the day and especially the day after with the women's march will be very interesting.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Inauguration weekend in Washington also means parties and balls around the city to celebrate the new president. There will be alternative events, too. The Peace Ball is one of them. It'll be held at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture on Thursday. Notable guests include actors and writers, like Angela Davis, Ashley Judd, Danny Glover and Alice Walker.
Andy Shallal is organizer of the Peace Ball. He's a local community activist and entrepreneur. He owns Washington's iconic Busboys and Poets restaurant chain. He came to our studios in D.C. to tell us more about the Peace Ball.
Welcome.
ANDY SHALLAL: Thank you so much.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So tell me a little bit about the Peace Ball. What's the idea behind this?
SHALLAL: The Peace Ball is a gathering of artists and activists and progressives to sort of take a moment and pause and assess all the successes we've had for the past few years - successes around the environment, around marriage equality, around women's rights. Sometimes in very difficult times, we forget to stop and celebrate and take that pause.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you've organized this Peace Ball twice before, during President Obama's two inaugurations. What's different about this one in your view?
SHALLAL: Well, you know, I remember the election of 2008. And when that election was announced that President Obama won, there was this jubilation. The next morning, I woke up and I said - we can't let this moment go. We have to extend it. Maybe we can throw a ball. I'd never been to a ball, never done a ball. You know, I don't go to balls. So I thought, let's throw one, you know. And lo and behold, we were able to secure a space, and we sold out. One thousand six hundred people showed up and had a fabulous time.
So this time, of course, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture - such an iconic place and really speaks to what America is about - it's a country of hope and resilience like no other. And we thought it'd be an ideal space to have an event like that that speaks to those values that make us all so American.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is this is a protest, though? Is this a space for people in opposition to the incoming administration?
SHALLAL: It's really not a protest, honestly. I mean, I know we've been asked that. This is more of a celebration, a chance for people to come together and rally around some of the great successes we've had.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I was reading in The Washington Post. They asked, you know, won't some progressive party-goers feel like crying into their punch instead of shimmying to Solange Knowles?
SHALLAL: I have no patience for sadness. I mean, this is not the time to cry into your punch (laughter). This is the time to just, you know, really kind of lift yourself up and brush yourself off and move forward. You know, democracy is not a spectator sport. It is something that has to be fought for all the time. And the minute we start blinking and falling asleep at the wheel, things start to slip back. We don't want to go backwards.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Some people listening to this might hear your words and wonder if you're Peace Ball is a nostalgia ball...
SHALLAL: (Laughter).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...If it really is looking back to, you know, a presidency that you obviously embraced.
SHALLAL: Well, I have to say that it's really far more than that. I think it's a prep rally to move forward. It's a way for people to say, I am not alone. I'm with 3,000 people who feel like there's a better world out there, who believe that change has to happen by us coming together toward a common goal - not a common goal to say I'm against somebody but a common goal to say we are here for peace and justice. And we are the change that we hope to see in the world.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Andy Shallal, organizer of this Thursday's Peace Ball in Washington, D.C., thank you so very much for being with us.
SHALLAL: It's my pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF SOLANGE SONG, "ODE TO MARVIN")
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
This past week, a lot of the news was about the news media.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: BuzzFeed, which is a failing pile of garbage...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SEAN SPICER: Is a sad and pathetic attempt to get clicks.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Can you give us a question?
TRUMP: Don't be - no, I'm not going to give you a - I'm not going to give you a question.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Despite all the developments having to do with Russian hacking and Cabinet nominations, a lot of the media coverage focused on Trump's interaction with reporters. We spoke to our media correspondent, David Folkenflik, about the president-elect's attacks on the press.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: He's turning any story that is inconvenient or highly critical or subjects him to unwelcome scrutiny as a fake story. He used the phrase fake news, which has been in vogue, to talk about what are effectively hoaxes, ungrounded in fact and unsubstantiated. And it is true that the allegations raised in this dossier that was obtained by the intelligence chiefs relied on a lot of unverified information, but that - ones that they took seriously and from a source that intelligence officials took seriously enough that they did, in fact, truly brief President Obama and Donald Trump about them.
So, you know, Trump is saying the fact that you guys are reporting even on these briefings is fake news, CNN. And I reject you. And you're not legitimate. And that use of that rhetoric, that inversion, is very effective in sort of throwing reporters off guard.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So I want you to deconstruct a little bit this inversion, as you call it. When President-elect Donald Trump uses words like fake news and turns the meaning around, what does that say to you?
FOLKENFLIK: The first thing is that it's a way in which you can rob the media of whatever standing it has left to raise questions about the leaders of government and to present themselves as honest brokers to the public and the audiences they seek to both inform and represent. Additionally, Trump comes from the arena of reality television, of tabloid New York culture, and conflict is a key element. It's entertaining and it's diverting.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you're suggesting he's better equipped at this than possibly we in the media are.
FOLKENFLIK: Oh, I think he's much better equipped at it than folks in what we think of as the responsible mainstream media. Absolutely. I think there are a lot of reporters that say, my goodness, BuzzFeed is going to be yet again on a blacklist in terms of being allowed to report on the Trump entourage and as it'll become the White House. And so a lot of people, I think, are concerned about being shut out.
I think reporters should be more concerned about subjecting the Trump administration to thorough inquiry, not being thrown off their game, not being thrown off tough questions that need answers - regardless of how willing Trump and his circle prove to be to answer them - and to worry a lot less about access, and to worry a lot less about whether or not he calls on you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We saw in the fallout of this press conference some solidarity, but a lot of infighting in the media. What should the media be doing going forward?
FOLKENFLIK: Sure. I mean, you saw people like Shep Smith of Fox News stand up for Jim Acosta and for CNN. You know, FOX News, not always one that shines a warm light on its competitors, usually going after them. Shep Smith said, these guys are doing journalistic function. They're doing their jobs. They shouldn't be attacked for that. And that's the kind of support that I think over time matters. When Fox was being attacked, Jake Tapper, then with ABC, told Obama administration officials they shouldn't be going after reporters, you know, and shutting them out simply 'cause they didn't like the kind of coverage they were receiving.
That kind of standing up in a public way to support fellow journalists, competitors I think does make a difference. But I think they also need to ensure that the questions that underlie some of the coverage that really have earned the irritation and anger of Trump and his aides, those questions can't be set aside. It can't - we can't only cover the conflict. We have to cover the meat beneath it.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: David Folkenflik. He's NPR's media correspondent. We are going to need to hear more from you, I think, over the next weeks and months.
FOLKENFLIK: Well, happy to do it any time.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Watch any music video, any ballet performance or pretty much any professional dance recital, and you're going to notice all the dancers are cut from a certain type of figure - thin, tall, long legs, long arms. That's how dancer Akira Armstrong describes those dancers. Armstrong isn't one of them, though, and she's giving that stereotype a swift high kick in the tutu.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
AKIRA ARMSTRONG: So I flew Los Angeles to be in a music video with Beyonce. And while I was there, I wanted to get representation from a dance agency so that I could book more jobs. And no one would represent me because of my size. I want to be the pioneer for plus-size women (laughter).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's Akira Armstrong talking about her dance company Pretty Big Movement, a company for women with curves. She joins us now from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being here.
ARMSTRONG: Hey.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Hey.
ARMSTRONG: It's me. It's Akira.
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It is you. And I'm really pleased you could join us. So many dancers would love to book a Beyonce video (laughter).
ARMSTRONG: Absolutely.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, I mean...
ARMSTRONG: Who wouldn't? Beyonce?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, Beyonce - I mean, I'd like to be in a Beyonce video.
ARMSTRONG: Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't (laughter)?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah.
ARMSTRONG: Yeah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what was it like to be in two of them?
ARMSTRONG: Oh, just to be in the same space with Beyonce was just enough for me, you know? Along with that, just learning the choreography for the video and being around so many other talented dancers, I...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Were you surprised, though, as a woman with curves that they would call you?
ARMSTRONG: Oh, I was shocked. During the audition process, I was even shocked that I was even chosen to be in a video with Beyonce. Are you kidding me?
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is it different being a plus-size dancer? Do you have to choreograph your moves differently?
ARMSTRONG: Yes. When people look at a full-figured girl, automatically they just think, they can't do. But there are lot of plus-sized people that can really dance and move. I mean, you have to know your body as a dancer. You have to know how to transfer your weight. Of course, you know, being a woman of my aesthetic, I know my body. I know what I'm capable of doing. So you just have to be comfortable in your own skin.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What kind of reaction are you getting? I mean, it's going viral, but what have been the reactions from people?
ARMSTRONG: The reaction is you have inspired me so much. I have given up as - being a dancer. I've gotten testimonies coming my way. And I'm just so grateful. I'm just speechless.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you were on this journey before you got to where you are right now, were there moments that you just felt really discouraged? Like...
ARMSTRONG: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...This was never going to happen?
ARMSTRONG: To be honest with you, a year ago, my mom had suffered a stroke and a brain aneurysm...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm sorry.
ARMSTRONG: ...And she was in a coma for about three months. I couldn't talk to her. I, you know, didn't know if she was going to make it. So I know if it would've went the other way - because thank God, my mom is still here with us today - she would have never wanted me to give up.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you think society kind of bombards us with these images of perfection constantly, especially women?
ARMSTRONG: Yes, they do. It becomes very discouraging when you want to take on the role of being a dancer and you're not the carbon copy body type as a dancer. So a lot of people get discouraged. We need to see more images of the everyday woman. And that's what Pretty Big is. You - a lot of the women in my company are - they look like the average woman walking down the street here - right here on 42nd Street, you know? I think we are so relatable to so many people, which is why the video did go viral.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Akira Armstrong, CEO and founder of Pretty Big Movement. Thanks so much for joining us.
ARMSTRONG: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GET ME BODIED")
BEYONCE: (Singing) Can you get me bodied? I want to be myself tonight. Can you get me bodied? I want to be myself tonight. Don't you...
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to shake up Washington. And the inauguration, it seems, will be no exception. Breaking with tradition, Trump's inaugural committee has replaced the man who's been the announcer at inauguration parades for the past 60 years. It's hired a new voice, that of Steve Ray. He's a local announcer who's voiced commercials for the Washington Nationals baseball team, and he joins us now on the line.
Hello and congratulations.
STEVE RAY: Lulu, thank you so much. I'm actually a big fan of yours, believe it or not. I find your articles about Brazil just fascinating.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter).
RAY: And that's the absolute truth. Thank you so much for having me on and even more so for being flexible. I know I was supposed to be on earlier in the day, but we had the dress rehearsal...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The dress rehearsal...
RAY: ...For the inauguration parade.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...How did that go?
RAY: Oh, phenomenal. I am very impressed with the - literally 13,000 military folks who are part of the logistics of this. Six thousand of them are in the parade. But on top of that, you've got literally hundreds of volunteers coordinating every aspect of this. And you know Washington. You're here with us.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yes.
RAY: Pennsylvania Avenue, from the Capitol to the White House - that's a good bit of territory to cover and keep everything very tight to time.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right.
RAY: But everything went off without a hitch this morning. And the marching units, the equestrian units, drill teams and even some of the civic organizations, like these beautiful pipe and drum corps from different first responder groups around the country - this is going to be a beautiful parade, and it will run maybe about an hour-fifteen, hour-twenty, tops. Mr. Trump has requested that it runs about an hour or so so that he can get right to work.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And you'll be making the announcement. Just for those people who don't know, what does the inaugural announcer do?
RAY: Well, the president's announcer, in particular - and there are five other announcers that we've chosen to be along that route as you come up Pennsylvania Avenue just because of the the fact that you can't have a PA guy that covers that entire length - that one of the things that's very key for me is that because that person now is the commander in chief, whoever takes that oath of office, they are required by protocol to stand and, in some cases, salute when there is a unit or a color guard.
So I work with the military protocol folks to be the eyes and ears of the president and the first family who then respond...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you're the...
RAY: ...Right across the street.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You're basically the presidential whisper, if you will.
RAY: Exactly. I like that, yeah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So...
RAY: Exactly I'm - OK. That's a new hashtag for me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) Presidential...
RAY: No, he's the Trump whisperer.
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The Trump whisperer. Just briefly, in a few sentences - you supported Mr. Trump during the election. You were a volunteer for his campaign. Is that how you were tapped for the job?
RAY: Actually, it's only part of the story. And I'm - Lulu, thank you for allowing me to clear this up, especially to your audience. And I love NPR, by the way. You guys, historically, have done a great job (coughing). Pardon me. I've been talking for two and half hours.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Just in a few sentences - we're running out of time. Just a few sentences.
RAY: OK - very quickly. Very quickly - I was a driver in the Trump motorcade. I was not a campaign volunteer. And the other thing that people think is I'm a huge donor. I paid all of $35 for a souvenir gold-and-black Trump card. It had everything to do with my qualifications and nothing to do with who I voted for because it isn't a political position.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: There you go. Steve Ray will be the announcer for the inauguration parade for President-elect Donald Trump this Friday. Thank you.
RAY: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE UNITED STATES NAVY BAND PERFORMANCE OF JOHN PHILIP SOUSA'S "STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER")
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Twins Matilda and Harry are close. Matilda is a wedding photographer. She's a hypochondriac, a failed artist, and she's prone to lies - little ones and really big ones. Harry is a professor - unpublished, untenured, and, as it turns out, unscrupulous, not unlike his twin Matilda. They are both 35. Rachel Hulin's new novel - it's called "Hey Harry, Hey Matilda" - is the story of these siblings. It's told through their emails and charts and graphs and drawings. What emerges is something very weird, very surprising, very, very funny and just a little bit icky.
Rachel Hulin joins us from her home in Rhode Island. Thanks for being here.
RACHEL HULIN: Thank you so much.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK. So this novel begins with a lie. Tell us the lie. It's Matilda that told it. It's sort of like the catalyst for the novel.
HULIN: Yeah. The first lie is just a mistake that tumbles out, and Matilda is dealing with it. She tells a boyfriend that she has a dead twin. And it turns out that the boyfriend also has a dead twin, which is unfortunate for her because she is immediately stuck in that situation.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, I have to say - when I read that, who would kill off their twin? What does that say about who she is in your mind?
HULIN: I don't know. You know - well, I do know. I feel that she is trying to be a more interesting person to those around her. And she's sort of deeply insecure, and she gets performative. And she had too much to drink, and she just blurted this out. In any case, it's - becomes a big problem for her to get out of.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: One of the things that's so interesting about these two characters - and it's done in this form - right? - of these letters or emails back and forth between these two siblings - is the intimacy that there is between them and the knowledge that siblings have and twins have. Describe to me, in your viewpoint, you know, who are these two characters? Who is Harry, and who is Matilda?
HULIN: Well, they're both sort of at this late stage of child adulthood that a lot of people are in in New York, I think, when they're in their late 20s, early 30s. And they're really trying to figure out who they're going to be. There's a lot of societal pressure to have families and partners and careers and do good for the world.
Harry is a professor in Connecticut. And they're both creatives. One of them, Harry, is a writer, and Matilda is a photographer. And so they're very similar, and they're sharing their stories of trying to be successful career-wise and also figure out what the next step for them is. And I think they're deeply anxious about what those steps will be.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And they're very funny. I want to read a section that kind of gets at their dynamic. They seem sort of very broken and weird, but they have this back-and-forth that's quite telling.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOOK, "HEY HARRY, HEY MATILDA")
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Reading) Harry, my favorite emotion is shame because it's the one I can deal with the least and the one that comes up the most. Thanks for asking.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Reading) Matilda, I didn't need to ask because I knew that already.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Reading) Harry, oh, well, did you know I've never made myself a sandwich?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Reading) Matilda, yes.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Reading) Harry, say something mean to me so I can react badly.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Reading) Matilda, tomorrow I'll tell you the dream I had, and you won't be in it.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Reading) Harry, jerk.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, very irreverent, the kinds of interactions that you would have with your sibling that other people might not see. Let's talk a little bit about how this novel came about. I mean, it is the first, as I understand it, Instagram novel that actually started in that form and then made its way to publishing and not possibly vice versa or in other formations.
HULIN: It's had, like, really a weird life so far, I would say. It began as a blog that I started called "Harry and Matilda." And it was really just, like, a way for Matilda to get some things off her chest, and Harry would sort of come in and absolve her of things. And then I put it away. I ended up doing a children's book and then, years later, coming back to this idea, realizing it was sort of sitting there and I wanted to make it into a full manuscript.
And so I did that. I wrote a full manuscript really quickly, and it was sort of missing something, I felt like. So I - being a photographer-writer, I'm always trying to figure out exactly which medium I want to work in. So I decided to shoot pictures for the project. And so I spent a full summer casting the book, basically. I found some friends to be Harry and Matilda, and I put them in a tree. And I made a website for them.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And you have all these curated photographs, you know - a pair of painted toenails, a book of stories accompanied by emails. It has this entire life on Instagram.
HULIN: Yeah. And then a friend of mine, who is a publicist, said you should put it on Instagram. And it immediately really worked. And I think it's a testament to what words and images together can do and what added dimension that is. And it was really incredible to see because people were emailing Matilda with questions about their own creative lives.
And it was almost like PostSecret. Like, people were sending me their deepest, darkest secrets and lies because I think, obviously, they were really relating to Matilda and Harry getting themselves into sticky situations. And that's what I love about Matilda. She's, like, so flawed, and she admits it (laughter).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you think this is the future of how books could be given birth to? I mean, people have been looking for a long time on how to meld social media and novels and art.
HULIN: No, I'm thinking so much about that. It seems so obvious to have serialized things. I think people are taking in literature in much smaller, bite-sized pieces. I think people are so visually literate now in a way they weren't five years ago. Even a year ago, when I started this project on Instagram, most people's pictures did not have captions. I think it's just sort of an obvious way to move literature, and it was a really fun way for me to explore this story.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you think Matilda and Harry remain sympathetic? They're really this mix of unlikable, charming. Do you think people can sort of embrace them fully?
HULIN: I think some people can. I mean, a friend of mine read the book and said, you know, I could never stay angry with Matilda for very long. But I'm sure other people will stay angry with them. And I think that in itself is interesting. I think that they bring up a lot of shame for people. I think that some people just find it icky. Definitely, people have strong reactions to this book one way or another, which is fascinating and, I think, sort of important and good. You know, I think thinking about taboos and doing the wrong thing and how that makes us feel is important. So I'm choosing to embrace that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Rachel Hulin's book is called "Hey Harry, Hey Matilda."
Thanks so much for being with us.
HULIN: Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Vidya Iyer is a YouTuber. Her claim to fame - cover music videos.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
CASEY BREVES: (Singing) Pull the sheets right off the corner of that mattress that you stole from your roommate back in Boulder. We ain't ever getting older.
VIDYA VOX: (Singing in Hindi).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Vidya singing "Closer" by The Chainsmokers fused with "Kabira," a song from the Bollywood movie "Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani." Vidya blends Top 40 American hits with music from her native India along with producing her own original music. Her YouTube subscribers - and she has more than a million of them - don't know her as Vidya Iyer, though. To them, she is Vidya Vox, and her music videos have collectively amassed more than 100 million views. Vidya Vox joins us now from our studios at NPR West.
Hi. So great to have you on the show.
VOX: Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So tell me a little bit about your mash-ups. You're bringing all these influences into your music. Tell me how you do that. What's the inspiration?
VOX: I was born in India, and - I was born in Chennai - South Indian. And my parents moved to the U.S. when I was about 8 or 9 years old. And so growing up in the West but listening and, like, learning South Indian classical music, I always felt like it was two different worlds. And I was like, how can I bring the two worlds together? And I - that's basically the short version of how I decided to do mash-ups.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
VOX: (Singing in Hindi).
VIDYA VOX AND CASEY BREVES: (Singing in Hindi).
VOX: (Singing in Hindi).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what's interesting is you were pre-med. You were studying psychology. And then, all of a sudden, you make this shift into music. How did that happen?
VOX: Yeah, I didn't ever think about music as a career. Like, it was never - it's just something like an extracurricular activity that my mom put me in. And as every South Asian, you know, like, child, I was like - oh, OK, I can do medicine. And I mean, I am very...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Make your parents proud. Become a doctor.
VOX: Yeah, exactly.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Exactly.
VOX: And I love science. I still do. But I think it was junior year of college, I collaborated with Shankar Tucker, who is an amazing musician. And he sort of showed me that, like, you don't need a record label to show and share your music with the world. And YouTube has been such an amazing platform for that. And that's why I decided, like, after I graduated, that I could do this.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What is it like being a YouTube star? Is it better to be able to directly give your music to the people or - rather than the traditional route of having a record label?
VOX: I think when you have such direct communication with your fans, it's a good thing. But it's also that people - I don't know, you can't really please everyone. And that's something that I have to constantly remind myself.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you've incorporated traditional South Indian music into your songs. There's one particular song called "Be Free." Is that a message about your own journey?
VOX: Yeah, it is. I - you know, I used to always - I don't know - not be ashamed. But I would always hide that part of me, like, hide being Indian. And - because it wasn't, quote, unquote, "cool." And but now I wear it proudly on my sleeve.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BE FREE")
VOX: (Singing) I'ma (ph) sing it louder like, oh, let me, be free.
VANDANA IYER: (Singing in Hindi).
VANDANA IYER AND VIDYA VOX: (Singing in Hindi).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So tell me, what are the lyrics that we're listening to right now? What are the actual words saying?
VOX: So it's (speaking Hindi). The (speaking Hindi) means, like, the princess or the goddess. And she has these weapons, like a sword and all these things in her hand. And she's, like, standing outside the temple, and she's, like, come at me. I'm ready for a fight.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's musician Vidya Iyer, more commonly known as Vidya Vox. Her first EP is set to release this march. Great talking to you.
VOX: You, too. Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BE FREE")
VANDANA IYER AND VIDYA VOX: (Singing in Hindi).
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
From head to toe, a first lady's look is heavily scrutinized. The next first lady will be no exception. Melania Trump was on the cover of Vogue in her Dior wedding dress. She's modeled for Harper's Bazaar and posed nude for GQ. She sold her own line of costume jewelry and watches on QVC.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MELANIA TRUMP: They are really special, unique pieces designed from my own ideas as well from my own jewelry box.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Now the whole world is watching. As NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports, what any first lady wears says a lot.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: The first lady can make a fashion statement like no one else. For that matter, she can make a difference during the campaign. Take the time Michelle Obama appeared on "The Tonight Show" wearing a mustard yellow sweater and printed silk shirt. When Jay Leno asked her what she was wearing, she responded, J. Crew.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE TONIGHT SHOW")
MICHELLE OBAMA: We - ladies, we know J. Crew.
(APPLAUSE)
JAY LENO: Very good.
BLAIR: The message came through. Ikram Goldman was Mrs. Obama's fashion consultant at the time.
IKRAM GOLDMAN: The idea of her being inclusive was very important. And I think it was important to other people who were looking at her to feel like they can have access to that as well.
BLAIR: Obama also championed young American designers. And when the first lady of the United States wears something you made, it's life-changing. Jason Wu's career took off when she wore his one-shouldered, white silk chiffon gown to President Obama's inaugural ball in 2009. Goldman helped select the gown but kept it a secret until that night. She says when Jason Wu saw it on TV, he called her.
GOLDMAN: He was crying. He was shocked. He was happy. He was - he couldn't believe it.
BLAIR: While Michelle Obama was embraced by the fashion industry, Melania Trump comes from it. Trump was a model and often wears European designers - Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, most of which she has reportedly bought off the rack.
ROBIN GIVHAN: It speaks to a bank account. It speaks to a particular kind of social life.
BLAIR: Robin Givhan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic for The Washington Post. She describes Melania Trump's look as body-conscious and expensive.
GIVHAN: There is a polish to it, a glamour to it, but not in a particularly personal or individual way.
BLAIR: But already, her choices are making an impact.
(SOUNDBITE OF REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION)
TRUMP: Thank you very much. You have all been very kind to Donald and me.
BLAIR: For her speech at the Republican National Convention this summer, Mrs. Trump wore an ivory, cotton and silk dress with sleeves that billowed at the elbows. The dress, by Serbian-born designer Roksanda Ilincic, goes for a little more than $2,000. It reportedly sold out in the days following Trump's speech.
Meantime, Washington, D.C., is getting ready for a very different style of first lady.
INGA GUEN: She would look tres chic - tres, tres, tres chic - in this. And then we have another Oscar de la Renta.
BLAIR: For 22 years, Inga Guen has owned a dressy consignment shop in Washington. She describes Melania Trump's style as daring with a slightly eccentric European sensibility. She says she's already had three new clients come into her shop who've been hired by the new administration.
GUEN: I have no idea how they heard about me, but I dressed them. And they were so, so, very happy to have met Melania Trump.
BLAIR: There has been some seam-splitting in the fashion industry over whether or not to work with Melania Trump. Some designers have said absolutely not. Others say it would be an honor to dress any first lady.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUPERMODEL")
RUPAUL: (Singing) It don't matter what you wear. They're checking out your savoir-faire. And it don't matter what you do.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
More than a hundred female inmates who were given sentences in federal prison faced a different fate. They were instead held for years in two windowless rooms in a detention center in New York City, and the conditions there have been found to violate international standards for the treatment of prisoners. From member station WNYC, Alec Hamilton reports.
ALEC HAMILTON, BYLINE: The problem in Brooklyn actually started in Connecticut, in what was the only federal prison for women in the Northeast. But with the prison population across the country increase nearly 10-fold over the last 40 years, and men's prisons overflowing, in December 2012, the Bureau of Prisons decided to move the women out of the Danbury prison and move men in. The women were sent to the Metropolitan Detention Center, a jail in Brooklyn, until a new prison could be built. The move was supposed to last 18 months, but nearly three years later, many remain stuck at MDC.
RAMONA BRANT: We felt like we were animals that was taken to a pound and then that was it. They just closed the door and left us.
HAMILTON: Fifty-three-year-old Ramona Brant was granted clemency by President Obama in February. Before that, she spent the first 19 years of a life sentence for a nonviolent drug charge at Danbury. She says it was OK, there were activities, jobs, access to the outdoors - until March 2014, when she and the others were moved to the jail.
BRANT: Little by little they started filling it up, and before we knew it, it was a hundred and twenty women in this one room, and it was unbearable.
HAMILTON: A report released by the National Association of Women Judges found conditions for the women at MDC violated both the American Bar Association standards and the United Nations standard minimum rules for treatment of prisoners. The judges said the women had no access to the outdoors, and inmates complained of being unable to get appropriate medical care, especially gynecological care. At least one inmate was visibly pregnant. The warden told the judges the Bureau of Prisons can't find doctors willing to work there.
David Patton is the executive director of the Federal Defenders of New York, the public defender service for people who can't afford a private attorney. He says his organization has had issues with the facility for years.
DAVID PATTON: There have been maggots in the food, urine-stained mattresses, dryers that vent into the sleeping area, a lack of fresh air and recreation.
HAMILTON: Unlike Danbury, which is a long-term prison, MDC is a detention center just meant to hold people while they await trial. David Fathi is the director of the ACLU's National Prison Project.
DAVID FATHI: Jails, like the MDCs, tend not to have the programming, the level of medical and mental health treatment, and a whole range of other services that you find in a prison.
HAMILTON: He points out federal courts have ruled that prisoners have the right to outdoor exercise.
FATHI: The Supreme Court has made clear that prison conditions that might be tolerable for a few weeks or even a couple of months can ripen into unconstitutionality if they go on for a sufficiently long period of time.
HAMILTON: Eighty-six-year-old Sister Megan Rice spent 13 months at MDC during her sentence for vandalizing a nuclear facility in Tennessee. She says without appropriate support, the women were denied any real shot at rehabilitation.
MEGAN RICE: They're meant to be given opportunities to grow, to leave the prison as more healed person.
HAMILTON: Neither the Bureau of Prisons, nor the Department of Justice, which oversees it, would talk on record about the conditions or the delay in returning the women to Connecticut. Meanwhile, the Danbury facility is finally ready. The bureau says they began transferring inmates back last month. For more than a hundred women sitting in two large rooms in Brooklyn, that move can't come fast enough. For NPR News, I'm Alec Hamilton in New York City.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE EVPATORIA REPORT SONG, "NAPTALAN")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
All right, so, Rachel, I don't call my wife by the wrong name. But she tells me that occasionally, I do do this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SNORING)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
(Laughter).
GREENE: Although, it doesn't sound that bad. So you can actually create health problems for your partner if you're snoring, and it's a serious thing.
MARTIN: Yes.
GREENE: But there are some gadgets that can help. And here's NPR's Patti Neighmond.
MARTIN: OK.
PATTI NEIGHMOND, BYLINE: Here I am standing in my local pharmacy, looking at a row of anti-snoring aids - nasal strips, Breathe Right, snore therapy. I wonder if any of these work.
KIM HUTCHISON: Talking about what may or may not work, we would first identify where the sound comes from.
NEIGHMOND: Dr. Kim Hutchison is a sleep specialist at Oregon Health and Science University. Before she recommends gadgets, she says there's one important caveat.
HUTCHISON: I don't want to fix their snoring without alerting them to the fact that this may be a symptom of something more serious.
NEIGHMOND: Like sleep apnea, where patients actually stop breathing, sometimes hundreds of times a night. Once that's ruled out, snoring is basically a mechanical problem. And for that, there's an array of what she calls medieval-looking options.
HUTCHISON: Some anti-snoring devices are more medieval than others.
NEIGHMOND: Prongs to keep nasal passages open, chin straps to literally keep your mouth shut and mouth pieces that hold the lower jaw forward.
HUTCHISON: I call this the bulldog effect. It's a mouthpiece that's fit for your mouth, and it holds you in a bit of an underbite. And that helps to hold the tongue forward and the jaw forward, which opens up the physical space in the back of the throat.
NEIGHMOND: The goal of all these devices - decrease congestion in the back of the throat so air flows easily and quietly into the lungs.
HUTCHISON: One that affects the mouth and chin is a tongue bulb. And that is a silicone suction device that fits over your mouth, and it uses negative pressure to hold your tongue in a forward position while you sleep.
NEIGHMOND: Opening up the airway in the back of the throat. Snoring is worse when you sleep on your back, so there are a number of ways to get you on your side. A belt with little cushions attached to the back makes it uncomfortable to sleep that way. Body pillows encourage side sleeping. And then there's a device like a dog collar.
HUTCHISON: Worn around the neck that begin to vibrate when the user turns onto their back. And the vibration slowly increases in intensity.
NEIGHMOND: Until the snorer turns over. A bit startling, but...
HUTCHISON: Right up there with getting a big shove from your partner to turn over on your side.
NEIGHMOND: And if those don't work, Hutchison says you can do what she does. As the wife of a positional snorer, she goes to bed with earplugs. Patti Neighmond, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A thing I am totally guilty of, David - messing up names. I've definitely called...
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Yeah.
MARTIN: ...My kids the wrong names. I know it's really...
GREENE: That's terrible.
MARTIN: No, it's very confusing in my household. Have you ever done that? Have you ever called your wife another name?
GREENE: No, absolutely not. And I can't believe...
MARTIN: Of course you wouldn't.
GREENE: ...You called your kids the wrong name.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
GREENE: That's horrible.
MARTIN: OK, it turns out I am not alone. Don't make me a pariah here. Most everyone does this. It's not random. There is a pattern to it. And Michelle Trudeau is going to explain.
MICHELLE TRUDEAU, BYLINE: Sometimes a scientist investigates a problem prompted by early personal experience. That's what happened to researcher Samantha Deffler from Rollins College.
SAMANTHA DEFFLER: When I was young, my mother used to call me by my siblings' names and by the dog's name.
TRUDEAU: It sounded like this.
DEFFLER: Rebecca (ph), Jessie (ph), Molly (ph), Samantha. (Laughter).
TRUDEAU: Not a big deal - but as a cognitive scientist, it got Samantha Deffler thinking.
DEFFLER: Why this happened, why these types of errors occurred and what the cognitive processes might be underlying these errors.
TRUDEAU: So she surveyed over 1,700 people - men, women, different ages - asking about name mix-ups. And she found naming mistakes are very common. Most everyone does it. Deffler calls it a normal cognitive glitch - not related to a bad memory or to aging, but rather to how your brain categorizes names.
DEFFLER: Overwhelmingly, the wrong name that was used was in the same category.
TRUDEAU: Meaning the same relationship category, like a special folder of family names and a different folder for friends' names stored in the brain.
DEFFLER: So I was being called other family members' names. I was never being called one of my mother's friends' names.
TRUDEAU: Deffler says misnaming happens across the board, to men and women, from college students to older adults. There was one group especially though.
DEFFLER: Especially moms. Any mom I talk to says, you know, I've definitely done this.
TRUDEAU: It works something like this. Say you've got an armful of groceries and you need some quick help from one of your kids. Your brain tries to rapidly retrieve the name from the family folder but...
NEIL MULLIGAN: It may end up retrieving a related but incorrect name.
TRUDEAU: That's Neil Mulligan, a cognitive scientist at UNC Chapel Hill.
MULLIGAN: As one is preparing to produce the utterance, you're activating not just their name but competing names.
TRUDEAU: The names of your other children stored in the family folder.
MULLIGAN: And sometimes these competing names win the battle, and they actually influence the articulation that you produce.
TRUDEAU: Like in that classic scene from the TV show "Friends" where Ross gets his wedding vows just a little bit mixed up.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FRIENDS")
PETER EYRE: (As The Registrar) Now, Ross, repeat after me. I, Ross...
DAVID SCHWIMMER: (As Ross Geller) I, Ross...
EYRE: (As The Registrar) Take thee, Emily...
SCHWIMMER: (As Ross Geller) Take thee, Rachel...
TRUDEAU: Now, Ross probably had both Rachel's and Emily's names in his mental folder of loved ones, and a mental mix-up ensued. And it's not just human loved ones that are filed together.
DEFFLER: Whatever dog we had at the time would be included in the string along with my sister, Rebecca, and my brother, Jessie.
TRUDEAU: Your family dog typically gets filed with other family members and thus mixed up with other family names. This, of course, begs the question, what about your family cat?
DEFFLER: You are much more likely to be called the dog's name than you are to be called the cat's name.
MULLIGAN: And that's interesting. And it implies that, psychologically, we categorize the dog's name along with our family members' names, and we don't do that with cats' names apparently, or hamsters' names, or other animal names.
TRUDEAU: So no need to worry if you do this, Mulligan says reassuringly. It's just an ordinary snafu in pulling up the right name from the right folder on demand. The findings are published in the journal of Memory and Cognition. For NPR News, I'm Michelle Trudeau.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A group of scientists are gathering this week in the U.K. to discuss a giant crack in Antarctica. It's a crack in an ice shelf there that could soon split off a frozen chunk the size of Delaware. Here's NPR's Rae Ellen Bichell to explain what it all means.
RAE ELLEN BICHELL, BYLINE: Last year, Heidi Sevestre spent six weeks living on a giant slab of ice attached to the Antarctic Peninsula.
HEIDI SEVESTRE: It's like being on a different planet. Everything is gigantic. Everything is white.
BICHELL: She and her colleagues would get really excited whenever they saw a bird pass overhead. Everything seemed so frozen and still, but it wasn't.
SEVESTRE: When you're camping on the ice shelf, you have no idea that you're on something that is floating and moving.
BICHELL: The ice shelf is in constant motion - rising with the tides, splitting off icebergs at its edges and growing again as inland glaciers add to it.
Sevestre is a glaciologist with the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The ice shelf she was studying is called Larsen C, and it now has a massive 90-mile-long crack running through it.
SEVESTRE: The big rift is slicing the ice shelf from top to bottom.
BICHELL: It's now a third of a mile deep and as wide across as 25 highway lanes. You might think this is just another sad climate change story, but, in fact, it's more complicated.
ADRIAN LUCKMAN: A lot of things are going on deep inside the ice.
BICHELL: That's Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University in the U.K. He's also leading a project to track changes in the ice shelf. He says climate change has influenced this region. Larsen C used to have two neighbors to the north - Larsen A and Larsen B. As the air and water warmed, those ice shelves started melting and then splintered into shards in 1995 and 2002. But the crack in Larsen C seems to have happened on its own.
LUCKMAN: This is probably not directly attributable to any warming in the region. Although, of course, the warming won't have helped.
BICHELL: Larsen C has a bunch of cracks - all ice shelves do. The one we're talking about has been around since at least the 1960s. The unusual part is that in 2014, this crack and only this crack started growing in spurts. Why?
LUCKMAN: Well, that is a little bit of a mystery, and that's why it drew itself to our attention.
BICHELL: It left other cracks in the dust about 50 miles ago. Now scientists are crunching the data collected from satellites and radar to figure out how.
LUCKMAN: And that knowledge will be useful in helping us to understand other ice shelves and how they might respond to rifts coming in to them.
BICHELL: Scientists are split on how important this crack is for the stability of the whole ice shelf. Some say if this giant section breaks off, it won't make a difference. But others say it could eventually cause the whole shelf to fall apart. And Heidi Sevestre says that scenario could be a problem because right now the ice shelf buttresses glaciers on land.
SEVESTRE: They are slowing down how much ice is coming from the land and goes into the water. So that's the very important role of these ice shelves.
BICHELL: She says according to pessimistic estimates, if the ice shelf completely disintegrated and if all the water packed in those glaciers made its way to the sea, it could significantly raise global sea levels.
SEVESTRE: It is quite a large impact indeed, yeah.
BICHELL: The 30 or so ice shelf experts gathered in the U.K. this week aren't sure whether this more serious chain reaction will happen. But they are confident, at least, that a Delaware-sized chunk will come off. The crack only has 10 miles left to go. Rae Ellen Bichell, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAUSCHKA'S "TAGTRAUM")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Republicans in Congress have already taken the initial steps to start repealing the Affordable Care Act. Democrats are hoping to at the very least slow that process down by rallying public support for the health care law. Those rallies happened around the country over the weekend, and NPR's Scott Detrow went to one of the biggest in Warren, Mich.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: For the past eight years, Obamacare has mostly been defined by its Republican critics. They've railed against its costs, its scope and its mandates. On Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to reframe the debate. Before the landmark health care law was passed, he said, coverage was out of reach for too many people.
(SOUNDBITE OF RALLY)
CHUCK SCHUMER: But average, middle-class people, the people of Macomb County, couldn't afford health care. Now they can.
DETROW: Macomb County, Mich., is an interesting place to make that argument. The county tells the story of Democrats' 2016 woes. It went narrowly for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but gave Donald Trump a 10-point win over Hillary Clinton. That more than accounted for Trump's razor-thin margin in the traditionally Democratic state. Schumer may soon be the most powerful Democrat in Washington. But on Sunday, he was the warm-up act.
(SOUNDBITE OF RALLY)
SCHUMER: And let me say this. Here's Bernie.
(CHEERING)
DETROW: The minority leader had to pause for all the Bernie cheers when the Vermont senator arrived in the middle of Schumer's speech. In Warren, Sanders delivered the message Democrats made at rallies all across the country. Obamacare may have taken a political beating over the years, they said, and it may need changes, but the law has become entrenched enough that an outright repeal would disrupt millions of Americans' lives.
(SOUNDBITE OF RALLY)
BERNIE SANDERS: If you want to improve the Affordable Care Act, let's work together. But if you think you're simply going to throw millions off of health insurance, you got another guess coming.
DETROW: Democrats are pleased with the amount of people who showed up at the rallies. Thousands came to San Francisco's City Hall, where House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi spoke. A large crowd also showed up in Boston to hear Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.
(SOUNDBITE OF RALLY)
ELIZABETH WARREN: We will make our voices heard.
DETROW: In Michigan, people stood outside in the cold for a variety of reasons. Connie Tucker said her family needs Obamacare.
CONNIE TUCKER: I'm on Medicare, but I have a grand-niece who is dependent on the Affordable Care Act. She has a pre-existing condition. She was born with a genetic anomaly.
DETROW: Terry Fields showed up more out of the general dread that so many liberals are feeling on the eve of Trump's inauguration.
TERRY FIELDS: I just believe that all of our rights and privileges are going to be taken away from us by Trump and the Republicans.
DETROW: Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow conceded to the crowd that the GOP has the votes it needs to ram through an Obamacare repeal if the party votes as a block. But she said the crowds that showed up across the country can slow a repeal down.
(SOUNDBITE OF RALLY)
DEBBIE STABENOW: If we aren't emailing and phone-calling and going to offices and speaking out and telling our stories, they're going to proceed.
DETROW: Emails, calls and public pressure on lawmakers from conservatives made Obamacare a political liability for many Democrats after it was passed. The party is hoping to use that same playbook against Republicans this time around. Sunday's rallies were a first step in putting the plan into action.
Scott Detrow, NPR News, Warren, Mich.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Dramatic developments this morning in South Korea for one of the world's biggest companies. Prosecutors have asked a court to issue an arrest warrant for the leader of Samsung. It's all in connection to this ongoing corruption scandal that led to record-sized protests and the recent impeachment of South Korea's president. NPR's Seoul correspondent Elise Hu has been covering this for us, and she joins us now on the line. Good morning, Elise.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: How is Samsung involved in all of this?
HU: Well, investigators say the head of Samsung, Jay Y. Lee, tried to curry favor with the president with payoffs. Specifically, Lee's accused of directing some $36 million U.S. in company money to two nonprofit foundations that were started by President Park Geun-hye's close friend. This was, prosecutors allege, in order to win government support of a controversial merger between two Samsung affiliates, which happened in 2015. This merger was approved, and it was actually thanks in part to support from the government's pension fund, which is a substantial shareholder. To put this into context, Rachel, if the arrest warrant does lead to an indictment, Samsung becomes the latest to take a criminal hit in South Korea's largest political scandal, really, ever.
MARTIN: OK, so what is Samsung saying about all this?
HU: This comes at a rocky time for the conglomerate. Samsung is set to release the findings on its fire-prone Galaxy Note 7 phone sometime in the next month or so. But on these specific charges, Samsung Korea says it is innocent. A spokesperson told NPR it's hard to understand the prosecutor's decision and that it won't accept the claims that there was any illegal solicitation going on regarding that 2015 merger.
MARTIN: In South Korea, just give us a sense of how big of a deal it is to charge an executive at this level from a company of this size.
HU: Good question. South Korea actually has a history of charging executives at its family-controlled conglomerates like Samsung. These companies are known in Korean as chaebol. Lee's father, the ailing Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, has actually been convicted twice before, once on bribery charges, another on tax evasion. But he never did jail time, and he avoided it partly because of the coziness between Korean government and business. Lee's prison terms were suspended, and his criminal records were actually erased by presidential pardons.
MARTIN: All right. So all this is connected to this presidential-level scandal. Remind us where we're at with that. Lawmakers impeached President Park in December for abusing power. But she's not been removed from office, so where are things at?
HU: Her powers have been suspended. We have an acting president that's running South Korea right now. And that's all while this impeachment trial continues, and an independent criminal investigation of the president is ongoing.
MARTIN: NPR's Elise Hu speaking to us about Samsung and the political intrigue from Seoul, South Korea. Thanks, Elise.
HU: You bet.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
As President Obama's national security adviser and U.N. ambassador before that, Susan Rice has been grappling with the biggest security crises of our time - Iraq, Afghanistan, ISIS, cyberattacks from China and Russia. Rice has said her biggest disappointment has been the failure of the international community to stop Syria's brutal civil war. I sat down with Ambassador Rice in the West Wing of the White House late last week, and our conversation began with Russia's role in Syria and why America did not intervene.
SUSAN RICE: The Russians have doubled down in backing Assad, along with Iran and Hezbollah. And the president made the fundamental choice not to intercede in the civil war between Assad and the opposition in a direct way.
MARTIN: Although his critics point to that often as a crucial mistake...
RICE: Yeah.
MARTIN: When President Obama articulated this red line that Bashar al-Assad could not cross or there would be military repercussions by the U.S., and then he used chemical weapons. And then the U.S. did not respond.
RICE: There's two different things here, and I want to separate them. One is the broader question, which we could have confronted at any point over the last five years, as to whether or not the United States ought to intervene in the civil conflict between Assad and the opposition. I think that was fundamentally the right choice for U.S. interests not to intervene.
On the so-called chemical weapons red line, indeed we had put in place the assets necessary to use force, to try to strike at those chemical facilities and command and control entities that we thought were relevant to our chemical weapons concerns. In the mean...
MARTIN: So why didn't it happen?
RICE: Because in the meantime, we were able to find a solution that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished. But the fundamental problem of Syria persists, and that is that there's enormous human suffering. And we have not - we, the United States, the international community, the U.N., Russia, everybody else - has not managed to find a negotiated solution, which would, by necessity, mean dealing with the problem of Assad continuing to govern Syria in the most violent and repressive way.
MARTIN: President Obama is not a man who speaks off the cuff often. There's a lot of thought that's put into the language that he uses. Do you regret the articulation of a red line in Syria?
RICE: It's not for me to regret or otherwise. I think the president stated the U.S. view, which is the use of chemical weapons is not something we're prepared to allow to persist, and we didn't. We managed to accomplish that goal far more thoroughly than we could have by some limited strikes against chemical targets by getting the entirety of the declared stockpile removed.
MARTIN: Our conversation then moved to the allegations of Russian hacking during the U.S. presidential election and why, specifically, the administration didn't release more of what it knew about intelligence assessments of Russia's role before Americans went to the polls on Election Day.
RICE: We did what was the most important thing to do back in October, which was to inform the American people that, indeed, from the high confidence judgment of our intelligence community and 17 intelligence agencies, that the Russian government, at the highest levels, was involved in cyber activity designed to influence the outcome of our election. And it was quite clear that this was a problem.
MARTIN: Then why not take action then?
RICE: Because the fact of the matter is, we have discovered more as the time has evolved. But also, we did not want to do Russia's job for them and make the actions they were taking even more of a potential influence on our electoral process than would otherwise have been.
MARTIN: You said that passing sanctions or repercussions would have been more destabilizing to the election.
RICE: That - we had plenty of time to do that, and we knew it. And the fact that we were concerned about what more might come between October 7 and the election was another factor. And thankfully, the warnings that we issued we believe had some impact because there probably was more that Russia could have done that it didn't do.
MARTIN: I want to ask you about your successor, retired General Mike Flynn. The two of you have met, I understand, as part of the transition.
RICE: On multiple occasions.
MARTIN: This administration has made a point of using the term, countering violent extremism as a way to encompass all its efforts against terrorism. The next administration, and Mike Flynn in particular, likes to talk about radical Islam. He has also personally tweeted a lot about what he perceives to be a fundamental problem with Islam that's perpetuating terrorism. Do you have concerns about Mike Flynn and the guidance and direction that he might push the next administration in as the national security adviser?
RICE: Rachel, as - for reasons I think you and your listeners would understand, I'm not going to get into commenting on the views or the comments of my successor. My responsibility is to execute the most responsible, comprehensive, effective transition that we possibly can. We have prepared hundreds of briefing papers for General Flynn and his incoming team. Those conversations have been candid and constructive.
MARTIN: You know that this administration has made a priority of climate change, considering it a national security threat.
RICE: Yes, it is.
MARTIN: The incoming administration does not consider it to be such. Have you had conversations with Mike Flynn about that?
RICE: We've touched a bit on that but not in great depth. I think the incoming administration has said a number of different things on this topic, and I think we need to see where they land. It is manifestly in the interest of the United States to deal with the very real threat that climate change poses. And that's why President Obama has worked so hard to reduce our own emissions and to lead internationally in forging the Paris climate agreement.
And I hope very much that as the incoming administration reviews both the domestic and international steps we've taken, that they'll realize as well that it's in our interest to continue with the Paris Agreement and to deal with climate change as the real threat it actually is.
MARTIN: But as Susan Rice gets ready to leave government, it is Syria that looms large in this moment, perhaps, in part, because she has been at the White House before, decades ago, as another global humanitarian crisis was unfolding.
You worked here when you were younger. When you were in your late 20s, I believe, is when you started here at the National Security Council, when you were working in the Clinton administration.
RICE: Twenty-eight.
MARTIN: Twenty-eight.
RICE: Twenty-eight is when I started.
MARTIN: Yeah.
RICE: I'm now 52, so time flies.
MARTIN: (Laughter) You oversaw a lot of complicated security issues even then. In particular, you were here when the genocide was taking place in Rwanda. How did that experience, working here in this building during that time, how has that informed how you have thought about the Syrian conflict and the mass atrocities there?
RICE: Well, I think, as I've said in various different contexts, these are very different circumstances. The Rwandan genocide occurred over a period of 100 days, people going house to house with machetes killing at extraordinary pace and speed. That is a very different scenario than what we witnessed in Syria, which is a horrific tragedy. But it's a five-year-long civil war in which a government, backed by foreign powers, has engaged against its own people.
So one of the things I've learned is that there are no cookie-cutter solutions that you can apply from one circumstance to another. They're different. Our interests, as implicated, are different. The tools we have at our disposal are different.
MARTIN: Outgoing National Security Adviser Susan Rice, she spoke with us from the West Wing of the White House.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK, here's a fact. There are very few women directing big Hollywood films. This has been an issue for decades. But a new report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film shows the numbers are getting even smaller. Here's NPR's Mandalit del Barco.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: There are no women among this year's feature film nominees for the Directors Guild of America awards. And there's only one up for best first-time features director, Kelly Fremon Craig, for her coming-of-age comedy, "The Edge Of Seventeen."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN")
BLAKE JENNER: (As Darian) Hey, life isn't fair sometimes, Nadine, OK? Get over it.
HAILEE STEINFELD: (As Nadine) I swear to God. I swear to God.
DEL BARCO: For decades, the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film has documented the paltry numbers of female directors. The latest study reveals that just 7 percent of all directors working on the 250 highest-grossing domestic releases last year were women. That's 2 percent less than the year before, roughly the same as 1998.
DEE REES: The same old, same old, about, you know, who gets the shot - like, who gets to make movies?
DEL BARCO: Dee Rees was a rare woman to win a DGA Award. Last year, she got it for directing the HBO biopic, "Bessie." As she prepares to premiere her new film, "Mudbound," at the Sundance Film Festival this week, Rees says male directors continue to be celebrated more than women.
REES: I really feel like these kind of questions should be asked of studio executives. Like, why are women's, you know, numbers declining - you know, versus asking a woman director. It's like asking the victim, like, why are you in this position?
DEL BARCO: Last year, the ACLU called out Hollywood for what attorneys say is a systematic bias against women directors. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began investigating the issue, but it's not new. In the late 1970s, a group of women directors did directly challenge movie and TV executives. Victoria Hochberg and five others compiled dismal statistics. They used to meet at her house to strategize how to fight the idea that directing is a man's job.
VICTORIA HOCHBERG: And any job a woman gets, we're taking it from them. And that's still true. That's what a lot of them think.
DEL BARCO: Hochberg and the others formed a women's steering committee at the DGA. And in 1979, they sued two movie studios. The case was thrown out, but Hochberg says many women were hopeful after Kathryn Bigelow directed the film "The Hurt Locker." In 2010, she made history as the first woman to win a DGA Award and a Best Picture Oscar, an honor announced by Barbra Streisand.
(SOUNDBITE OF 82ND ACADEMY AWARDS)
BARBRA STREISAND: Well, the time has come.
DEL BARCO: But Hochberg says Bigelow's wins were an anomaly. She had the same response Dee Rees did to this year's nominees and industry statistics.
HOCHBERG: Same old, same old. It's heartbreaking, soul-killing.
DEL BARCO: Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. San Diego Chargers fans now know their relationship with their football team wasn't forever. And those bolt tattoos they got to represent their fan love - well, now they want them off. The Chargers announced they're moving to LA for the 2017 season. And tattoo parlors are now offering discounts to help people through this, quote, "painful endeavor" by refashioning the Chargers icons into something else - maybe an Oakland Raider shield. Actually you might want to hold off on that one. It's MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
It has been a year since the United States and a pretty unusual coalition including both Russia and China began implementing a landmark nuclear deal with Iran. But by the end of this week, the president who supported that deal will give way to a new president who has been openly hostile towards it. So can the Iran deal survive to see its second anniversary? Let's pose that question to NPR's Peter Kenyon, who is joining us from Istanbul. Peter, good morning.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Hi, David.
GREENE: So let's remember, this was a deal that - I mean, it took a long time to hammer out. The U.N. Security Council endorsed it. Is it in jeopardy? That's the big question. But why don't you start by just reminding us what this last year has been like.
KENYON: It looks like it is in jeopardy. Now, the deal, as you remember, made big cuts in Iran's nuclear program. Iran is basically a lot farther now from getting a nuclear weapon than it was before, and it should remain so for at least a decade if the deal holds. There have been some violations. It hasn't been perfect, but they're being corrected. And on the Iranian side, the deal meant billions of dollars, plus aviation deals, oil and gas deals but for ordinary Iranians not really the kind of rapid improvement that they were promised.
GREENE: And we're seeing some new analysis, a new report out today looking at the deal's first year and where it might go in the future, right?
KENYON: Yeah. And it's from the International Crisis Group, which has followed this very closely. It says the deal is basically working as promised, but what it hasn't done is change the political atmosphere. It hasn't convinced skeptics either in Washington or Tehran. And remember, it's not a treaty. The Congress never approved it. I talked with the group's Iran analyst, Ali Vaez. He made an interesting comment. He says the deal probably isn't strong enough to survive if on every other issue the U.S. and Tehran are still at loggerheads. Here's a little bit of what he said.
ALI VAEZ: And we have realized just looking at the experience of the past year that there is so much instability in the deal. The environment in which it is implemented is so unstable that its long-term sustainability is really in question. This is regardless of who would be president in Iran or in the United States.
KENYON: Now, that's interesting on a couple of fronts. First, the deal was shaky even before Trump's election win. And second, this isn't what we were hearing when they were hammering the deal out. Then they all said, look, this is an arms control agreement period. We're not supposed to solve all the problems. Now, this report says maybe there do need to be some spin-off effects just to shore up the nuclear agreement.
GREENE: OK. If there's a belief that there should be spin-off effects and change Iran's behavior, if the Obama administration couldn't really do that, is there any thinking at all that the Trump administration would be able to?
KENYON: (Laughter) Well, the proper answer - we don't know. He hasn't taken office yet. But the signs are not good. His latest interview with The Times of London, he calls the Iran agreement the dumbest deal he's ever seen. He's talked about improving it, but he hasn't said how he plans to get Russia, China and the European countries to get on board with that. But that's not even the biggest threat. The big threat is Congress. Republican leaders there, they've got the votes for new sanctions. That would trigger a hard-line backlash in Tehran. And they've got their own presidential elections this year and anti-American rhetoric is building.
GREENE: So if you say that there might be a hard-line backlash in Iran, what is Iran saying so far when we have this moment of transition here in the U.S.?
KENYON: Well, a senior negotiator says, Tehran, forget it. We're not going to renegotiate this deal. The supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has said if you change it, we're going to burn it. Iran's president is supposed to hold a news conference on the agreement. That could happen tomorrow. So hopefully we'll learn a little bit more then.
GREENE: OK, talking to NPR's Peter Kenyon in Istanbul about the future of the nuclear deal with Iran. Peter, thanks.
KENYON: Thanks, David.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Tomorrow, Britain's prime minister, Theresa May, will begin revealing her plan for one of the biggest upheavals in the United Kingdom in decades. We're talking about Brexit. Now, before voters decided last summer to leave the European Union, many economists were warning that a vote for Brexit was a vote for a recession. But as NPR's Frank Langfitt reports from London, the U.K. economy is holding up surprisingly well.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Just before last June's vote, there was a chorus of doom.
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FORMER PRIME MINISTER DAVID CAMERON: The experts warn us we will have a smaller economy, less employment, lower wages.
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GEORGE OSBORNE: The financial leaders of the world's biggest countries have given their unanimous verdict, and they say that a British exit from the EU would be a shock to the world economy.
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WILBUR ROSS: I think if it were to leave, it would be the most expensive divorce proceeding in the history of the world and the most complicated as well.
LANGFITT: Those were the warnings from the then U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and George Osborne, who served as Britain's treasury secretary. The American you heard speaking on Bloomberg TV was Wilbur Ross. He's now Donald Trump's choice for commerce secretary. But since then, the economic picture here has been much rosier.
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If we look at the second half of the year, we've probably grown by just over 1 percent.
LANGFITT: That's Chris Williamson. He's chief business economist at IHS Market. That's an information and analysis firm.
WILLIAMSON: So not just defying a recession but actually doing quite well.
LANGFITT: Williamson says the economy has defied the naysayers because consumers remain confident and continue to spend.
WILLIAMSON: New car registrations is one area where we've seen surprisingly strong growth. We're also seeing the housing market picking up, people making major purchases on investments in the home as well.
LANGFITT: The economists haven't been entirely wrong. As most predicted, the British pound did plunge. But that's also made British products a lot cheaper on the global market, which, as Williamson points out, has been a boon to factories here.
WILLIAMSON: You're seeing a wide variety of manufacturing firms benefiting. Producers of car parts here in the U.K. who would normally just service the domestic U.K. market, but with the exchange rate now, they're finding that their parts are very competitively priced to firms in other countries.
LANGFITT: So does this mean smooth sailing for the U.K. economy? Most economists say no. For instance, the drop in the pound has sparked inflation, making imports more expensive and hurting people's pocketbooks. Simon Kirby points out that some companies are jacking up their prices. Kirby's with the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, an independent think tank.
SIMON KIRBY: The latest Apple laptops, they have already increased in price by a few hundred pounds over the last couple of months. So the pass through for Apple consumers has been very, very quick.
LANGFITT: Why? Why so much so fast?
KIRBY: Apple has taken the view that this is a permanent change in the exchange rate, so they're going to adjust their prices already.
LANGFITT: Economists expect more pain to come. After all, Brexit hasn't even started yet. It will take at least two years for the U.K. to leave the EU, a single market of half a billion people and the U.K.'s biggest trading partner. Kirby says the relative economic calm won't last.
KIRBY: There's a, I would say, pause before the storm, but it's perhaps a bit too strong a word to call the next few years a storm, although some might disagree of that depending on who it is that's losing their jobs.
LANGFITT: As the economic consequences of Brexit play out over the decades, Kirby thinks he and other economists will ultimately be proven right. Frank Langfitt, NPR News, London.
(SOUNDBITE OF JULIA KENT'S "FLICKER")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It's inauguration season here, a time for champagne toasts and A-list balls. Many of us revel in inauguration traditions, the chance to glimpse the famous and powerful. Yet, as NPR's Shankar Vedantam explains, we humans have another side to our psychology. It's a darker side that enjoys nothing more than seeing the powerful topple from their pedestals.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: To unravel our strange and contradictory feelings about power, we start not in the nation's capital but in Hollywood. Movie stars aren't the only ones here. Adoring fans are drawn here too like paperclips to a magnet.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: And point your attention to the left 'cause we are seeing Beverly Hills for the first time on the left-hand side. Wow.
VEDANTAM: With the muzak blaring, a handful of people on a celebrity tour peer out an open-topped van hoping to glimpse the homes of LA's rich and famous. The guide points out Gwen Stefani's house before pulling up near Katy Perry's compound.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Do I have any Katy Perry fans aboard? (Singing) Fireworks.
OK, well here's her house. She actually owns the entire corner here. And look at her view. It's amazing, isn't it?
VEDANTAM: Humans hunger for a chance to fantasize about lives of luxury and extravagance. And yet, many of us also hate the rich. The lure of celebrity tours is rivaled only by the popularity of tabloid magazines detailing the rehab trips and broken marriages of those same celebrities. You see this all the time. We idolize our leaders but pounce on the slightest gaffe. Vice President Dan Quayle was all but drawn and quartered when he urged a little boy to add an E to the spelling of the word potato. Texas Governor Rick Perry's campaign for president was ended by one moment of forgetfulness in a debate.
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RICK PERRY: The third agency of government I would - I would do away with - the Education, the
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Laughter).
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Commerce.
PERRY: Commerce. And let's see - I can't.
VEDANTAM: And the one moment from Governor Howard Dean's 2004 campaign for president that everyone remembers.
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HOWARD DEAN: And then we're going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House - yah (ph).
VEDANTAM: Goodbye Mr. Dean. You get the point. We can adore our leaders one moment and skewer them the next. Some researchers believe the roots of our love-hate relationship with power lies in our evolutionary history. Christopher Boehm is an evolutionary biologist who has studied chimpanzees in Tanzania. In chimp society, the alpha male is often the center of attention. Other chimps suck up to him, flatter him, except, Boehm says, when they don't.
CHRISTOPHER BOEHM: Basically, if you look at the individual chimpanzees and how they behave around their superiors, it's rather ambivalent.
VEDANTAM: You can see this ambivalence every time the alpha puts on an intimidation display - uprooting trees, throwing rocks, forcing the other chimps up into the trees.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHIMPANZEES SCREAMING)
BOEHM: As they race up the trees, they are screaming, which tells the alpha male I'm scared of you, so it's also deference. But as they get up to the top of the tree, they then stop screaming and they give another call called the waa bark. And a waa sounds something like this - waa. And the waa call is one of defiance and hostility. And this tells him and me that they don't like what he just did. So political ambivalence toward the alpha male is pretty easy to identify once you know the species well.
VEDANTAM: Early humans shared this trait. Boehm studied nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes whose lives have changed little over thousands of years. What he found again was a deep ambivalence toward the powerful. Take, for example, one of the most powerful members of a hunter-gatherer tribe, the skilled hunter.
BOEHM: And people love this guy, but the minute he tries to turn that meat into power, that is to keep the meat for himself and give it to his cronies and develop power that way, the group will treat him with extreme discourtesy. They may criticize him. If it really gets too bad and the guy is a real despot and is trying to basically take other people's autonomy away, they'll kill him.
VEDANTAM: The great hunter is admired and revered, but if he gets too big for his boots, he's taken down. This love-hate attitude toward power isn't lost on those who hold it. It's one reason handlers work so hard to make leaders look down to earth and humble. President Reagan was often shown in jeans and flannel shirt on his ranch saddling up his horses.
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FORMER PRES RONALD REAGAN: I'm not used to riding with the chest plate on him, and I forget and girth up before I remember.
VEDANTAM: The Kennedys took time to blow off steam and remembered to bring the press along.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: It's a family outing in Lewis Bay Hyannis Port for the Kennedys. The president, accompanied by his convalescing father, his brother...
VEDANTAM: What these images do is say don't worry. I may be powerful, but I haven't lost touch with you. We're still connected. We're the same.
So what should we make of our newly elected president, Donald Trump? He's not just powerful but a celebrity in his own right. Back in Hollywood, this hasn't been lost on Star Track Tours.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: This is Donald J. Trump's winter estate here in Beverly Hills, yeah. And here's the servants quarters back here on the right-hand side.
VEDANTAM: Donald Trump's election has ignited the contradictory feelings we have toward the rich and powerful. To his critics, he's broken with the precedent of modesty set by many leaders. He's rich. He's powerful. He's famous. And he flaunts it. In the language of evolutionary anthropology, he's the boastful hunter in the tribe. But to his supporters, Donald Trump is very much a man of the people, someone who's promised to level the playing field, a populist. In the language of evolutionary anthropology, he's the skilled hunter who vows to share the meat. You can be sure of this. As the cameras flash and the motorcades go by, there will be lots of adoring smiles and hidden fury. Shankar Vedantam, NPR News.
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MARTIN: Shankar Vedantam is the host of the Hidden Brain podcast.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Let's get a progress report now in the battle against ISIS in the Iraqi city of Mosul because that battle appears to be picking up speed. Iraqi security forces, with international help, began their offensive on the eastern part of that city last October. And progress had been slow. That seems to be changing. Let's hear more about that from NPR's Alice Fordham, who has reported in Iraq. She is following all of this from her base in Beirut. Alice, good morning.
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: So what is the latest from the city of Mosul?
FORDHAM: Well, I think it's helpful to look back over the last month or so. In mid-December, the Iraqi security forces were really looking bogged down in very difficult urban warfare. They were in heavily populated areas where it's hard to advance without harming civilians. ISIS was hiding among the people there.
Then there was what was termed an operational pause around Christmas, after heavy casualties. And then the battles resumed at the end of December. And since then, they have gotten much faster. Iraqi security forces have moved into the university, into a key hospital complex, and they now say they hope to have the east side of the city under control by the end of the month.
GREENE: Which sounds like potentially real progress. I mean, what's changed to bring this about?
FORDHAM: Well, everyone is very keen to say that ISIS are weakened. We are seeing fewer truck bombs, which are a really devastating battlefield weapon. And their supply routes have been disrupted by the destruction of almost all the bridges and the routes across the Tigris River, which divides the east of the city from the west. But also, in the course of that operational pause, some changes seem to have been made in tactics. Coordination has improved. Some soldiers have been redeployed up there. And the coalition led by the United States, which is supporting this operation, has ramped up its airstrikes. And it has redeployed some advisers there.
GREENE: You and I have talked a lot about the fate of the civilians in the city of Mosul and just the awful conditions that a lot of people were in. What has happened to them?
FORDHAM: Well, to get an update on that, I spoke to the United Nations humanitarian coordinator there. Lise Grande is in Baghdad, and she was able to explain a bit about the situation.
LISE GRANDE: In humanitarian terms, what's now happened is there were about 400,000 civilians who were in their homes in newly liberated areas. We are desperately trying to reach them with urgent front-line assistance.
FORDHAM: And NPR was able to reach people in some of those areas of eastern Mosul, and they are, indeed, telling harrowing stories of lack of food, of water, of wells running dry. Ms. Grande also tells me that as this fight has intensified in the last week or 10 days or so, more people have been caught in the crossfire.
GRANDE: We are absolutely seeing an increase in the number of casualties requiring trauma care, either because they've been shot or because they've stepped on a booby trap. You know, the biggest gap in our operation, Alice, has been front-line trauma care. This is the way that you try and keep people that have stepped on booby traps and have suffered a gunshot wound alive.
GREENE: So it sounds like, I mean, as the battle against ISIS intensifies, that means civilians can be more in danger, which is one of the tough parts of this. I mean, we're talking about the eastern part of the city. Alice, what about the rest of Mosul? I mean, will the battle now shift west to other parts of the city?
FORDHAM: Well, eventually it will. And it does seem like that will present its own challenges. I asked Ms. Grande of the U.N. in Iraq about that as well, and this is what she had to say.
GRANDE: This is, I think, going to be a battle of different magnitude and scope than what we saw in the east. There are about 750,000 civilians that are still trapped in the west.
FORDHAM: And, David, military commanders have told us that they believe there is more support for ISIS in the west of the city. It's actually also more difficult terrain. It's the old city. There's narrow, small, winding streets there. And because it is close to the border with Syria, where there are still significant areas of ISIS control, there are easier resupply routes.
Another challenge is that for the Iraqi security forces and their international advisers, they will have to redeploy their troops before an assault can start there. Currently, most of them are in the east of the city. They're going to have to re-headquarter probably somewhere south of the city. And in terms of the humanitarians, I imagine that this is possible, that the area could come under siege or that an evacuation could be attempted there.
GREENE: Alice, it just sounds like - I mean, progress does not necessarily mean that Iraqi security forces are anywhere close to retaking this entire city.
FORDHAM: Oh, it's a huge and very difficult fight, yes.
GREENE: OK. NPR's Alice Fordham joining us from Beirut to talk about the fight against ISIS in Mosul, Iraq. Alice, thanks.
FORDHAM: Thanks for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF PERFORMANCE, "THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Ladies and gentleman, children of all ages...
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
That is sound from "The Greatest Show On Earth," which amazingly is coming to an end. Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus will fold its tent for good in May after 146 years. There was a show yesterday in Miami, and people were lamenting the end of an era.
JUAN FERRER: It's a sad, sad time to lose Ringling, Barnum and Bros. For me, it's an absolutely amazing experience, so we'll miss them for sure.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Juan Ferrer (ph) grew up going to the circus. He had already bought tickets when he heard the news, and he says he was glad he brought his three kids along for what would be their first and last visit.
GREENE: And the Ringling show - really, it was one of a kind. Trapeze artists, dogs jumping rope, human cannonballs - and, of course, there were those elephants.
LINDA MARCELIN: I think the most I loved about it was the elephants because that's not something you see on a normal day.
MARTIN: Linda Marcelin (ph) isn't the only one. Ringling stopped using elephants last year following decades of protest from animal rights groups, and ticket sales plummeted. Tina Alonzo (ph) says she has mixed feelings about.
TINA ALONZO: I wouldn't be here had it not been for my 5-year-old, who has never experienced a circus. And for her, it's a very innocent display of animals playing. And so I think for most adults, it's something completely different.
GREENE: Even though she says she is relieved the circus is ending and the animals can be free, she's also glad her kid can enjoy the show just this one last time.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
So if you're one of those people who find it hard to choose gifts, you really need to listen to this next story. NPR's Philip Reeves was recently in Brazil's city of Manaus in the middle of the Amazon rainforest where he found a pretty unusual gift.
PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: When you travel a lot, you learn certain rules. One is this - never return home from a trip with a gift for the family from the airport. You can't fool them - at least I couldn't until now. This is the international airport in Manaus, a city in the Amazon rainforest.
ERIVELTON SOUZA: (Foreign language spoken).
REEVES: Erivelton Souza has a solution for the desperate traveler who's heading home empty-handed after a great trip to the jungle. He's holding it in his hand. It's a very large fish.
SOUZA: (Foreign language spoken).
REEVES: Souza's standing at a stall behind three big freezers full of fish. He's pretty sure this is the only airport shop in the world that just sells freshwater fish.
SOUZA: (Foreign language spoken).
REEVES: These fish from the Amazon River basin, explains Souza. He says they're caught and sold legally and in some cases farmed. There's an intriguing selection. You can buy your family a bit of pirarucu, a carnivore that can grow bigger than a man and has teeth on its tongue.
SOUZA: (Foreign language spoken).
REEVES: When this shop opened a year ago, doing business was tough, says Souza. Travelers took a while to cotton on to the idea that a fish can be a souvenir that gives your family a little taste of your gastronomic adventures in the Amazon.
In Manaus, there's one fish that the airport stall does not happen to sell, which catches every gastronomical adventurer's eye. They make horror movies about it in Hollywood.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PIRANHA")
ALIPIO MARTINS: (Singing in foreign language).
REEVES: In Brazil, it's inspired song - and soup.
I'm in one of the many restaurants here that serve fish. And above me, there's a big sign and it says drink piranha soup. It's good for the heart and better than Viagra.
Alas I can't test that claim. Piranha soup is not on today's menu. In Manaus fish market, though, people know all about this story.
JOSE RAIMUNDO: (Through interpreter) It's really delicious.
REEVES: Jose Raimundo, a 45-year-old fish seller, says piranha soup is indeed an aphrodisiac.
RAIMUNDO: (Through interpreter) They say if a guy drinks this soup when his morale is low, it'll turn him into a 20-year-old.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken).
REEVES: But remember, Manaus is a big tourist town. Every year, roughly 1 million visitors come here to see its opera house built during the huge 19th century rubber boom and to head out on rainforest safaris. Everyone loves hearing exotic stories about piranhas, says Hilario Teixeira, a market worker.
HILARIO TEIXEIRA: (Through interpreter) Tourists come here every day and they go nuts when they see a piranha and take loads of photos of it.
REEVES: Perhaps that's why there's so much fake news about piranhas, about how shoals of them carry out frenzied attacks reducing the human to a skeleton in seconds. Attacks are actually rare and only occur in certain conditions. Teixeria's had first-hand experience.
TEIXEIRA: (Through interpreter) I was bitten by a piranha a long time ago when I was out fishing.
REEVES: He shows me a scar on his thumb. The bite did hurt, he says.
TEIXEIRA: (Through interpreter) But then I had some beer, and the pain was gone.
REEVES: Back at Manaus airport, it's time to choose a souvenir. I select a tambaqui. It's the size of a laptop and costs 12 bucks. My tambaqui thawed before I reached my home in Rio de Janeiro 10 hours later. But this airport gift fooled the family, and it was also quite delicious. Philip Reeves, NPR News, Rio de Janeiro.
(SOUNDBITE OF EMANCIPATOR'S "OUTLAW")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. Just take your time. I got nowhere to be. That kind of sarcasm had to be filling a commuter train outside London because a swan was just waddling along on the tracks for two miles. The train had to slow to a crawl behind the bird. The British news site Metro said one guy got on the tracks and frantically waved his laptop at the swan who was finally captured. The rail company tweeted that the bird, upon being released, apologized for holding everyone up. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
And since the election, we've been listening to the voices of those trying to revive the Democratic Party after their big losses in November. Not only did Democrats lose the White House, they were unable to win majorities in the House and the Senate. Democrats are also in a weak position in statehouses across the country.
Leading the DNC in this moment, the Democratic National Committee comes with a lot of pressure, and it can be a fairly thankless job. That has not deterred Sally Boynton Brown. She's the executive director of the Democratic Party of Idaho. And she is running to be the chair of the DNC.
SALLY BOYNTON BROWN: I think, having done politics in Idaho for the last six years, that it is a very thankless job. We have more red states in our country than we have had in a very long time and that what really needs to happen is we need to re-envision what the organization of the DNC can do for the people of this country and the people in our party, and really focus on building an organization.
MARTIN: So what's your vision? I mean, Democrats took some huge and quite unexpected losses in this past election. How would you position your party to regain those losses?
BROWN: Well, they were definitely unexpected, I think especially the amount of races that we lost. I don't think that we got here overnight. We didn't all wake up on November 8 and suddenly there was a problem. The problems that are facing our party have been with us for a while. And this is just the culmination of that. And so...
MARTIN: What are the problems, before we get to your solutions?
BROWN: Well, I really think that we have lost focus as a party. I don't think we have any overarching identity message. We've let the Republicans frame the debate and frame our party for a really long time. And, frankly, I will say that in losing the amount of statehouses that we've lost, we've also allowed them to legislate. And what we know is that they've been passing really dangerous voter suppression laws, really stripping Americans of their rights and their freedoms.
And we have not had an organization who's designed to fight back. We have 57 state parties who have been doing that to the best of their abilities. But it's time that we had a DNC really designed to look at not just the president of the United States and that seat but every single seat all the way down to school board and city council and county commissioner seats.
MARTIN: You said that Republicans, for too long, have been framing what it means to be a Democrat. So what does it mean to be a Democrat? What are you about?
BROWN: The reality is is that the Democratic Party has always been a party of the people and that we really need to make sure that our support structures are pushing down so that our actions and our values are in alignment with that. We absolutely believe in equity and fairness and transparency and collaboration. And we need to make sure that everything that we're doing then promotes our values. And I think we've been out of alignment for a while.
MARTIN: Donald Trump and the Republican Party - to a lesser degree - but Trump in particular was able to synthesize what it meant to be part of his movement, Make America Great Again, put America first. What does it mean to be the Democratic Party now? What does it mean to be a Democrat? What is the vision?
BROWN: Ultimately, I think the Democratic Party's job is to save democracy and to be the fighters for freedom. Republicans have been stripping us of our freedoms. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that our constitutional rights can be under fire in this next administration. And we absolutely must be of powerful voice to push back on anything that potentially is going to come down the road.
MARTIN: Sally Boynton Brown is the executive director of the Idaho Democratic Party. Thank you so much for talking with us.
BROWN: Absolutely. It really was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
All right. As Inauguration Day approaches, we are marking the end of an era. It's the era of Charlie Brotman known for 60 years as the president's announcer.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHARLIE BROTMAN: Mr. President, my name is Charlie Brotman. I had the pleasure of introducing your dad and it's a similar honor introducing you as the 43rd president...
GREENE: That is Brotman announcing President George W. Bush in 2001. Brotman not only introduced the president but also the bands and the floats as the inaugural parade made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
He did this for 10 presidents at 15 inaugurations. The regular gig started with a chance encounter back in 1956. Brotman was stadium announcer for the Washington Senators when President Dwight Eisenhower threw out the first pitch.
BROTMAN: And we became 15-minute buddies, the president and this ordinary guy, Charlie Brotman.
GREENE: Fifteen-minute buddies. Well, later that fall, Brotman got a phone call.
BROTMAN: And the lady says, are you the announcer who announced President Eisenhower? I says, yes, ma'am. She says, thank goodness. The president has had everybody at the White House going crazy trying to find you. You must have really impressed him because he wants to know if you're available to introduce him again.
GREENE: Yeah, he was available. Brotman agreed immediately.
MARTIN: (Unintelligible) Four years later, he got another call from the incoming Kennedy administration.
BROTMAN: Mr. Brotman, we've never, ever been involved with a parade before.
MARTIN: They asked to pick his brain. They ended up picking him.
BROTMAN: That's how I happened to go from president to president to president to president.
GREENE: President to president to president for six decades actually. A Nixon inaugural was especially memorable. At one point, the president waded on to Pennsylvania Avenue and word got out that he was signing autographs.
BROTMAN: And we're talking about thousands and thousands of people, and they would have crushed the president.
GREENE: The announcer quickly ad libbed.
BROTMAN: Ladies and gentlemen, the parade is over.
MARTIN: (Laughter) Brotman has memories of president after president, Republicans and Democrats, but this year, Brotman, now 89 years old, got an email informing him his services would no longer be needed.
BROTMAN: I wish I could tell you why.
GREENE: Well, Steve Ray, a broadcaster and Trump supporter will replace him. When Brotman first got this news, he was hurt. He says he's now over it. The Trump team offered him a new title - announcer chairman emeritus - and also a prime seat at the event. He turned down that seat and will instead join Washington's local NBC station as their special inaugural commentator. And don't forget that NPR and reporters from stations around the country will be live on Friday reporting on that inauguration. Listen live and watch a live fact-check on the inaugural address at npr.org.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
To understand what it means that Congress is on its way to repealing the Affordable Care Act, it will help to better understand what the act is. It includes health care provisions that many people do not think of as being part of Obamacare. Julie Appleby wrote a report for Kaiser Health News and spoke with our own Rachel Martin.
RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Thanks for coming in.
JULIE APPLEBY: Thank you.
MARTIN: A lot of Americans don't realize Obamacare isn't just about the insurance marketplaces. What else is in there that might go away if the ACA is dismantled?
APPLEBY: Well, you're right. There's a lot of things people don't realize. So here's three. So on the way in today, you stop at the coffee shop. And you look at that muffin. And you see there's 400 calories in it, right? So...
MARTIN: Yeah.
APPLEBY: The health...
MARTIN: I hate seeing that, by the way.
APPLEBY: ...Law (laughter) requires that restaurants and fast-food chains with at least 20 outlets post calories counts on their menu items.
MARTIN: Oh, that was part of the ACA.
APPLEBY: So that was part of the ACA. At work, employers must provide new moms break time to express milk and a private area, that's not a bathroom stall, in order to do so. At the emergency room, there are some limits in the law on what insurers can charge patients if they're seen in an out-of-network emergency room. Those are just three of the things that a lot of people don't realize are in there that could potentially go away, depending on the repeal process.
MARTIN: In terms of what we know now about how that's unfolding, how likely is it that these things would disappear?
APPLEBY: You know, that's highly uncertain. We don't really know what's going to stay in and what's going to go. The Republicans are obviously eager to repeal the law. But they've not yet coalesced around a replacement plan or even a timetable on when they will do this.
So some of these items could be saved. You know, the Democrats and the Republicans may say, hey, let's keep a certain amount of these aspects. But we just really don't know what will stay and what will go.
MARTIN: Even if the law changes and the legal requirement to comply with these laws goes away, is it likely companies will still provide them? I mean, once you've given women a place to express breast milk, and then you take it away - I imagine there'd be some repercussions.
APPLEBY: Clearly, women and new moms really want that protection. They want that time. They want a private room. Employers sometimes feel burdened with that. They've got to find a place. They've got to set it aside. So there may be some pushback from employers.
The Republicans may feel that that has overstepped the boundaries. You're telling an employer how to operate. But at the same time, they're going to hear from some of their constituents that they really want to keep this provision.
MARTIN: What's the most important yet little-known item in the ACA that might go away, in your opinion?
APPLEBY: You know, there's a lot of things in there. But I was thinking about this. And before the health law, insurers could place annual or lifetime caps on how much they would pay towards your medical care. And these caps were often set at, like, a million or $2 million, which sounds like a lot. But if you have an expensive, serious illness, like cancer, or you have a premature baby that spends a lot of time in the intensive care unit, you can hit that cap.
Insurers said they needed this as one tool to slow premium growth. But it could leave consumers in the middle of an illness or right after an illness without insurance coverage. And that's going to be something that's discussed a lot depending on the repeal package that's chosen.
MARTIN: Julie Appleby is a reporter for Kaiser Health News. Julie, thank you so much.
APPLEBY: You're welcome. Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We have an investigation this morning of drug companies gaming a system designed to help desperate patients. It's a story of orphan drugs.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
These are life-saving drugs that pharmaceutical firms don't develop because they wouldn't help enough people to be profitable. People with rare diseases are left with no health.
INSKEEP: Orphan drugs were a big issue decades ago and were featured on an old TV show, "Quincy, M.E."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "QUINCY, M.E.")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) The truth is that the only real chance of research money going to these diseases is if you, the Congress, make the orphan drug bill a reality.
GREENE: And Congress did make the Orphan Drug Act a reality in 1983. It offers incentives to companies that develop drugs for rare diseases.
INSKEEP: Now, a Kaiser Health News investigation finds drugmakers are manipulating the system to collect the incentives. Sarah Jane Tribble has the first of two stories.
SARAH JANE TRIBBLE, BYLINE: A few years ago, something strange began to happen in the world of drug development. The FDA was approving a growing number of drugs that had been given orphan status. Orphan drugs, so-called because they were once abandoned by large pharmaceutical companies, are defined as those that treat a disease that affects fewer than 200,000 people. By 2015, 47 percent of new medications were orphan drugs. That raised red flags for medical researchers like Dr. Martin Makary at Johns Hopkins University medical school because many of these are household names.
MARTIN MAKARY: Some of these medications clearly serve large populations and to find out that they've been submitted for orphan drug approval for a very narrow indication when we all know in the real world they're being used broadly.
TRIBBLE: They include familiar names like arthritis drugs Enbrel, Remicade and Humira. In fact, 7 of the 10 top-selling drugs of any kind in the U.S. in 2015 were orphan drugs, and Makary says this is a big problem.
MAKARY: What we're doing is diluting the impact of the Orphan Drug Act to create incentives for companies to develop drugs for diseases that really do affect underrepresented populations in medicine.
TRIBBLE: The Orphan Drug Act gives companies three economic incentives. The biggest one is market exclusivity. So it's a government promise of no direct competition for your drug for seven years when treating that disease. The other incentives are tax credits and a couple of million in savings on fees paid to the FDA.
GAYATRI RAO: There are still tremendous unmet needs that are out there.
TRIBBLE: Dr. Gayatri Rao runs the FDA's Office for Orphan Products. She says she knows there's talk that companies are taking advantage of the system. It's her job to safeguard the law.
RAO: I want to ensure that we continue to keep our eye on that prize and we ensure that we utilize the Orphan Drug Act in a way that the framers really intended.
TRIBBLE: But it's not clear if that is happening. The Kaiser Health News investigation reveals more than 70 orphan drugs were approved to treat common diseases before winning an approval to treat a rare disease and, with that, the financial incentives that come with being an orphan drug. Bernard Munos is a former executive at drug giant Eli Lilly and now with FasterCures at the nonprofit Milken Institute. He reviewed our analysis and was surprised.
BERNARD MUNOS: I looked into it and the more I looked into it and the more I discovered that there is something there that is going on that doesn't seem to be in keeping with the intent of the law. It looked like somewhere some smart person perhaps had found a way to hijack the system, but it had become, according to the data, it looked very pervasive.
TRIBBLE: Munos says there are drugs that meet the spirit of the law - helping small populations of patients. He questions so whether some drugs, particularly the drugs that were already on the market, should get the financial incentives.
MUNOS: We're wasting resources. We're not doing any good. We're not adding any patient to the population of those that could benefit from the drug. As far as the patients are concerned, it is a complete waste.
TRIBBLE: Top-selling drug Humira won five approvals for orphan treatments after 2002 when it was already on the market to treat millions of people who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis. AbbVie, the maker of Humira, declined to comment on why it sought multiple orphan approvals for their drug. Anne Pritchett of PhRMA says drugmakers are following the science, and she warns that the Orphan Drug Act's incentives are necessary to support the research and development of life-saving drugs.
ANNE PRITCHETT: When you look at cystic fibrosis, it was 25 years to the development of an effective therapy. I think we would be concerned about anything that would undermine the current incentives.
TRIBBLE: Treatments for cystic fibrosis have been hugely successful, and they are hugely expensive. The FDA's Dr. Rao says the law is still needed to create drugs for about 7,000 rare diseases that have no treatments. But after being briefed on what we found, she also wants to examine the issue more closely.
RAO: Where I am is I want to understand more what the truth is really.
TRIBBLE: Rao says some drugs should get more than one approved use because there are scientific benefits to studying specific rare diseases. Still, she worries about companies using the law to drive up the prices of drugs.
RAO: Our goal is to try to get it right, you know, like, figure out what the right balance is and making sure that we're appropriately incentivizing things.
TRIBBLE: The FDA is doing its own evaluation of the drugs that want orphan status during 2010 and 2015. If necessary, the agency could propose changes to the Orphan Drug Act's regulations. I'm Sarah Jane Tribble in Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF KINSKI'S "BULLETIN OF THE INTERNATIONAL STRING FIGURE ASSOCIATION")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Hey, let's talk about the 21st century strategies for making a song a hit. The music industry has always had its ways over the generations, from the musicians known as song pluggers who were paid to promote sheet music in the early 20th century all the way to the payola scandal of 1950s radio. Well, how's it work today? Allyson McCabe reports on modern efforts to blur the line between entertainment and advertising.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ALLYSON MCCABE, BYLINE: "The Clicquot Club Eskimos," the "Champion Spark Plug Hour," "King Biscuit Time" - major brands often produced and underwrote live broadcasts during radio's golden age, says media historian Cynthia Meyers.
CYNTHIA MEYERS: There were no advertisements during the music program. And so they hoped that the audience would feel very favorably toward them for financing free radio programming.
MCCABE: Television took off in the '50s, taking with it sponsors and stars. But radio remained vital, thanks to disc jockeys like Alan Freed, who introduced audiences to new music, including rock 'n' roll.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BERN BENNETT: And here is the king of rock 'n' roll himself, Alan Freed.
(APPLAUSE)
ALAN FREED: Thank you, Bern Bennett, and welcome to our "Camel Rock 'N' Roll Dance Party."
MCCABE: DJ's became influential tastemakers, and record labels plied them with cash payments and gifts in exchange for airplay. Media reports led to congressional hearings. Hundreds of DJ's were implicated, and Freed was eventually fired and fined. But Cynthia Meyers sees payola as an inevitable consequence of radio's evolving business model.
MEYERS: When you think about it, the music industry was buying airtime just as brands were buying airtime in order to promote their product, which was music recordings.
MCCABE: In 1960, Congress amended the Federal Communications Act to require that pay-for-play arrangements be disclosed on the air. But record labels quickly found work-arounds, using independent radio promoters as middlemen, to covertly fund airplay, contests and giveaways. Kevin Erickson in the nonprofit Future of Music Coalition says the consolidation of the radio industry in the '90s corporatized payola.
KEVIN ERICKSON: When we talk about payola, people have an image of somebody, like, sliding a briefcase full of cash to a DJ, and that Alan Freed model is not really how it works anymore.
MCCABE: Today, large media companies own most major market radio stations and playlists are set at corporate headquarters. Payola investigations in the mid-2000s led to multimillion-dollar settlements by several major label conglomerates and four of the nation's largest radio station owners.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MCCABE: Now, a new model of brand sponsorship has supplanted label-funded payola.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: You don't jump on the bandwagon. You drive it. But that doesn't mean you have to go it alone. Dr. Pepper is all about being a one-of-a-kind flavor. So they're right there with you. And when it comes to helping promote independent artists, they're all in.
MCCABE: Dr. Pepper's One Of A Kind Sound was designed by the tech start-up Music Audience Exchange to sound a lot like pre-release album teasers. CEO Nathan Hanks says this allows major brands to reach specific demographic targets while emerging bands gain valuable exposure.
NATHAN HANKS: Artists are calling us months in advance to be in the program, and they're thinking about these partnerships as the marketing strategy for the single or for the album.
MCCABE: On an even larger scale, Pepsi launched The Sound Drop this fall. It's a partnership with MTV, the music app Shazam and iHeartMedia, formerly Clear Channel Communications, the country's largest radio station owner.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SWAY CALLOWAY: Pepsi invites you to discover your next music obsession in episodes where we profile new artists.
MCCABE: The Sound Drop spotlights artists who are already on major labels and in rotation on iHeartRadio. Emma Quigley is Pepsi's head of music.
EMMA QUIGLEY: It's not a traditional spot. It's - because it goes deeper. It's telling you a story.
MCCABE: Sort of like a mini documentary.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LUKAS FORCHHAMMER: We are Lukas Graham.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MAMA SAID")
LUKAS GRAHAM: (Singing) Your mama said that it was OK.
FORCHHAMMER: So "Mama Said" is about how I grew up without all these things that people say you need to be happy and yet I was happy.
MCCABE: Soundbites from the artists - in this case Danish pop band Lukas Graham - are woven together with audio clips of the song being pushed and aired on all of the iHeart stations playing that format. Quigley explains that these are in addition to regular airplay of the single.
QUIGLEY: We work with iHeartRadio at a pivotal time in the cycle of the single that will connect the dots between the single that's on air and in rotation and the artists themselves.
MCCABE: There is also a longer mini documentary hosted on Pepsi's YouTube channel. The only part of the campaign that resembles a conventional commercial is the banner ads Shazam runs on its app. Quigley insists that The Sound Drop isn't advertising under the guise of entertainment.
QUIGLEY: We're not advertising anything. There's no, you know, that ad's running, they have to play the track after the ad or anything of that. Yes, it's very clear that The Sound Drop is a Pepsi-owned platform, but the star of that platform is the artist and that song.
MCCABE: The approach seems to be working. Pepsi's first artist, Lukas Graham, just picked up three Grammy nominations, including song and album of the year. For NPR News, I'm Allyson McCabe.
(SOUNDBITE OF GOLD PANDA'S "IN MY CAR")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
So there was that Brexit vote back in June, but only now, months later, are we learning exactly what that vote means. British Prime Minister Theresa May this morning has laid out her plans for Britain's exit from the European Union. She signalled this would be a clean break.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRIME MINISTER THERESA MAY: We seek a new and equal partnership between an independent self-governing global Britain and our friends and allies in the EU. We do not seek to hold on to bits of membership as we leave.
GREENE: We do not seek to hold on to bits of membership, all that membership will go away, the prime minister says. Let's hear more now from NPR's Frank Langfitt in London. Frank, good morning.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Hey, good morning, David.
GREENE: So not holding on to any bits of membership. Well, what are the key points in this speech? It sounds like it really is a clean break.
LANGFITT: It is a clean break, and this is what we've been talking about for months now is a hard Brexit. The idea is that the U.K. is going to leave the single EU market. That means walking away from half a billion consumers. It's a huge step. The other key point she made was the United Kingdom's going to take control of its borders again. It's not going allow all these people from the EU to just come in here. And the idea there is that people really wanted here in the United Kingdom to see a limit in immigration. The government - this is also very interesting - she did say that the government is going to put a final result of Brexit negotiations to a vote of the Houses of Parliament. So there will be a Democratic response to all of this and that later they'll try to strike a free trade deal with the EU and try to get the best deal they can for access for, you know, car manufacturers here, people like that.
GREENE: So is this - I mean, is a divorce a fair analogy here? Like there was some wiggle room, right? I mean, the prime minister couldn't have...
LANGFITT: Yeah, I...
GREENE: ...So done a separation but still being married. This sounds like a divorce. I mean, this is the real thing.
LANGFITT: It is a divorce. And what you have is a case where there were some people here who were very worried about the impact this was going to have on the United Kingdom economy. They wanted to have special deals for certain sectors, and what she's saying for now is we're out. And a reason that she's doing that is that vote back in June, a lot of people here voted about immigration. It's what really bothered them. They felt it was affecting the national identity, and they felt in some small - smaller communities, they felt they were being flooded. And what she's saying is this is it. We're out. What's going to be fascinating is to see what the response is in Europe and the kind of deal during the Brexit negotiations, how it plays out.
GREENE: You know, there are broader implications to talk about here, right? I mean, in the West, we see this rise in populism in different countries, concern about immigration, concern about globalization. What are we expecting?
LANGFITT: Well, it really does track into so much of what we heard frankly in the presidential election in the United States, a concern about immigration, the impact of globalization, taking back sort of a sense of - certainly in the United Kingdom there's been a lot of talk about taking back sovereignty in terms of all the EU laws that have an impact here in the United Kingdom. And so you definitely see a big connection there. Also in Western Europe, we have elections coming up there very soon in France, in Berlin and in Germany. And you're going to see a lot of the same issues coming up in terms of control of borders, things along those lines.
GREENE: OK, so this speech from the prime minister of Britain, just sort of one piece of a larger puzzle. That's NPR's Frank Langfitt in London. Frank, thanks as always.
LANGFITT: Happy to do it, David
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Kitty Dukakis had struggled a lot with addiction. First, it was amphetamines and then alcohol. These addictions were masking deep depression. But over many years, nothing was helping. Finally, she turned to something more daring, electroshock therapy, and it seemed to work. Now Kitty Dukakis and her husband, former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, are outspoken advocates for this often stigmatized treatment. They spoke to us from their apartment here in California. Governor Dukakis is teaching at UCLA this winter. And we looked back to 1988. Michael Dukakis lost the presidential election to George H.W. Bush. And the bottom fell out for Kitty Dukakis.
KITTY DUKAKIS: It was pretty devastating, a loss like that after such intensive involvement for both Michael and myself and for our children, for John, Andrea and Kara. It was difficult and affected me psychologically a lot.
MICHAEL DUKAKIS: It was getting pretty hopeless. I mean, I'm an inveterate optimist and there's always something out there. Kitty calls me the prince of fine, you know, that everything's fine. We're going to make it fine. But I got to tell you after - here was this beautiful, brainy wife of mine. And yet every eight or nine months, she'd started going down, goes through three or four brutal months. And to have this happening over and over and over again was devastating for her and frustrating for the rest of us.
GREENE: Now, the real turning point came in 2001, many years after that political defeat. Kitty Dukakis was ready to try electroshock therapy. This treatment, which is today called electroconvulsive therapy or ECT, involves going under with general anesthesia. Electric currents are sent into the brain deliberately causing small seizures. Kitty Dukakis was apprehensive.
K. DUKAKIS: I was willing to try this new treatment. And the night before, I was anxious about it. I was afraid I might drink and I would then be ineligible for the treatment. And so I asked the doctor to hospitalize me the night before.
GREENE: Now, she went through the treatment, and Michael Dukakis says that initial treatment produced a big and positive surprise.
M. DUKAKIS: The first treatment ended the depression...
GREENE: Really?
M. DUKAKIS: ...Just like that.
K. DUKAKIS: But that - we need to say right out front that that was very unusual. I've hardly met anybody who has had such immediate response.
M. DUKAKIS: But you can imagine to finally find something that effectively ended it.
GREENE: How could you tell, Governor, that something was different, that it had worked so quickly?
M. DUKAKIS: I picked her up. She was the old Kitty. We get into the car. I headed for home. It happened to be our wedding anniversary, and she said let's go to dinner tonight. And, you know, I almost drove off of Storrow Drive. I mean, I had left this woman in terrible shape at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and here she was alive, smiling and doing great.
GREENE: Do you remember that moment, Mrs. Dukakis, when you got in that car?
K. DUKAKIS: You know, it's a (laughter) vague memory. It's so long ago, 20...
M. DUKAKIS: Long time.
K. DUKAKIS: Yeah. It's about 24 years ago.
M. DUKAKIS: But I'll tell you, I remember.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: Kitty Dukakis receives electroshock treatments to this day under the direction of her longtime doctor, Charles Welch. Now, electroshock can have side effects, including memory loss, and for others that has been worse than it's been for Kitty Dukakis. But her progress has made this couple public advocates for this therapy, and they really want to battle the stigma. It's a stigma that Hollywood contributed to with Jack Nicholson's stomach-turning depiction of an electroshock session in the 1975 movie "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest."
K. DUKAKIS: The stigma is from that movie. It was so strong at the time.
GREENE: Was that movie accurate for 1975?
M. DUKAKIS: No, no, it was not. By that time, the treatment had changed dramatically. But in the '50s, there was no question that that was what the treatment was like. But by '75, there had been many, many changes. And they continue to refine the treatment and make it better and better and better.
GREENE: Well, what do you tell people who hear about the memory loss and some of the side effects that are real. I mean, there can be some dangers. What do you tell people who are afraid of that?
K. DUKAKIS: Well, I talk about my own experience, and one of the advantages of the support group that I began was that many of us - I'm able to talk about it and to talk about the experience and how our lives had changed so appreciably.
GREENE: Do you hear from some people who have had side effects, who have had negative experiences?
K. DUKAKIS: Yes, I've talked about that and talked about the fact that, you know, I had some slight memory stuff and I - the example that I give is that I pick up Michael very often at Northeastern.
GREENE: These - the university where he does teaching, yeah.
K. DUKAKIS: I would get halfway there, a routine that I knew by - so well and I would stop and have to call him and get directions. This happened two or three times.
M. DUKAKIS: And very temporary. I mean, this would disappear in a matter of days.
K. DUKAKIS: I also want to add that patients have a right to question their doctors. And Dr. Welch, for us, was just so reasonable about every concern we raised and is with his other patients.
GREENE: Well, let me ask you both this - why dedicate so much time to this cause? Why is it so important to you?
K. DUKAKIS: Well, part of the reason is that there is so much misunderstanding and still has been even in the media. There had been very difficult articles to read that were full of untruths about the treatment.
M. DUKAKIS: And if you know people who have or are suffering from depression, David, there's nothing worse. And if there is a treatment out there that can have the kind of impact that it had on Kitty and now has on thousands of people - I mean, McLean Hospital in Massachusetts...
K. DUKAKIS: Where I'm being treated.
M. DUKAKIS: ...Is now doing ten thousand treatments a year.
GREENE: Sounds like this has really changed both of your lives.
K. DUKAKIS: I certainly feel that I have had a new lease on life, and I feel very fortunate and full of gratitude for that.
M. DUKAKIS: And, you know, as the husband of Kitty, I don't have to tell you that the difference is just dramatic. And the fact that she's now in a position to encourage literally thousands and thousands of others to try the same thing is a great thing to be able to do.
GREENE: All right. Well, Michael and Kitty Dukakis, it has been a real pleasure, and thanks so much for taking the time for us.
K. DUKAKIS: Thank you so much.
M. DUKAKIS: Thanks for having us.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene with the story of a shark named Leonie. She's a proud mom - gave birth last year to three baby sharks. Here's the thing. She hadn't had any contact with a male shark.
Now, the British magazine New Scientist reports some animals that reproduce sexually can occasionally reproduce asexually. And that does include sharks. But usually it happens when a female has never had male contact. Leonie had a ton of offspring with a male partner, then apparently decided she would just do it her way. You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Washington, D.C. is bracing for an influx of visitors for Donald Trump's inauguration later this week, and this includes both supporters and protesters. As reporter Patrick Madden of member station WAMU tells us, protests have long played a part in this American tradition.
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PATRICK MADDEN, BYLINE: Few events embody pomp and circumstance like inauguration. From the military bands to the troops, the horses, it's a highly choreographed affair.
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FORMER PRES FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear...
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FORMER PRES RONALD REAGAN: That I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States...
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FORMER PRES GEORGE W. BUSH: And will, to the best of my ability...
MADDEN: But these peaceful transitions of power sometimes clash with another hallmark of our democracy - the First Amendment and the right to peacefully assemble and protest. TV coverage of George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration captured raucous protests along Pennsylvania Avenue, a fallout from the bitter recount fight.
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UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: Tom, the protesting is now very intense as we're coming up here. Got the National Organization for Women screaming fraud, Bush stole the election. The police are now in...
MADDEN: The tradition of protests at inauguration goes way back, According to historian Jim Bendat, a former public defender and author of "Democracy's Big Day."
JIM BENDAT: You can go back as far as 1853, Franklin Pierce. There were a small group of unemployed people who wanted to countermarch.
MADDEN: One of the more memorable demonstrations took place in 1913. As Woodrow Wilson was preparing to take office, thousands of women - suffragists - marched down Pennsylvania Avenue the day before inauguration to push for voting rights.
BENDAT: That was a very big event. There weren't any arrests, but some people treated them well, but other people insulted the women as they marched by.
MADDEN: Bendat says while large-scale protests aren't common during inaugurations, they have happened, like in 1973 for Richard Nixon's second swearing in.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) One, two, three, four, we don't want this [expletive] war.
MADDEN: Thousands descended on D.C. as anger over the Vietnam War boiled over.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Out, out, out, out, out, out.
BENDAT: By 1973, his second inauguration, that was probably the most amount of people to ever show up in Washington, D.C. for an inauguration. The estimate was 25,000 to 30,000 protesters.
MADDEN: And what do the presidents think? Bendat says the loud protest during 2001 clearly left an impression with the incoming president. He reads an excerpt from George W. Bush's memoir.
BENDAT: (Reading) I spent most of the ride in the presidential limo behind thick glass windows. While I couldn't make out their words, their middle fingers spoke loudly.
MADDEN: Striking the right balance between the rights of protesters and the needs of the inaugural ceremony can be a delicate dance. In recent years, it's become tougher for groups to protest along the parade route. But with more than 200,000 demonstrators expected in D.C. for inauguration week, there's little chance the protesters won't have their voices heard. And for Bendat, the inauguration historian, that's OK.
BENDAT: Generally these protests have been very peaceful. That should tell you that most people who want to make their feelings known want to do so in a peaceful way, that's the tradition.
MADDEN: And Bendat that says it's healthy for democracy. For NPR News, I'm Patrick Madden in Washington.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Leading Republicans in Congress are not big fans of President-elect Trump's talk of higher taxes on imports, but they are talking about one change which could affect the price of goods that you buy. It's an overhaul of the system used to tax imports and exports. Charles Lane from our member station WSHU explains.
CHARLES LANE, BYLINE: Debbie Hickey (ph) just bought some slacks for her sons, and she wanted to buy them at Wal-Mart.
DEBBIE HICKEY: 'Cause they're, you know, young and starting out in the business world, so their clothes are very economical.
LANE: What makes them economical is this...
HICKEY: Oh, Vietnam. Made in Vietnam.
LANE: The U.S. imports about $2.7 trillion worth of goods a year. Imports are cheap because labor costs are much lower in places like Vietnam, and for the most part, the U.S. doesn't impose a lot of special taxes on them. Here's how it works. When Wal-Mart buys pants from Vietnam for $20 and sells them to Hickey for 25, the company is only taxed on that $5 of profit. Part of the Republican tax plan would change that. It would tax Wal-Mart for the full $25. It's called a border adjustment tax, and Wall Street analysts expect some retail prices to go up as much as 15 percent.
HICKEY: Wow, OK, so that would make a difference of where I buy Things like that. Honestly, 15 percent, I think it's a lot.
LANE: At the same time the border adjustment would hike taxes for companies that import, it would cut taxes for companies that export. Alan Auerbach is an economist at Berkeley, and one of the architects of the plan.
ALAN AUERBACH: Our current corporate tax system is just broken, it has so many problems.
LANE: The corporate tax code has been accused of slowing growth, forcing companies to shift profits overseas, or even shifting the entire company. Advocates say border adjustment would solve that, and Republicans love it for one more reason.
AUERBACH: The fact that it's encouraging companies to locate profitable productive activities in the United States, companies that might otherwise locate them in countries where their tax rates are lower. There's no longer an incentive to do that.
LANE: Even if this plan sounds like one dreamed up by President-elect Donald Trump, it actually predates his campaign by several years. In fact, it originates from the left. And Auerbach, who advised Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, thinks unions should embrace border adjustment, but right now that seems unlikely.
BOB MCINTYRE: The Republican Party has been trying to get some kind of weirdo consumption tax for at least the last 40 years.
LANE: Bob McIntyre directs the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice. Since the poor and middle class spend the vast majority of their income, he sees them shouldering most of the import tax. Meanwhile, companies that export a lot will pass their new tax windfall on to shareholders. McIntyre says this is the same regressive tax Republicans have always pitched.
MCINTYRE: They like taxes that hit the middle class and the poor, and they hate taxes that the rich have to pay, and now they're in power.
LANE: Academics point to economic theory which says as the U.S. reduces its trade deficit, the dollar will gain in value and offset any benefits to U.S. exports. Wall Street buys this theory, but not its simplicity. Brian McGough is a retail analyst for Hedgeye.
BRIAN MCGOUGH: This is a paradigm shift, and a paradigm that's been in place for 30 years won't change in a week, won't change in a month, and it won't even change really in three or four years.
LANE: McGough predicts major bankruptcies, and this is where the retail lobbyists come in. They've been marshalling resources and planning a full-on battle royal to key border adjustment out of the tax bill. Proponents, however, say Congress has run out of options. If the corporate tax code is going to change, a border adjustment might be the only thing both sides can agree on. For NPR News, I'm Charles Lane.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene. And, Steve, I do not have to tell you how excited I was the other night when my Pittsburgh Steelers hung on to beat the Kansas City Chiefs, and it is on to the AFC Championship Game against England.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
No, you actually don't.
GREENE: (Laughter) You can hear it.
INSKEEP: You actually don't have to tell me how excited you are, David. I can - I knew, I knew. But go on, go on. Anyway, your Steelers were excited themselves about the game in the locker room, which we usually don't get to see, except that this time a wide receiver Antonio Brown pulled out his phone and started streaming the locker room party to Facebook Live.
GREENE: Yeah, our star wide receiver, and this was just not a good idea as we hear here from Cindy Boren. She's a sports reporter for The Washington Post.
CINDY BOREN: There was a lot of nonsense in it, you know, just yelling and screaming and jibberish. But then you could hear a voice in the background talking about the upcoming game. And that voice clearly belonged to Mike Tomlin, the coach.
INSKEEP: The Steelers coach who apparently has no idea that he's being sent out to the world.
GREENE: Right.
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MIKE TOMLIN: When you get to this point in the journey, man, not a lot needs to be said [expletive] but let's say very little moving forward. Let's start our [expletive] preparations. We spotted those [expletive] a day and a half.
GREENE: So the worst part, Steve, Tomlin used a vulgar term to refer to the Patriots, so the Patriots now have more motivation. And here's the crazy thing - Tomlin actually ended his speech by telling players to lay low this week, stay off social media.
INSKEEP: (Laughter) Don't curse about the other team or anything like that (laughter). And we should say we do Facebook Live here. Facebook pays NPR to make live videos that run on the site. But this is news.
GREENE: But not in our locker room.
INSKEEP: We're talking about this because it's news.
GREENE: Not in our locker room (laughter). In an in NFL locker room, you'd think - I mean, players, coaches, they think this is private, and sports journalists, they've just been piling on. This is Manish Mehta, an NFL columnist for the New York Daily News.
MANISH MEHTA: Well, there are myriad factors. One, of course, is you don't want to rile up the other team needlessly. And of course it's disrespectful to the coach because you have a coach here relaying a specific message to his team that's not meant to be heard not only by fans, but it's certainly not meant to be heard by the opponents.
INSKEEP: It was actually heard by more than one million people before it was taken down on Monday. It's not clear, by the way, if Antonio Brown is going to face any consequences.
GREENE: Yeah, as in fines. But consequences the team might face - I can imagine some of what Coach Tomlin said about the Patriots probably already up in the Patriots locker room.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This week, members of President-elect Trump's economic team take questions at Senate confirmation hearings. One of them is Wilbur Ross, the billionaire investor who's the choice for commerce secretary. Another is Steven Mnuchin, the hedge fund investor who's the pick for secretary of the Treasury. We brought in part of our own economic team. Jared Bernstein is a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, author of the book "The Reconnection Agenda." Good morning to you again, sir.
JARED BERNSTEIN: Good morning.
INSKEEP: And also Peter Morici, a conservative economist who writes for The New York Post, among many other publications. Thanks to you as well for coming in.
PETER MORICI: Nice to be with you.
INSKEEP: So how do these Cabinet choices compare with what the president-elect promised while campaigning? Peter, you can start.
MORICI: Well, he didn't really promise much in terms of who he would put there. But essentially, we're getting generals, billionaires and people with PR experience, not a lot of economics, not a lot of policy expertise. And it draws concern as to whether he's really going to put together a coherent plan that reflects what he campaigned on.
INSKEEP: But did he promise disruption when he was campaigning? Is it fair to say this is a disruptive set of choices, Jared?
BERNSTEIN: Well, you know, I very much agree with Peter's assessment of the Cabinet's experience. But what I would see differently is that I actually think he did very much make a set of promises to a group of people who were instrumental in his getting elected, and that's working-class folks who've been on the wrong side of globalization, on the wrong side of inequality. I think many of those would be rightly very surprised to see a Cabinet that was largely billionaires, that as far as I can tell right now is talking mostly about big, fat tax cuts for rich people.
INSKEEP: They're also talking about protectionist policies and that sort of thing, though. They are talking about trying to shift the way the United States approaches globalization.
MORICI: But it seems to be deal-making. Let's lean on General Motors. Let's lean on Carrier. Let's lean on United Technology. You know, all the deals in the world are not going to give you the kind of turnaround and jobs growth that he needs. For example, 100,000 more jobs a month would mean a hundred deals a month.
INSKEEP: Oh.
MORICI: That's absurd. Instead, he needs to create a suitable environment for trade. And he's pooh-poohing congressional proposals to change the tax structure and things of that nature. It doesn't seem like he's interested in the kinds of holistic solutions that will give rise to fundamental change and incentives to locate here.
INSKEEP: He did talk about changes to the health care system over the weekend. He talked with Robert Costa of The Washington Post. And he claimed, although he did not give any details, that he was very close to having a replacement ready, his own plan to replace Obamacare. Wouldn't say what it was, but he said it would be "insurance for everybody" - that's a quote - lower prices for the insurance, lower deductibles for the insurance, lower drug prices. What do you make of all this, gentlemen?
BERNSTEIN: Well, look, I mean, this is - it sounds a little bit like Medicare, by the way, Medicare for All, which is something Ted Kennedy was for years ago.
INSKEEP: Socialized medicine.
BERNSTEIN: Yeah. So, I mean, it's very - it's a very important set of statements because it flies in the face of what we're actually seeing from folks like Tom Price, his designee for Health and Human Services, the kinds of plans that depend on cost shifting back on to people. So high deductibles - so, you know, these high-risk pools, plans that shift costs back on to folks that the Affordable Care Act was actually trying to take off of them.
So it really goes the opposite way. One other quick point on this. One - another piece of this is that when you get rid of the ACA - when you get rid of the Affordable Care Act, you're implementing a huge tax cut for millionaires and actually a tax increase for people who were formerly getting the premium subsidy tax cuts.
INSKEEP: Oh, because there were a lot of tax changes as part of Obamacare.
BERNSTEIN: Exactly. Well...
INSKEEP: Peter Morici, what do you think, as a conservative economist, of what the president-elect set out as principles that he wants, insurance for everybody, et cetera, et cetera?
MORICI: A fundamental problem that Donald Trump has to address - the Democrats have to address, the Republicans have to address, everyone has to address - is that we pay substantially more for specific health care services, drugs, medical devices and so forth than the Europeans, about 50 percent more. It sounds to me like he is circling around a European system where they regulate prices. The only way he can deliver on what he promised is to regulate prices.
Now, as for cutting taxes on billionaires, you know, some of his taxes kick in on families that make $250,000 a year. That is a substantial income. But to say it's just tax cuts for billionaires is wrong. The thing is is that he is willing to take on the issues that neither Obama nor the conservatives and Republicans - conservative Republicans are.
INSKEEP: I want to ask one other question, though. Is he taking them on realistically? Philip Klein, managing editor of the Washington Examiner, which is a conservative-leaning publication, said this over the weekend. Quote, "what Trump said on health care is like we're going to Mars without fuel for the price of a Popsicle stick. NASA is figuring out details." Is the president-elect wrestling seriously with the issues here?
MORICI: That was demagoguery. My feeling is that he is wrestling with - seriously by entertaining those solutions because the Europeans have a range of systems. Some have a single provider system...
BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
MORICI: ...Some have a single-payer system, some have private insurance.
BERNSTEIN: So I just, look, I...
MORICI: Hold on. What - they all deal with pricing, and he seems to be willing to take that on.
BERNSTEIN: So I don't think he's willing to take on any of that stuff. I think he's just - I don't think he actually has a plan. I think he's just making stuff up as he goes along, and I don't believe what he's talking about. What I think is particularly important here, though, is that he is completely at odds with his Republican caucus, who, again, has a plan that shifts costs back on to individuals much in the way that the Affordable Care Act was trying to take cost back the other way.
In fact, what Donald Trump is talking about is much closer - and I agree with Peter on this - is much closer to the type of health care reform that Democrats have been trying to move forward for years.
MORICI: In his press conference, he specifically talked about drug pricing. He specifically talked about it.
BERNSTEIN: Yeah, true.
INSKEEP: Negotiating for drugs, yeah.
MORICI: And that's not the first time. He's also talked about...
BERNSTEIN: It's actually a good idea.
MORICI: He's also talked about a single-payer system in the past. The real question for Democrats then is, are you willing to work with him, or are you going to criticize everything he says or does? 'Cause he's embracing some of your ideas, and you're trashing him right now.
BERNSTEIN: No, no. I just say that - there's no question that Democrats would be happy to work with him if that's the direction he's going in. No one believes that that's really the direction he's going in.
INSKEEP: Let me ask about one other thing, gentlemen. The inauguration is coming up on Friday. Perhaps you've noticed. And The New York Times reports that more than $100 million has been raised by the Trump Inaugural Committee. More than $100 million, that's a record. It's more, I believe, than both of Obama's inaugurations combined.
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean a lot because the prices of all these things always go up. But it's a lot of money, including from corporations like Boeing. And here's a detail from the Times article. For the most important guests, his new hotel, blocks from the White House, will serve as a defacto home base. How are you feeling about this man's relationship to business?
BERNSTEIN: Well, the last point you made sounds like it generates constitutional problems 'cause you're not supposed to take gifts that way. But to me, this is just part and parcel of his whole resistance to actually divest and to put his assets in a blind trust. And I think the conflicts of interest here are deep. I recognize that he doesn't have to, by law, do much about them. But I think optically, he absolutely should.
INSKEEP: Peter Morici.
MORICI: Well, these things are always becoming more expensive. But I think this notion that presidents have to go out and raise money for their own party their first day in office is silly. And we really do need reform in that regard.
INSKEEP: Do you think that this man is going to - this man - do you think the president-elect, as president, is going to be independent of the special interests that he's now collecting money from?
MORICI: Well, he's going to be more independent than other presidents 'cause he certainly has - is going to have to worry about where his money's going to come from when he leaves office. He's so incredibly wealthy that he - that's one advantage of having an incredibly wealthy guy.
INSKEEP: Jared.
BERNSTEIN: Yeah, I see nothing but downside from that perspective. I mean, I understand that it's difficult to divest that kind of a fortune, but he absolutely should try to do it. And the fact that he hasn't suggests deep conflicts of interest. He actually owes money to the Chinese. I mean, this is a serious problem.
INSKEEP: Hundreds of millions of dollars. Gentlemen, thanks very much, always a pleasure talking with you. Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland. Glad that you came by.
MORICI: Thank you.
BERNSTEIN: Thank you.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
All right, the widow of the killer behind the Orlando nightclub shooting is expected to appear in federal court today. The FBI arrested Noor Salman yesterday. She has been charged with aiding and abetting her husband by providing material support to a terrorist organization. Prosecutors say she also obstructed justice by misleading police and FBI agents when they questioned her about the attack. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang has more.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: It's been more than seven months since Noor Salman's husband, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and injured more than 50 at Pulse nightclub. He pledged allegiance to ISIS during the attack before he was killed in a shootout with police. Afterwards, federal authorities and a grand jury started looking into Noor Salman. It was part of an ongoing investigation, as U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch explained on MSNBC.
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LORETTA LYNCH: We said from the beginning we were going to look at every aspect of this case, of every aspect of the shooter's life to determine not just why did he take these actions but who else knew about them, was anyone else involved?
WANG: Salman's attorney Linda Moreno says her client did not have any fore knowledge of the Orlando shooting. Salman has claimed in an interview with The New York Times that her husband repeatedly beat her and verbally abused her, and her lawyer argues that she could not have predicted what her husband intended to do.
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LINDA MORENO: Noor has told her story of abuse at his hands. We believe it is misguided and wrong to prosecute her and that it truly dishonors the memory of the victims to punish an innocent person.
WANG: FBI agents arrested Noor Salman on Monday morning at her home outside of San Francisco. She and Mateen got married in Northern California back in 2011 before they moved to Florida. They had a son together. He's now 4 years old, and they named him in part after Mateen. Last month, Salman filed a court petition to change her son's name which has become bound to the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
With Mateen dead, no criminal charges had been filed in connection to the shooting until Salman's indictment. Orlando's police chief John Mina released a written statement about the charges. He said, quote, "there is some relief in knowing that someone will be held accountable for that horrific crime." Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Here's the harsh reality for some refugees. Some parts of life have gotten harder since they fled. Just listen to Mohammad Mehdi (ph). He escaped religious persecution in Afghanistan. We reached him on his cell phone at a camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. People are packed in camps, living in flimsy tents, and it has snowed recently which reminds Mehdi of Kabul.
MOHAMMAD MEHDI: The difference of here and Kabul is that we have a roof there. So unfortunately, the air is too cold because we don't have a roof on us.
GREENE: No roof on Lesbos, but a roof in Kabul - though, Greek government officials do say they hope to get all refugees out of tents in the coming days. Now, Philippa Kempson lives on Lesbos.
PHILIPPA KEMPSON: There is 4,700 people living in this camp. Many of them are sick and getting sicker with flu and different infections because of the conditions.
GREENE: Tens of thousands of refugees have landed on the beach in front of Philippa Kempson's house the last couple years. She sees them from her window, and she told us what she saw just the day before.
KEMPSON: The weather conditions were awful. We had two boats. The first one arrived some time in the middle of the night containing 59 people and I think five children amongst them. They weren't spotted because it wasn't safe for our rescue teams to be out there, so they actually walked for hours before anyone found them.
GREENE: They were just walking along the shore of the island?
KEMPSON: Yeah, pretty much trying to find help. Thankfully, they were spotted by one of the local residents who alerted everybody. And they were given dry clothes to await the transportation to the detention center.
GREENE: And what do you do when you see one of these boats approaching the beach?
KEMPSON: Well, we've been doing this for two years because of where we live. We're - you can't take your child to school and drive past women and children on the beach freezing and crying, so we would go with whatever we could find. We gave away our own clothes, whatever food we could afford to buy.
As the conflict in Syria gained momentum, we went from one or two boats with 50 people and maybe a couple of kids every day to - in October 2015, there was 200 boats a day coming.
GREENE: Wow.
KEMPSON: The two boats we had yesterday were predominantly Iraqi people coming from Mosul and Syrians also. So every time there's a new conflict, these people have to go somewhere.
GREENE: When did you move to Lesbos?
KEMPSON: We moved in the spring of early 2000.
GREENE: And you moved there - I imagine...
KEMPSON: For a quiet life.
GREENE: ...Not thinking you would be...
KEMPSON: (Laughter) Yeah, we moved here with my daughter who was just a baby at the time. We just wanted a quiet, out of the rat race kind of life basically.
GREENE: Do you think about leaving and looking for a different quiet place ever?
KEMPSON: To be honest, we're going to have to leave eventually. I mean, we're staying at the moment because there is no one else here who is dealing with the refugees arriving, but we had to send our daughter back to the U.K. a year ago.
We're constantly under threats here by different groups who don't like what we've done. We've had many death threats. Yeah. It's not an easy place to live now.
GREENE: Why are they threatening you?
KEMPSON: They blame us for bringing the refugees. Apparently, if we didn't help them, they wouldn't come.
GREENE: Do you believe that in any way?
KEMPSON: Of course not, of course not. That - I mean, these people were fleeing anyway. It's just a case of we couldn't stand by and watch them drown.
GREENE: What needs to happen if anything is going to ease this crisis?
KEMPSON: I don't know the solution to this. But I know what doesn't work is making these people criminal, refusing to give them any sanctuary, even temporary. The rest of the world seems to treat this like some kind of plague they need to keep out instead of seeing it as humanity they need to help.
GREENE: Well, Philippa, thank you for talking to us. We really appreciate it and appreciate hearing the work that you're doing.
KEMPSON: OK. Thanks for listening.
GREENE: Philippa Kempson lives on Lesbos and helps refugees. We spoke via Skype.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Surveys show unease as Inauguration Day approaches. It's common for a president-elect to gain sky-high approval ratings during the transition.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
After all, almost anything he or she does is seen as new and different, and he hasn't had to make any hard decisions yet - Donald Trump. But Trump has provoked a different reaction here. When asked about his transition, more people disapprove than approve.
INSKEEP: For his core supporters, though, this is an exciting week. And we called back one of the voters we met last fall during our project Divided States.
GREENE: She is Annie Ruiz, a Trump supporter I met in Florida. When we reached back and spoke to her again, she was busy cleaning up her house, running errands. She is throwing a party.
ANNIE RUIZ: My husband is turning 50, as well as a very close friend of ours. So we're celebrating their 50th. And it's going to be on the day of the inauguration, so we will also be celebrating the inauguration.
GREENE: They actually plan to live stream the inaugural ball on a big screen outside the house.
RUIZ: For us, it's been eight years, you know, that we haven't celebrated, so we want to celebrate. We want to have a good time. And we're happy, and we want to show that.
GREENE: Now, when I spoke to Ruiz back in October, she told me that she had originally backed Marco Rubio for president. But she came around to Trump, and now Ruiz is an enthusiastic supporter of the president-elect.
RUIZ: I feel more positive than I've felt in a long time. I see him holding meetings with people. I see him reaching out to the automotive industry, the tech sector, leaders from the African-American community. I just - I see him really trying to change things, trying to do things, get things done. And I find that exciting and positive.
GREENE: Now, some changes have already happened. The stock market has done well since the election. Other changes Trump is promising, like bringing back American jobs, in part by renegotiating trade deals. Some economists question whether that is possible. But Annie Ruiz says she is feeling a difference already.
RUIZ: My 401(k) is doing a lot better than it was, you know, since the election. And I think also my kids' prospects for the future has changed. I feel like their job opportunities are going to be better already because they're, you know, getting to that stage now where they're entering the job market. And that's really important to me, that they have a lot of opportunities. And I feel like that is already opening up with all the jobs that are coming back.
GREENE: Annie Ruiz, a Donald Trump supporter we met last year in Florida as part of our Divided States series. She is looking forward to Friday's inauguration.
INSKEEP: Which, of course, NPR News and reporters from stations across this country will be reporting on Friday. You can listen live and watch a live fact-check on the inaugural address at npr.org.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep with a case of do-it-yourself health care. People in a Swedish town responded to news that the only maternity ward was closing. The nearest one still operating is more than 60 miles away - quite a journey with a mom in labor. So two midwives are offering a training course on delivering a baby in a vehicle. People need to be ready for an emergency stop. Think of the courses - what to expect when you're expecting to give birth on the road. You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President-elect Trump spent his final weekend before the inauguration making provocative statements. And NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith has been following along. She's on the line. Hi, Tamara.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Hi.
INSKEEP: One of those statements was in an interview with European publications. He said that NATO, the North Atlantic Alliance, is obsolete, which he's said before. Although, in fairness, he added, it's very important to me. So how have his words been received?
KEITH: Well, Russia spoke out to say that it agreed with Trump's assessment of NATO, that it's obsolete. And in Europe, it certainly ruffled feathers, as he has a tendency to do. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said, I think we Europeans have control of our destiny. You know, the interesting thing here, though, is that both Trump's nominee for secretary of state and his nominee for secretary of defense disagree with the assessment that NATO is obsolete. Testifying in their confirmation hearings last week, they spoke of the value and necessity of that alliance.
INSKEEP: And we should just underline the strangeness of this situation, where a Russian - a Kremlin spokesman - is saying, we agree with President-elect Trump, who is saying something different than his American advisers. It doesn't make him look very independent of the Kremlin, does it?
KEITH: No (laughter). And I think that that might be something that the Kremlin likes. It boosts up Russia in a way that Russia wants to be boosted on the international stage - not necessarily what Donald Trump is aiming for. You know, there's this New York Times article that's out today that says that Trump's ties to Russia may be deeper than what he had been saying recently. He says he has no dealings in Russia. The Times article says that he doesn't have any current deals in Russia, but it documents three decades of effort by him and his associates to secure deals that just never really happened.
INSKEEP: Now, here at home over the holiday weekend, he had a fight with John Lewis, the Democratic congressman from Georgia. Lewis, fairly - to be fair, can say - we can say he started it by saying that the president-elect is not going to be a legitimate president because of concerns about Russia in the election and other things. What's the latest here?
KEITH: Well, and then Trump tweeted at him multiple times and in a way that many felt was insulting. Then, on Martin Luther King Day, Martin Luther King Jr.'s son, Martin Luther King III, visited Trump Tower to talk to him. That had been arranged before the Lewis dust-up. King said that maybe people had gotten hot on both sides and said things in the heat of the moment on both sides. He called his discussion with Trump constructive. They talked about voting access. But John Lewis is still boycotting the inauguration, along with a lot of other people.
INSKEEP: How divided is this country as the inauguration approaches, Tamara?
KEITH: This country is very divided as the inauguration approaches. You know, typically leading into an inauguration, a president-elect's ratings go up. In this case, Donald Trump, according to a Gallup poll released yesterday, has a favorability rating of 40 percent. Fifty-five percent view him unfavorably. By way of contrast, Barack Obama, in January of 2009, had almost an 80 percent approval rating. Even George W. Bush, after that very contentious election, he headed into his inauguration with a 62 percent approval rating. And Donald Trump is at 40 percent.
INSKEEP: What's happening to the president-elect then?
KEITH: He is - you know, he talked about coming in, on that night of his election, of bringing Americans together. But for the last couple of months, he hasn't done much to make a lot of Americans feel like he's bringing them together. And he's also been tweeting a lot. And if you look at polling, even people who support him are concerned about some of the things that he's been saying. You know, the feuding worked well as a candidate. There's a question of whether this ongoing feuding is working as president-elect.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Tamara Keith. Tamara, thanks very much.
KEITH: You're welcome.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
After more than two weeks, a manhunt in Turkey is over. Overnight, police captured the main suspect in a deadly attack at an Istanbul nightclub. The suspect is described as a native of Uzbekistan and a supporter of ISIS.
Here's NPR's Peter Kenyon in Istanbul.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: After a search that led to central Anatolia and the Aegean coast, police and intelligence forces tracked the suspected nightclub shooter to a suburb of Istanbul Monday night. A photo released by police showed a man with a bruised face, who was described as an Uzbek national named Abdulgadir Masharipov. Turkey's prime minister said the suspect was being questioned by police. He described the capture as a big step for everyone. Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin briefed reporters on the capture. He's heard here through an interpreter.
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VASIP SAHIN: (Through interpreter) The Istanbul Security Directorate has carried out some diligent work regarding the perpetrator. And tonight, during an operation in the district of Esenyurt, the perpetrator of this heinous attack has been captured.
KENYON: Sahin says police believe they have the right man, having obtained a confession and evidence that points to his being the gunman.
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SAHIN: (Through interpreter) The terrorist has admitted to his crime. And his fingerprints also matched those found on the scene.
KENYON: Sahin says Masharipov was born in whose Uzbekistan in 1983. Turkish officials described the attack as professionally carried out. And Sahin says the information they have on Masharipov suggests he was capable of such an attack.
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SAHIN: (Through interpreter) He's received training in Afghanistan and speaks four languages - a terrorist that has been well brought up.
KENYON: The governor described an exhaustive manhunt involving the viewing of some 7,200 hours of video footage and the use of 2,000 police officers supported by Turkish intelligence. One-hundred-fifty raids netted 50 detainees. Two were arrested to face charges. The governor added that authorities consider Masharipov an ISIS terrorist, though the exact link remains unclear. Sahin uses the acronym Daesh, another way of referring to Islamic State.
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SAHIN: (Through interpreter) Can we say that he is a Daesh terrorist now? Yes. Well, at least it's clear that this has been done in the name of Daesh.
KENYON: The attack shocked Turkey's largest city, targeting unarmed civilians out celebrating the new year at an upscale Istanbul nightclub overlooking the Bosphorus Strait. The gunman sprayed bullets around the club, killing 39 people - mostly foreigners - and wounding dozens more. He fled in the chaos that followed. State media say the suspect eluded police at least four times before finally being captured, and there was speculation he might have fled the country.
In an online message, ISIS called the gunman a heroic soldier who had attacked those celebrating what it called a pagan holiday. Turkish officials say it was likely a response to Turkey's military operations in northern Syria. Istanbul Governor Sahin says the suspect is being questioned, in particular about possible accomplices and about any other attacks that may be planned in Turkey. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Abandoned houses boarded up with plywood on the windows are synonymous with blight. And Ohio is trying to change those optics by banning the use of plywood on some foreclosed properties. Proponents say clear boarding panels made of a clear polycarbonate will improve esthetics and help prevent vandalism. But Esther Honig of member station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, reports there are problems with this new facade.
ESTHER HONIG, BYLINE: Standing outside this single-story home in Cleveland's Slavic Village, you'd never guess the property's been abandoned for several years.
ROBERT KLEIN: It looks like any other property in the block. You can't tell this property's vacant.
HONIG: Sloshing through wet snow, Robert Klein points to a house whose windows have been boarded up with sheets of clear polycarbonate, the same plastic that's used on airplane windows. It's weather resistant and deters break-ins. Klein picks up a hammer and takes a swing.
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HONIG: OK, so pretty - pretty...
KLEIN: It's not breakable. You cannot get in.
HONIG: Klein owns a company that boards up foreclosed properties and says plywood has a number of disadvantages. It's ugly, and it's easy for squatters and vandals to breach. Three years ago, Klein helped develop and patent this polycarbonate sheet and is now the leading manufacturer. He also lobbied for this new law. It doesn't require clear boarding, but by banning plywood, it leaves few alternatives.
KLEIN: So do I have an interest? Absolutely I have an interest but that still doesn't - shouldn't take away from the benefits, what it does for the community.
HONIG: Now, this new law doesn't mean every abandoned structure will now have clear boarding. It only applies proactively to houses foreclosed on by a bank. Still, that has some people in this community pretty excited. Halley Eads lives here in Slavic Village.
HALLEY EADS: When you drive down a street and half of the houses are boarded, it makes you sad almost. Like, you know, you feel like things are kind of going downhill.
HONIG: That's why Eads and her neighbors really like clear boarding. It looks better, and they can see into these properties to report any criminal activity. But there's a number of catches. A large piece of plywood costs about $20 while a similar-sized sheet of clear polycarbonate costs nearly six times as much. And it's not only about the money. Lieutenant Matthew Hertzfeld is with the Toledo Fire Department and says while it only takes a firefighter seconds to rip through plywood with an ax, to cut through polycarbonate sheeting, you have to attack it with an electric saw.
MATTHEW HERTZFELD: How long does it take us to deploy that saw to cut through that plastic? In the fire service, time is of essence for us. Life and death, not to be dramatic, comes down to minutes.
HONIG: Hertzfeld also worries these windows could trap his men inside a blazing structure. Robert Klein's windows are built with a quick release bar, but Hertzfeld isn't convinced that design will hold up in a fire.
HERTZFELD: Imagine yourself with 70 pounds of firefighting gear on and you have zero visibility.
HONIG: Robert Solomon with the National Fire Protection Association says, like it or not, firefighters across the country will have to adapt. Federal mortgage company Fannie Mae has already installed clear boarding on thousands of homes across the U.S., and Phoenix recently became the first city to require it on all vacant properties. Solomon says while it poses a problem for firefighters, they'll figure it out.
ROBERT SOLOMON: You know, fire departments can, you know, breach through a brick wall or a concrete wall if they have to and when they have to.
HONIG: It's likely that plywood will continue to be replaced by polycarbonate. New York City and other cities are now also considering banning the use of plywood on their abandoned houses and buildings. For NPR News, I'm Esther Honig in Columbus, Ohio.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This week, we begin to get a glimpse of how President-elect Trump's nominee for education secretary wants to change the nation's schools. Betsy DeVos is a wealthy advocate for school choice. She's been praised by mainstream Republicans like Jeb Bush, and she has been criticized by those who fear her push to privatize public education could destroy it. Newly elected Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan is among those who will hear her testimony before a Senate committee, and she's on the line. Senator, welcome to the program.
MAGGIE HASSAN: Good morning, Steve. Thanks for having me.
INSKEEP: What did you think when you met Betsy DeVos?
HASSAN: Well, look, one of the foundations of our democracy is that all of our children deserve access to quality public education, regardless of their personal circumstances. And after my meeting with Ms. DeVos, I still have serious concerns about whether she will uphold that. She both lacks support for and experience with public education. She never attended a public school. She's also spent an awful lot of her time, energy and money to create a parallel system which has diverted taxpayer dollars to private religious and for-profit schools without any accountability. She is a champion of vouchers, which have largely proven unsuccessful and divert public school dollars. And I have a particular concern as well because vouchers often hurt students who experience disabilities because in order to get the voucher, many of these students have to sign away their legal protection. And there are also accountability issues.
INSKEEP: Let me ask you though, Senator, essentially she's an advocate for school choice, for parents, for families, being able to choose more than one school. President Obama has not favored vouchers for private schools, but he did during his administration increase funding for public charter schools, which is basically school choice. Are the two sides really that far apart here?
HASSAN: I am a proud supporter of public charter schools here in New Hampshire as well. But there is a real difference between public charter schools, which can be established working with local communities and educators to fill a particular need in the public school system and provide more alternatives and more choice for learning styles and families - then a voucher system, which diverts money from the public school system, generally and often doesn't cover the full cost of the private school that the student is attending.
So it doesn't provide access for everybody because only families who could afford the additional money to fill the gap between the voucher and tuition can use it. And what Ms. DeVos has championed often are unaccountable schools. She doesn't want accountability measures, and they're often for-profit schools, which really means that parents and families are often vulnerable in terms of the marketing efforts that some of these schools engage in.
INSKEEP: Senator, having met Betsy DeVos, do you think she'd agree with the statement you just made, she doesn't want accountability measures for private schools?
HASSAN: Well, she has opposed accountability measures in many of the systems that she's championed. And many of these systems don't have accountability measures. And when you look at the history of the system that she's been most involved with in Detroit, it's been a really bad experience both on the voucher side of things and on the public school side of things. You know, even when a child, for instance, gets expelled from one of the private schools under the voucher system, the private school keeps the money. The child is returned to the public school. But there are no dollars there to support that child in that public school setting. So this is the type of thing that really concerns a lot of us.
We should be working together to provide strong neighborhood public schools with public school systems that include public charters so that we can address the learning needs and learning styles of many different students. That's what we focused on in New Hampshire with also strong accountability to make sure that taxpayers and families and students, most importantly, are getting the kind of education they deserve...
INSKEEP: Senator, we've just got...
HASSAN: ...And that will prepare them for the 21st century.
INSKEEP: Senator, we've just got a few seconds here. Are you a no vote then already on Betsy DeVos?
HASSAN: I'm going to listen carefully to what she says this afternoon in our hearing and see if she can address those concerns.
INSKEEP: OK. Senator, thanks very much, appreciate it.
HASSAN: Thank you very much. Take care.
INSKEEP: Maggie Hassan is a newly inaugurated United States senator from New Hampshire.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Tomorrow, President-elect Trump lays a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery. It's the traditional start of a presidential inauguration, a way to honor those who've defended this country. As the inauguration unfolds, thousands of people in and out of uniform will be working to protect him and the many who come to see him. Washington, D.C. streets are lined with fences and cement barriers. Providing security for three days of events is expected to cost more than $100 million dollars. NPR's Brian Naylor reports.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: Law enforcement agencies in Washington have been planning for over a year how to keep safe those who will be watching, taking part in and protesting the 58th presidential inauguration. They estimate that from 700,000 to 900,000 people will be in attendance, fewer than watched Barack Obama's inaugurations but still a very big crowd. Little is left to chance. Here's FBI assistant director Paul Abbate.
PAUL ABBATE: We have been doing a lot of preparations and practices and drills, tabletop exercises and rehearsals.
NAYLOR: In all, some 28,000 law enforcement personnel will be in Washington, including the FBI, the Secret Service, National Guard troops and police from Washington, D.C. and out of town. The Coast Guard will be patrolling the Potomac. And sharpshooters and spotters will be posted on top of buildings lining the inaugural parade route on Pennsylvania Avenue. A new security concern this year, that someone might try to drive a big truck into a crowd following similar attacks last year in Nice, France and Berlin. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson says security officials have taken steps to prepare for that.
JEH JOHNSON: Dump trucks, heavy trucks, trucks with cement, busses and things of the like, that is a precaution that we are doubling down on, in particular, this inauguration.
NAYLOR: Johnson says 99 groups have applied for permits to demonstrate against or in favor of the incoming president. Protesters who go through security will be allowed along the parade route like anyone else. U.S. Park Police Chief Robert MacLean says there will also be spots for organized demonstrations.
ROBERT MACLEAN: We have issued several permits. We continue to issue them all the way up through the day of the inauguration to these groups. And they will be spread out. And they will be placed in areas where they can exercise their First Amendment right.
NAYLOR: Demonstrations have disrupted inaugural parades in the past, most recently at George W. Bush's second inaugural. Protesters also threw rocks at Richard Nixon's motorcade in 1973. Johnson says officials will be closely monitoring things come Inauguration Day.
JOHNSON: We have our ear to the ground. We listen for and keep an eye on planned demonstrations, planned activity, specific types of demonstrations. And extra precautions are taken to ensure that the actual official event cannot be disrupted or blocked.
NAYLOR: Law enforcement will start to ease back security after the last official event, a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral on Saturday. Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump made China a regular target of his rhetorical attacks. So it's safe to say the next U.S. ambassador to China is going to have to manage a diplomatic relationship that is even more complicated than it usually is. If confirmed, that job will go to Iowa Governor Terry Branstad.
In a moment, we'll hear about the kinds of challenges Branstad will face as ambassador to China. But first, Iowa Public Radio's Clay Masters reports on why Trump picked the Midwestern governor for this particular job.
CLAY MASTERS, BYLINE: Two days before the election, Donald Trump stood before a large crowd in Sioux City, Iowa, and he called up on stage the longest-serving governor in U.S. history.
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DONALD TRUMP: I think there's nobody that knows more about trade than him. He's one of the ones in dealing with China - well, you would be your - you would be our prime candidate to take care of China. He is...
MASTERS: What Trump was alluding to was Terry Branstad and Iowa's long relationship with China. While sitting in his Capitol office in Des Moines, Branstad says the state exports billions of dollars' worth of pork, soybeans and other goods to China.
TERRY BRANSTAD: I had told Donald Trump on several occasions, don't say anything bad about China when you're in Iowa. We have a great relationship there.
MASTERS: Part of that great relationship can be traced back to the 1980s, when Branstad had his first run as Iowa's governor. In 1985, Xi Jinping came to the U.S. as a young agriculture officer from Hebei province.
SARAH LANDE: Then these were some of their foreign visits. They went to Monsanto.
MASTERS: Sarah Lande points to photos as she walks through what's now dubbed the Friendship House in Muscatine, Iowa. It's an unassuming 1960s, brick, split-foyer house where the Chinese president stayed back in 1985 in the bedroom of a young "Star Trek" fan. Two locals have purchased the house and hope to make it a tourist attraction. Lande was part of the group that organized that first trip. She says he'd read Mark Twain and fell in love with the Mississippi River, which borders Muscatine.
LANDE: And we found him jolly, a great smile.
MASTERS: Lande says Xi Jinping did not get a royal treatment in Iowa.
LANDE: One of the reasons we had homestays, everybody was a volunteer - people in the home, the potluck dinner - and I think that really appealed to him.
MASTERS: Since then, Xi Jinping and Terry Branstad have visited each other over the years. Branstad's office at the Capitol in Des Moines has lots of tokens of their friendship on display, including some artwork.
BRANSTAD: This is a gift from Xi Jingping when he was here for the old friends' reunion.
MASTERS: Branstad says he knows promoting Iowa to China is a much different job than being an ambassador between the two largest economies in the world. He's hopeful he can find areas of cooperation. Branstad was a big supporter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal backed by President Obama. Donald Trump has called it a disaster and says he'll back out of it. Branstad points out that China was not included in the TPP.
BRANSTAD: Maybe it can be renegotiated, and China could be included. That's something I think should be looked at, or the other thing would be to do bilateral agreements like we've done with South Korea.
MASTERS: While Branstad is hopeful his decades-long friendship with the Chinese president will be a benefit for the country, he acknowledges he has a lot to learn about foreign policy. For NPR News, I'm Clay Masters in Des Moines.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: And those lessons can't begin soon enough. Never have relations between the U.S. and China have been more strained or more crucial.
I'm NPR's Rob Schmitz reporting from Beijing. The most recent spat began in early December, started by Branstad's new boss. He had just taken a call from the president of Taiwan, an island with its own government, but an island Beijing considers part of China. China was not happy. But then five days later, things got a little better.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking Chinese).
SCHMITZ: Trump appointed Terry Branstad as the next ambassador to China, prompting the hint of a smile from a spokesman for the foreign ministry as he called the Iowa governor an old friend of China.
KEN JARRETT: Now this is a common quote in China which signifies that this is somebody that China feels that they can trust.
SCHMITZ: That's Ken Jarett, former China diplomat who now heads the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. Jarrett says Branstad's 30-year relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping is important. A more important relationship, though, will be the one Branstad has with his new boss. And Jarrett says the challenge will be interpreting Trump to the Chinese.
JARRETT: Now, everyone is still in the stage of trying to understand how to interpret his tweets. Now, this is not easy for Americans to do. It's even more difficult for Chinese to do.
SCHMITZ: Branstad will also have to navigate what has become a complicated frenemy kind of relationship. Beijing-based lawyer Lester Ross.
LESTER ROSS: Well, he's going to have, of course, major challenges because the relations between our two countries right now are somewhat tense.
SCHMITZ: Diplomatic landmines abound. China's encroachment into the South and East China Seas, cybersecurity, North Korean nukes and now the Chinese economy is in trouble. The Communist Party is tightening control over its people, their access to information and exposure to foreign influence.
ROSS: China has absorbed and embarked upon a fiercely security-conscious policy mix under which foreign influence is regarded suspiciously, no matter where it emanates from, no matter what its contents are.
SCHMITZ: In short, there may never have been a more challenging time to be U.S. ambassador to China. And, says Peking University professor Zha Daojiong, the role of the U.S. ambassador has never been more confusing to China's leadership.
ZHA DAOJIONG: What kind of role is he here to play? Is he here to represent a voice from the administration, or is he going to be functioning as a bridge of sorts?
SCHMITZ: Ambassadors to China in the '80s and '90s were descendants of missionaries in Asia, so-called old China hands, with the ability to see China through the lens of history, philosophy and civilization. Then around the turn of the century, a more politically savvy batch of ambassadors arrived with close connections to Washington. Zha misses the old days.
ZHA: Time has come for the ambassadorship to function as a bridge between the different voices of both societies.
SCHMITZ: Lester Ross agrees. When I ask him for advice for Branstad, the 30-year China veteran doesn't skip a beat.
ROSS: Be prepared to work hard. Be prepared to travel the country and to accommodate and welcome Chinese cultural influence. Try to make a broad, popular impression on the Chinese people.
SCHMITZ: In other words, get off Twitter. It won't be hard in China, where it's blocked. And be the face of America to the Chinese people. Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Beijing.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAWN OF MIDI SONG, "NIX")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now to one of Donald Trump's most politically important Cabinet picks. Georgia Congressman Tom Price goes before the Senate Health Committee today to make the case that he should be the next secretary of Health and Human Services. Price is a doctor, an orthopedic surgeon, in fact. And he's worked on budget and health care issues during his time in Congress.
He's been a vocal critic of Obamacare. So Democrats are sure to grill him about Republicans' plans to repeal and replace the law. And as NPR's Alison Kodjak reports, Price is also likely to face questions about his own finances.
ALISON KODJAK, BYLINE: Price's ethics reports show he traded in dozens of stocks while he served in Congress. Those include shares of pharmaceutical companies and medical device makers. Several news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, have reported that Price traded in those stocks while he sponsored legislation that could have increased their value. Senator Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the committee, is promising to ask Price a lot of questions.
PATTY MURRAY: We want to know who he met with and when, whether the transactions in question were initiated by a broker or by Congressman Price himself, what, if any, nonpublic information Congressman Price had when those transactions were made and exactly how much profit he made from each transaction.
KODJAK: Murray says the committee needs to ensure that Price was acting on behalf of the public rather than himself. That's the standard for all government employees. A Trump transition spokesman says Price's stocks are held in a broker-directed account, and the broker buys and sells without Price's knowledge. He also points out that some Democratic senators also hold individual company stocks in their portfolios. The spokesman says the Office of Government Ethics has determined that Price complied with congressional disclosure rules.
Along with ethics, Price is going to have to talk about the incoming administration's plans for Obamacare. Lawmakers have already taken steps to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And Price has been a vocal opponent of the law. He's proposed a replacement that would offer people tax credits to buy insurance on the private market. But those credits would often be smaller than the subsidies offered under Obamacare. Price's plan also promotes the use of tax-free health savings accounts to pay for medical costs.
Senator Bernie Sanders, who wants universal health care, says Price's ideas will result in fewer people being covered. He spoke to reporters yesterday just after meeting with the nominee.
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BERNIE SANDERS: My major concern is that I believe his approach would make a difficult situation right now even worse.
KODJAK: And lurking in the background will be the words of President-elect Donald Trump, who said a few days ago that he too wants health care for everyone. But Trump didn't give any details on how that would happen. Alison Kodjak, NPR News, Washington.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Betsy DeVos has spent much of her career and her own money trying to create alternatives to public schools that aren't giving students the education they need. Donald Trump has tapped her to lead the Department of Education. And yesterday, DeVos took questions from senators on Capitol Hill about her education philosophy. NPR's Cory Turner says it all boils down to one word - choice.
CORY TURNER, BYLINE: In her opening remarks, DeVos made clear she doesn't think traditional public schools are a good fit for every child.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BETSY DEVOS: Parents no longer believe that a one-size-fits-all model of learning meets the needs - need of every child, and they know other options exist, whether magnet, virtual, charter, home, faith-based or any other combination.
TURNER: The problem, say DeVos' critics, is her faith in the free market and that she thinks parents should be able to use public school dollars to pay for options that aren't public schools. That led to this exchange with Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington.
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PATTY MURRAY: Can you commit to us tonight that you will not work to privatize public schools or cut a single penny from public education?
DEVOS: Senator, thanks for that question. I look forward, if confirmed, to working with you to talk about how we address the needs of all parents and all students.
TURNER: DeVos went on to say she hopes she can find common ground with those who disagree with her views on school choice, to which Murray said...
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MURRAY: I take that as not being willing to commit to not privatizing public schools or cutting money from education.
DEVOS: Well, I guess I wouldn't characterize it in that way.
MURRAY: Well, (laughter) OK.
TURNER: Congress passed a big bipartisan education law just a year ago. And as the committee's Republican chairman, Lamar Alexander, pointed out during the hearing, vouchers didn't make the cut. So he asked DeVos if, as secretary, she would try to push them on the states anyway. Her answer...
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DEVOS: No, I would hope I could convince you all of the merit of that in maybe some future legislation, but certainly not any kind of mandate from within the department.
TURNER: To be clear, Alexander is a strong supporter of DeVos, and began the hearing by saying he believes she is on our children's side. Also on DeVos' side, former Senator Joe Lieberman, who introduced her and swung back at her critics, including teachers unions, who point out that the billionaire has never taught in, managed or attended a public school. In Lieberman's words, she's not part of the education establishment.
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JOE LIEBERMAN: Honestly, I believe that today, that's one of the most important qualifications you could have for this job.
TURNER: The committee's Democrats were frustrated, not just with some of DeVos' answers, but also with Chairman Alexander - first, because he chose to hold the hearing before the Office of Government Ethics could finish its review of DeVos' financial holdings, looking for conflicts of interest. Alexander also held senators to a strict five-minute time limit, prompting one of his colleagues to lament what he called a rush job. Cory Turner, NPR News, Washington.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Today the United States Supreme Court considers just what you can trademark. Most familiar names and logos are registered trademarks, from the McDonald's golden arches to the apple on an iPhone.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In the last two decades, the federal Patent and Trademark Office has approved roughly 4 million of them. That helps businesses protect their ownership rights, but there's a limit to what they can do.
INSKEEP: A federal law says you may not register a trademark that disparages a group or individual, and that is the law that's before the court today.
Be warned. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg's report, which runs about five minutes, does contain terms that people find offensive.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Disparage is a nice-sounding legal word, but be forewarned, there is no way to tell this story without some offensive language. The protagonist here is an Asian-American band called The Slants.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SAKURA, SAKURA")
THE SLANTS: (Singing) For the Japanese and the Chinese and...
TOTENBERG: The band members picked that name precisely because it is offensive to many Asian-Americans, a cliche about Asian eyes. Simon Tam is the group's frontman.
SIMON TAM: We could turn this phrase upside down, flip it on its head and kind of re-appropriate it to something that's positive and about self-empowerment.
TOTENBERG: Now, there's nothing to stop The Slants from trademarking their group. But when they went to get the extra protections afforded by registering the name with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, they were turned down under a section of the 1946 federal law that bars registration of trademarks that, quote, "disparage or bring into contempt or disrepute persons, institutions, beliefs or national symbols."
Thus, for example, the trademark office has denied registration to a group calling itself Abort the Republicans and another called Democrats Shouldn't Breed. It recently canceled the registration for the Washington Redskins at the behest of some Native American groups who said the name was offensive to them. But while the Washington football team will survive regardless, The Slants say they really need the registration.
TAM: If you want a record label deal, oftentimes companies will not sign with you unless you have a registered trademark.
TOTENBERG: And the band points to lots of other registered groups that are viewed by some as offensive, like the rap group NWA, which stands for Niggaz Wit Attitudes. So The Slants went to court, contending that the denial of trademark registration violated their free speech rights.
ILYA SHAPIRO: Does the government get to decide what's a slur?
TOTENBERG: Ilya Shapiro of the libertarian Cato Institute.
SHAPIRO: It shouldn't be the government that makes that call.
TOTENBERG: The government counters that it's not doing anything to stop The Slants from speaking or calling themselves anything they want. But as the government sees it, if it's going to give its imprimatur to a name, the law appropriately forbids disparagement. Otherwise, the federal government would be required to register, publish and transmit to foreign countries marks containing crude references to women's anatomy, repellent racial slurs, white supremacist slogans and demeaning illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad and other religious figures. Cato's Shapiro has a different view.
SHAPIRO: Surely it's not the case that the government endorses every trademark that it registers. There are a lot of crazy trademarks out there. Is the government saying that it endorses the idea of Take Yo Panties Off or Capitalism Sucks Donkey Balls? And those are some of the tamer ones.
TOTENBERG: Georgetown Law professor Rebecca Tushnet replies that once the government creates a program, it usually is allowed a fair amount of control over it.
REBECCA TUSHNET: And preventing the government from even seeming to officially endorse discriminatory or disparaging terms is probably a good enough reason, as long as the government never punishes someone for using that disparaging term elsewhere.
TOTENBERG: Indeed, the government points to other Supreme Court decisions that have upheld similar programs. The ban on discussions about abortion in programs that get government grants or the 2015 decision upholding the Texas ban on specialty license plates. But Ilya Shapiro maintains there's a difference in the trademark registration case because the government is not providing any subsidy. Moreover, he contends, the trademark disparagement provision is unconstitutionally vague with insufficient criteria.
SHAPIRO: Vagueness means that a law doesn't give enough instruction to citizens about how to follow the law. What is disparaging? It depends on the particular trademark examiner that you get or the particular judge.
TOTENBERG: Rebecca Tushnet replies that in a program with 500,000 applications for trademark registration each year, there will inevitably be some inconsistencies, just as there are in the judgments made under the other parts of the law and other laws. In each case, she observes, if you get turned down for a trademark registration, you can appeal within the agency. And if you lose there, you can go to court. But she adds that the trademark registration system has served the nation well.
TUSHNET: It's a complex system, and if you pull out a chunk of it without extreme care, you're going to upset the rest of the system.
TOTENBERG: And that, she says, could put the whole trademark system in jeopardy. As for The Slants, they're enjoying their current legal fame. But as guitarist Joe Jiang puts it...
JOE JIANG: We're going to keep playing music 'cause that's what we were first. We're musicians first.
TOTENBERG: Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FROM THE HEART")
THE SLANTS: (Singing) Sorry if our notes are too sharp. Sorry if our voice is too raw. Don't make the pen a weapon and censor our intelligence until our thoughts mean nothing at all. Sorry if you take offense. You made up rules and played pretend. We know you fear change. It's something so strange. But nothing...
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
So many Cabinet nominees, so little time. One of the nominees who has a hearing today is Scott Pruitt. He is the attorney general of Oklahoma - now President-elect Trump's nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. He faces opposition because of his ties to fossil fuel industries and his questioning of climate science. Joe Wertz of StateImpact Oklahoma has more on what to expect.
JOE WERTZ, BYLINE: Scott Pruitt has been public with his defense of coal and oil and natural gas - industries the federal agency oversees. Here's what he told me in 2013.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
SCOTT PRUITT: I think the attitude with the EPA and certain environmental groups is that fossil fuels are bad, period. And they're doing everything they can to use the rule-making process to attack.
WERTZ: Since then, Pruitt has become a leader in counter-attacking. He's joined other Republican attorneys general to fight EPA regulations with federal lawsuits - on ozone, methane emissions and Obama's signature climate plan.
MICHAEL BRUNE: This is not somebody who should be leading the Environmental Protection Agency.
WERTZ: Michael Brune is the executive director of the Sierra Club.
BRUNE: Mr. Pruitt has basically made his career working to tear down, or at least challenge, environmental and public health safeguards. Why does he want to lead EPA if that's what he's spent his career doing?
WERTZ: Brune also hopes the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee asks tough questions about the hundreds of thousands of dollars Pruitt has received from fossil fuel industries.
KAY MILLS: He's taking a lot of campaign contributions from big corporate polluters. I'm afraid that that's where he's going to get his information.
WERTZ: That's Kay Mills from Missouri. She's part of the Moms Clean Air Force, a national group of women who traveled to D.C. to pressure their senators to reject Pruitt's nomination.
MILLS: Because I'm really concerned about Scott Pruitt's rejection of science - in particular, his rejection of the science around mercury pollution. As a pregnant mother, you know, I've been thinking a lot about mercury and how that impacts my unborn baby.
WERTZ: Pruitt has been less active than his predecessor in the Oklahoma AG's office in pursuing environmental cases. Court records and data collected by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group also suggest Pruitt stalled a state lawsuit over water pollution from chicken manure after receiving contributions linked to the poultry industry. Pruitt declined requests for an interview. But Pruitt's industry ties are seen as a good thing by many of his supporters. And he's likely to get a positive reception from Republican senators from coal and oil and gas states.
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MARTY DURBIN: Attorney General Pruitt has certainly shown a clear understanding of energy policy in his time in Oklahoma.
WERTZ: That's the American Petroleum Institute's Marty Durbin on a call with reporters.
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DURBIN: We can achieve the goals of environmental improvement, you know, without sacrificing, you know, our economic development, energy security, you know, jobs.
WERTZ: The coal industry has also come out in support of Pruitt's nomination to the EPA. Groups representing these drillers and miners say their economic concerns were largely ignored over the past eight years. For NPR News, I'm Joe Wertz in Oklahoma City.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This morning, billionaire Wilbur Ross takes to the stand in front of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. Ross is Donald Trump's nominee for Commerce secretary. He's one of the wealthiest of the billionaires Trump has named to his cabinet. And Democrats have criticized him as one of the Wall Street elites Trump is packing into his administration. Chris Arnold is here in the studio with us. He covers economic issues for NPR. Hi, Chris.
CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: Hey, Rachel.
MARTIN: So this is what we have seen from the Trump administration before, tapping people who are quite wealthy. That raises a lot of questions about conflicts of interest, at least potentially. Is this something Wilbur Ross has addressed?
ARNOLD: Well, just this week, Wilbur Ross is now saying that he's divesting himself of some assets and resigning from corporate boards. So that process is beginning to happen. We'll see how much further it goes.
MARTIN: Is that likely to satisfy those on the left? And there have been those who have criticized him and his wealth and question whether or not it makes him a competent choice.
ARNOLD: We'll see. There are some on the left who are very upset about this sort of cabal of wealthy people that they see as taking over the country. And many of them describe Ross as what they call a quote, unquote, "vulture investor," the image being that he swoops down on troubled companies and feasts upon their remains. The reason that they use that image is because he buys up bankrupt companies or struggling companies. But Wilbur Ross might be the best pick that Democrats could hope for.
MARTIN: All right, what does that mean?
ARNOLD: That means that if you talk to people who work in the steel industry, they know a very different Wilbur Ross from the one that's being described right now by some liberal groups. And back in the early 2000s, there were a bunch of dying and bankrupt steel companies in this country. And Wilbur Ross bought them up.
And at this point, the doors were locked. The jobs were lost. The factories were shut down. The steel mills were shut down. And Wilbur Ross came in, and he did not devour the companies. He saved the companies. And people who were involved in that say, look, he was more like an ER triage surgeon than he was a predatory bird. We talked to Leo Gerard. He's the head of the international steelworkers union, and he's saying that Ross got the mills running again and did a lot of good.
LEO GERARD: Well, look at - the relationship we had with him was one where he was open and accessible and candid and honest. And he put a lot of money back into the mills and so that literally tens of thousands of jobs were saved.
ARNOLD: Also, Gerard says that Ross reinstated health benefits for the retirees. He didn't have to do that. They weren't quite as generous as they were before. Also, Ross is a former Democrat. He has not always been a Republican. He served as an officer in the New York State Democratic Party. He's raised money for Democrats. He's also raised a lot of money for Republicans. But if you're a Democrat, Ross doesn't exactly sound like a radical right velociraptor here.
MARTIN: (Laughter) OK. Dinosaurs aside, are there things that are more specific that his critics take issue with where it might hit home a little more?
ARNOLD: Sure, just this week, there's been criticism. So there were some numbers put together that showed that, look, in the auto parts business, Ross, when he controlled companies, shipped several thousand jobs overseas. These were jobs that he did not save in America. This happened at a time when there was a lot of outsourcing going on in this country. And if we believe the steelworkers union, there were more American jobs saved there than there were lost in this other example. So look, it's a complicated picture.
MARTIN: Let's talk about trade because this was a huge issue in the presidential campaign. What are we likely to see there?
ARNOLD: Ross and President-elect Donald Trump have both said that the U.S. needs to renegotiate trade deals to protect American jobs. And that's no surprise to anybody. Ross told CNN right after he was picked for Commerce secretary, though, that one of the first things he's going to tackle is renegotiating NAFTA. Now, later today, there is undoubtably going to be something that he gets questions about from members of the Senate. How are you going to dismantle a longstanding trade deal without sparking a damaging trade war for this country?
MARTIN: It's also worth noting, Wilbur Ross is - he is up there in years, shall we say? He's 79 years old. That seems exceptional for someone to be a Cabinet pick.
ARNOLD: I guess. But look, there's a lot of people of that age who are very active. And a story...
MARTIN: I'm not suggesting otherwise, by the way.
ARNOLD: My father hits the gym every day. He's 82. But, you know, one story that a former worker told me was he went to pick up Wilbur Ross from the airport. And he's got an easel and the charts, and he's carrying his own suitcase. And, you know, he appears to be a pretty fit guy.
MARTIN: All right, we'll watch the confirmation hearing. NPR's correspondent Chris Arnold covers economics. Thanks, Chris.
ARNOLD: Thanks, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Rachel Martin. Artists make a point of going to their exhibit openings to talk about their work with potential buyers. But one painter in Finland decided to take a long nap instead. The artist's name is Juuso, and he's a 900-pound brown bear. His paintings are on display in Helsinki, 11 original works of art. Some prints have sold for more than $4,000. Some feature small bits of Juuso's fur. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep with your chance to ask Cokie about the presidential inauguration. Cokie Roberts is here, as she is most Wednesdays, to take questions from our audience. Hi, Cokie.
COKIE ROBERTS, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: So there's one huge story coming up on Friday morning. And we have some questions from the audience, including this.
TRACY CLEVELAND: My name is Tracy Cleveland. I'm from Commerce Township, Mich. Aside from those presidents who were deceased, has the outgoing president ever skipped the inauguration?
ROBERTS: Well, the Adams father and son were not very gracious about the men who defeated them.
INSKEEP: John Adams and John Quincy Adams.
ROBERTS: Exactly. But John Adams, it is fair to say, there had never been a transfer of power from one party to another. So there was no ritual in place. And even so, there were 36 ballots to get Thomas Jefferson elected. It was a very tough inauguration.
INSKEEP: Oh, that was one where it actually went into the House of Representatives, in 1800.
ROBERTS: Right, right.
INSKEEP: OK.
ROBERTS: And a very perceptive reporter, Margaret Bayard Smith, wrote at the time, in every government and every age have most generally been epochs of confusion, villainy and bloodshed. In this, our happy country, this takes place without any species of distraction or disorder.
So this sense of a peaceful transfer was understood for the very first one. But then you had the same party for a while. And then Andrew Jackson gets elected.
INSKEEP: 1828.
ROBERTS: And John Quincy Adams asked his Cabinet whether he should go to the inauguration or not. And they said, basically, no. And so he said in his diary, it was a warm, spring-like day, and I rode on my horse into the city. And he rode and rode and rode.
INSKEEP: And just kept going and left Andrew Jackson to be inaugurated on his own.
ROBERTS: By himself.
INSKEEP: Wow. Here's another question now from our audience.
ADAM HANNA: Hi, I'm Adam Hanna from Edwardsville, Ill. Has the chief justice of the United States always administered the oath of office at inauguration?
INSKEEP: Which is what we would expect from John Roberts on Friday with Donald Trump.
ROBERTS: We will. But the first two, George Washington's first two inaugurations, were not the chief justice. The first was the chancellor of New York, which was the highest judicial post.
INSKEEP: OK.
ROBERTS: The second one, an associate justice - but from John Adams on, except when there's been an extraordinary incidence, like an assassination or a death, the chief justice has administered the oath. But, Steve, that also can represent a transition of power. When Thomas Jefferson took the oath, John Adams just the night before had made John Marshall chief justice. And Thomas Jefferson hated his cousin, John Marshall. And then when Abraham Lincoln took the oath, his chief justice was Roger B. Taney, who had handed down the Dred Scott decision.
INSKEEP: Which reinforced slavery in the United States and Lincoln was so against, sure.
ROBERTS: And there was Lincoln, a minority president elected with only 30-some percent of the vote. He was so unpopular that there was tremendous concern about whether he would survive Inauguration Day. And so the military was out in force. This is nothing new, to have a very unpopular president take office.
INSKEEP: One more question now.
COLLEEN GOLDSMITH: Hi, Cokie. My name is Colleen Goldsmith (ph). And I'm calling from San Diego, Calif. My question is, when, why and how did the inauguration become such a big extravaganza?
ROBERTS: The truth is, it's really always been a pretty big deal. People marched with George Washington to Federal Hall in New York. And then as the years went on, more and more military people marched. The parades got bigger. Balls started with Dolley Madison. And they were stopped briefly by Woodrow Wilson.
The businessmen of Washington were furious because the ball paid for the inauguration. But Congress felt that some of the dances that had been at inaugural balls were not good. They were trying to outlaw grizzly bear gyrations, the bunny hug and all similar forms of convulsive movements.
INSKEEP: Well, you know, I mean, everybody's against grizzly bear gyrations really, when you get right down to it. Cokie, thanks very much, as always.
ROBERTS: Good to be with you, Steve.
INSKEEP: And Cokie Roberts joins us Wednesdays to answer your questions about how Washington and politics work. So you can tweet us at MORNING EDITION with the hashtag, #AskCokie. Or email us if you'd rather, askcokie@npr.org.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Television critics from around this country are gathered in Pasadena, Calif., for the twice-yearly Television Critics Association press tour, which is of interest to us because it's when the networks and cable and streaming companies show critics their new TV shows, which means NPR's Eric Deggans has been getting an early look. Hi, Eric.
ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: Hey.
INSKEEP: He's at NPR West. So what are you seeing?
DEGGANS: Well, there's a lot of great stuff coming on all the television platforms - networks, online, cable. I'm excited about a lot of this stuff.
So the first show that I'm really excited about is FX's "Feud: Bette And Joan." This is from Ryan Murphy. He created "Glee" for Fox and "American Crime Story" for FX, and he's got this great, little, eight-episode series with Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange playing Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
INSKEEP: Wow.
DEGGANS: They famously didn't like each other, but they came together to make this classic camp movie "What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?," and this little limited series tells that story. It's really great.
INSKEEP: It's the story of the making of a movie. That's what's happening here.
DEGGANS: (Laughter) That's part of it. But it goes beyond that.
INSKEEP: OK.
DEGGANS: Now, we've got another show, HBO's "Big Little Lies," executive produced by Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. And it's about the lives of several mothers that are kind of torn apart by a murder, which is pretty interesting.
We've seen a lot of these streaming services come along, and they're doing a lot of original content that's really great. So Hulu has a version of "The Handmaid's Tale," starring Elizabeth Moss. You might remember her from "Mad Men" - really well done.
And Crackle - this is the website that was known as the home for Seinfeld's "Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee."
INSKEEP: Oh, yeah.
DEGGANS: It has a version of the movie "Snatch" that is really good. Rupert Grint - you might remember him from the Harry Potter movies - is in it. It's really well done. There's a lot of stuff out there that's great.
INSKEEP: A lot of high-profile shows about women in that list, Eric.
DEGGANS: That's right. And, you know, Ryan Murphy, for example, said that his project, "Feud," was inspired by this organization he has that's called Half. He's really dedicated to trying to get half of the director slots on his TV shows to be filled by women. And FX, the channel that he's working with, is also committed to that, right?
So we're seeing a drive, I think, in the industry to try and create more opportunities for women. And we're seeing shows that star women, that star complex women - "Big Little Lies," again, executive produced by two of the biggest female stars in the movie business coming to television. So that's something that we've also seen here.
INSKEEP: Maybe hard to prove this one way or the other, Eric, but what's your sense? Do you think that when producers were putting together all these shows about women and thinking about this very moment that they were going to be presenting them in an environment just before a woman became president of the United States?
DEGGANS: I wouldn't credit Hollywood with being that smart (laughter).
INSKEEP: Oh, OK - or dumb, as it turned out to be. Yeah.
DEGGANS: Exactly. But I do think there was a drive to create more diversity. So last year, we saw a lot of great high-profile shows about black people, including "Insecure" on HBO and "Atlanta" on FX. And this year seems to be more about women. We're seeing a lot of high-profile, well done shows about complex female characters because, again, there's this push to create more diversity. And Hollywood has responded by looking towards women's stories.
INSKEEP: Is the sheer number of quality television programs going to be a problem for quality television?
DEGGANS: I think it might be. The - the thing that people who make TV are worried about is this idea that we have a common cultural conversation. And so when a show like "Seinfeld" really hits big or "Friends" really hits big, we're all sort of engaged in that watercooler conversation. And if there's so many great shows out there that everybody can gravitate to the one thing that speaks to them, then we don't have that common parlance anymore. And maybe we won't have big hits, like even "The Walking Dead" or "This Is Us" on NBC.
INSKEEP: Well, we'll catch as much as we can. Eric, thanks very much.
DEGGANS: Always a pleasure.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Eric Deggans, our television critic. He joined us from NPR West.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Of all the major sports leagues in the country, the National Football League is the only one without a dedicated professional minor league system. That could be about to change. Great way to cultivate new, younger talent for the NFL, right? Commentator Kevin Blackistone says not so.
KEVIN BLACKISTONE, BYLINE: I always thought a fullback named Mike Sellers had one of the most remarkable NFL careers, not for the one Pro Bowl he made in 2008 as a special teams player, not because he lasted 12 seasons, all but one in Washington, before he retired in 2011. It's because of how it all started.
Sellers came to the NFL from the Canadian Football League, and he wound up in the CFL at 19, despite not playing major college football. Sellers never took a college entrance exam. So he couldn't accept one of the athletic scholarships offered to him after he was the Washington state High School Play of the Year in 1993. Instead, he wound up at Walla Walla Community College for a year, dropped out and then bolted north of the border for a football paycheck.
And now, Don Yee, the agent of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, is betting there are a lot of guys like Mike Sellers. And he's probably right. So he's trying to start a minor league for high school players who want to get paid to play football, after the senior prom, without having to go to college where they play basically for free. Yee
calls his deal the Pacific Pro Football League. He wants it to kick off a six-game schedule in the summer of 2018, with four teams in and around - where else? - that pro football hotbed of America, Los Angeles.
How did LA go from not having a single NFL team for 21 years to gaining two virtually overnight - and now a minor pro league? But I digress.
Yee proposes to pay players $50,000 with benefits, worker's comp, a 401(k) plan and free community college tuition, or basically do for college-age football players what the multibillion-dollar college football industry should and could be doing for them now. Did you see how much extra Clemson coach Dabo Swinney got for beating Alabama in the college football national championship? Upwards of $1 million to go on top of his $5 million annual salary.
Swinney's players got attaboys, T-shirts, swell ball caps and fake jeweled rings. College-spending rules say the players, who sweat and bleed for coaches and colleges that rake in millions, can only get a few hundred dollars' worth of kitschy gifts for winning the whole thing. And that's the problem.
College football, one of the two cash cows of the NCAA, is under unprecedented legal and moral pressure to give college players a more equitable slice of the pie. As noble as it sounds, Yee's league threatens to let college football off the hook.
MARTIN: That was sports commentator Kevin Blackistone.
(SOUNDBITE OF TYCHO SONG, "A WALK")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Amnesty International says President Obama was right to commute the sentence of Chelsea Manning.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
House Speaker Paul Ryan says the act was outrageous.
INSKEEP: Her lawyer says the move will save the life of a prisoner who was often held in solitary confinement.
MARTIN: Senator John McCain says it's a, quote, "grave mistake that will undermine military discipline."
INSKEEP: Chelsea Manning was the former Army private who gave sensitive military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks, thousands of them, in fact. Her sentence of 35 years is being cut short and now ends in May. And NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman is in our studios to talk about it. Good morning, Tom.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: Why do this?
BOWMAN: Well, the White House basically said Manning was tried and convicted, did her time, seven years, which is a lot of time in prison. Others have - who've leaked classified information have done a lot less time. This was the longest term ever for a leak conviction.
INSKEEP: It was a really big leak, though, we should emphasize. This was thousands of documents.
BOWMAN: It was. It was hundreds of thousands of documents. And also, she admitted her guilt as well. And another factor, as you alluded to, was - seems to be the stress from Manning's gender transition. She's at the men's prison at Fort Leavenworth, tried to kill herself a couple of times. There were concerns about her mental health as well as her safety.
INSKEEP: Is it clear that the gender transition concern was part of this? The fact that she'd been going through this...
BOWMAN: It seems to be that, that there was a concern about that.
MARTIN: So what does all this mean for people in military national security circles? How are they responding to this commutation?
BOWMAN: Well, I spoke with a senior officer last night who said this commutation was a slap in the face, that this would send a message it's not a big deal to release classified information. And this release of information was published by WikiLeaks, of course, the same group the Obama administration says has served as an arm of Russia's intelligence organizations in the election, with embarrassing information released by the Democrats.
Now, on Capitol Hill, as you mentioned, John McCain attacked this. And he also said it devalues legitimate whistleblowers who use proper channels. And Tom Cotton, the senator, said, when I was leading soldiers in Afghanistan, Manning was undermining us by leaking these hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.
INSKEEP: You know, McCain also used the word dishonor and talked about taking an oath and then violating the oath. When you talk to military people, is this something beyond the substance of the secrets? They're just offended that someone dishonored their oath. They violated the oath here.
BOWMAN: Right, they are. And they basically say, if it's OK - well, not OK for someone to do it, but if you're kind of giving a - commuting someone's sentence for doing this, again, it's sending the message that it's not a big deal. You can do it. They take this very, very seriously.
INSKEEP: You also mentioned Julian Assange. Now, let's remember, he said on Twitter the other day, if President Obama were to - were to pardon or commute Manning's sentence, he would agree to be extradited to the United States.
BOWMAN: Right. Well, there's no immediate comment from Assange or his lawyer. Assange tweeted, without commenting on that offer, quote, "thank you to everyone who campaigned for Chelsea Manning's clemency. Your courage and determination made the impossible possible."
INSKEEP: Let's remember Assange's situation. He is in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
BOWMAN: Right.
INSKEEP: He is charged with a crime in Sweden. Or he's been accused; let's not say charged. I think it's not been a formal charge. He's accused, suspected of a crime in Sweden.
BOWMAN: That's right. We don't know if there's been any formal charge.
INSKEEP: And are there any formal charges known to be held against him in the United States at this time?
BOWMAN: Not that we know of, no public indictment. So yeah, we'll just have to wait and see. But again, he said, you know, if Manning's granted clemency, I will be willing to be extradited to the United States. So we'll just have to wait and see.
INSKEEP: If there are any charges for him to be extradited for to the United States.
BOWMAN: Right.
INSKEEP: So let me ask about one other thing that happened here. There's another name on this list of pardons and commutations. The name is James Cartwright.
BOWMAN: That's right. And Cartwright was a retired Marine general. He used to be vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He pleaded guilty to misleading federal investigators who were looking into the release of classified information for another big story, the U.S. use of cyber weapons against Iran. And that story was, of course, published in The New York Times. He was supposed to be sentenced on Tuesday. And he was looking at a couple of years in prison. And now he's off the hook.
INSKEEP: How did he come to be talking with reporters about the Stuxnet virus, as I think it was called?
BOWMAN: Well, I think administration officials suggested he talk to some of these reporters. So - and then the problem was, clearly, when he was approached about it, he misled federal investigators. That was the charge. It wasn't releasing classified information.
INSKEEP: So he was doing his job. He was doing what he was told to do. But then he didn't tell the truth about doing what he was told to do.
BOWMAN: Exactly, that's right. And that's what caught him up.
INSKEEP: And so now he's pardoned. The sentence is commuted. What happens with him, exactly? He's off the hook completely.
BOWMAN: He's completely off the hook right now.
INSKEEP: And is his career over?
BOWMAN: Well, his military career, of course, was over. Now he's in a think tank in D.C.
INSKEEP: OK. All right, Tom, thanks very much, really appreciate it.
BOWMAN: You're welcome, Steve.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Pentagon correspondent, Tom Bowman, this morning.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
As the inauguration approaches, we placed a call to Ohio and reached Ennis Tait, a pastor at the Church of Living God in Avondale, which is a neighborhood in Cincinnati. He's also one of the voters we met last fall, during our project Divided States. We're calling them back during this inauguration week. When we reached him via Skype, he was just starting his busy day.
ENNIS TAIT: I'm meeting with Public and Law Committee for City Council today to talk about community-police relations. I am meeting with the concerned people of Avondale to talk about the condition of our community. And then I'm meeting tonight with a group of people to talk about poverty in the city.
INSKEEP: You get a sense of the range of his concerns. Now, Tait told us last October that the Affordable Care Act was a big reason he was supporting Hillary Clinton.
TAIT: We are benefactors of the Affordable Care Act. My family and I didn't have health care for five years. And any attack or any attempts to repeal it without a replacement is going to impact us directly.
INSKEEP: And he says members of his church are looking to him for advice.
TAIT: People in the community now - and I'm in a predominantly African-American community - and so there is great concern just because a lot of the programs and the policies that impact African-Americans and minorities are being threatened. And as a result of that, people are really afraid that the life in which they've come to enjoy is going to be, somehow or another, taken away from them because of this administration.
INSKEEP: So now on Sundays, Tait's preaching about the importance of hope - not fear.
TAIT: For me as a pastor, there's an encouragement to the people who are believers to really step up and to step out and know that your voice is important in this season and that it's critical that we stay engaged - not only in the politics, but also in the activities that take place within our communities.
INSKEEP: That's Pastor Ennis Tait, a Democrat from Ohio we met last year as part of our Divided States voter series. We're hearing from a number of those voices as the inauguration approaches. NPR News and reporters from public radio stations across this country will be live on Friday, reporting on the inauguration.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
As we've been hearing this morning, President Obama granted clemency to Chelsea Manning yesterday, commuting her 35-year sentence to the almost seven years already served. Manning, you'll remember, was the former Army private who gave sensitive military and State Department documents over to WikiLeaks. Reporter Glenn Greenwald has been a vocal advocate for Chelsea Manning. He was also instrumental in helping another prominent leaker, Edward Snowden, publicize classified material. Mr. Greenwald is on the line now via Skype from his home in Rio de Janeiro. Thanks so much for being with us.
GLENN GREENWALD: Great to be with you.
MARTIN: The Speaker of the House Paul Ryan called Manning's release outrageous. Sen. John McCain of Arizona said the commutation is a grave mistake. Why do you believe Chelsea Manning deserved clemency?
GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the key context for what happened was that she volunteered for the Iraq war believing her government's claims about what was taking place in Iraq, only to get there and see a huge range of atrocities. And she believed the American people had the right to know about what the government was actually doing in this war.
Beyond that, she served seven years already in conditions that the U.N. found to be abusive and inhumane. And she had received the largest sentence in history for somebody who leaked to the public as opposed to selling secrets to a foreign government, in contrast to people like David Petraeus, who leaked far more secret information than she did, and he didn't spend a single day in prison. So I think all of the factors militate in favor of this commutation.
MARTIN: Speaking of people who've not served a single day in prison, you have called for Edward Snowden to be pardoned. Do you see these two cases, the Manning and Snowden cases, as similar?
GREENWALD: Very. Both of them joining the U.S. government thinking that the U.S. government's claims about what they were doing in the world were true, only to discover that in fact the government was committing widespread crimes. And like Daniel Ellsberg before them, in good conscience felt that the public had the right to see what was being improperly kept from them. And so when you look at the motive, when you look at the caution that each of them used in terms of which information would be disseminated to the public, I think the cases are extremely similar.
MARTIN: Although White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest yesterday said that in the Snowden case the documents that he disclosed were, quote, "far more serious, far more dangerous" than those that Manning leaked, that this was not just low-level diplomatic cables or battlefield reports, that Snowden leaked sources and methods that compromised America's security.
GREENWALD: Right. But a critical distinction that he omitted, given that he's the White House press secretary, is that Snowden didn't just take the documents and release them wholesale to the public. He came to journalists, the most established media outlets in the world - The Guardian, The Washington Post - and asked journalists and editors to be very selective and very meticulous about making sure that the only documents that got released were ones that can be released safely and that would inform the public debate.
And so what Josh Earnest is talking about is the amount of documents Edward Snowden took and gave to journalists. Whatever documents ended up in the public sphere were the ones that journalists and editors at The New York Times and The Guardian and The Post decided were in the public interest to reveal.
MARTIN: It's worth pointing out - Chelsea Manning served time for a crime that she acknowledged. The White House will also point to Edward Snowden and say this is a man who then fled after the disclosure, and is now being holed away in a country that the United States has, to say the least, a very tense relationship with, a country that's been accused of interfering in the U.S. presidential election.
GREENWALD: Right. Well, Edward Snowden looked at what happened to Chelsea Manning. Remember, when Manning was put into prison in Quantico before she had ever been convicted of anything, she was put in solitary confinement. She was humiliated. She was treated to abusive conduct. Why, if you're Edward Snowden, would you submit to that form of abuse from a government that treats whistleblowers in that way? So I think that when you look at what Snowden's conduct was, it won Pulitzer Prizes, it led to legislative reform, and on balance it was a very positive step that he took.
MARTIN: Others would disagree in the military community, in national security circles, we should point out. Glenn Greenwald, founding editor of The Intercept, he joined us from Rio de Janeiro. Thanks so much, Glenn.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Some other news - veterans groups say they're pleased and also bemused by President-elect Trump's choice to run the Department of Veterans Affairs. NPR's Quil Lawrence reports on the response to David Shulkin.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Trump saved his pick to lead Veterans Affairs until almost all his other nominations were made, and some of his other Cabinet choices seemed to oppose the very institutions they're supposed to lead. There rumors for Veterans Affairs ranged from a Fox News contributor to Sarah Palin.
GARRY AUGUSTINE: There's no doubt that we had some concerns with some of the names that were being considered.
LAWRENCE: Garry Augustine is with Disabled American Veterans, one of the largest veteran service groups. He's pleased with the nominee, David Shulkin, a renowned physician and hospital administrator who has been running VA health care for the past two years. Augustine hopes this pick means Donald Trump's views on VA are evolving.
AUGUSTINE: We're all hoping that as President-elect Trump becomes more aware of what's going on with the VA that his views will change. As he becomes more aware of what's happening over there, he will start to support the integrated health care idea that we all support.
LAWRENCE: The integrated idea is basically using private care in the community to shore up, but not replace, the VA system. That's how VA's been trying to fix a scandal with access to care that blew up in 2014. Dr. Shulkin was part of the team brought in to fix it in 2015.
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DAVID SHULKIN: The VA approach is to find the very best care that serves the veterans. And I think that we've shown that in response to our access crisis that we have encouraged the use of community care to address our access issues.
LAWRENCE: That was Shulkin at a House hearing in 2015. He went on to say the VA has specialized care that veterans can't get elsewhere, and defended the quality of VA care.
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SHULKIN: VA overall has lower mortality rates than the private sector hospitals do. VA overall has better patient safety rates than overall sectors do.
LAWRENCE: That doesn't sound much like President-elect Trump, who had been promoting a more drastic increase in private care. So while supporters of the VA are hoping Trump has come around to the way his nominee thinks, critics are expecting the nominee to change for the new administration. Dan Caldwell is with the conservative group Concerned Veterans for America.
DAN CALDWELL: We think it's absolutely critical that at his confirmation hearing that Dr. Shulkin states whether or not he supports the president-elect's VA reform agenda.
LAWRENCE: Caldwell is withholding judgment, but says Shulkin has been part of the leadership that failed to fix VA health care in the past two years. Shulkin has already picked up bipartisan endorsements in the Senate, and if confirmed he'll have a head start. As the only Trump nominee held over from the Obama administration, he's already at work at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Quil Lawrence, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF QUANTIC SONG, "TIME IS THE ENEMY")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep with social media follies. We've told you the Pittsburgh Steelers coach was caught on Facebook Live insulting the New England Patriots. Patriots coach Bill Belichick responded. He said he missed the insult because, quote, "I'm not on Snapface (ph)."
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Snapface?
INSKEEP: Apparently conflating Facebook and Snapchat. He also said he's not on Instantchat (ph).
MARTIN: Instantchat is not a thing.
INSKEEP: He's said in the past he doesn't Twitter, Myface (ph) or Yearbook.
MARTIN: OK, well, there are yearbooks.
INSKEEP: It's All Things Edition.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, joins us now. He's among those who questioned President-elect Trump's choice for education secretary yesterday. And today, that same committee, including Senator Murphy, hears from Tom Price, the choice for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Senator, welcome to the program.
CHRIS MURPHY: Yeah, thanks for having me.
INSKEEP: What questions do you have for Tom Price, the guy who would be overseeing the implementation of Obamacare?
MURPHY: Well, I think we're going to try to get to the bottom of this secret plan. Both Tom Price and President-elect Trump have told us that their replacement to the Affordable Care Act is going to be terrific. It's going to be wonderful. It's going to be better than what we have now, which means that everybody who has insurance can keep it, and prices are going to be lower. Of course, there's nothing that has been proposed that would do anything close to that. So a lot of the questions for Price will be trying to divine exactly how they're going to replace Obamacare and when they're going to do it.
INSKEEP: You know the president-elect gave an interview with The Washington Post over the weekend, said he wanted health care for everybody, said he wanted to have lower deductibles and many other things. Would you - would you support such a plan if one could be crafted?
MURPHY: You know, I'm with President Obama on this. If he's going to put something on the table that expands coverage, then I'm all for it. I'll rip up the Affordable Care Act and pass something better and more expansive. I'm just convinced that's not happening, and we'll see what Price says when pressed on some of these details.
INSKEEP: Your - the phone broke up there a second. I think you said you're convinced it's not happening, that there is no such plan. Let me ask about another thing. Tom Price, it's been reported by The Wall Street Journal and others, traded stocks of health care companies while in Congress working on health care legislation. Some Democrats have called this a conflict of interest. His supporters have said, in some specific cases, come on. His broker was making choices about stocks. He wasn't paying attention to this. Are you satisfied with what you've heard here?
MURPHY: I think a lot of us are concerned that this whole administration is starting to look like a get-rich-quick scheme. You've got all sorts of millionaires and billionaires who are presiding over agencies that could further enrich them. In at least one case, Tom Price bought six stocks in pharmaceutical companies that would be directly benefited by legislative action that he ended up taking just a week later. Whether his broker was doing it or not, the fact that he didn't have instructions to his broker not to be buying stocks in companies that he was directly legislating on is a conflict of interest in and of itself.
So for a lot of us that are worried that this whole Cabinet is a bunch of millionaires and billionaires that are seeking to enrich themselves, a lot of these questions for Price about his conduct and his potential conflicts of interest are very important for us to get to the bottom of what this whole administration is about.
INSKEEP: And we'll just mention, as you alluded to, his - his explanation is he didn't know what his broker was doing.
Let me ask briefly about Betsy DeVos, the nominee for education secretary. A lot was said in a hearing yesterday, but it included this one thing. She declined to say if she wants to privatize public education in some form because she's been a big advocate of school choice. Do you think she does want to do that?
MURPHY: Well, I think she absolutely does want to privatize our public schools, and she said as much. She said that she would try to convince us to pass legislation to do that. I think what was more disturbing was the fact that she didn't seem to know very much at all about some of the most important federal education laws. When pressed about the Individuals with Disabilities Act, she didn't really seem to know what it was nor what it required schools to do.
INSKEEP: One other thing, Senator Murphy. The Republican case when people push against privatizing public education is that Democrats are just trying to protect teachers' unions. Is that what you're doing?
MURPHY: I think both parents, teachers and kids don't want public schools to be closed to benefit for-profit, private operators, which is who she has generally represented. I think that's a very dangerous trend line for our public schools, and that's what we're trying to fight against.
INSKEEP: OK, Senator Murphy, thanks for taking the time this morning. Really appreciate it.
MURPHY: Thanks a lot.
INSKEEP: Chris Murphy is a Democratic senator from Connecticut. The committee that he sits on heard from Betsy DeVos yesterday, the nominee for education secretary, and hears today from Tom Price, the choice for Department of Health and Human Services.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The White House and the Kremlin are taking parting shots at each other. This just days before the president-elect takes office, Donald Trump. Russian President Vladimir Putin says Trump's foes are trying to undermine his legitimacy. The U.S. says Russia is trying to undermine global order. Here's NPR's Michele Kelemen.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: In her final speech as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power took aim at Russia for carrying out, quote, "one aggressive and destabilizing action after another."
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SAMANTHA POWER: Having defeated the forces of fascism and communism, we now confront the forces of authoritarianism and nihilism.
KELEMEN: She says Russia is meddling in U.S. politics and supporting illiberal groups in Europe. Power noted that some experts argue that the incoming Trump administration should ease sanctions to get Russia to start playing by the rules.
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POWER: But they have it backwards. Easing punitive measures on the Russian government when they haven't changed their behavior will only embolden Russia.
KELEMEN: Power spoke just hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin weighed in on reports that Russia has been gathering compromising material about Donald Trump. Putin denied it.
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PRES VLADIMIR PUTIN: (Speaking Russian).
KELEMEN: "People who order such fakes against the president-elect and use it in a political fight are much worse than prostitutes," Putin said. Putin often blames the Obama administration for sparking protests in Kiev's main square, the Maidan, protests that led to the ouster of Ukraine's pro-Kremlin president. Now he sees something similar brewing.
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PUTIN: (Speaking Russian).
KELEMEN: "I have the impression that having trained in Kiev, they now plan to stage a Maidan protest in Washington to prevent Trump from taking office," he said. The White House spokesman brushed off Putin's criticisms saying it looks like the Russian leader has Trump's talking points. And in her speech at the Atlantic Council, Ambassador Power said the U.S. must fight fiction with facts.
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POWER: If we try to meet the Russian government in its upside-down land, where right is left and black is white, we will have helped them achieve their goal, which is creating a world where all truth is relative and where trust in the integrity of our democratic system is lost.
KELEMEN: She recalled one example last September. An aid convoy came under fire in Syria. The Russians tried to blame others and called into question many eyewitness accounts. By the time the U.N. issued a report concluding that either Syria or Russia carried out the airstrike, Power said the finding received almost no attention.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNBITE OF PORTICO QUARTET SONG, "SU-BO'S MENTAL MELTDOWN")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Businessman Wilbur Ross goes in front of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee today. The billionaire investor has made his fortune buying up troubled companies with the hopes of turning them around. That includes some steel mills. Others have pointed to the fact that some of his business dealings have pushed jobs overseas.
To get a better sense of Wilbur Ross and his qualifications to lead the Commerce Department, we've called up Cory Gardner. He's a Republican senator from Colorado. Senator, welcome back to the program.
CORY GARDNER: Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: I understand you met Wilbur Ross in your office back in December. What kind of impression did he make?
GARDNER: I did. You know, he was just getting started. I think I was one of the first senators that he met with during the confirmation process. It was a good conversation. Obviously, there's a learning curve both to any new incoming administration about the duties that they have ahead of them, and I look forward to visiting him today, as I'm sure he has a little bit clearer idea of the duties that he faces going forward and some of the some of the leadership opportunities he has at commerce.
MARTIN: How do you respond to Democrats who say that this is just another case of Donald Trump tapping another billionaire who's out of touch? I mean, conservative economist Peter Morici has said, quote, "private-sector management skills don't necessarily transfer well across industries or into the public sector."
GARDNER: I think it's great that we have people with business backgrounds that are leading agencies that are important to business. I think one of the down turn - down - shortcomings of the last eight years was the fact that we had a president who didn't really spend any time in the private sector, who spent eight years as a community organizer - I mean, spent previous years as a community organizer, but eight years showing that he didn't have the skills to manage the nation's business in a way that actually expanded opportunity, created jobs at the level that we needed to.
And so this is an important role. I think commerce under President Obama was led by a billionaire, Penny Pritzker. And Penny, I thought, did a very good job of building relationships with Congress and reaching across the aisle. And I actually encouraged Wilbur Ross to model his relationships with Congress in the fashion of the previous secretary of commerce under President Obama.
MARTIN: We mentioned that Wilbur Ross is known for taking failing companies and trying to turn them around. He's done that with steel mills in the past. I want to play a bit of tape from International Steelworkers President Leo Gerard. This is what he had to say about Ross.
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LEO GERARD: Well, look at - the relationship we had with him was one where he was open and accessible and candid and honest. And he put a lot of money back into the mills and - so that literally tens of thousands of jobs were saved.
MARTIN: Is this a nominee you could see your Democratic colleagues getting behind?
GARDNER: You know, I hope so. A couple of weeks ago when Senator Schumer announced that they had narrowed down the opposition they would oppose to different Cabinet members, it seemed like it was every single Cabinet member that they were going to oppose. And so at this point, I hope that he has met with enough members of the Democratic Party to gain their
support. He does have good relationships from - with workers around - around his organizations. In fact, he was invited in Miami to speak to a union conference. I think that's something that not all Republicans get the chance to do.
But the fact is he understands the importance of taking failing businesses, make them succeed. And that's what we need in this country, a turnaround specialist who can look at the regulations that are burdening our businesses, get this country back on track and help make it easier to start a business instead of more difficult.
MARTIN: Let's talk about trade. Wilbur Ross has indicated that he agrees with President-elect Trump. He wants to renegotiate some critical trade deals, NAFTA - primary. You've talked about the importance of the U.S. helping to write rules for international trade and free trade. So what do you want to hear from Mr. Ross on this?
GARDNER: It is extremely important that the United States lead on matters of trade. We want a world trade opportunity that looks like it's based on U.S. norms and the values that we hold, in terms of free markets and economic value. So it is important that we continue to advance trade alliances and opportunities to enter into trade agreements.
- I Colorado, if you look at our state, four and a half billion dollars of exports go to regions around Asia. I think we have to show that we are going to lead. We're going to give nations an alternative to other economic powerhouses, emerging powerhouses whether that emerging powerhouse is China or India.
We need to make sure that we stand up and lead and give people an alternative, an option to do business with the United States. And that's going to be the first question that I ask to Mr. Ross this morning, is what we can do to help promote trade opportunities for this country. We can't - we can't wither and draw away from trade.
MARTIN: Very briefly - Wilbur Ross has released an ethics plan. He's agreed to divest some of his investments to avoid conflicts of interest. Are you satisfied with that plan?
GARDNER: You know, I'm going to the plan this morning. I think he's agreed to step away from dozens of businesses that he's been a part of and funds, divest himself of stock and ownership. So I think it's important that they are transparent about this and look forward to hearing from him this morning on that.
MARTIN: Cory Gardner is a Republican senator from the state of Colorado. Senator, thanks for taking the time.
GARDNER: Thanks for having me.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
There are a lot of exciting ideas in cancer research out there, but they never pan out. And one reason is initial studies don't hold up to scrutiny. Well, a research group is trying to figure out how big a problem this is. And the first results suggest it's just not easy for scientists to reproduce the work of others. Here's NPR's Richard Harris.
RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: A few years ago, Brian Nosek stunned his field of psychology when he and his colleagues determined that many of those experiments couldn't be repeated successfully. Next, he turned his attention to laboratory cancer research.
BRIAN NOSEK: Reproducibility is a central feature of how science is supposed to be, and it's not clear to what extent it is happening in practice.
HARRIS: In 2011, scientists at the companies Bayer and Amgen each tried to redo dozens of promising cancer experiments to see if they could get the same results. The vast majority of those attempts failed.
NOSEK: The community responded very strongly to these reports of challenges to reproduce some of these core findings.
HARRIS: But Bayer and Amgen wouldn't say which experiments they examined. So their work raised questions but left no way for scientists to follow up.
NOSEK: And so the reproducibility project in cancer biology was an attempt to sort of advance that discussion with an open project.
HARRIS: Nosek, at the Center for Open Science and the University of Virginia, made sure this project was transparent about how it picked the studies, transparent about their methods and their study plans. They got grants to replicate key experiments from up to 50 high-profile studies in collaboration with a company called Science Exchange. They are now publishing the results of their first five attempts in the journal eLife.
Timothy Errington is a biologist at the Center for Open Science.
TIMOTHY ERRINGTON: Three of the five show very, very striking differences from the original. And then there's two of them that, I think, you'll get a lot of different opinions on whether they, quote, unquote, "replicate" it or not.
HARRIS: Did these initial results surprise you?
ERRINGTON: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
HARRIS: Some of the original labs cooperated while others didn't. In one case, the original scientists went the extra mile to help the follow-up labs reduce potential sources of error.
ERRINGTON: The lab gave us the same drug. This is wonderful - right? - 'cause, like, that could have been a sticking point. Oh, wow, they gave us the same tumor cells that they used.
HARRIS: But the replicating lab didn't end up with the same results. The inevitable question then is whether the original science was wrong or whether the scientists who tried to repeat that work tripped up. In two cases, the original scientists are so confident in their findings that they've been able to draw millions of dollars in investment to start developing new drugs. Sean Morrison, an editor at eLife and a prominent cancer biologist, notes that it can take months or years to perfect the laboratory techniques used in any given experiment.
SEAN MORRISON: And one of the difficulties of the reproducibility project is that they have limited time and resources to spend on any one study. And as a result, they can't go back and do these things over and over again when the first attempts turn out to be uninterpretable.
HARRIS: Errington agrees that their results leave that very important question hanging.
ERRINGTON: And as exciting as that is and important as that is - and hopefully, somebody does follow up on it - we're a bit more curious on - well, what does that look like when we do it across many, many, many studies?
HARRIS: They're looking for patterns across cancer research and also trying to identify common reasons that labs might have trouble reproducing one another's work. Are the directions offered in a paper too sketchy? Or maybe an experiment only works under certain unusual conditions. Morrison at eLife says the entire reproducibility project is itself one big experiment.
MORRISON: I think it's too early for us to know whether this approach is the right approach or the best approach for testing the reproducibility of cancer biology. But it'll be a data point, and it'll start the conversation.
HARRIS: The conversation is important because the vast majority of treatment ideas that come from this basic science fail when they're tried in people. Cathy Tralau-Stewart at UC San Francisco says scientists often don't know why those failures occur.
CATHY TRALAU-STEWART: And so that's why I think these sort of studies are really, really important.
HARRIS: The point isn't who's right and wrong but all about the why.
Richard Harris, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF RUSPO SONG, "FILOMENA")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Donald Trump has gone after a couple of different companies on Twitter. Boeing is one of them. It also happens to be one of the corporate sponsors for his inauguration. As Tom Banse of the Northwest News Network reports, the nation's single largest exporter enters the Trump era with plans for buyouts and layoffs.
TOM BANSE, BYLINE: A 32-year career at the Boeing company comes to a close in April for engineer Dave Baine of suburban Seattle.
DAVE BAINE: Yeah, it's been a long road. It's been a good career in many ways. But like everything else, you know, yeah. There's been good things. There's been bad things.
BANSE: Baine was already prepared to retire when Boeing sealed the deal by making him a buyout offer last week.
BAINE: It's better than a gold watch, by the way. (Laughter).
BANSE: As in six months' pay in a lump sum and extended health insurance.
BAINE: It will help the younger folks that want to stick around and allow some of the older folks to exit quickly and quietly.
BANSE: The buyout offer Baine received is part of a new wave of Boeing downsizing. This comes on top of nearly 11,000 job cuts across the company last year, according to a union tally. The company's PR department declined to say whether there's a specific target number for job cuts this year.
Most of the trims are coming from the commercial jetliner workforce in western Washington state. Boeing has a lot of planes on order, but new jet sales are slowing. Plus, Canada, Brazil and China are getting in the game, making for increased competition and pricing pressure. Richard Aboulafia is an aviation analyst at the Teal Group.
RICHARD ABOULAFIA: We're not seeing any evidence of a serious downturn, but there's just a lot more risk of a downturn materializing.
BANSE: Aboulafia says Boeing is a prime example of the kind of major manufacturing company that will be in the spotlight under President Trump. He says the incoming administration creates additional risks as well as opportunities.
ABOULAFIA: Obviously, anything that caused any kind of trade ruckus, particularly with China - that would be very bad news.
BANSE: On the other side of the ledger, the prospect of higher military spending could help major defense contractors like Boeing. New fighter jets and a multibillion-dollar contract to replace the aging Air Force One jumbo jets spurred a second face-to-face meeting between President-elect Trump and Boeing's CEO. Dennis Muilenburg left Trump Tower Tuesday saying he felt very encouraged.
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DENNIS MUILENBURG: We're all on the same page here. Our objective is to provide the best capability for the country most affordably. We want to generate jobs in the U.S.
BANSE: Trump did not speak with reporters after this meeting with Boeing, but the president-elect was pretty candid about his strategy for pressing for cost concessions. It's a dance, is how Trump put it after a Twitter jab and an initial meeting with the Boeing chief right before Christmas. For NPR News, I'm Tom Banse in Seattle.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The Pentagon, earlier this week, announced that they have transferred 10 detainees from Guantanamo Bay to Oman. Forty-five prisoners remain in the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo. NPR's Arun Rath has been reporting this story as part of an upcoming project with the PBS series "Frontline."
Today, on President Obama's last full day in office, Arun looks at Obama's effort and failure to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the challenges ahead for President-elect Donald Trump.
ARUN RATH, BYLINE: On his third day in office in 2009, President Obama signed Executive Order 13492. It ordered the detention facilities at Guantanamo be closed, quote, "as soon as practicable and no later than one year from the date of this order." To that end, it also ordered a review of the 240 detainees then held in Guantanamo. Matt Olsen was the head of President Obama's Guantanamo Review Task Force, which compiled and evaluated all the available information on the detainees. The files had never been brought together in one place.
MATT OLSEN: We concluded that 126 detainees would be approved for transfer. And that means transferred to another country with security measures.
RATH: But the yearlong review process also revealed how complicated the job of closing Guantanamo would be. It still wasn't clear where to put those who could not be released - those would be tried as war criminals, those considered too dangerous to release but too difficult to prosecute. In 2011, Congress began to place restrictions on Guantanamo transfers, effectively preventing the president from transferring the population in Guantanamo to a U.S. facility.
Even the detainees cleared for release were stuck in Guantanamo if, for whatever reason, they couldn't return home. There were dozens of Yemenis, for instance, who had been cleared but could not return to a country descending into civil war. It was up to the State Department to find a country willing to take them in. The U.S. would not.
CLIFF SLOAN: Rather than being the worst of the worst, there are some who have the worst luck because they were from Yemen, because they were from a country that they cannot go back to.
RATH: Cliff Sloan served as special envoy for Guantanamo closure in 2013 and '14. He was responsible for convincing third countries to accept detainees.
SLOAN: It's a very interesting process, talking to foreign governments about their willingness to accept detainees for resettlement. The conversations are difficult. There are many things to work out.
RATH: The State Department won't discuss details of the deals between the U.S. and foreign governments. But the detainees have ended up all over the world, from Kazakhstan to Uruguay. Ambassador Lee Wolosky, the current special envoy for Guantanamo closure, says that one of the things that makes it difficult to convince foreign governments to accept detainees is that old but sticky label, worst of the worst.
LEE WOLOSKY: The fact that they have been labelled in a political discourse as the worse of the worst - which some of them are but some of them aren't. And the ones we're moving out are not, but they're lumped in there - that certainly makes the task of doing what we do, which is looking at each case and convincing our foreign partners to look at the facts in each case, more difficult because of the labeling.
RATH: The dozens of detainees left in Guantanamo include seven men being tried in military commissions, like 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as well as others whose actual value and danger are disputed. Even if Mr. Obama had more time, it's unlikely they'd be anywhere else. Chuck Hagel was President Obama's secretary of defense from 2013 to 2015.
CHUCK HAGEL: Until we're able to get a policy, a plan, agreed to by a president and by a Congress to deal with the reality of - what are you going to do to address that last group of really hard-core people who are down there? - then this will stay open indefinitely.
RATH: President-elect Trump has said he intends to start loading up Guantanamo with new war detainees - bad dudes, in his words. Secretary Hagel says Trump will have plenty of opportunity to do just that.
HAGEL: The reality is that we're at war. I mean, America is still at war after 15 years. So as long as that's the reality, we're going to be dealing with Guantanamo and what you do with those that you capture and you pick up and you have responsibility for.
RATH: There are still a handful of detainees who have been cleared for release in Guantanamo, and it's possible the transfers could continue up until the moment Mr. Trump, who has called for the transfers to stop, takes office.
Arun Rath, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump went out to dinner last night at a luxury hotel here in Washington, D.C., that happens to bear his name. As NPR's Jackie Northam reports, the hotel is attracting a lot of attention, not all of it positive.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: The Trump International Hotel is a grand dame of a building just a stone's throw from the White House. It's become something of a tourist destination since Donald Trump won the election - and a rallying point for protesters. This week, they snarled traffic in front of the hotel. One protester suffered serious burns after trying to set a fire outside the building. Yesterday, security guards stood behind barricades.
UNIDENTIFIED SECURITY GUARD: It's, like, hotel guests and invites only. I would assume it would probably be for the next few days. It's going to be hard to get inside the hotel.
NORTHAM: And that includes journalists. There's other trouble for the hotel besides protesters and media. Trump has a 60-year lease with the General Services Administration, or GSA, which owns the building. The GSA contract explicitly says that no elected official of the government of the United States may hold that lease. Steven Schooner, a procurement specialist at George Washington University, says Trump will be in breach of that contract once he takes office. But he says Trump doesn't seem to care.
STEVEN SCHOONER: There is no evidence whatsoever that suggests that the Trump Organization has made any effort to resolve this problem in advance of the inauguration.
NORTHAM: Last week, Trump said he's keeping his businesses but handing over day-to-day operations to his two adult sons. Schooner says even if Trump isn't heading up daily operations, holding on to the hotel lease sets up numerous conflicts of interest. Once president, Trump will oversee the GSA, so he'll be landlord and tenant. Another problem...
SCHOONER: If foreign states, if lobbyists, if special interest groups pay price premiums at the Trump hotel to host their events, to stay and maybe rub elbows with the president's children, that's a problem.
NORTHAM: Trump's lawyer, Sheri Dillon, disagrees. She said at a press conference that people will not try and curry favor by staying at the hotel.
SHERI DILLON: Paying for a hotel room is not a gift or a present, and it has nothing to do with an office.
NORTHAM: The GSA declined an interview. It said in a statement it needed more information from the Trump Organization about its new business structure before making a decision about the lease.
Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF ERNEST GONZALES' "WHILE ON SATURN'S RINGS")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The man Donald Trump has tapped to lead the Department of Energy is the same former presidential candidate who once said that agency should be eliminated. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry has his confirmation hearing today. Grace Hood from Colorado Public Radio reports.
GRACE HOOD, BYLINE: When a solar company wants to test new technology, they bring their panels here...
CHRIS DELINE: So this is the outdoor test facility.
HOOD: ...to the National Renewable Energy Lab near Denver. Lab engineer Chris Deline says federal scientists here measure how powerful and long-lasting panels are so consumers know what they're buying.
DELINE: A lot of times, maybe people don't even know how to evaluate new technologies appropriately. And so we have a lot of insight and knowledge into the market that can help with some of those decisions.
HOOD: Research at the Department of Energy's 17 national labs is wide-ranging, from fossil fuel-based energy to understanding dark matter in the universe. Under the Obama administration, research and development dollars flowed into renewable energy. But both President-elect Donald Trump and Energy Department nominee Rick Perry have at times questioned climate science. Here's Perry in 2011 at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire.
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RICK PERRY: The issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects.
HOOD: Perry's not a scientist, but Ken Kimmell with the Union of Concerned Scientists says that's not the issue.
KEN KIMMELL: We do have a concern that a secretary who doesn't fundamentally accept the science of climate change isn't necessarily going to direct the assets of the Department of Energy towards advancing that mission.
HOOD: On the other hand, Kimmell says that wind energy took off during Rick Perry's three terms as Texas governor. It was part of Perry's all-of-the-above energy approach. In one of his last public appearances outgoing Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz stressed the importance of clean energy research.
ERNEST MONIZ: I think we have an innovation edge compared to most. But we could certainly lose it if we don't keep this focus. And that will lead to lost market share. That will lead to lost jobs.
HOOD: Then there was that controversial questionnaire. The Trump transition team wanted the names of Energy Department workers who attended climate change meetings. Moniz refused, and Trump's team backed away. Last week, Moniz announced tougher measures for Department of Energy scientists to protect them from political meddling.
For NPR News, I'm Grace Hood in Denver, Colo.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Donald Trump's nominee for treasury secretary is on Capitol Hill for a confirmation hearing this morning. Steve Mnuchin, a Wall Street investment banker who was Trump's campaign finance director, is facing questions from the Senate Finance Committee. And NPR's John Ydstie has been watching this.
And John, some of the controversy here is over Mnuchin's leadership of OneWest Bank, which some housing activists have dubbed a foreclosure machine. I know you've been talking to some homeowners. But just tell us a little bit about this bank.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: Well, back in 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis, Mnuchin headed a group that bought a failing California-based bank, IndyMac. It was holding billions of dollars in shaky mortgages. Mnuchin and his group renamed the bank OneWest. And during his tenure, it foreclosed on more than 36,000 homeowners, including Rex and Rose Schaffer, a couple in their mid-80s. They lost their California home. And that was after several attempts they made to get OneWest to modify their loan. And in fact, their local branch vice president said he would put off a planned foreclosure.
REX SCHAFFER: And he said, I'm going to get you 60-day extension on the sale date so we can work this thing out. Well, that was on February 17, 2011. And on February 18, that house was auctioned off. We didn't even know it. We didn't have the faintest idea.
GREENE: God, it's just one anecdote there. But it sounds like that couple really suffered because of this bank, in their mind.
YDSTIE: They did. They lost their home, now are renters. And it was huge financial damage for them. You know, another thing that OneWest was involved in, it had a subsidiary called Financial Freedom that made reverse mortgages.
GREENE: And what are those?
YDSTIE: They're mortgages that people take out, often when they're very old, and take money - equity out of their homes to help them live off their final days.
GREENE: OK. So this subsidiary, Financial Freedom, was actually doing a lot of these kinds of mortgages?
YDSTIE: Right. And they're responsible for nearly 40 percent of the foreclosures on these types of loans nationwide. Julia Wieck, who's 86, has one of these loans on her home. She lives in Hawaii. And the bank has threatened to foreclose on her for not buying hurricane insurance through them and more recently claiming that she doesn't even live in her home. She says she checks the government website daily to make sure that her home is not foreclosed.
JULIA WIECK: I have lived in fear for over six years continuously - without a stop. It's a terrible way to live.
GREENE: OK. I remember, John - looking back at the housing crisis, I mean, so many people who suffered blamed banks. The banks had responses to that. Has Steven Mnuchin said anything about these kinds of charges?
YDSTIE: Well, Mnuchin says his bank was not overly aggressive. And he says he's proud of his leadership of OneWest. Incidentally, he and his partner sold much of their interest in the bank in a merger with CIT Bank. They sold it for $3.4 billion. And Mnuchin's share was reportedly in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
GREENE: And I guess some people, during the crisis, pointed the finger at homeowners who decided to take out mortgages, who were foreclosed on because they were just unable to pay. Right?
YDSTIE: Right. And that's what defenders of Mnuchin say. Here's Steve Moore of The Heritage Foundation, who advised the Trump campaign on economic issues.
STEVE MOORE: The government wanted a lot of these private companies to buy up the mortgages so that the whole banking system and the whole mortgage market didn't implode.
GREENE: Does a voice like that tell us that Mnuchin has a solid defense here against these charges? Or is this something that, if a lot of criticism comes his way, could actually hold up his confirmation?
YDSTIE: I don't think his confirmation will be held up. Republicans on the committee would likely take the position that Steve Moore has taken on this. I talked to Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio about these issues. He said he doesn't think OneWest necessarily disqualifies Mnuchin. But he has deep concerns about the foreclosures and Mnuchin's support for rolling back financial reforms made in the Dodd-Frank law.
SHERROD BROWN: There seems to be a collective amnesia in this new administration about what happened to our country less than a decade ago when Wall Street misbehavior caused much of the economy to almost implode - costing us jobs, costing all kinds of people their homes.
GREENE: So the Democrat Sherrod Brown there saying he has broader concerns here.
YDSTIE: He does. But Brown said he's willing to listen and hasn't made up his mind about whether Mnuchin will get his vote.
GREENE: OK. John, thanks a lot.
YDSTIE: You're welcome, David.
GREENE: That is NPR's John Ydstie, who is watching today's confirmation hearing for Donald Trump's pick for treasury secretary.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK, Rachel, you know this tune, right?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THEME FROM WILL AND GRACE")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Oh, yeah. That's the theme from "Will And Grace." Of course, the show in the '90s was all groundbreaking and stuff because the main characters were openly gay, right?
GREENE: And fans of the show were really excited in the fall, when the cast got back together to film this video supporting Hillary Clinton.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO, "OMG! NEW 'WILL AND GRACE' SCENE ABOUT 2016 ELECTION.")
DEBRA MESSING: (As Grace Adler) Who are you voting for?
SEAN HAYES: (As Jack McFarland) I don't know, Grace. Maybe I'll stay home on December 1st.
(LAUGHTER)
ERIC MCCORMACK: (As Will Truman) You - you have to vote.
MESSING: (As Grace Adler) No, it is un-American not to.
HAYES: (As Jack McFarland) But does my vote even matter? I mean, how can one unemployed white fellow registered in Pennsylvania make a difference?
GREENE: OK, so it actually didn't matter which candidate you supported. If you liked the show, when you saw this video, you were psyched because you thought, like, maybe the show's going to come back.
MARTIN: Yes, and now, David, the show is coming back.
GREENE: Good.
MARTIN: NBC is doing a 10-episode run with the original cast.
GREENE: And with news so slow these days, you and I are going to have so much time to be able to watch that on television.
MARTIN: Probably not.
GREENE: Yeah, no.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Donald Trump's inauguration will draw plenty of supporters here to the nation's capital tomorrow. There are also plans for large rallies against Donald Trump. And Saturday's Women's March on Washington is expected to bring demonstrators from across the U.S., including New York City, where NPR's Hansi Lo Wang met a group getting ready for their trip.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: They'll pack into buses, trains and cars. But before these New Yorkers head for D.C...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Buttons.
WANG: They're stocking up on protest gear for the Women's March.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: The buttons are $2, or three for $5.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Are you on one of the mini-busses?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: Yeah. I am, too.
WANG: A group of women are crowded around a table collecting donations for the rally. On this afternoon, they're inside a wine bar and restaurant with a faint whiff of magic marker. Many of the demonstrators here are making anti-Trump signs to take to the streets on Saturday.
CAROLYN LOMBARDO: I'm old enough to have seen the marches in the '60s. And this president is the absolute opposite of anybody that I would want in office.
WANG: This is Carolyn Lombardo of Manhattan.
You've made some signs today?
LOMBARDO: Not very feminist, but it says, Traitor Trump.
WANG: What do you mean by that?
LOMBARDO: I don't think he's looking out for our interests. He has said negative things about just about everyone except Putin.
WANG: The Women's March may have been inspired by Trump becoming the 45th president of the United States, but organizers say it's not all about him. Instead, they say they're marching to remind the country about the need to expand and protect the rights of all women, no matter their race, religion, country of origin, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. They're calling for a wide range of demands, from paid family leave and affordable access to abortion and birth control, to accountability in cases of police brutality and a higher minimum wage. Still, organizers have been debating about not just the issues, but also the march itself.
KAREN WALTUCH: It was very, very important to us that it wasn't just a white effort - that it wasn't just upper-middle-class white people from New York that were able to afford to go.
WANG: Karen Waltuch is the coordinator of the New York City chapter of the Women's March, which has been collecting donations to organize free bus rides to Washington. Waltuch describes herself as a white woman who was raised Jewish, and she says she and other organizers have been working hard to highlight the challenges facing specifically women of color, including those in the immigrant and LGBT communities.
WALTUCH: Their lives, their opportunities, their educational experiences are not to the level of a white woman. They're not to the level of a white man, if you want to take it all the way up to the top. But I think that until everyone has the same experiences and the same opportunities, we can't stop working.
WANG: There's been some pushback against the organizers' emphasis on race. And others criticize the march for initially having only white organizers and calling itself the Million Woman March, just like the 1997 black women's march in Philadelphia. Jewel Cadet shared those concerns, but she says she decided anyway to organize a bus to the march for transgender, gender non-conforming and homeless protesters from New York.
JEWEL CADET: And it was difficult to recruit people to be on my bus because they were like, you're an unapologetically black, queer feminist. This march isn't for you. And I'm like, you know what? I'm going to change the narrative.
WANG: A narrative that Cadet traces back to the time when the women's suffrage movement discriminated against women of color.
CADET: Those who know our history, we know that the first wave of feminism did not include trans women. It did not include gender non-conforming people. It actually was very anti-black. And so we have to really expand what womanhood looks like.
WANG: For Anne Hogan, the Women's March represents a call for equality for all Americans during the Trump administration.
ANNE HOGAN: Our leaders of government, aside from Trump, will hear our voice and understand that we're not going to be silent.
WANG: Hogan is 48 and says this will be her first protest. She's never marched for a cause before.
HOGAN: But I feel like there's such a threat to our basic human rights and our democracy. It's time that we all have to stand up.
WANG: Organizers say they're preparing for 200,000 protesters to stand up on Saturday in Washington. More than 600 other cities and towns around the world are hosting Women's Marches, too. Some organizers say despite their outreach efforts to communities of color, they're expecting the D.C. crowd to be predominantly white women who did not vote for Donald Trump. According to exit polls, though, the majority of white women - 53 percent - did. Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News, New York.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. So we kind of have a rule on this program. We try not to talk about toilets or things you don't want to hear about at breakfast, but this is news.
Japan is making itself more friendly to visitors, and one change - toilets. They have these high-tech functions in Japan - bidets, air-drying, spraying. Tourists would just get confused not knowing what button did what. That problem will now go down the drain. Manufacturers have been told to use a standard set of symbols. Thank goodness. It's MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And on this final full day of President Obama's term, we are of course far from history's final verdict about him. But the first drafts are being written. One person who believes the president significantly failed in what he set out to do is Peter Wehner of the Ethics & Public Policy Center.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Wehner served three Republican presidents. And this election year, he was an outspoken critic of Donald Trump. His fellow conservatives railed against him for criticizing their nominee and their party. But Wehner had some tough words for Democrats, too - in particular, Barack Obama. Wehner says the president contributed to the current divisions in this country. Here's his conversation with our co-host Steve Inskeep.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
What makes it the president's fault for the divisions in the country?
PETER WEHNER: Well, I don't think that they're all his fault. But it happened on his watch, and he is the president. And he came into office promising to heal the divisions. And he knew the nature of the Republican Party. He knew what he was going into. And really, the core promise of the Obama campaign in 2008 was to transcend the divisions and that he would act in a post-partisan trans-political way. I don't think he did.
But it's not simply that he wasn't able to achieve common ground with Republicans on legislation. It is more broadly that the political culture is rancorous and divided and angry. I don't lay all of the blame on President Obama for that. Republicans have their role in that. Conservatives have their responsibility but so does President Obama. And he used rhetoric that I think, for a president, was unusually divisive. He constantly accused Republicans of putting party ahead of country. And that kind of rhetoric, over a sustained period of time, has consequences. And I think that some of the failures of the Obama presidency led, unfortunately, to the Trump presidency.
INSKEEP: How so?
WEHNER: Well, I think that there was so much alienation and anger in America that it opened the way for a cynical demagogue in Donald Trump to rise up and to win. I wish Trump had not won. I'm - lifelong Republican. I'm a conservative, and I was Never Trump from the moment he announced his campaign all the way through. But he wasn't elected in a vacuum. There was a lot of acrimony, a lot of division. A lot of Americans, particularly blue-collar Americans, felt dishonored and unheard and voiceless during the Obama years.
INSKEEP: Is this a description of what you think happened? This is a president who tried to think technocratically, analytically about policy. And he would reach a conclusion. And if someone reached a different conclusion, he believed that it must have been cynical because the facts were so obvious to him.
WEHNER: Yeah, I think that's a fair description of it. He is a person who has enormous confidence. And when he arrived at a position, he thought it was the only reasonable and rational position. And if you didn't share his conclusion, then it must have been informed by cynical...
INSKEEP: Because you should know better and...
WEHNER: Because you should know better because I arrived at this position. I arrived at it because it was reasonable and it was logical. And everyone who's reasonable and logical should arrive at the same position I do. I think that is exactly what happened.
INSKEEP: How's President-elect Trump done at bringing the country together, in your view?
WEHNER: I think he's been horrible. I think he ran on one of the most divisive and pernicious and demagogic campaigns in American history.
INSKEEP: Well, let's even just talk about his time as president-elect. How do you think he's done there?
WEHNER: As president-elect, I think he's continued to divide the country. He's continued his Twitter wars. He has this propensity to create enemies and to go after them. And he seems to thrive in division. Look, this is supposed to be the easy part, the transition period. This is as easy as it gets. And normally, the president-elect takes advantage of that, and he acts in a way that unifies the country. Donald Trump has not done that.
INSKEEP: So as a person from the Ethics & Public Policy Center, what would you have political leaders do in this situation after Inauguration Day?
WEHNER: Well, I think political leaders need to give President Trump a chance to govern well and to govern effectively. And for critics of President Trump like me, we have to give him the space and the room to prove us wrong. On the other hand, I think that he has shown, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he has problematic tendencies. And I think, therefore, the political institutions in this country and the leaders of those political institutions - in this case, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell...
INSKEEP: The House and the Senate leaders...
WEHNER: ...The House and Senate leaders and the people they represent - have to be prepared to act as a check on Donald Trump.
INSKEEP: Peter Wehner, thanks very much.
WEHNER: Thanks for having me on.
GREENE: That's Peter Wehner of the Ethics & Public Policy Center speaking to Steve Inskeep.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We listened to a whole lot of voices from around the country during the presidential campaign.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Our Divided States series took us to swing states. And this week, we're calling some voters back.
MARTIN: In Ohio, we met Linda Caudill. She's a retired insurance business owner and staunch Donald Trump supporter.
GREENE: And she is excited about tomorrow's inauguration. She almost got to go.
LINDA CAUDILL: Kind of late in the game, I got invitations. But I did not get them until about a week ago. And at that point in time, it was not possible to get a flight. They were all booked.
MARTIN: Even though Caudill won't get to see Trump take the oath of office in person, his campaign has left a lasting impression on her.
CAUDILL: Since Trump announced that he was going to run, I've gotten politically involved, which I had never done before. And I intend to stay politically involved in some way, shape or form - not running for office but to stay behind the scenes.
GREENE: And Rachel, in the state of Arizona, one voter I met was Majerle Lister. He was also inspired by Trump's victory but in a really different way.
MAJERLE LISTER: Since he was elected, my confidence in the electoral process has kind of shrunk a little bit. So I'm more focused on grassroots movements, focusing on my own state legislative group. I've noticed that I have a little bit more courage in doing things when it comes to stepping up, where prior I was a little shy. And I would help, but it wasn't really any leading roles.
GREENE: Lister is Navajo. He works as a researcher at a community college run by the Navajo Nation. When we spoke in October, he was on the fence about Hillary Clinton. He ended up writing in Bernie Sanders on Election Day.
MARTIN: David, this week leaders of the Navajo Nation and other tribes are convening in Washington, and they're here to advocate for Native American issues with the incoming administration.
GREENE: That's right. And Lister is really hoping his leaders stand firm.
LISTER: You know, letting it be known to Trump that, like, you can't bully us. Every tribe should recognize the rhetoric - the racist rhetoric that Trump has. And if they go to these meetings, they should be very firm in saying, we do not appreciate that. We will not accept that, you know, and saying look, this is what we're going to do. We're a sovereign nation, and we expect your administration to respect that.
MARTIN: Those were the voices of Linda Caudill - she's a Trump supporter from Ohio - and Marjerle Lister, a Bernie Sanders supporter from Arizona. They're both voters who we met during our Divided States series this past fall.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
In the business world, Andrew Puzder is known as the man who helped turn around the company that owns Hardee's and Carl's Jr. fast-food chains. Well, now Puzder is President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for labor secretary. If confirmed, he will influence an array of policies affecting workers, from overtime pay to foreign-worker visas. But for now, Puzder is facing criticism from both sides of the aisle, as NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Laura McDonald spent two decades working 60-hour weeks managing Carl's Jr. locations in Southern California.
LAURA MCDONALD: The company refused to pay any overtime or even to pay anything to recognize the fact that we always work more than 40 hours each week.
NOGUCHI: Now she is speaking out against Puzder, the veteran CEO of CKE Restaurants.
MCDONALD: He never protected the employees at CKE when he was in charge. So I don't think he would be the person to protect American workers' rights.
NOGUCHI: Puzder is a Midwesterner and corporate lawyer by training. His nomination comes as the country debates whether to expand overtime pay, whether to increase the federal minimum wage and whether employee benefits should be extended to some contractors. He would also take over a labor department that, under President Obama, aggressively enforced wage and hour laws.
Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, says Puzder worked hard for his shareholders. Now he hopes to see him apply himself to improving workplace safety and conditions for workers.
MARC PERRONE: If he turns a blind eye to them, they're the ones that are going to pay the price.
NOGUCHI: On policy, Puzder is outspoken, appearing frequently on TV and newspaper opinion pages and co-authoring a book on job creation that's critical of government interference with industry. He criticized fast-food protests calling for $15-an-hour wages, telling Fox Business in November of 2015 that would mean less hiring and more automation, like self-ordering kiosks.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ANDREW PUZDER: If you price the person behind the counter out of the restaurant, then, you know, you're going to end up with a kiosk because that's the only way these restaurants can stay in business.
NOGUCHI: From the right, some conservative commentators decried Puzder's nomination because of his earlier support for a path to legalization for illegal immigrants. Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group calling for reduced immigration.
MARK KRIKORIAN: His earlier views on immigration were diametrically opposed to what Donald Trump himself had been saying on immigration.
NOGUCHI: Since his nomination, Puzder has walked back from some of his earlier comments. But Krikorian says...
KRIKORIAN: I don't know whether to believe it.
NOGUCHI: There are other objections to Puzder's nomination as well. Allegations of repeated domestic violence resurfaced from his 1987 divorce, incidents his ex-wife now disavows, saying she filed those claims to help her divorce. In recent years, his company also faced criticism for its TV ads featuring barely clad models simulating sex acts with food.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: ...And a full foot of sausage. Open wide.
NOGUCHI: Puzder stood by the ads, speaking on CNN two years ago.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PUZDER: I don't think there's anything wrong with a beautiful woman in a bikini eating a burger and washing a Bentley or a pickup truck or being in a hot tub.
NOGUCHI: Comments like that prompted Washington Democrat Patty Murray, ranking member of the Senate committee hosting Puzder's confirmation hearing, to question whether he would enforce workplace discrimination laws. That hearing is scheduled to take place February 2.
Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF RATATAT'S "NOSTRAND")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We've been talking with some of President Obama's key ambassadors over the past few days. His political appointees are all out of a job tomorrow, that's when Donald Trump becomes president. This morning, we hear from U.S. ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert. He's represented the U.S. in Seoul for the last two years. He joined us from the U.S. embassy there, and he started off explaining how the U.S. has been countering the nuclear threat from North Korea.
MARK LIPPERT: While we have been watching this growing threat we've been spending billions of dollars to erect robust missile defenses here in the Western Pacific. We've added ground-based interceptors to Alaska. We've added a second big - what's called a TPY-2 radar in Japan. We've added two Navy ships in the western Pacific that can shoot down missiles as well. So all of that is designed to push Kim Jong Un into a choice where he comes back to the table and keep the United States protecting its key allies in the western Pacific.
MARTIN: But has any of that actually changed the North Korean leader's behavior?
LIPPERT: Well, what I would say is that it has isolated him more. There's no doubt that hard currency is dwindling. You know, sanctions - regimes are miserable failures until they're not, and, you know, I think that's what the Trump administration should be focused on.
MARTIN: The U.S. has almost 30,000 troops in South Korea. Donald Trump has said South Korea and other U.S. allies in the region need to take more responsibility for their own defense, and he has suggested South Korea even develop nuclear weapons. How have those ideas been received in Seoul?
LIPPERT: In Seoul the Koreans obviously object strongly to being characterized as a free rider. And, you know, my opinion is they are absolutely not a free rider. They have a draft, all military age males serve. They are building the largest overseas U.S. military installation in Korea at the cost of $10 billion and paying 96 percent of that. Those are just a few examples. So, you know, on the nuclear weapons issue, you know, we feel that there is a strong commitment of the nuclear umbrella through what we called extended deterrence that provides ample protection and obviates the need for South Korea to bring nuclear weapons back to the Korean peninsula.
MARTIN: As President Obama tried to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from a foreign policy perspective he talked about this pivot to Asia. Are you convinced the Trump administration will maintain that focus on Asia, and what are the consequences if it doesn't?
LIPPERT: Well, there was strong progress made under President Obama. But I do think going forward we're going to have to find some way to resurrect the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is the big multilateral trade deal that is good for U.S. consumers, that is good for U.S. manufacturers and good for U.S. companies. And if we don't, China is going to write the rules. And that's going to be a lower standard, and it's going to be a trade agreement that is not fundamentally in the United States' interests.
MARTIN: I guess in closing I would just ask you how you're feeling in this moment, what your personal reflections are as you get ready to leave this post. I would remind listeners that this job, this move for you started out in a violent way.
LIPPERT: Yeah. I mean, I obviously was a subject of this vicious knife attack in March of 2015, but, you know, everybody has moments of crisis. It's not whether you're going to face moments of crisis, it's how you're going to respond. And, you know, the South Korean people, all the people who helped me and all the people who supported me and my family after that attack, it was remarkable. The other thing too that I would just say is that, you know, we had two children here. And, you know, it's, you know, we came as two, we're leaving as four. If - and then I don't know how the dog fits in that equation, but...
MARTIN: (Laughter).
LIPPERT: ...The point is, you know, we're really linked to this country. And our children have Korean middle names, our son speaks and understands Korean. And so, look, this is a place that we will always remember, always cherish and always come back to.
MARTIN: Mark Lippert is the outgoing U.S. ambassador to South Korea. He spoke to us from the U.S. embassy in Seoul. Ambassador Lippert, thank you so much.
LIPPERT: Thank you, Rachel.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
You know, here at MORNING EDITION we like to strive to give you in-depth lively coverage of the news.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Indeed, we hope you are informed and entertained.
GREENE: I mean, the last thing we want to do is bore you. But as NPR's Andrew Limbong reports, being bored might not actually be such a bad thing.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Being bored sucks. Anyone sitting in a waiting room, standing on line at the bank or sitting through some work seminar can relate. For me, it mostly comes at night.
All right, so this is Andrew's go to bed routine.
All right, I'm not really going to make you listen to me try and fall asleep. It's a lot of rustling, a lot of staring at light fixtures and a lot of thinking about my day until I get my computer and...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FRASIER")
LIMBONG: ...Pull up an old episode of "Frasier" that I've seen a bunch of times on Netflix.
So the trick of it is that you don't actually watch it, right? It's just on and you know that it's on, you know that it's there, and then just fall asleep without thinking about anything of consequence, really.
Anything but that uncomfortable feeling of boredom, which I do not like.
EVA HOFFMAN: Well, first of all because we're addicted to the other thing, we're addicted to its, you know, to its counterpoint.
LIMBONG: That's Eva Hoffman, and the counterpoint here is stimulation - checking your phone, scrolling through Facebook, in my case watching a sitcom from the '90s, for Hoffman it was answering email.
HOFFMAN: It started making me feel sort of strangely frayed and dissatisfied after a while. And secondly, I understood that I was actually doing nothing. There is an illusion of doing something, of accomplishing something, but you knew I was simply wasting time.
LIMBONG: So she wrote this book "How To Be Bored." It's a part of a self-help series called The School of Life. And her book is a mixture of the history of leisure and some concrete advice. Start journaling, read a super long book, really savor your morning cup of coffee, Hoffman refers to it as unscripted time. But maybe you don't need another book telling you to stop looking at a screen and go for a walk. The idea has been around for a while. One of Hoffman's references is tech writer Nicholas Carr. Back in 2010, he talked to NPR about his book "The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains."
NICHOLAS CARR: And so the more time we spend surfing and skimming and scanning online and multitasking and processing lots of interruptions, we begin to lose the capability to pay attention, to concentrate, to be contemplative and introspective.
HOFFMAN: We have lost the ability to be with ourselves and to understand how, you know, fruitful and interesting it can be.
LIMBONG: But it's possible to learn, neuroscientists have proven that our brains adapt at a cellular level to whatever we practice. So, really, Eva Hoffman's title - How" To Be Bored" - is a bit cheeky, and she admits that. It's more like how to get comfortable being bored. Andrew Limbong, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAMU THE FUDGEMUNK SONG, "TO RBI")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Obama defended his decision to commute Chelsea Manning's prison sentence at his final press conference yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence. So the notion that the average person who was thinking about disclosing vital classified information would think that it goes unpunished - I don't think would get that impression from the sentence that Chelsea Manning has served.
MARTIN: But for some inside the military and the intelligence community, that is not good enough. Among them is James Woolsey. He served as CIA director under President Bill Clinton and before that was undersecretary of the Navy. More recently, he was an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump.
Mr. Woolsey, thanks for being with us.
JAMES WOOLSEY: Good morning, Rachel. Good to be with you.
MARTIN: How did you feel about the president's decision to commute Chelsea Manning's sentence?
WOOLSEY: I thought it was a very bad decision. Chelsea Manning turned loose a huge volume of secret and above information, essentially to the public. And if you turn it over to the public, you turn it over to the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, etc. It seems that people who do this, such as Chelsea Manning, don't understand that the volume of releases makes it possible for people like the Russians or the North Koreans to cross-check things and to learn things that they wouldn't have learned if there had just been, you know, one or two messages or something like that. I think it's a serious blow to American intelligence and to our military. And I do not think Chelsea Manning should be released this soon. I think the president was quite wrong to do this.
MARTIN: So even though the president pointed out that Manning did serve time - served seven years, went to trial, took responsibility for her crime - you wanted to see her fulfill her entire sentence?
WOOLSEY: Well, the seven years is about sort of average for spies from friendly countries like, say, South Korea or the Philippines who don't damage the United States hugely. It's kind of the regular sentence. And because of the amount of material that Chelsea Manning stole and released to our enemies, I think it should have been definitely a longer sentence, yes.
MARTIN: Although, a task force that investigated the impact of leaks on behalf of the Defense Department in 2013 said they'd uncovered no specific examples of anyone who lost his or her life in relation to the Manning leaks.
WOOLSEY: Well, that's not the way it happens. People get led off into the dark of night if they're found to be doing something for the United States, and you don't hear from them again.
And this is really a - I mean, I had an experience when I was director of Central Intelligence back in the Clinton administration. We realized that something that was about to be written because the journalists had spoken to us to clear something and was about to be turned loose would have uncovered some extremely important intelligence assets of the United States and gotten several people killed. And we could not get the system to listen to us, and so I paid a single call on the head of this news organization - won't name the one, even now - and went through, in detail, exactly how people were going to die as a result of printing, in this case, it was the date...
MARTIN: Yeah.
WOOLSEY: ...So not something that people would notice that much.
MARTIN: Let me ask you this. Glenn Greenwald, who helped Edward Snowden release troves of other classified material - he was on this program yesterday. And he said Chelsea Manning was given a disproportionately tough sentence while General David Petraeus, who also leaked classified material, avoided felony charges and served no prison time.
WOOLSEY: Well, I think, you know, if you are of a cast of mind that wants to help Snowden and the way you choose to do it is by making Snowden's efforts look small, I think, you know, you can do that. It's a free country. You can say what you want to say. But I really think that trying to minimize this is ridiculous.
MARTIN: Do you think David Petraeus was let off the hook?
WOOLSEY: Well, I think one wants to - one needs to look at the volume of material and what happened. He showed it to his biographer apparently. And I don't recall the amount, but it was a most unwise decision for someone with his background and experience. But the volume of material, as I recall, was quite small.
MARTIN: The Obama administration made a point of cracking down on government leakers in a way that set it apart from previous administrations. Do you expect Donald Trump to repeat that, or do you expect Donald Trump to come down even tougher?
WOOLSEY: I don't know. I think the toughness of sentencing and the like should depend on several things - motivation, length of time compared to other people in similar circumstances. But it shouldn't be just universally low because one feels sorry for the person who did this. He pardoned the Puerto Rican terrorist who had been responsible for deaths the same day. And that is not the way to stop people from giving away the country's secrets and from acts of terrorism.
MARTIN: Former director of the CIA James Woolsey, thank you so much.
WOOLSEY: Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Like a lot of Donald Trump's Cabinet picks, his choice to run the Commerce Department is a very wealthy man. Seventy-nine-year-old billionaire Wilbur Ross took his turn on Capitol Hill yesterday for his confirmation hearing. Ross has said he wants to make renegotiating NAFTA a top priority if he is confirmed. And to talk about that hearing, we're joined in the studio by one member who was there. It's Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas.
Senator, good morning.
JERRY MORAN: Good morning to you, David.
GREENE: So Donald Trump has talked a lot about needing to tear up bad trade deals. Wilbur Ross has said he agrees with that idea. Do you?
MORAN: Well, I certainly would preface that by saying that exports, trade are important to our country, especially important to a state like mine of Kansas where agriculture commodities are sold and consumed around the globe. We manufacture lots of airplanes in our state. They're sold around the globe. So...
GREENE: Limiting trade could really hurt your state.
MORAN: Absolutely. I'm a supporter of the opportunity for American businesses to sell their products, the agriculture commodities, around the globe. And it matters in jobs in my state and in the nation. Having said that, it seems to me that there is nothing wrong with a re-look at trade agreements that are designed to last - or I don't know whether they're designed, in reality, they last a lifetime.
GREENE: Like NAFTA, you would include that...
MORAN: Like NAFTA, and...
GREENE: So you say re-look, though. And Donald Trump has used much more aggressive language. Are you on the same page?
MORAN: Well, I'm - what Wilbur Ross said yesterday makes sense to me is that things change. And here's the point. In fact, he and I had this conversation because it's been my view that when we negotiate a trade agreement, generally, that's about lowering tariffs. Our ability to get products into another country's markets are harmed by the fact they have higher tariffs, taxes, keeping those products less competitive. When they import into the United States, we don't have that circumstance, so it's an unlevel playing field. And so the trade agreements that we see negotiated, generally, are ones that try to level the playing field and have the tariffs be identical or similar.
What we talked about yesterday is that that's a fine thing to do, what Mr. Ross and I's conversation was about - that's a good thing to do. But that's not the end of it. What happens in too many instances is other countries find other ways, non-tariff barriers, to keep our commodities and products out. And that's what his point is. So let's go back when we see that happen - currency valuations, opposition to GMOs coming...
GREENE: Make it more comprehensive, you're saying. You're worried that too much of a focus on tariffs could - might not be...
MORAN: So we do high-fives and congratulatory pats on the back every time we negotiate a trade agreement.
GREENE: (Laughter) Do you actually do that in the Senate?
MORAN: I'm talking figuratively.
GREENE: (Laughter) OK.
MORAN: But I think that happens. We celebrate a trade agreement, believing that it has solved our problems.
GREENE: Right.
MORAN: And that's a start. But the point that I would make - and that was confirmed in the conversation I had with Mr. Ross - is but then they do other things. So let's go back in and reconsider the changes in circumstances or the actions of another country. Even though the tariffs may be similar, they've done other things that harm our ability to get our products into their country.
GREENE: Let me just ask you, the conservative economist Stephen Moore has said that Republicans have to come to grips right now with the fact that the Republican Party is no longer the party of Ronald Reagan. It's now a populist, working-class party led by Donald Trump, talking about things like creating jobs by being more protectionist. How does that sit with you? Do you feel like you're in a party that you're less familiar with?
MORAN: Well, I'm certainly a fan of Governor - President Reagan. And he has a tremendous influence on elected officials even today. But I recognize that our country's economy, and particularly people out in the hinterlands, have had the sense, in reality, that they've been forgotten. And so there's nothing wrong - in fact, it's a great thing that we're now putting front and center working people, men and women across the country. And perhaps that could be called populist, but it's really what this country is about, is making certain that the elected officials represent the everyday person across the nation.
So I'm not at all offended by that. And I'm glad to see the focus, particularly on jobs and economic growth. And we talk about economic growth, and what that really means to me is having a job, getting a better job, having a higher-paying job, our kids, when they graduate from school, they can get a job and pay off their student loans.
GREENE: OK. That's Republican Senator Jerry Moran of the state of Kansas.
Thanks so much for joining us, Senator.
MORAN: My pleasure.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Rachel Martin. Maybe 2017 is the year you decide to upgrade your digs, get a bigger backyard, a house with a nicer kitchen. And if you're looking for a place to hang your hat in LA, like say a certain MORNING EDITION host might be, check out this new listing at $250 million. It is reportedly the most expensive house in the country - 12 bedrooms, 21 bathrooms, a bowling alley, fully stocked wine cellar, and for days when you just can't face the traffic, your very own helicopter.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Not for me, Rachel.
MARTIN: Yeah, it's MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Donald Trump's nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency came before a Senate panel yesterday. He's Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt. His supporters say he'll protect the environment but wipe away burdensome and unnecessary regulations. Critics say he might not believe in climate change and would be dangerous running the EPA. Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland was at the hearing yesterday and is on the line. Senator, good morning.
BEN CARDIN: Dave, it's good to be with you, thank you.
GREENE: So I suppose when it comes to hearings like this, you've got to decide, do I just philosophically disagree with this nominee but I'm going to give a new president latitude, or does it go so far as to try and block a nomination? What do you think of Pruitt?
CARDIN: Well, that's correct. First of all, I'm very concerned about this nominee. He has sued the EPA on so many different issues, from clean water to clean air to climate issues. It's uncertain as to whether he believes in the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency to protect the environment. So I have some serious concerns about his nomination from the point of view of whether he would carry out the responsibilities of that office, and that's a very important Cabinet position.
GREENE: Well, some of those lawsuits you're talking about, I mean, they're often in his view dealing with regulations that are unfair, burdensome to businesses. I just want to listen to a little bit of what Attorney General Pruitt had to say yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SCOTT PRUITT: This paradigm that we live within today, that if you're pro-energy energy you're anti-environment and if you're pro-environment, you're anti-energy is something that I think is just a false narrative.
GREENE: What do you think of that? Can you be both pro-environment and pro-energy?
CARDIN: Oh, absolutely. An energy policy that's good for the environment's not only smart. It's also good for our economy and good for our national security. But it's energy policy that allows for less carbon emissions, which is critically important to our environment. Mr. Pruitt said things yesterday that were encouraging. We're going to evaluate his total record, but he can't avoid his past. And the question on climate change is really telling.
GREENE: Well, let me ask about that because your colleague Sen. Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, went after him on the question of global warming. And let's give a listen here.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ED MARKEY: Do you agree that global warming is a hoax?
PRUITT: I do not, Senator.
MARKEY: So Donald Trump is wrong?
PRUITT: I do not believe that climate change is a hoax.
GREENE: Senator, our colleagues who report on science here at NPR have not found an example of Pruitt actually explicitly saying he doesn't believe in climate change. Here he's saying climate change is not a hoax. Has there been a little unfair labeling by critics, you know, calling Pruitt a climate change denier?
CARDIN: I really am not an expert on that subject. But I would say this. His actions have been unfriendly towards remedies on carbon emissions, and reducing carbon emissions is the number-one way that you deal with reducing the impact of climate change. And he has a record of being unsympathetic to policies that would reduce carbon. Also, the question is, will the EPA regulate? It's been - the carbon emissions has been determined to be a hazard to our air quality. Will he in fact regulate at the EPA?
GREENE: Senator, you brought up lead in water at the hearing. And it was a pretty interesting exchange because Pruitt said that he is very concerned about lead in water, but it's not something that he has studied extensively. What did you make of that?
CARDIN: Well, I found it both positive and negative. I was disappointed he didn't have a stronger position on lead. As you are aware, we have to make sure that there is no lead in our children, and we need to have the EPA enforce our water standards to make sure lead doesn't get into our water supply. He was sympathetic, but showed I guess a lack of knowledge of what should be done. He was the attorney general of Oklahoma. He should have been, I think, more aware of ways that we can work to reduce the lead exposure to our children.
GREENE: Let me ask you just a broad question, as we come to Inauguration Day tomorrow. There are a good number of your Democratic colleagues in Congress, in the House, who've decided not to attend Donald Trump's inauguration. Some have said this is a transition of power, an important moment in democracy and that that's not something that should be done. What do you make of that?
CARDIN: Well, I do think it's the office of the president. I think the right thing to do is to be there, and I will be there. It's not that I supported Donald Trump. I did not. It's not that I agree with a lot of things that he's said. I've disagreed with much of what he's said. And I'm going to take action to do everything I can to protect the values of our country. Number one, we want to see the peaceful transition of power. Two, we would like to see the Trump administration succeed, and we're going to do everything we can to make him a successful president. But those of us who disagree, that think that some of the things he's talking about are just not the values of America, we're going to speak out and do everything we can to protect American values.
GREENE: OK. Thanks as always for joining us. We really appreciate it, Senator.
CARDIN: Thank you.
GREENE: Sen. Ben Cardin is a Democratic senator from the state of Maryland.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the nation's 45th president tomorrow. All kinds of political dignitaries will be there, even Trump's former political rival Hillary Clinton. However, there's a growing list of people who will not attend. More than 60 House Democrats say they're choosing to sit out the ceremony. One of them is Congresswoman Yvette Clarke. She represents New York's 9th District. She says she made her decision after a recent intelligence briefing on reports that Russia orchestrated a campaign to sway the election in Mr. Trump's favor.
When we reached her in her office, we asked her if she draws some kind of connection between Russian hacking and the president-elect's legitimacy.
YVETTE CLARKE: I can't speak to the legitimacy. What I can speak to is the integrity. And our election lacked integrity.
MARTIN: When you say our election lacked integrity, that is pretty strong language. Do you believe that the election wasn't democratic? You're calling into question the results?
CLARKE: What I'm saying is that there was a breach. There was a deliberate, very focused attempt that included Russian intelligence that was targeted specifically at the Democratic Party and at Hillary Clinton.
Secondly, I'm concerned about the nominees. When I look at all of the nominees that have been put forth by the incoming Trump administration - individuals who've made pronouncements that are antithetical to the agencies they will now govern - and when I think about these individuals, I don't see it in the best interests of the people that I represent here in Brooklyn.
MARTIN: How much of your decision to stay home had to do with the back-and-forth that the president-elect got into with Congressman John Lewis? John Lewis said that he believes Donald Trump's election to be illegitimate. And Donald Trump countered...
CLARKE: Yes.
MARTIN: ...Against the civil rights icon.
CLARKE: A man that holds that type of position should not be using Twitter to respond. There are a whole host of ways he could have responded to that. He could have called John Lewis directly; he could have asked for a meeting. But he chose to go on Twitter and not only go after the congressman but the people that the congressman represented and falsely put out a stereotype of the people that Congressman John Lewis represents, right during Martin Luther King weekend.
MARTIN: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, last week, told us that even though she clearly has profound differences with Donald Trump, she considers it her duty to attend the inauguration. What kind of message are you sending about our political system and our ability, as Americans, to come together even when we disagree profoundly?
CLARKE: Well, I think that each American has a right - a right to protest, a right to show their dissent, a right to celebrate. And I respect those members who are attending. I am making a decision based on my constituency and my personal convictions.
(SOUNDBITE OF D NUMBERS' "XYLEM UP")
MARTIN: That was Congresswoman Yvette Clarke. She's a Democrat from Brooklyn.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
It is time now for StoryCorps. And today we'll meet a man who performs two very essential, very different jobs. John Marboe is a Lutheran pastor who grew up admiring his local garbage collectors in Alexandria, Minn. And when times were lean for his family, he decided to take on some shifts hauling trash.
He came to StoryCorps with his 13-year-old daughter Charlie to talk about his work as a pastor and garbage man.
JOHN MARBOE: I've been hauling trash probably since you were about 8 years old. And I brought the truck to your school, didn't I?
CHARLIE: Yeah, you decided to pick me up in the garbage truck. Then I hopped in reluctantly. I was kind of like, this is my last day of fifth grade...
MARBOE: Right in front of your friends.
CHARLIE: Right in front of my friends.
MARBOE: Did I ever tell you the story about when I pulled up to an intersection and there was a mother and her little children? And her littlest boy just started waving, and I was waving. And the mother looked up at me with this kind of concerned look and then grabbed her son. It was almost as though, no, that's not something you're going to want to be.
CHARLIE: I think to me as your kid, I'm not embarrassed when people say like, oh, what does your dad do? And I'm like, oh, he's a pastor, he's a garbage man.
MARBOE: I keep doing it because it's, I don't know if I want to say it's more important but it's differently important. You're doing something for people, and I think especially I'm aware of that when it's hot out, when it's really smelly, when there are a lot of maggots. But as a garbage man, I probably know more about people on my route than their pastor does because their trash tells a story.
Charlie, do you remember the note that was written on the back of this envelope? I've tried and I've tried and I've tried and I just can't stand the pain anymore. I looked at it and I thought, you know what? I'm paid here to take out the trash, not to intervene in people's lives based on what I find. But as a pastor, all I could do was say a prayer. It's similar to the way I feel about doing funerals, though it's not usually as intense.
But it puts me in touch with that side of life which is about loss, that everything is temporary. And I love remembering the things that you said when you were, like, really little. Your first sentence was what?
CHARLIE: It all goes.
MARBOE: It all goes. And to do the trash, it's sort of a reminder that every small thing that we ever do for other people is valuable, even though it might be really small and unnoticed.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GREENE: John Marboe with his 13-year-old daughter Charlie at StoryCorps in Minneapolis, Minn. Their interview was recorded in partnership with Georgetown University's American Pilgrimage Project that gathers stories about the role of faith in everyday life. That interview will also be archived at the Library of Congress
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump puts his hand on the wheel of history today. And he's signaling a sharp turn in the direction of the federal government. Trump could sign his first executive orders on the very day he takes the oath of office. Trump has promised to roll back regulations, renegotiate trade deals and repeal his predecessor's signature health care law.
For more on all this, NPR's Scott Horsley joins us now from the White House. Good morning, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: Kind of an interesting moment to be sitting there where you are in the White House as we all anticipate this change.
HORSLEY: This is usually such a beehive of activity. But the White House is kind of in a state of suspended animation this morning as we wait for this passing of the baton. There's a corridor outside the Oval Office that is usually hung with oversized photographs of the president and first family. Those pictures have all been taken down, but the empty frames are still hanging there just waiting for a new president and a new chapter in American history.
Vice President-elect Mike Pence told reporters yesterday Donald Trump is eager to get started and to bring a businessman's sensibility to the White House.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MIKE PENCE: We are all ready to go to work. In fact, we can't wait to get to work.
HORSLEY: Aides say Trump is ready to uncap his presidential pen and start signing orders as early as this afternoon. But there are also ceremonial celebrations - the inaugural parade, fancy balls, a big church service tomorrow. Trump says his first full workday could be next week.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: We'll be doing some pretty good signings on Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday, on Thursday, on Friday and then also the next week.
HORSLEY: Trump plans to nominate a new Supreme Court justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia within a couple of weeks. He'll direct the military to develop plans for battling the Islamic State and cyberattacks. And along with Congress, he'll start the process of building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. Other top priorities include replacing Obamacare, rolling back energy regulations and reshaping trade.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: We will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores.
HORSLEY: Throughout the campaign and in this videotape message from November, Trump was sharply critical of U.S. trade deals. He's promised to slap import tariffs on U.S. companies that move jobs overseas but still want to sell their products domestically. Congressional Republicans have shown little interest in higher tariffs.
But Simon Johnson of the pro-trade Peterson Institute for International Economics says the new president could sidestep lawmakers and make good on his threat with unilateral sanctions if he wants to.
SIMON JOHNSON: The president has a lot of power in this country. And it looks like President Trump wants to use some of that power.
HORSLEY: Johnson cautions that could start a trade war that would hurt American exporters and raise prices for U.S. consumers. But he acknowledges the tough tariff talk could also be just a scare tactic. Trump's pick for commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, took a nuanced position at his Senate confirmation hearing this week.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WILBUR ROSS: I'm pro-trade, but I'm pro-sensible trade, not pro-trade that is to the disadvantage of the American worker.
HORSLEY: Trump has also promised to boost America's fossil fuel production. The U.S. is already the world's top natural gas producer and the third-largest producer of crude oil. But Trump says output would be even higher were it not for regulatory roadblocks imposed by the Obama administration.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: I will cancel job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy, including shale energy and clean coal, creating many millions of high-paying jobs.
HORSLEY: Jack Gerard, who heads the American Petroleum Institute, says the new president will have the power to reverse many Obama-era restrictions on energy production. Gerard also expects Trump to green-light some controversial oil pipelines.
JACK GERARD: Things like Keystone XL Pipeline, Dakota Access Pipeline. We expect he'll take some early action on a variety of those fronts.
HORSLEY: Finally, Trump's team says their first order of business will be repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. That was a popular applause line for Trump throughout the campaign. But the incoming administration has also promised to move carefully to avoid further disruption in the already fragile insurance market.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TOM PRICE: Nobody's interested in pulling the rug out from under anybody.
HORSLEY: This is Trump's nominee for health secretary, Tom Price.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRICE: We believe that it's absolutely imperative that individuals that have health coverage be able to keep health coverage.
MARTIN: OK, so, Scott, that was a recap of the people Trump has tapped to be in his Cabinet and what his first weeks and months in office might look like. But let's take a step back. Can you just get us back in the present moment and walk us through what the next few hours might look like?
HORSLEY: Well, Donald Trump and Melania have been staying just across the street from the White House. And they will begin their morning with a church service at St. John's Church. It's sometimes called the president's church. It's an easy walk just across Lafayette Park from the White House. And then they'll make their way over here to the White House itself for a sit-down with President Obama and Michelle Obama.
It's billed by the White House as a tea, although I think coffee will also be available...
MARTIN: They can choose, yeah.
HORSLEY: ...On the South Portico of the White House. Then the incoming and outgoing presidents and first ladies will motorcade together to the Capitol. It's a ritual that is rich in symbolism of the peaceful transfer of power. Of course then there will be the swearing-in ceremony before a crowd on the National Mall. And then as - by then, President Trump and the first lady go to a luncheon and the inaugural parade.
The Obamas will slip off to Andrews Air Force Base and head west to California for a sunny vacation in Palm Springs.
MARTIN: NPR's Scott Horsley at the White House. Thanks so much, Scott.
HORSLEY: My pleasure, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
An unmarked corporate jet left a Mexican border town last night in great secrecy, bound for the United States. The prisoner on board - one of the world's wealthiest, most ruthless and powerful drug kingpins. His name - Joaquin Guzman. He's also known as El Chapo, and he was extradited and will stand trial in a U.S. federal court. NPR's Carrie Kahn has followed El Chapo's remarkable story for years, and she joins us now from Mexico City. Good morning, Carrie.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: Tell us more about what we know of what transpired last night.
KAHN: Well, word came down late yesterday afternoon that Guzman was on that plane to the U.S. It was a surprise and not really. He and his lawyers have been fighting this extradition ever since he was recaptured by Mexican marines early last year. So this has been going on for a year. According to Mexican prosecutors, Guzman had lost his last appeal, the last legal maneuver he had, yesterday, and he was already right at the border. He was moved from a maximum security prison last year to that federal facility near the border in Ciudad Juarez, which is right across from El Paso, Texas.
The Mexican government sent out pictures last night showing Guzman dressed in tan prison garb accompanied by many Mexican police. They also showed pictures of him then in the custody of the U.S. DEA agents and boarding that plane. U.S. officials say he landed in Long Island, N.Y., last night, and today they'll announce plans for his arraignment.
MARTIN: Remind us who is El Chapo? He's a legend in Mexico, right?
KAHN: He definitely is. He grew up very poor and started in the family business very young. He climbed the ranks of the drug trafficking syndicate very quickly despite not having more than a sixth grade education, they always say. He's believed to be a billionaire and the head of this cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, which is one of the most powerful in the world, and it has cells throughout the world. Many a Narco ballad, the songs about the drug traffickers, have been written about Chapo's supposed generosity back in his home state. But don't ever forget that this man is responsible for unspeakable murder, torture and violence throughout Mexico and beyond and despite some of his glorification in the press.
But the best part about Chapo to talk about is his notorious great escapes, and he made two - the latest in the summer of 2015. That was the most daring and amazing. It was through a tunnel that began in his prison cell shower, dropped down to a tunnel that ran a mile long. He jumped on a modified motorcycle and went through that mile-long tunnel and out to freedom. And he was on the run for about six months. And during that time, he had that secret meeting with Mexican star Kate del Castillo and actor Sean Penn.
MARTIN: Yeah.
KAHN: And in some way, that led to his downfall. Mexican officials say that he was captured after they caught up with him hearing about this clandestine meeting. And he was captured, but not before he almost escaped from a safe house through a tunnel.
MARTIN: So why now? Why would Mexico have decided to extradite him now?
KAHN: That is the big question, and it's lots of speculation. And I don't have the answer to that. But I can tell you what some of the speculations were is what - that the Mexicans wanted to give him over to the United States while President Obama was still in power, not to President Trump today, but also maybe that this was a signal to President Trump that they are ready to negotiate, and this was their prize to him on his first day in office.
MARTIN: What charges will he face in the U.S.?
KAHN: U.S. officials say there are six separate indictments in courts throughout the United States. He's up for murder, drug trafficking, money laundering, use of firearms. He's got a lot of charges, and the first one up is the federal court in New York.
MARTIN: And just briefly, what - is there a larger significance here? I mean, he was so important in the drug trade in North America. What does it mean for the so-called War on Drugs?
KAHN: It has a lot of significance. El Chapo represents, in some ways, the failure of the War on Drugs. There is just this large drug market in the U.S. You know, even with his capture and his being extradited to the U.S., the drug war rages on. In Mexico, violence levels are as high as they were four years ago, and there probably will be little impact on the drug war with his capture.
MARTIN: NPR's Carrie Kahn in Mexico City. Thanks, Carrie.
KAHN: You're welcome.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
For decades, Donald Trump played coy about his interest in running for president. But he never shied away from talking politics. And as seemingly erratic as he might be with his rhetoric, his political views have actually remained relatively consistent. Here's NPR's Don Gonyea.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Listen to the clips - I mean, old clips - and some familiar themes jump right out.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LARRY KING LIVE")
DONALD TRUMP: I was tired and I think a lot of people are tired of watching other countries ripping off the United States.
GONYEA: This is from a chat with CNN's Larry King in 1987. Trump was 41 years old.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LARRY KING LIVE ")
TRUMP: They laugh at us behind our backs. They laugh at us because of our own stupidity. And the leaders, I mean - what we have - we have a Persian Gulf situation. You saw what happened today. Billions and billions of dollars are being spent on getting oil for Japan, and they're not paying anything for it. Essentially, they're paying nothing for it.
GONYEA: The specifics of that particular story may be old, but the message from Trump is as clear as it was on the trail in 2016 - other nations take advantage of American generosity. Here's another - 1988, Trump with Oprah.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW")
TRUMP: Kuwait - they live like kings. The poorest person in Kuwait, they live like kings. And yet, they're not paying. We make it possible for them to sell their oil. Why aren't they paying us 25 percent of what they're making? It's a joke.
GONYEA: So vintage Trump is also today's Trump. There are other moments in years past where Trump foresaw a key to his future campaign success. New York-based journalist Glenn Plaskin interviewed Trump for Playboy magazine more than 25 years ago.
GLENN PLASKIN: I asked him who would support a Trump bid for the White House. And back in 1990, he said the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows. Well, it is the working guy who is electing him.
GONYEA: The younger Trump would also regularly talk about settling scores with enemies, at one point saying an eye for an eye. Read his Twitter feed, and you'll find out that view hasn't changed. Now in nearly all of these old interviews, Trump denies interest in running for president or other high office while always leaving a bit of wiggle room. This is from 1988 on NBC's "Late Night With David Letterman."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN")
DAVID LETTERMAN: And politics - we talked about this last time - any interest in any kind of appointment or a commission or a position with this administration or something down the road a ways?
TRUMP: I always had...
GONYEA: Trump answers that he's happy doing what he's doing.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN")
LETTERMAN: I'm talking about maybe in eight years, in 12 years.
TRUMP: Well, I'm not sure that you want to see the United States become a winner. Do you want to see the United States become a winner, David?
LETTERMAN: Of course we want to see - the United States is and always has been a winner for my money, Don.
(APPLAUSE)
GONYEA: Donald Trump, 28 years ago, floating a future campaign slogan and maybe an inaugural address.
Don Gonyea, NPR News, Washington.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Later this morning, the 45th president of the United States will be sworn into office. Donald Trump arrived in Washington, D.C., yesterday.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And the inaugural events got started last night with a concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Afterwards, Trump spoke to his supporters.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: We all got tired of seeing what was happening. And we wanted change, but we wanted real change.
GREENE: OK. NPR's Scott Detrow, who spent so many mornings with us throughout the campaign, helping us understand what was happening, is going to do the same today for this inaugural day. Scott, welcome back.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Morning, David.
GREENE: So take us through the day. What exactly is going to happen? I mean, it seems like every moment has a little bit of weight of history with it.
DETROW: Yeah. Donald Trump talked about change. Basically, every incoming president talks about change when they run for president. But Inauguration Day itself, there's not much change.
(LAUGHTER)
DETROW: There's a very set schedule. It's ceremonial. There's a few markers. And one of them is the day begins around 8:30 with a prayer service at a church right near the White House. At 9:30, the Trumps go to the White House, and they meet the Obamas. And they all sit down for tea together. And this is...
MARTIN: You know that it's tea?
DETROW: It is tea.
MARTIN: (Laughter) OK.
DETROW: We have seen that it's tea. Yeah, this year - coffee or tea. But they all sit there in the Blue Room. They chitchat.
GREENE: That's where I really want to be a fly on the wall.
MARTIN: Yeah.
GREENE: I mean, that must be extraordinary.
DETROW: An interesting conversation, especially for all the ways that Donald Trump attacked Barack Obama over the last eight years. And now Barack Obama hands over power to him. And this is not on the set schedule. But we know that right around this time is when Donald Trump will be given a really important briefing. And that's familiarizing him with the nuclear codes, walking him through that nuclear football and how to use it starting at noon today, when he's in charge of it.
MARTIN: Wow.
DETROW: So they all get in a limousine around 10:30. And they go to the Capitol. And that's when all the moving trucks pull up at the White House because they have a very small window. Think about how long it takes you to move in and out. David, you just moved across the country. So you can relate.
GREENE: I did. Yes, I know what it's like. But these are not, like, Ryder trucks. I mean, these are probably some special...
DETROW: They're big trucks. But they pull up. The Obama stuff all goes out. The White House is cleaned, redone as much as it can. The Trumps move in. And by the time the Trumps get there after all the ceremonies this evening, they're moved in.
GREENE: And then, of course, the big speech comes. And that'll be at midday.
DETROW: Right. Yeah. Around 11 o'clock hour is when that gets started. There's music. There's some prayers. Donald Trump will take the oath of office around noon and will give his inaugural address. We're expecting it to be shorter - around 20 minutes or so - and big-picture. Philosophical is the word that his spokesperson used.
MARTIN: OK, Scott. Stay with us throughout the hour as we follow all of this.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK. We're going to be hearing all different perspectives on a Trump presidency throughout the morning, throughout the day. One person we reached out to is Chris Buskirk. He was an early backer of Donald Trump. He's the publisher of the conservative blog American Greatness and also a radio-talk-show host in Phoenix.
CHRIS BUSKIRK: For me - and I don't know. I think I speak for a lot of people who supported Donald Trump from early on - is that this is a time where we can look and say that the voters spoke up against the entrenched elites of both the Republican and Democrat Party and spoke for themselves and had a different view about where the country is going, what the country is and what it should be - and that Donald Trump's election represents a rebuke to the political order, right and left, of the past 20 or 30 years and is the start of, I think, a new debate within the conservative movement itself. In the Republican primary, 17 different candidates...
GREENE: Seems like so long ago when there were that many people (laughter). But yeah.
BUSKIRK: Right, 17 candidates. And here's Donald Trump, the guy nobody takes seriously. And he's going to be sworn in as the next president of the United States. You know, Donald Trump, in some ways, represents, for conservatives and for Republicans, what Bernie Sanders represents for the progressive left. And that is a sense that things need to change.
GREENE: So is this an optimistic moment?
BUSKIRK: Absolutely. I think it is an optimistic moment not only for Republicans, who won and did very well across the board in the states, in the Senate, in the House, et cetera, but also for Democrats, also for the left. And I know that sounds almost counterintuitive. But the reason I say that is because I think - I hope - that we are looking into a political future that is ushering in an era of a politics of conviction.
GREENE: Politics of conviction. OK, what - yeah, tell me what you mean by that.
BUSKIRK: Yeah. I look at somebody like a Bernie Sanders. And I say, I disagree with his policy prescriptions. I disagree with a lot of the things he says. And yet there's a sense in which some of the problems that he sees in the country I agree with. Though I can disagree with somebody like a Bernie Sanders, I can respect the fact that I think that he is a conviction politician. And I think that, you know, when we go back a year or so, when we thought that the 2016 election was going to be an election between a Clinton and a Bush, that represents a time in this country that has passed.
GREENE: Forty percent approval rating, roughly - the most recent Gallup poll. Donald Trump has said that the polls, even the ones since the election are rigged, doesn't trust them. But that is incredibly low compared to both Republican and Democratic presidents recently as they have been sworn in. How do you explain that?
BUSKIRK: Well, I would explain it - and looking at some of these polls, I would explain it in two ways. One is that they are undersampling Republicans. I mean, I looked at The Washington Post-ABC poll. I looked at the NBC poll. And they're sampling 23 and 24 percent Republicans in their sample respectively. That's not what the electorate looks like.
Having said that, I think that there is a kernel of truth in the polls, which is to say that there are still a lot of people, even some people who voted for Donald Trump, who pulled the lever for him, who are skeptical, right? I mean, there is that kernel of truth in those polls without having to accept the fact that - the idea that there's a 40 percent approval rate.
GREENE: Are you skeptical at all?
BUSKIRK: I'm no more skeptical - in fact, I'm less skeptical of Donald Trump than I was of George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush when they came into office - much less skeptical. I think, with Donald Trump, warts and all, what you see is what you get. And I like what I see.
GREENE: All right. Chris Buskirk is publisher of the blog American Greatness. Really appreciate it, Chris.
BUSKIRK: Thanks, David.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And our colleague, Danielle Kurtzleben from NPR's Washington Desk, has been with us this morning keeping us up to date on how the Trump administration might change our country's direction on some key issues. And, Danielle, let's talk about health care, if we can. Interesting moment for this president, right? I mean, a lot of supporters of Obamacare like to say things have really improved. There are far fewer Americans without insurance now. But Donald Trump has said he's going to repeal that law. So, I mean, talk to me about the position he's in.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Right. So that puts him in a little bit of a bind when you think about it because, you know, like Obamacare proponents like to point out, the uninsured rate is at a historic low. And under Obamacare, the cost of premiums continues to rise, but that has slowed down some. So, you know, that's also good for consumers. Aside from that, we had a new poll that came out this week from NBC News showing that for the first time, more Americans like Obamacare than dislike it. So that makes...
GREENE: Oh, that's a big change. That's a new trend.
KURTZLEBEN: Right, yeah. So repealing this law and then replacing it, you know, all of this means that he has higher bars to clear with that replacement - he and Republicans in Congress, that is. You know, recently he promised health care for all. So if he does that, he and Republicans in Congress will have to prevent health care costs from skyrocketing. Add to that you just have major overarching problems. The cost of health care in America is still fantastically big. Health care costs right now equal around 18 percent of GDP, which is just massive.
GREENE: A lot.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.
GREENE: Can I just ask a really broad question at this moment of transition? Are we a healthy country?
KURTZLEBEN: (Laughter) I mean, in the global context, yes, we are a highly developed country. You know, we are, in the grand scheme of things, relatively healthy, but we have some really ugly numbers. For example, adult obesity continues to climb. Drug overdoses grew in a really big way during the Obama presidency, in large part driven by this really terrible opioid epidemic we have. There are some shocking numbers on that. Between 2008 and the most recent numbers we have, 2015, opioid overdose deaths grew by 69 percent. That's just massive.
However, you know, you can see a few bright spots. Americans are smoking less. They're drinking less soda. And, you know, especially when you look at our young people, things are looking a bit better. High schoolers are smoking way less than they used to, and childhood obesity seems to have flattened out. So in some ways, we're seeing a few bright spots.
GREENE: OK. Talking about this moment of transition in the country with our colleague, Danielle Kurtzleben. Thanks, Danielle.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah, thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin with a story about what could be in your hamburger. It starts in Wisconsin, where a whole bunch of red Skittles were found on a road. Officials figured out that the candies fell out of a truck that was taking them to be used in cattle feed. One farmer said it's a good way to give cows, quote, "cheap carbs." The sheriff's department posted the story on its Facebook page. One commenter called it absolutely gross. Another said - hey, strawberry Skittles equals strawberry milk, right? It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Also in the studio with us is NPR's Scott Detrow. Scott, we are awaiting an historic moment, the inauguration of the 45th president of the United States. It is a sober moment. It is a solemn moment. We have not seen Donald Trump navigate this kind of tone before.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: That's right.
MARTIN: And inaugurations - there is usually a long list of people who give prayers...
DETROW: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...At least a handful of people, religious faith leaders. Donald Trump has done the same. He's invited some faith leaders to the events today. What can you tell us about the people who will be praying?
DETROW: It's an interesting mix of people. And several of them were featured at high-profile moments over the course of the presidential campaign. One of those people is Pastor Wayne Jackson. He's a Detroit-area pastor, and he is the head of a black church in Detroit. And Donald Trump went to visit his church in early September. This was a period where Donald Trump and his campaign were working very hard to be on script, to tone things down a bit to try and grow their base and appeal to Republicans who didn't want to vote for Hillary Clinton, were wary of him but looking for a reason to get on board. So Trump visited his church.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: You do right every day by your community and your families. You raise children in the light of God. I will always support your church - always - and defend your right to worship.
DETROW: One of the most toned-down moments of Donald Trump's campaign. Wayne Jackson is one of a couple people who will be on the stage today who kind of come from the prosperity gospel part of the religious world...
MARTIN: This is...
DETROW: ...Making the argument that, you know, being rich - being wealthy is not incompatible with Christianity and might even be a sign that you are a good Christian.
MARTIN: Yes, that you are in fact blessed.
There will also be, I understand, a rabbi?
DETROW: That'll be - that's Marvin Hier, the first rabbi to take part in an inaugural ceremony since 1985.
MARTIN: There will be some notable people who are not in attendance today - right? - a growing list of House Democrats, in particular, who have decided to sit this out.
DETROW: We're approaching about 70 Democrats at this point, a little under 70 House Democrats.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Those numbers have just been growing. I mean...
DETROW: Yeah.
GREENE: ...How big a deal is this if you put this in historic perspective?
DETROW: It became a much bigger deal over the last few days, starting this weekend when Representative John Lewis said that he was not going to go to the ceremony because he didn't view Trump as legitimate, talking about the Russian influence of the election, the hacking efforts that allegedly came from Russia.
Donald Trump responded to that, as he often does, by attacking John Lewis. And then he...
GREENE: Aggressively. Like, he - like, Donald Trump had some options there.
DETROW: Yeah.
GREENE: He could have just sort of said - I don't know, kind of taken a high road and said, you know - Congressman, it's disappointing you're not coming to this peaceful transition of power. But I mean, he really went after Congressman Lewis, which seemed to anger a lot of people.
DETROW: And I think the one thing that he said that really upset people was saying that John Lewis was all talk and no action. He said this about a civil rights icon on Martin Luther King weekend. So the number of representatives skipping the inaugural basically doubled at that point in time. Earlier this week, it was in the 30s, and it's just been growing since. It is notable that no senators are skipping the event, and President Obama will be there. Hillary Clinton will be there in her role as a former first lady.
GREENE: Not just there but, I mean, up near where Donald Trump will be delivering this inaugural address - I mean, you can't imagine what that will be like for her.
DETROW: Definitely within camera shot. And I think many cameras will be cutting to Hillary Clinton to see how she responds during his inaugural address.
MARTIN: We should mention George H.W. Bush will not be in attendance. He is still recovering in hospital. But he sent a lovely note to Donald Trump, did he not?
DETROW: He did. George H.W. Bush has kind of perfected the art of sending the nice note. And he sent this. It was released earlier this week saying, you know, I'd love to be there. But if I sit outside in January, the doctor says that will put me six feet under. But I'm thinking of you, and I'm thinking of the country.
GREENE: All right. Scott Detrow, thanks so much for being here this morning and staying with us throughout the morning. We appreciate it.
DETROW: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Our colleague Danielle Kurtzleben from NPR's Washington desk has been keeping us up to date on how the new Trump administration might change our country's direction in several respects. And she's here now in the studio to talk about foreign affairs.
Danielle, thanks for being here.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Of course.
MARTIN: The world is very different than it was eight years ago when President Obama came into the White House. National security threats have evolved. What do we know about the security challenges that Donald Trump is going to face?
KURTZLEBEN: Sure. So there are some enduring challenges that Obama will hand off. The U.S. right now has around 15,000 troops in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan combined right now, for example. The fight against ISIS is continuing. We had that news this week about airstrikes in Libya. Global incidents of terror really increased during the Obama administration. Of course, that is not to pin the blame on him. But that certainly did happen. It is a very tense world that Trump is going to be governing in.
Aside from that, you have some other growing tensions that occurred during the Obama presidency. Let's start with North Korea. As of right now, North Korea has conducted five nuclear tests. When President Obama took office, it was just one. So that's one thing. Aside from that, you know, China has a growing presence in the South China Sea. So, you know, you have several regions of the world that Trump will have to keep his eye on simultaneously.
MARTIN: So those are the challenges. What do we know about how Donald Trump is going to handle those challenges?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, we've heard a lot of different things on a lot of different issues. So there are still some pretty big question marks about a lot of these. For example, in November, he had said he would end America's newly opened relations with Cuba. If that happens, that would end something that just took place very recently. Aside from that, he recently said that the One China policy is negotiable. That surprised people when he seemed to go against that pretty quickly.
MARTIN: This is a long-standing agreement between the U.S. and China that there is one China and Taiwan is a part of it.
KURTZLEBEN: Right, exactly. You know what - also, our European allies might be a bit nervous because Trump has blasted NATO. He was a champion of Brexit. He has criticized the European Union. That has made a lot of our allies across the Atlantic in Europe pretty nervous.
And then aside from that, one big accomplishment of President Obama is the big Paris climate change agreement. Donald Trump has said various things on climate change. He once called it an invention of the Chinese. He more recently said that he is open to the idea that climate change is real. Of course it is. So it's a big question of exactly what Donald Trump will do in that area.
MARTIN: NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben talking about foreign affairs and what we can expect from the incoming administration.
Thanks so much, Danielle.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah. Thank you.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And Danielle's going to be talking about all sorts of issues as we look forward to the Trump administration throughout the program this morning.
Scott Detrow is still here with us. And Scott, sort of an amazing moment in this city - I took a taxi to work - to the studio this morning. And, you know, my cab driver said, I've been picking up so many visitors. My first question was - what are they coming for? Because there are a ton of people coming for Donald Trump's inauguration, a lot of people coming for other reasons.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: That's right. We have 900,000 people expected to come to the inauguration today. That's even with the rain in the forecast. But then tomorrow, there's going to be a big, kind of countermarch, a women's march, that they're expecting more than 200,000 people to be marching against Donald Trump after so many other people are here for Donald Trump today, so a lot going on in Washington.
MARTIN: Obviously, security is really tight. Lots of people in this city and traffic, I should mention, is a bear already.
GREENE: To a lot of D.C. residents, you're talking about.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: Well, we're going to be talking much more about the inauguration all morning.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Steven Mnuchin, Donald Trump's choice for Treasury secretary, got a pretty rough welcome on Capitol Hill yesterday. During a five-hour confirmation hearing, Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee peppered him with questions about his investments and his role in the foreclosure crisis. But Mnuchin also took a moderate tone on some issues very important to Democrats. Here's NPR's John Ydstie.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: The major focus of the Democrats' grilling of Steven Mnuchin was his involvement in a bank that housing activists have dubbed a foreclosure machine. During the housing bust, Mnuchin and some partners bought a California bank, IndyMac, that had been dragged under by bad mortgages. They renamed it OneWest and foreclosed on tens of thousands of those bad loans, something Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden pointed out as the hearing began.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RON WYDEN: OneWest was truly unique. While Mr. Mnuchin was CEO, the bank proved it could put more vulnerable people on the street faster than just about anybody else around.
YDSTIE: But Mnuchin described his role in this drama differently. He pointed out that he didn't make the bad loans, he inherited them, and that his motivation wasn't just to make a profit, but also rescue a business.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
STEVEN MNUCHIN: We invested $1.6 billion into a failing financial institution when most investors were running for the hills. We renamed the business OneWest Bank and saved thousands of jobs.
YDSTIE: New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez had a different take on Mnuchin's role.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROBERT MENENDEZ: In the darkest days of the financial crisis, it seems to me that you and your friends were looking for stores to raid, and you found a gem in IndyMac. And with the government subsidizing the risk, you engineered a highly lucrative equation that made billions off the backs of homeowners, seniors, minorities, military men and women.
YDSTIE: Menendez also confronted Mnuchin with his initial failure to list significant assets on the financial disclosure statement he provided the committee.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MENENDEZ: You did not answer, in that questionnaire, listing your position as director of a Cayman Islands corporation, as manager, chairman and director of eight additional shell corporations and holding companies and nearly a $100 million in real estate.
YDSTIE: Mnuchin amended his disclosure just hours before the hearing began, and he blamed the overwhelming amount of paperwork required.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MNUCHIN: These forms are very complicated. I don't have the form in front of me, but I believed it said, to the best of my knowledge this is true. And when I certified those forms, I thought it was correct.
YDSTIE: Republicans on the committee downplayed the omission. And for the most part, they provided the Treasury nominee opportunities to talk about the new administration's priorities.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MNUCHIN: We believe the most critical issue is creating economic growth, and passing tax reform is a major component of that.
YDSTIE: Mnuchin also said he supports a strong dollar. He tried to explain away Donald Trump's suggestion that a weaker dollar might be a good thing. And he staked out some moderate positions, for instance, saying he would keep the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He also called for more staff and resources for the IRS. Republicans have cut its budget in recent years. Mnuchin argued that when we add people, we make money. And he said that's something his new boss would get behind.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MNUCHIN: He'll get that completely. That's a very quick conversation with Donald Trump.
YDSTIE: John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
We listened to so many voices from around the country during the presidential campaign. Many of them we heard during our Divided States series in the fall. We spoke to many voters. And this week, we're calling some of them back. Jon Jackson is a veteran we met in Georgia. He owns Comfort Farms. It's a nonprofit that helps veterans transition to civilian life. And when we reached Jackson via Skype, he kept getting interrupted.
JON JACKSON: We definitely should, you know...
(SOUNDBITE OF SHEEP BLEATING)
JACKSON: ...Work together in any way. And...
(SOUNDBITE OF SHEEP BLEATING)
JACKSON: Sorry. We got a sheep in the background. We had to foster one. Her name is Mary. She's in our house with a diaper on. She's running around.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Oh, wow. When Jackson's story aired in October, an NPR listener heard it and decided that she wanted to help him raise money for his farm. Jackson is a Trump supporter. That listener was not.
JACKSON: The division that we have in our country right now really sucks. But when she reached out to me, it really hit me at the heartstrings.
GREENE: And for Jackson, that is what makes this country great.
JACKSON: Most people that work for me have different beliefs than I do politically. And it's funny because they rag me all the time. They poke me in the chest about my support for Donald Trump. And we laugh about it. We joke about it, but we get on to the business of our day and doing what we need to do. And that's just how life should be.
MARTIN: Diana Font is a businesswoman and lifelong Republican who we met in Florida, and she feels the same way. Last fall, she said she could not bring herself to vote for Trump, but she knows a lot of people who did.
DIANA FONT: My cousin, who is like my sister, she and her husband are Trump supporters, and I love them with all my heart. I mean, I'll give an arm, if I have to, for them. We just don't touch the subject.
GREENE: Now, Font ended up voting for Hillary Clinton, but she says she is still a Republican despite not liking their candidate this time around.
FONT: Like any mother, you know, your kid makes a boo-boo, you know, does something that really pisses you off or whatever. But you still love them, and you still have to stay there and see what else they're going to do.
GREENE: Voice there of Diana Font, a Republican from Florida who voted for Hillary Clinton, and also Jon Jackson, a veteran from Georgia who supports Donald Trump.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now, we don't know how much time President Trump and first lady Melania Trump will actually spend here in D.C. But when they're here, a whole lot of organizations are going to ask for their time, from the Kennedy Center to the American Red Cross. NPR's Elizabeth Blair has this look at how social and cultural Washington is waiting for a new first family.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: At a black tie event earlier this week, Mary Kane and Tim Quigley were hoping their guest of honor would show up.
TIM QUIGLEY: And we do have good Slovenian wine to toast her with.
MARY KANE: (Laughter) And vodka.
BLAIR: Melania Trump is, of course, from Slovenia. So when Donald Trump won the election, Mary Kane immediately asked the Slovenian embassy if they'd like to co-host the ball, a fundraiser for Sister Cities International, a citizen diplomacy network. Slovenian Ambassador Bozo Cerar said sure, he'd also like to get her attention.
Will she be here tonight?
BOZO CERAR: I believe she's out of town, at least that is what I was told about.
BLAIR: Melania didn't make it. But when the Trumps do spend time in Washington, many of the city's cultural organizations kind of need them to be involved. Paul Tetreault is director of historic Ford's Theatre.
PAUL TETREAULT: It's a new beginning for us here. And I think we are excited, we're a little anxious because trying to figure out, OK, how do we get to this administration, who are our connections and how do we know them?
BLAIR: Ford's Theatre holds an annual fundraising gala every year, a whole weekend of events including a reception at the White House. One year President and Michelle Obama were unable to participate so the gala was canceled.
TETREAULT: Quite candidly, their role in that weekend is so central that it really happens with their participation, and without their participation it sort of doesn't - it falls apart.
BLAIR: Even a casual visit to a local restaurant can make a big difference. When then-President-elect Obama made a visit to Ben's Chili Bowl, it was all over the news. Regular customer Baron Saunders hopes President Trump will visit all of Washington.
BARON SAUNDERS: If he wants to get to know Washington, go to the city. You've got to get to where, as we call, the hood. No, not just the upper class, but you got to get to know the middle class, the lower class and all classes. Because to hear the heart, you have to go where they live.
BLAIR: And here's where there's some anxiety, Washington voters are overwhelmingly Democratic. When the Obamas showed up at the restaurant and performance space Busboys and Poets, owner Andy Shallal says there were cheers and tears. He doesn't know what will happen if President Trump comes.
ANDY SHALLAL: I don't see the same kind of reception would take place if he was to set foot in here. I don't know if people will start booing, but I don't think they'll give him a standing ovation. I think there's been so much vitriol that has come out in this election that it's going to be very hard to just move on.
BLAIR: But Lea Berman believes it's important to try. She was a White House social secretary under President George W. Bush.
LEA BERMAN: I think it's useful and very important for presidents to reach out to the Washington community, and those who do it are very successful at it.
BLAIR: Berman is co-writing a book with one of the Obama's former social secretaries called "Treat People Well." She says a wise leader can gain advantage by being part of social Washington.
BERMAN: For example, when the Reagans, who were kind of exceptional in terms of getting to know people in Washington, seeking out people who are not necessarily their supporters and befriending them and basically co-opting them, were able to have much more influence within the city than presidents who don't bother.
BLAIR: Berman says that kind of interaction is rare these days, even though there are neighborhoods where it could happen.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRUCK ENGINE)
BLAIR: In Northwest Washington, a couple of moving trucks are parked in front of the six-bedroom house Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner recently bought. It's on a tree-lined section of D.C. with historic mansions and embassies. It's not exactly the kind of community where people bring over fresh baked cookies to welcome new neighbors. But David Bender, head of the local neighborhood commission, says the Trump-Kushners will be treated kindly.
DAVID BENDER: Once they're here, they're kind of treated like everyone else. We don't talk about them. We basically let them live their own lives, and they can interact in the community as much as they want or they choose.
BLAIR: In a twist, the Obama family is renting a house just around the corner. They're staying in the city at least until their daughter Sasha graduates from high school. Just like political Washington, social Washington is waiting to see what kind of tone president and first lady Trump will set. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF RYAN HELSING, MATTHEW SALTZ SONG "LAYERS")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And Rachel, we should say, we're getting reports from our colleagues who are covering these events. All over the city, there are people already lining up before sunrise to get into the inaugural events. So the lines are building. And we're going to be listening to a range of voices this morning, reflections on what this day means. And joining us now from New York is John Podhoretz.
He's the editor of Commentary magazine, also worked as a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and served briefly in the White House of George H.W. Bush. He's been an outspoken critic of the president-elect. Mr. Podhoretz, good morning.
JOHN PODHORETZ: Good morning, how are you?
GREENE: I'm well, thank you. How are you feeling this morning? You were not a supporter of Donald Trump. I wonder what, you know, where you are right now on this inauguration morning.
PODHORETZ: Well, I'm of two minds. One of which is that it still seems to me to be surreal that this is happening, that a man who was best known 18 months ago for being the sort of caricature star of a television show about being rich has, you know, is now ascending to the highest office in the land and, you know, where only 44 men over 240 years have served before him.
At the same time, I'm also very struck by the panic and terror that I see and hear from many people who do not share my conservative ideological perspective, who are behaving as though what has happened here is essentially a kind of coup. I mean, not that - some of them think he's illegitimate, a lot of people are, you know, in a state of shock and mourning and terror and rage.
GREENE: And you think that's an overreaction. You don't think this is a moment for people to be terrified at all.
PODHORETZ: No, I mean, well, I mean, if you are - if one thinks that a conservative president pursuing a conservative agenda is a terrifying creature, then you can be full of shock and rage. But the unprecedented nature of Donald Trump isn't that he is going to pursue conservative policies, it's that he is someone who got elected, you know, never having been in politics before at all and who comes with a kind of the imprimatur of pop culture rather than policy.
And that's not what people, I think, are afraid by - scared by. They're scared by how conservative a lot of what it is that he's talking about is. I'm worried about the tariffs, I'm worried about the trade issues. But a lot of people are, you know, that I know are really in horror from Betsy DeVos, the education secretary designate, who has views that are entirely within the mainstream of conservative opinion on education.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Let me ask you, Mr. Podhoretz - it's Rachel Martin here. When you take the big picture, I mean, when you think about the Republican Party that existed when you served in the White House, when you worked for Ronald Reagan, when you worked for George H.W. Bush, how has it evolved? What does it look like to be a Republican in 2017 in the era of Trump?
PODHORETZ: Well, it's interesting because, of course, the Republican Party is much larger and more powerful in its own way than it was then. There were, I think, twice as many Democrats among registered voters as there were Republicans in the 1980s. That number has shrunk to, I don't know, a gap of 5 or 6 percent, something like that. Republicans are, you know, during the Obama era, Republicans took control of the House, the Senate, a thousand seats at, you know, below the national level in states.
So it's actually much larger and institutionally much more powerful. But it's also much less cohesive in some ways.
GREENE: You like some things that have happened to the party in this moment.
PODHORETZ: Well, I mean, I think I like the fact that the party has become, you know, did not lie down and die when it was shellacked in 2006 and 2008 and did not take lying down the arrival of the most liberal president in American history. And it rallied and it found new ways to reach out to voters and to reach out to Americans.
I am very concerned that core principles about, you know, say, economics, like that protectionism actually hurts the country, that takes on protectionist policies are being lost...
MARTIN: Yeah.
GREENE: All right, we'll have to because of time stop there but much more conversation to be had. That was John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Presidential inaugurations are supposed to be about unity. That may be more inspirational than aspirational, rather, than anything else this year. Donald Trump will be sworn in later this morning in the wake of a divisive and ugly campaign that perhaps describes the deeply partisan era we're living in. We're hearing different perspectives on Trump's Inaugural Day this morning and one of them is that of the novelist Attica Locke.
She is also a writer on the TV program "Empire," and she spoke to our own Steve Inskeep.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We called you up on the morning after the election. That sounded like an excruciating morning for you.
ATTICA LOCKE: It was, and I can't say that things have gotten necessarily better for me.
INSKEEP: What do you mean?
LOCKE: I wake up every day and think, this is how much this country can't stand black people that this has happened. Or I think, this is how much this country did not want a woman as a leader. This is how much this country doesn't want Muslims here. This is how much this country can't stand immigrants.
And though I know this to not be literally true, that it's not that simple, emotionally, I feel a sense of rejection of what Obama's presidency represented.
INSKEEP: Do you feel a personal rejection?
LOCKE: No, it's not like that. It's just how am I letting my child, my young, biracial child know that this country loves her and makes space for her and wants her to do well?
INSKEEP: OK, so how are you doing that? You've got a 10-year-old, right?
LOCKE: Yes, I do.
INSKEEP: A 10-year-old daughter - and are you talking to her about the political situation? And what are you saying?
LOCKE: We're talking about it to the degree that she shows interest. I'm not trying to bombard her with depressing thoughts about how frightened her mother is. What I'm trying to do is put Trump's election in some kind of context. I'm definitely trying to not normalize what is happening. I don't want her to think that this is normal.
INSKEEP: How do you plan to spend the next few years, politically, I mean? You've got a job but do you intend to engage yourself in some way that you weren't engaged before?
LOCKE: Yes, I mean, I think that there will be infinitely more interactions, be it correspondence or phone calls, with my locally elected officials than I've ever engaged in before. I think that I will - my husband said this is the year we're going to get arrested.
INSKEEP: Was that a New Year's resolution, we're going to go out and get arrested at some point this year?
LOCKE: (Laughter) It almost was. And he said it very plainly and he was not kidding. And he may be right. And I'm OK with that. But I'm also going to continue to be frank because there's too much obfuscation in the media - that we're not calling a lie a lie, that we're not calling racism racism. The concept of objective truth is now maybe up in the air.
And so I'm going to keep saying the truth as I know it over and over and over again.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. On big news days, it's so fun to look at the witty headlines in the tabloids. OK, cover of the New York Daily News, "Don Of A New Day." Don as in D-O-N for Trump.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Oh, yeah, I get it. Cute, very cute.
GREENE: All right, Rachel, tell me what's on the cover of the New York Post.
MARTIN: All right, New York Post, look at what it says. "Don Of A New Day."
GREENE: No, the Post.
MARTIN: Yeah, that's what it says.
GREENE: They used the same headline?
MARTIN: Yes. The photos of Trump even look the same.
GREENE: It's almost the same photos? I feel cheated. It's MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And on this morning of the presidential inauguration, we're joined in the studio by NPR's Scott Detrow. Scott, just make this a habit. We like you being here.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
(Laughter).
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Happy to be here anytime.
GREENE: (Laughter) We like you being here. And also on the line, our colleague Jennifer Ludden, who is out on the streets of Washington as things are getting going. Jennifer, are you there?
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: Hey, David.
GREENE: Hey, where exactly are you?
LUDDEN: I am at the beautiful Navy Memorial, not far from the Trump Hotel right along the parade route and right inside a security checkpoint where people are slowly trickling in. It is quite a thorough check, I will say. And there are lots and lots of police and National Guard. I saw some Virginia State Police - a lot of security out here so far.
GREENE: And are people cold, excited, both?
LUDDEN: You know, it's a quiet happiness. So we had, like, a half-hour walk along here and passed several checkpoints. And there were, I would say, dozens to maybe a couple hundred people waiting already at 0-dark-hundred here at every checkpoint...
GREENE: Oh-dark-hundred, that's very military, I like that.
LUDDEN: Oh-dark-hundred (laughter) - families, you know, college students. Yeah, I spoke with a father and son who'd come down from Philadelphia. The son is a freshman in college. He's about to start a Conservative club. They were Ted Cruz supporters to begin with, but they feel happy that Donald Trump is elected. His father, used to teach high school, feels this is an educational opportunity.
And so they're down here to check it out and take in all the pageantry.
GREENE: Very cool. Was the weather holding up? There's all this talk of rain.
LUDDEN: You know, so far it's pretty nice.
GREENE: All right, stay with us. Stay with us.
LUDDEN: Dry and not too cold.
GREENE: Yeah, we might want to talk to you some more.
MARTIN: OK, stay with us, Jennifer. But let's turn to Scott Detrow, who's still in the studio with us. Scott, let's get an update on where the Cabinet is at this moment. As Donald Trump prepares to take the oath of office, does he have his people in place?
DETROW: He has finally named his full Cabinet. He named Sonny Perdue as his nominee for agriculture secretary just a few days ago. That was the last spot we hadn't filled. We're expecting two confirmations today at least. And that's James Mattis for secretary of defense and John Kelly for homeland security. Other Cabinet nominees might take some time to be confirmed by the Senate, though.
MARTIN: Also can you just take a moment to tell us about this tradition that happens? When the outgoing president leaves, they write a letter - right? - to the incoming president. Do we expect Barack Obama to do the same thing?
DETROW: Yeah, yeah, we do. And it's a really nice tradition. In fact, the National Archives just released yesterday George W. Bush's letter to Obama and Bill Clinton's letter to George W. Bush. They typically say, you know, you're inheriting a big job with a lot of responsibilities, but I'll be with you, the American people will be with you, we're rooting for you and praying for you.
That's kind of the general tone. It's a very nice, positive tradition.
MARTIN: Do we still have Jennifer on the line? Can we bring her back into the conversation?
LUDDEN: Hi, Rachel.
MARTIN: Hey, Jennifer. I'm just wondering if you've had conversations with people - I know they're excited about the moment. But has anyone gotten kind of big picture with you to talk about the significance, the kind of change they want to see in the country with this election?
LUDDEN: Yes, people like change. You know, one person works with small farmers. He says they feel very optimistic. Some people really were, you know, are excited about Trump the man and others just about the sense of change. Although one person, you know, kind of gave off a little bit of sense of apprehension. He said, I would just like to get through the first hundred days.
And, you know, like, it's this sense of uncertainty. Like, he's like, you don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what he's going to tweet. He's like, I think he should...
MARTIN: Yeah.
LUDDEN: ...Probably stop tweeting. But then again, you wouldn't have told someone a long time ago to not use the telegraph (laughter). It is the modern means of communication.
GREENE: That's a very good point. That is a very good point.
MARTIN: Which is what Donald Trump has said, right? It's a modern form of communication. Although, Scott, there have been surveys done. Americans right now, they don't really love his Twitter habit.
DETROW: Yeah, that's true. And I think we're seeing that in surveys and also in a lot of interviews. Even his biggest supporters say maybe he should tone down the Twitter just a little bit in terms of the reactionary tweets as well. We have seen some reports that he might have gotten that new secure phone that a president has already. Maybe that'll change his Twitter habits.
GREENE: So he's going to be using that to tweet? I mean, I guess he has no choice once he's president.
DETROW: Unclear - I don't know if a presidential phone includes Twitter.
GREENE: (Laughter).
DETROW: I think - we did do some stories with security experts saying that kind of having that app on the phone kind of opens it up to penetrations. So that might not be the case. He might have to log into his computer...
GREENE: It's so interesting because...
DETROW: ...Or dictate the tweet to somebody else.
GREENE: Oh, that's an option. And covering tweets has been a whole new thing for political reporters.
DETROW: It is something we have worked on and tried to perfect over the last year and especially the last few months as big, major announcements and policy pronouncements, even up to nuclear policy, have come on Twitter.
GREENE: On Twitter. All right, NPR's Scott Detrow, stay with us in the studio. NPR's Jennifer Ludden, thanks so much. And stay warm out there, Jennifer.
LUDDEN: Will do.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And as part of our coverage this morning, our colleague Danielle Kurtzleben has been here. We have the good fortune of having her in the studio talking us through what this new administration, how it could change our country's direction or not. Hey, Danielle.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Hey.
GREENE: Let's talk about the economy. I mean, it's - every number seems to suggest it's doing better than when President Obama took office. We're out of recession. The recovery is chugging along. Often, that's good news for an incoming president to have a strong economy. Is that the case?
KURTZLEBEN: Right, absolutely. Not only are a lot of figures looking better than when Obama took office; the trajectory is different. When Obama took office, we were plunging into recession. Right now, like you said, we are steadily getting out of it. We've had 75 months of job growth in a row. Consumer confidence is good. Wages are picking up. GDP has been kind of lackluster, but it picked up in the last quarter. And the stock market is up. All that looks great.
Now, one thing that could happen during a Trump presidency is that if things continue to improve, the Fed, as the saying goes, will have to take the punchbowl away. They might have to raise interest rates and keep things from overheating. That's not bad. That's the Fed's job. But, you know, Trump has accused them of playing politics in the past. So you could see a little bit of conflict there.
GREENE: So this could be really interesting. I mean, the Fed, at a moment when it will decide to act, the president can't really do anything about it. But he could come out and say, no, no, no, no, no. Don't play politics. You know, let the economy keep heating up. Or he could kind of back away and let the Fed do its thing and think long-term.
KURTZLEBEN: Right. And like you said, to be totally clear, the president does not have control over what the Fed does.
GREENE: Right.
KURTZLEBEN: The Fed is independent.
GREENE: Just he has a big bully pulpit.
KURTZLEBEN: Right, yeah. However, Donald Trump will get to pick the next Fed chair. Janet Yellen's term is up in January of 2018. So that will be a huge decision that we'll all be watching.
GREENE: Are there any troubling signs right now in the economy that Donald Trump might have to deal with?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, you do have some overarching, you know, structural problems. Inequality was high when Obama took office. It's still high. It's growing. So it is possible that inequality could, at some point, hurt growth, you know, if you have a lot more Americans who have a lot less disposable income. And, you know, the stock market is really doing well. That doesn't really directly help a lot of Americans. You know, a lot of Americans just don't have money in the stock market.
Now, one headwind that's really particular to him is manufacturing. He has put all of his economic eggs in the manufacturing basket during the campaign.
GREENE: Saying jobs, jobs jobs.
KURTZLEBEN: Right, yeah. And the question is, how much can he grow that industry when it has just automated so much? Output is pretty good in manufacturing. But employment is lower. So it's a question of how much can he change an industry that really has undergone its own changes.
GREENE: OK, NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben. Thanks, Danielle.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah, thank you.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
This morning we are mourning the loss of one man who chronicled Donald Trump's rise. Wayne Barrett died yesterday at the age of 71.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Barrett made a name for himself as an investigative reporter at The Village Voice newspaper. He was a dogged critic of New York mayors Ed Koch - Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani and a certain Donald J. Trump.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WAYNE BARRETT: I've always felt I could go toe-to-toe with anybody.
MARTIN: That's Barrett speaking to New York local news in 2011.
GREENE: Now, in 1992, Barrett wrote "Trump: The Deals And The Downfall." The book was a flop at first, but Barrett's deep knowledge of the president-elect made him a go-to source for journalists during the 2016 campaign.
MARTIN: He suffered from lung disease, but Barrett continued his reporting on Donald Trump through Election Day. He told Democracy Now! last year that Trump motivated him.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BARRETT: You know I'm in a sick bed a lot, but he gets me up out of it.
GREENE: That is journalist Wayne Barrett who died yesterday at 71 years old.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Later this morning, the 45th president of the United States will be sworn into office. Donald Trump arrived in Washington yesterday.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
That's right. He kicked off his inauguration weekend with a concert at the Lincoln Memorial, and afterwards he spoke to his supporters.
MARTIN: He said that he and the people who voted for him were all about change. That's what he wants to see happen. NPR's Scott Detrow is here in the studio with us to talk about what we can expect this morning. Hi, Scott.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: So what's the itinerary?
DETROW: Well, it's a packed day, and it's a day that's set with ceremony that's pretty constant from year to year. Donald Trump will take the oath of office around noon, but his day starts much earlier. There's a church service at 8:30 at St. John's Church right near the White House. At 9:30, the Trumps go to the White House, and they meet with the Obamas. They have tea or coffee. They chit chat. They talk. Around this time, according to know - what we know about previous transitions is when Trump will likely be briefed on how to use the nuclear codes, an awesome responsibility that...
GREENE: No small thing.
DETROW: ...His at noon. That's his decision at noon, so he'll get that briefing. A lot of previous presidents had said that's a real reality check moment.
MARTIN: Yeah.
DETROW: And then the Obamas and the Trumps all go to the Capitol around 10:30...
MARTIN: Together.
DETROW: ...Together in a limo and that has been a source of tension in previous years. Herbert Hoover refused to talk to Franklin Roosevelt when they rode to the Capitol together...
GREENE: They just sat there in the car not speaking?
DETROW: Roosevelt waved to the crowd. Hoover was grumpy about losing in a landslide and didn't talk at all the entire way.
GREENE: Wow.
MARTIN: OK. So - and then we will watch history unfold as Donald J. Trump takes the oath of office. Stay with us, Scott. You're going to help us monitor all these events and mark the festivities, but we want to bring another voice into the conversation now, Christopher Buckley. He worked as a speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush during his years as vice president to Ronald Reagan. Chris Buckley is the author of several political satires including the novel "Thank You For Smoking." He joins us via Skype from the Bahamas. Mr. Buckley, thanks for being with us.
CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY: Good morning.
GREENE: Where exactly are you, Mr. Buckley? You emailed us last night and said you were very excited to tell us this.
BUCKLEY: (Laughter) Well, I thought it would be worth mentioning that I'm speaking to you from a place called Hope Town...
GREENE: OK.
BUCKLEY: ...Which is a very small island that was founded by - in 1785 by loyalists escape - who had to escape America and come here (laughter).
GREENE: Are you saying there's some symbolism there? Are you trying to escape right now?
BUCKLEY: I will leave (laughter) that to your listeners to decide whether or not there's some embedded symbolism there. It's a very pleasant place, but I'm happy to join you by the marvel...
MARTIN: Of technology.
BUCKLEY: ...Of technology.
MARTIN: So setting your geography aside for the moment, let's talk about - a little bit about your lineage. You are, of course, the son of William F. Buckley tremendously influential conservative intellectual, the founder of The National Review. When you sit from your perch in the Bahamas and think about this moment and where your party is at, where the Republican Party is at, how has it changed since your dad's time?
BUCKLEY: Well, it has changed. It's changed quite a bit. I am frequently asked what my dear old, departed dad would have made of Donald Trump. And it's funny no one asks me what he would have made of Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush or John Kasich so I...
GREENE: Other Republicans - they don't ask you about that?
BUCKLEY: I have to conclude that they are asking me this at wanting to know whether or not that my dear, old dad would have considered him a conservative. And my - it's tricky channeling your dad's ghost. Hamlet tried it. That didn't work out so well. But my best answer is - would be that Donald Trump defies categorization. I think he is - to use the Latin which my dad frequently reverted to - he's sui generis. He is his own type.
MARTIN: Yeah.
BUCKLEY: There is no one like him. I do not - that is not necessarily a compliment, but I think it is true.
GREENE: What about the party today? I mean, George H.W. Bush - obviously on a lot of minds because he is hospitalized right now. And you said in the past that you have an abiding affection for the first President Bush. Do you see his influence in the Republican Party of today?
BUCKLEY: Sadly, I see very little, and I - you're probably now aware of the letter that Mr. Bush sent Donald Trump last week saying we will not be...
GREENE: Yeah - unable to come to the inauguration. Yeah.
BUCKLEY: ...Unable because under doctor's orders - he said that as a 92 year old, if he sits outside in January, he will be - he will soon be six feet under. I thought it was a typical grace note of President Bush, who was, I think, the man after my father I admire most. The mischief - my mischievous side would be tempted to hypothesize whether or not Mr. Bush being in the hospital had decided it was preferable to shuffle off this mortal coil than be alive today, but I am - I rejoice that he is still with us. And I'm sure he is participating in his way by the marvel of modern technology...
GREENE: Of the technology - watching things on television or somehow, we hope, depending on his condition which we're all watching of course.
BUCKLEY: I mean, consider the graciousness of the man. You know, Mr. Trump among other things defeated Mr. Bush's own son during the Republican primaries. George Bush is - he may be the last gentleman. It grieves me to say that, but he embodies virtues that are conspicuously, I think, absent from today.
MARTIN: Let me ask you this, Christopher Buckley. Your dad is often cited as the intellectual father of the modern conservative movement. He was the definition of a conservative elitist to many people, and the election that just happened was in many ways a rejection of that. This was about the outsiders. This was about the every man, the working class that has felt disenfranchised. Do you think this represents a temporary shift? Is it a rejection of what your dad was about?
BUCKLEY: I would point out to that - I mean, you may think of my dad as an elitist. I would point out to you that when he ran for mayor of New York in 1965, he polled best among - in Queens in the borough of Queens - his constituency, the people who awarded him his 13.5 percent vote in the - in that general election were cops and firemen which I think runs a little bit athwart your definition of an - as an elitist. He was - he had patrician manners, but my dad was very much a man of the people.
GREENE: Well, this is one of the things, really, that I'm curious to look for as the Trump presidency begins. I mean, a lot of people, you know, made a big deal out of the fact that you have this rich, you know - this rich man, wealthy man from New York City drawing a lot of appeal from the working class. But there was one study that they did at Harvard saying like, no, if you are working class, if you're hardworking, you care about your families, you admire someone who is wealthy. And it's just going to be interesting to watch where that appeal is as these first days happen.
BUCKLEY: Yes. I think that's true. There's obviously a fascination with wealth. There's always been, I mean - like some years ago, the most - it was under some dreadful television show called "Lifestyles to Rich And Famous" (ph).
GREENE: "To Rich And Famous" (ph) - yeah. Who can forget it?
BUCKLEY: I doubt it was - I doubt its greatest viewership was along Park Avenue in New York. It was probably played a little bit better in what we sometimes refer to as the fly-over states. But I think that fast - I mean, I think - of wealth and especially the variety of flashy wealth that - one might say gaudy wealth that Mr. Trump's (unintelligible) - I think will be interesting up to a point.
MARTIN: Let me ask you this, Chris Buckley, to interrupt you. We have to mention this, though, because in 1999, you wrote a parody address for Donald Trump as if he had won the presidency.
GREENE: Amazing.
MARTIN: And this is how...
BUCKLEY: (Laughter).
MARTIN: ...It starts. (Reading) This is a great day for me, personally. You're very smart to have voted for me because I'm going to do positive things for this country starting with this Mall I'm looking out over.
And I'm we're poking fun, and it is a parody, but there is something about the rhetoric that is very true to who he is. Clearly, this is something you saw coming in some form or another.
BUCKLEY: Well, it took 17 years to come true. I would say it seemed funny at the time, but here we are. It's morning in America, as we say, and morning is a word that can be spelled two ways.
GREENE: And (laughter) - nice way to put it. And we have many people arriving in Washington this morning - many of them Donald Trump supporters and many of them who plan to be protesting tomorrow, so might use two different versions of that word. Listen, once we get off the line...
BUCKLEY: I wish them all a good day.
GREENE: Yeah. Well, I would love you to predict my future when we get off the live radio here because it sounds like you have a knack for that.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: That is the novelist Christopher Buckley, who worked as a speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush when he was vice president.
Mr. Buckley, thanks so much for taking the time this morning. We appreciate it.
BUCKLEY: All right. Good to be with you.
MARTIN: Thanks.
BUCKLEY: And God bless America.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
It is Inauguration Day here in Washington, D.C., and already thousands of Donald Trump supporters are gathering at checkpoints along the Mall as they make their way to the scene of the swearing in of the 45th president of the United States. NPR's Jennifer Ludden is out there somewhere on or near the Mall talking to people. Jennifer, where are you and who are you with?
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: Hey, David. I am on Constitution Avenue around 7th Street in a line that is moving, finally, to let people through the checkpoint onto the Mall. And I'm here with Whitney Ruiz (ph) who is from San Angelo, Texas.
GREENE: Oh, great.
WHITNEY RUIZ: Hey there.
LUDDEN: So tell me - you're here with your son. What brought you guys up to D.C. for this inauguration?
RUIZ: Well, my son was invited to the Envision Presidential Inauguration Youth Summit, and we felt like that was a grand opportunity for him to witness part of history. And it was an honor for him to be invited to the summit as well. So that...
LUDDEN: And you guys are both wearing Trump headgear here.
RUIZ: Yes.
LUDDEN: So you're excited that it was Trump who won.
RUIZ: Yes.
LUDDEN: You would've come anyway...
RUIZ: Yes.
LUDDEN: ...But you're happy about this.
RUIZ: We're excited to be here, yes.
LUDDEN: Now, you told me you were a Ted Cruz supporter first...
RUIZ: Yes.
LUDDEN: ...From Texas. So how - what made you come around to Trump?
RUIZ: Simply his nomination. He would not have been my first choice or second choice along the way, but when we got down to the end, I typically support more conservative and the Republican Party for - in all races.
LUDDEN: Are you feeling excited about the next - him taking office?
RUIZ: Yes, I am.
LUDDEN: What are you looking forward to most in the next few weeks?
RUIZ: Well, just it's going to be an entertaining show and...
(LAUGHTER)
LUDDEN: Not boring.
RUIZ: Not boring. That's correct. And I really don't know what he's going to get to first exactly. The things that I'm most excited about are our Supreme Court nominations, border security, military emphasis. My husband is retired military, and my son is in the Army now.
LUDDEN: All right. Great. All right. Well, thank you so much. You guys have a wonderful day out here and enjoy.
RUIZ: All right. Thank you.
LUDDEN: All right. Hey, David.
GREENE: All right. Hey, Jennifer. So it sounds like people are really gathering and moving in. It's going orderly so far, no huge lines, people getting these massive security checks. I mean, it's so far...
LUDDEN: There are lines, but we're finally moving. There's multiple security checks. There are lots and lots of security officers, dozens and dozens along the parade route and everything - very thorough checks here.
GREENE: OK.
LUDDEN: So it's taken a while, but people are slowly making their way onto the Mall. And you know what? The rain hasn't happened yet. It's actually a lovely morning.
GREENE: Well, there you go. We'll hope that that stays that way. NPR's Jennifer Ludden. We'll talk to you later on. Thanks, Jennifer.
LUDDEN: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep, looking up at the white, cast-iron dome of the United States Capitol this morning. We're overlooking the scene where President-elect Trump will become President Trump around mid-day today. American flags are draped off the side of the Capitol, one of them with 50 stars, the other with 13, representing the original colonies. And the lectern where the president, the new president, will stand to deliver his address, is covered in clear plastic this morning because we've had a few spritzes of rain. And there may be a little bit more as we go through the morning. Now, we're going to be covering this live throughout the morning, and I'm joined right now by NPR's Audie Cornish of All Things Considered. Hey there, Audie.
AUDIE CORNISH, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: And Tamara Keith, NPR's White House correspondent...
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: ...Getting ready to cover a new White House. And let's look out over this scene here. When we look to our right, away from the Capitol, we see the National Mall which is a couple of miles long. The Washington Monument is out there in the distance, and it looks white, almost as if it's covered in snow. Those are like giant tarps that they put on over the grass.
CORNISH: Right. I mean, everyone's got tarps up, hoods up. I think we're all preparing for the chance of rain today. On the other side of the Mall at the Lincoln Memorial, there was actually a concert last night, a kind of welcome inauguration show very similar to what President Barack Obama did - and George W. Bush. And I think last night it was Toby Keith, 3 Doors Down. And the thing that struck me from that concert was Donald Trump's words where he said, you know, I called you the forgotten man and the forgotten woman, well, you are forgotten no more. That was the tone last night.
INSKEEP: And so now we prepare for the discussion this morning. And thousands of people are out there, and the crowd is increasing.
CORNISH: Yeah. You know, it's - the seats are empty right now. We're looking at kind of the reserved area, so...
INSKEEP: Yeah, the people who can come in a little later.
CORNISH: ...Those folks aren't here. But the people who can come in now, some of the early public, they are already pressed up against the barricades. They're already here waiting, right, Tamara?
KEITH: Yeah. And there are some people who have put out a blanket and are sitting down because this is going to be a long time. People came very early to get here to see this, to be close to, you know, witnessing history, witnessing the peaceful transfer of power.
INSKEEP: Can we remember - because we've been here for a couple of past inaugurations - this is a different inauguration, a different moment in history than 2009 or 2013, the inaugurations of President Obama. We were looking back at the speeches that were delivered on those days. In the 2009 speech, the president said, I need to speak with you frankly about the dire situation the economy is in and that the nation is at war. In 2013, the president was much more optimistic, saying the recovery had come and that 10 years of war - a decade of war - was ending. That turned out to be a little over optimistic as we've now learned, and it's a very different mood today as we await President-elect Trump.
KEITH: And he did tweet this morning, which is a new thing, and he says that the movement continues, the work begins. And this was in all caps with an exclamation point, and it was sent from an Android device which is generally thought to mean it was sent by the fingers of the president-elect himself.
CORNISH: Right.
KEITH: He sees himself as being part of a movement and sees that going forward, and it'll be really interesting to see what he says in his speech.
CORNISH: And worth mentioning because it's an extension of campaign language about the movement...
KEITH: Yes.
CORNISH: ...About look how far we have come, he's talking to his supporters still. And I think we're going to hear today also from protesters - right? - because they're also gathering at the gates.
INSKEEP: Well, let's go to NPR's Cory Turner, who is out somewhere in Washington, D.C. looking at people arriving and looking at the protesters. Cory, where are you?
CORY TURNER, BYLINE: Hey, Steve. I am between you and the Washington Monument. I'm on the Mall looking out over, as you said, this sea of white. It was actually plastic covering over the grass of the Mall, and I have to say...
INSKEEP: Protecting the grass, yeah.
TURNER: Protecting the grass, exactly. It's really sparsely populated right now. I came in the gates around about 12th St., which is just near the Trump, hotel about 6 o'clock. And a line was forming, security was very tight.
INSKEEP: Cory, I got to tell you, I'm peering out over the crowd as if I could possibly see you a mile or two away, but I assume you're out there somewhere. Go on, go on.
TURNER: Well, I have to tell you, I had to duck into the the media here where NPR has a desk because the music over where I am is blaring really loudly. When I showed up, they were playing Aerosmith's "Dream On" and it was hard...
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
TURNER: ...To hear myself think. But I will tell you, Steve, so I wandered around for a good 20, 30 minutes catching up with a handful of people. The funny thing is the first half-dozen or so folks I found who are were all separate all happened to be George Washington University students, most of them I believe public policy students, who were really just here to see what they could see. Now, obviously I'm an education reporter. I didn't intentionally seek out students, but I did see the biggest group I could find. They got my attention because they were all wearing these bright white little bags on their backs. I ran into maybe 40 or 50 students from a group called Pathways in Education out of California.
INSKEEP: OK.
TURNER: And they're all, as it was explained to me by their chaperone Alison Gross (ph), they're some of the best students in their network of schools out there in California, and they all came out here just to see the inauguration, be a part of it. I grabbed one cut of tape from a student, Star Anderson (ph). Let's see if we can play that now.
INSKEEP: Give it a shot.
STAR ANDERSON: It means a lot because my family is so divided politically, and so like that - so to be here and to be a neutral party, it just feels so good to be, like, a part of history.
TURNER: Your family's so divided, how so?
ANDERSON: I mean, I got a lot of women right activist people in my family, and then I have a lot of very, very - like stereotypical Republicans, so it's pretty split (laughter).
TURNER: And what did they say to you when you said, yeah, I'm flying out to D.C. to go to the inauguration?
ANDERSON: They were really excited. They know that I'm making my own choices and I'm coming as a neutral party so they were like, oh, that's so exciting and I hope you see, like, Obama and Trump, and you see famous people and stuff like that.
TURNER: So, Steve...
INSKEEP: OK.
TURNER: ...One last note, Star told me she turned 18 in December, so a little too late to vote.
INSKEEP: OK, a little too late to vote, but she'll get a chance to see the inauguration here. And we're at the west front of the United States Capitol. The inaugural address is scheduled to take place a little bit before noon. This is a president-elect who gave a dramatic and dark convention speech. We'll see what kind of a speech he gives now as he takes the reins of the country. I'm Steve Inskeep with Audie Cornish and Tamara Keith, and we will be having live coverage a little bit later on this morning. Back to you guys at NPR headquarters.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK. We're going to be hearing much more from Steve and Audie there from the Capitol as the morning goes on. Let's hear now from one person who supported Donald Trump and this presidency that's beginning. It is Chris Buskirk, He was an early backer of Trump. He's the publisher of the conservative blog "American Greatness" and also a radio talk show host in Phoenix.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
It is Inauguration Day here in Washington, D.C., and we just saw President-elect Donald Trump. He has just left Blair House, which is just near the White House. He spent the night there last night, and he is on his way to church now. Let's go to the White House right near Blair House. NPR's Scott Horsley is on the line.
Scott, good morning.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: So a lot of ceremony - we're seeing President-elect Trump head to church, of course, the big moment - the swearing in at the Capitol. There are crowds of supporters who are already there. But we should talk about the agenda because there's a lot that Donald Trump could do literally within hours of being sworn in.
HORSLEY: Well, that's right. He has a busy schedule ahead of him. He's hoping to reverse a lot of what the Obama agenda accomplished over the last eight years. It's not clear whether he's going to jump right into that this afternoon or maybe wait until Monday. But lots of ceremonial stuff filling the morning and early afternoon today. He's, as you say, just stepped into a black SUV for a very short motorcade across Lafayette Square...
GREENE: Short drive. Could walk, but with security, you know, you understand why you have to drive over there probably.
HORSLEY: ...Heading to St. John's Episcopal Church for a service this morning. There is a guest pastor, a Southern Baptist, Robert Jeffress from Dallas who's going to preach this morning from the book of Nehemiah, the wall-builder. And the sermon is titled When God Chooses a Leader.
GREENE: Wow, OK. Well, that is part of the symbolism of the day, I guess, for people to interpret. Well, Scott Horsley at the White House, we'll come back to you throughout the morning.
HORSLEY: Good to be here.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
And - thanks, Scott. So now we're going to go down to the Washington Mall, to the National Mall. NPR's Pam Fessler is down there. She has been monitoring things. There are, of course, a lot of supporters down there. But there are also a few protesters.
Pam, what are you seeing?
PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: Well, if you could hear, all of a sudden there's a loud roar of Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. But...
MARTIN: Pam Fessler was there on the Mall reporting on what she was seeing. It appeared to be a rally where people were supporting Trump saying Trump, Trump, Trump. Obviously, things are intensifying down there on the Mall.
Pam, what can you tell us about what's going on down there? Things are getting a little heated? People feeling more animated down there?
FESSLER: Right. I'm on a line with probably about 500 or 600 people waiting to get through the security checkpoint to the parade route. I would say most of the people here are Trump protesters, a lot of people holding up signs saying that they are not supportive of the president-elect. And at one point, somebody held up a big sign that said fake 45. Half the crowd cheered, then the other half started saying Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
Some of these protesters have been here for hours. They're waiting to go to - there's going to be a rally along the parade route that's...
MARTIN: So...
FESSLER: ...Being sponsored by a group called ANSWER Coalition.
MARTIN: These people, Pam, are all in the same proximity. It's not like they're being separated with supporters inside a different perimeter. They're all kind of together. And thus, it's a little bit tense.
FESSLER: Exactly. I actually wouldn't call it tense. You know, actually, the mood seems to be pretty...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Yelling) Adrienne.
FESSLER: ...Jubilant, you could say. As I say, a lot of these protesters have come from long distances. I'm here with one woman, a young woman, 24-year-old Terina Keller...
TERINA KELLER: Yeah.
FESSLER: ...From Boston. And she came down very early this morning. Maybe you can tell us.
KELLER: Yeah, so I came on a charter bus from Boston. And we left at 10 at night, got here at 5 in the morning. And we are leaving tonight and getting back to Boston at around 3 a.m. So two nights on a bus, but it's definitely worth it.
FESSLER: Why is it worth it? What are you hoping to achieve?
KELLER: Well, I would really like to just stand up for not only my rights but the rights of other marginalized groups. I stand here as a low-income minority woman, Mexican and black. And I stand here for my own rights and knowing that discrimination in America, as well as inequality, has been going on for a long time, not only for people who are similar to my demographics but as well as others, including LGBTQ community, those with mental health disabilities, as well as other marginalized groups that I can't mention them all because there are so many.
And the inequality that's going on here and that came out during this election definitely needs to be stood up against, and I definitely show the opposing side.
FESSLER: OK. Thanks a lot. I would say that Terina's pretty representative of the people who are here. As I - right now as we're speaking, I can just see signs all around me, a lot of them showing him affectionately with Vladimir Putin (laughter). The other ones I...
MARTIN: Which has obviously been controversial in the last couple of months.
FESSLER: I see another one where a woman's saying I stand with my Muslim brothers and sisters. That's another big issue among the people here.
MARTIN: Yeah, we also - we're going to turn now - Pam, thank you so much. Pam Fessler is down on the Mall where she's been talking with supporters and protesters on this Inauguration Day.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Let's hear now from Christopher Buckley. He worked as a speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush during his years as vice president to Ronald Reagan. Buckley is also the author of several political satires, including the novel "Thank You For Smoking."
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
He joins us via Skype from the Bahamas. Mr. Buckley, thanks for being with us.
CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY: Good morning.
MARTIN: You are, of course, the son of William F. Buckley, tremendously influential conservative intellectual, the founder of the National Review. Your dad is often cited as the intellectual father of the modern conservative movement. He was the definition of a conservative elitist to many people. And the election that just happened was, in many ways, a rejection of that. This was about the outsiders. This was about the working class that has felt disenfranchised. Do you think this represents a temporary shift? Is it a rejection of what your dad was about?
BUCKLEY: You may think of my dad as an elitist. I would point out to you that when he ran for mayor of New York in 1965, he polled best in Queens. His constituency, the people who awarded him (laughter) his 13.5 percent vote were cops and firemen, which I think runs a little bit athwart your definition of him as an elitist. He had patrician manners. But my dad was very much a man of the people.
GREENE: Well, this is one of the things, really, that I'm curious to look for as the Trump presidency begins. I mean, a lot of people made a big deal out of the fact that you have this rich man - wealthy man from New York City - drawing a lot of appeal from the working class. But there was one study that they did at Harvard, saying, like, no. If you are working class, if you're hard-working and you care about your families, you admire someone who is wealthy. And it's just going to be interesting to watch where that appeal is as these first days happen.
BUCKLEY: Yes. I think that's true. There's obviously a fascination with wealth. Wasn't there some dreadful television show called "Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous?"
GREENE: Rich and famous. Yeah. Who can forget it?
BUCKLEY: I doubt its greatest viewership was along Park Avenue in New York.
MARTIN: Let me ask you this. Chris Buckley, to interrupt you, we have to mention this, though, because in 1999, you wrote a parody address for Donald Trump as if he had won the presidency.
GREENE: Amazing.
MARTIN: And this is how it starts.
BUCKLEY: (Laughter).
MARTIN: (Reading) This is a great day for me personally. You're very smart to have voted for me because I'm going to do positive things for this country, starting with this mall I'm looking out over.
BUCKLEY: (Laughter).
MARTIN: And we're poking fun. And it is a parody. But there is something about the rhetoric that is very true to who he is. Clearly, this is something you saw coming in some form or another.
BUCKLEY: Well, it took 17 years to come true (laughter). It seemed funny at the time. But here we are. It's morning in America, as we say. And morning is a word that can be spelled two ways.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: Nice way to put it. And we have many people arriving in Washington this morning, many of them Donald Trump supporters and many of them who plan to be protesting tomorrow. So we might use two different versions of that word. That is the novelist Christopher Buckley, who worked as a speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush when he was vice president. Mr. Buckley, thanks so much for taking the time this morning. We appreciate it.
BUCKLEY: Good to be with you.
MARTIN: Thanks.
BUCKLEY: God bless America.
GREENE: And Rachel, morning in America spelled two different ways really seems to capture...
MARTIN: It's appropriate.
GREENE: This is a moment. We are hearing from people - throngs of people - who are arriving in the mall very excited about this day. And there are a lot of people in Washington and around the country who are very alarmed and very nervous.
MARTIN: Yeah. The country is definitely divided as we watch the inauguration of the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep at the west front of the United States Capitol. I'm here with Audie Cornish and Tamara Keith. We're getting ready for live coverage of the inauguration. We're looking at a lectern covered in plastic against the rain, where President-elect Trump will become President Trump a little bit later on today. Behind it up the way a little bit in the stands, a bunch of people in ivory-colored robes is waiting for their cue.
The Washington National Cathedral choir will be singing in just a little bit as we get into the pre-inaugural festivities. Thousands of people have gathered off to our right, stretching across the National Mall, although I will say there's still plenty of room for more people to come. Many people in American flag-accented clothing - I saw a man in a wheelchair covered with an American flag-themed blanket against the chill.
AUDIE CORNISH, BYLINE: And ponchos, of course, because it has started to rain just a little bit.
INSKEEP: It's a bit spitty out here.
CORNISH: That is expected today. It's interesting because it's sort of like two parallel conversations going on right now. You have the Trump supporters and voters who are here to support this president and this inauguration. And then, meanwhile, throughout the city at the checkpoints, there are protesters. At least one checkpoint area, our reporters are saying, was shut down near the Canadian Embassy due to protesters. And so you have kind of two groups of people. They're not of the same size but definitely gearing up for the day.
And Tamara, you've been out talking with some of the folks in our area - right?
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Yeah. And I was out chatting with the people who got here relatively early, who have decent spots pretty close to the action.
CORNISH: Right. And you need tickets to get into this area.
INSKEEP: Yes.
KEITH: Yes.
CORNISH: They're free, but you needed to get on it.
KEITH: Yes. And one woman I talked to - talking about people who support and people who don't support - a woman I talked to, Michelle Davern (ph) and her son Andrew Gutierrez (ph) - they came from Delaware. They asked their senator for tickets - they requested them before the election - they're Hillary Clinton supporters. But they decided to come anyway. I asked her what she was hoping for in the speech from President-elect Trump, and she said that she wants him to deliver a speech that's going to make her feel like it's going to be OK.
INSKEEP: You know, and I'm impressed that she came because so many people have talked of boycotting this inauguration, not even watching it on television.
CORNISH: We should note Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton herself are expected to be here.
INSKEEP: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But this woman saw things differently - that this was an occasion to come to and to share.
KEITH: To witness history, to witness democracy in action - she felt like it was important to be here.
I also talked to some Trump supporters, David and Molly McGrath (ph) from Connecticut. They are feeling very hopeful. You know, the way that liberals are feeling right now, the dread that liberals are feeling right now is the way they say they've been feeling for the last eight years. And, you know, they didn't initially support Donald Trump. But then, when he won the nomination, they got behind him. They're excited, though they are less excited about the tweeting.
INSKEEP: Tweeting - and we've actually heard that from a lot of voters. And in fact, it shows up in surveys. It's been an unusual transition, one in which the president-elect has not enjoyed the huge boost in popularity ratings that you would normally get for a president in transition who's not having to make any of the really tough decisions yet. His approval rating has been in the low 40s at best in recent days.
Let's go to a voice of someone who's going to be working with this new president, from one side of the Capitol to the other. Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma is on the line. Congressman, where are you?
TOM COLE: Hey, I'm actually in my office looking down at you guys (laughter)...
INSKEEP: Oh, awesome.
COLE: ...Right onto the Capitol grounds from the Rayburn. So I've got this spectacular view in front of me.
INSKEEP: Oh, the Rayburn office building.
KEITH: We're waving.
INSKEEP: We're waving. We're waving at you, Congressman.
(LAUGHTER)
COLE: Well, I'm waving back.
INSKEEP: We're the people who are slightly wet. We just heard a couple of people explain, through Tamara Keith, what they want to hear from the president-elect today. What do you think he needs to say to the nation?
COLE: Well, I actually agree with a couple of the comments. I think this is very much a time to try and unify people and to try and reassure people. Obviously, it was a very tough, hard-fought election. And when you lose one like this, it's hard. I've been on both sides of this, so I understand how my friends on the other side of the aisle feel. But it's important that we reaffirm that, hey, there are things that unite us as Americans. This is one of them. The peaceful transfer of power in the greatest democracy in the history of the world is a pretty extraordinary thing to see. So I hope and I believe Mr. Trump will, you know, take advantage of the opportunity, and we'll move forward from there.
INSKEEP: Is there anything different that you would want the president-elect to do once he becomes president compared to the way that he has been during the transition?
COLE: Well, you know, I think people can want it. But I think Donald Trump is going to do things his way. He is a very unusual person to be the president the United States. He's really unprecedented. We've never had a president that had no public experience before, either in uniform or as an elected official. And quite frankly, I think that's one of the reasons he won. People want a dramatic change in this town, so his persona is part of that.
But I guess I would probably come down. A little less tweeting would be good. And I think he actually will do a very good job of engaging members of Congress in a way, with all due respect to President Obama, he didn't like to do. I mean, I get the impression that Trump is a very gregarious guy. I got a call from him once myself out of the blue after doing an interview. All of a sudden, Donald Trump's on the phone - hey, I liked that interview - just wanted to chat with you. I'd never met the guy.
INSKEEP: (Unintelligible) Start paying attention to the media, for sure.
COLE: So I think members will like that.
INSKEEP: He's somebody who attacks the media from time to time but certainly consumes a lot.
I want to ask about one other thing, Congressman. Many people are partying at the Trump International Hotel a short distance from where we are here. There are questions about conflicts of interest. I know what the law is. But ethics lawyers had urged the president-elect to do much more to separate himself from his business. Do you think Congress needs to do anything about that?
COLE: Well, I think it probably needs to look at it. And look, I think Mr. Trump is certainly aware of that. But on the other hand, you have to reckon that this is a family business and they shouldn't have to sell everything and give up everything that, collectively, for over three generations, they worked for to build. So he's going to have to be extra special careful. And he's going to be under extraordinary scrutiny. And hopefully, that will be the check that you need.
But I find it hard to believe somebody that's worth $3 billion dollars is worried about enriching themselves. I mean, he's not taking a salary. If anything, he's walking away from a lot. So, you know - and he's never made his money particularly in government. That's just not what he's done. So I guess I'm a little more reassured than some of the critics, but I recognize the legitimacy of their concerns.
INSKEEP: Congressman, it's always a pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much.
COLE: Hey, thank you. Have a great day.
INSKEEP: Tom Cole is a Republican congressman from Oklahoma. We are at the west front of the United States Capitol a few hours away from the inauguration. Let's go back to NPR headquarters.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Thanks so much, Steve.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene on this morning of the presidential inauguration. The rain was falling here in Washington, D.C., although it appears to have stopped for now. There are throngs of supporters of President-elect Donald Trump who are filling in the mall with view of the Capitol. There are also pockets of protesters around the city. This group of organizers is from Black Lives Matter.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Chanting) Black lives - they matter. Hear?
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Black lives - they matter. Hear?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Chanting) Black lives - they matter. Hear?
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Black lives - they matter. Hear?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Chanting) Black lives - they matter. Hear?
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
OK. We're going to take you down to the National Mall now. NPR's own Jennifer Ludden is there talking with supporters and protesters. Jennifer, just describe where you're at right now.
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: Hey, Rachel. I am at the corner of 4th Street right on the mall, looking at the Capitol. And we are with supporters. I have Manuel Aguinaga here, who came down - woke up at 3 o'clock in the morning to come down from Newark, Del., with his father and sons. Can I introduce you to him?
MARTIN: Please, yeah.
MANUEL AGUINAGA: Hi. How you doing?
LUDDEN: So tell us what brought you down here so early today.
AGUINAGA: Well, we came to be part of history. I mean, this is the first time that we are able to attend a presidential inauguration. So it is very important for us to see a hope and a change in this country.
LUDDEN: Now, you told me you actually came to the U.S. in 2008 from Ecuador...
AGUINAGA: Yes.
LUDDEN: ...Because...
AGUINAGA: Well - because, unfortunately, my country ended up taking a different government, which was - ended up changing our politics back home, ended up becoming - taking the same route as Venezuela.
LUDDEN: Socialism.
AGUINAGA: Socialism. So for...
LUDDEN: So Donald Trump appealed to you very early on.
AGUINAGA: Oh, yes - yes, since the beginning, since 2012, when he was planning to run for president. And then he ended up backing out before the nominations.
LUDDEN: And what are you looking forward to mostly when you talk about change? What'll you be looking for?
AGUINAGA: What I look more is first - like, I am a small business owner. So I am looking for tax relief, like, somebody that will help us with taxes, decrease a little bit of the taxes. I mean, right now, as a small business owner, we paid a lot of money in taxes. So that can help us - that can give us the opportunity to increase our business - like, to become - to be able to expand our business.
LUDDEN: You told me you were not able to vote yet. You're still a permanent resident, not a citizen. But your father did vote for Trump.
AGUINAGA: Yes, my father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters, which - they have been living in this country for over 20 years.
LUDDEN: Now, some people, you said to me, may question, you know, the fact that you're a Latino who supports Donald Trump.
AGUINAGA: Exactly. Yes. A lot of people - they are surprised. And they usually - when they ask me my political view, they get very surprised that, as a Latino, I am supporting Donald Trump. Like I mentioned to you before, I am a legal Latino. I came legally to this country. I waited 10 years to be able to come as a resident. And I am in the process of becoming a citizen. So I should be a citizen in the next two or three months.
LUDDEN: OK. Are you excited today?
AGUINAGA: Oh, yeah. I'm really excited. This is, like I said, like history for me. It's very emotional - very emotional.
LUDDEN: All right. You're going to watch the festivities. And then you're going to head back home to your restaurant tonight.
AGUINAGA: Yes, exactly. I have to be working tonight (laughter).
LUDDEN: A long day.
AGUINAGA: Yes.
LUDDEN: Well, thank you so very much.
AGUINAGA: Well, thank you. Thank you.
LUDDEN: Take care.
AGUINAGA: Bye.
LUDDEN: Hey, Rachel.
MARTIN: Yeah. That was great.
LUDDEN: So very happy people here.
MARTIN: Yeah.
LUDDEN: There's a - it's a mixed crowd, I will say.
MARTIN: Yeah. Lots of differing opinions down there - but it's nice to hear Miguel's story. We could also point out we could hear some singing in the background. The choirs are starting to sing.
GREENE: Sounds beautiful, yeah.
MARTIN: The festivities are getting kicked off into high gear. NPR's Jennifer Ludden. Thank you so much, Jennifer.
LUDDEN: The choirs are better than the loud music they've been playing.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: The music is improving.
LUDDEN: People are anxious for the real ceremony (laughter).
MARTIN: Yeah, to be sure. Thank you so much, Jennifer. And we're going to bring in NPR's Scott Horsley now, who has a really fascinating vantage point. He is sitting in the White House as we anticipate this historic transition. Hi, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Hi.
MARTIN: How's it feel there right now?
HORSLEY: Well, we're in sort of a period of suspended animation. But Donald and Melania Trump have just left St. John's Church, which is about a block away from the White House, and are going to be making their way over here. There are some photographers set up on the South Portico of the White House there to see the president-elect's arrival. And a moment ago, they trained their long lenses on the Oval Office. And we saw President Obama walk into the Oval Office, bend over to slip something into the drawer of the Resolute desk, presumably the traditional note to his successor.
GREENE: Oh, wow. You could actually see that on camera.
MARTIN: Yeah. I happened to catch that on TV. It was amazing. I also noted, Scott, that as that was happening, the president had to jockey around a ladder...
HORSLEY: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...That was in the Oval Office because they are - they're working to make this move quickly.
HORSLEY: That's right. You know, we call this the peaceful transfer of power. But it's a very animated transfer of power at the White House.
GREENE: What is the ladder, Scott? Is that, like, redesigning the Oval Office already? What is...
HORSLEY: There's a ladder up, presumably, to move some of the artwork or maybe do some touch-up painting during this brief window of time.
GREENE: Very brief.
HORSLEY: The swearing-in ceremony and the parade give a few hours for the household staff to make over this White House in this sort of lightning renovation to make it feel like home to the new occupants.
GREENE: That note, Scott - I mean, we're never going to know what's in that note, I guess, unless...
HORSLEY: Well, we may.
GREENE: Maybe Donald Trump will say. But...
HORSLEY: It's become more common now to see those notes. They're very much a private communication from one president to the next. But they've also become public now. We've seen the note, for example, that George W. Bush left for President Obama eight years ago and the president that George H.W. Bush left for Bill Clinton, who, of course, had defeated him in his own bid - and a very gracious note. So we may see that.
And just now, we're seeing Vice President Pence arriving at the South Portico of the White House, being greeted by - Vice President-elect Pence being greeted by Vice President Biden. And their wives are there. The presidents and vice presidents and their wives will all get together for coffee or tea before making the motorcade together up to the Capitol to witness the swearing in and the exchange of power.
MARTIN: You know, I happened to notice on Twitter Paul Ryan actually tweeted out that he was joining that coffee. And I didn't know if that was normal for the speaker of the House to do so, or if that was exceptional to be some kind of conversational buffer in what could be an awkward conversation.
HORSLEY: I think it is exceptional but not so much as a conversational buffer but maybe just as a gesture by the incoming president to include the man he hopes will be his partner on the Capitol.
MARTIN: Yeah.
HORSLEY: You know, what is remarkable, I think, given the acrimony of the campaign season, is just how unawkward these meetings have been.
MARTIN: Yeah, yeah.
HORSLEY: And, certainly, President Obama has gone out of his way to execute...
MARTIN: To try to make that happen.
HORSLEY: ...A peaceful transfer.
GREENE: Peaceful transition of power. All right.
MARTIN: NPR's Scott Horsley from the White House. Thank you so much, Scott.
GREENE: Thanks, Scott.
HORSLEY: My pleasure.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
It is Inauguration Day here in Washington, D.C., and we just saw President-elect Donald Trump. He has just left Blair House, which is just near the White House. He spent the night there last night, and he is on his way to church now. Let's go to the White House right near Blair House. NPR's Scott Horsley is on the line.
Scott, good morning.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: So a lot of ceremony - we're seeing President-elect Trump head to church, of course, the big moment - the swearing in at the Capitol. There are crowds of supporters who are already there. But we should talk about the agenda because there's a lot that Donald Trump could do literally within hours of being sworn in.
HORSLEY: Well, that's right. He has a busy schedule ahead of him. He's hoping to reverse a lot of what the Obama agenda accomplished over the last eight years. It's not clear whether he's going to jump right into that this afternoon or maybe wait until Monday. But lots of ceremonial stuff filling the morning and early afternoon today. He's, as you say, just stepped into a black SUV for a very short motorcade across Lafayette Square...
GREENE: Short drive. Could walk, but with security, you know, you understand why you have to drive over there probably.
HORSLEY: ...Heading to St. John's Episcopal Church for a service this morning. There is a guest pastor, a Southern Baptist, Robert Jeffress from Dallas who's going to preach this morning from the book of Nehemiah, the wall-builder. And the sermon is titled When God Chooses a Leader.
GREENE: Wow, OK. Well, that is part of the symbolism of the day, I guess, for people to interpret. Well, Scott Horsley at the White House, we'll come back to you throughout the morning.
HORSLEY: Good to be here.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
And - thanks, Scott. So now we're going to go down to the Washington Mall, to the National Mall. NPR's Pam Fessler is down there. She has been monitoring things. There are, of course, a lot of supporters down there. But there are also a few protesters.
Pam, what are you seeing?
PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: Well, if you could hear, all of a sudden there's a loud roar of Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. But...
MARTIN: Pam Fessler was there on the Mall reporting on what she was seeing. It appeared to be a rally where people were supporting Trump saying Trump, Trump, Trump. Obviously, things are intensifying down there on the Mall.
Pam, what can you tell us about what's going on down there? Things are getting a little heated? People feeling more animated down there?
FESSLER: Right. I'm on a line with probably about 500 or 600 people waiting to get through the security checkpoint to the parade route. I would say most of the people here are Trump protesters, a lot of people holding up signs saying that they are not supportive of the president-elect. And at one point, somebody held up a big sign that said fake 45. Half the crowd cheered, then the other half started saying Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
Some of these protesters have been here for hours. They're waiting to go to - there's going to be a rally along the parade route that's...
MARTIN: So...
FESSLER: ...Being sponsored by a group called ANSWER Coalition.
MARTIN: These people, Pam, are all in the same proximity. It's not like they're being separated with supporters inside a different perimeter. They're all kind of together. And thus, it's a little bit tense.
FESSLER: Exactly. I actually wouldn't call it tense. You know, actually, the mood seems to be pretty...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Yelling) Adrienne.
FESSLER: ...Jubilant, you could say. As I say, a lot of these protesters have come from long distances. I'm here with one woman, a young woman, 24-year-old Terina Keller...
TERINA KELLER: Yeah.
FESSLER: ...From Boston. And she came down very early this morning. Maybe you can tell us.
KELLER: Yeah, so I came on a charter bus from Boston. And we left at 10 at night, got here at 5 in the morning. And we are leaving tonight and getting back to Boston at around 3 a.m. So two nights on a bus, but it's definitely worth it.
FESSLER: Why is it worth it? What are you hoping to achieve?
KELLER: Well, I would really like to just stand up for not only my rights but the rights of other marginalized groups. I stand here as a low-income minority woman, Mexican and black. And I stand here for my own rights and knowing that discrimination in America, as well as inequality, has been going on for a long time, not only for people who are similar to my demographics but as well as others, including LGBTQ community, those with mental health disabilities, as well as other marginalized groups that I can't mention them all because there are so many.
And the inequality that's going on here and that came out during this election definitely needs to be stood up against, and I definitely show the opposing side.
FESSLER: OK. Thanks a lot. I would say that Terina's pretty representative of the people who are here. As I - right now as we're speaking, I can just see signs all around me, a lot of them showing him affectionately with Vladimir Putin (laughter). The other ones I...
MARTIN: Which has obviously been controversial in the last couple of months.
FESSLER: I see another one where a woman's saying I stand with my Muslim brothers and sisters. That's another big issue among the people here.
MARTIN: Yeah, we also - we're going to turn now - Pam, thank you so much. Pam Fessler is down on the Mall where she's been talking with supporters and protesters on this Inauguration Day.
MARTIN: We're going to turn back to Scott Horsley who is at the White House.
So Scott, we just heard Pam there talking with supporters but also some protesters. We should note there's a large protest that is scheduled to take place tomorrow. So this president, coming into office with historically low approval ratings at this moment.
HORSLEY: Obviously, Donald Trump continues to be a polarizing figure, a lightning rod. And you're seeing that reflected in the crowds for him and against him on the Mall today.
GREENE: Scott, it's just capturing this day. I mean, there is so much ceremony and history and a schedule that literally is scheduled down to the minute all surrounding a man who is famous for speaking off the cuff and kind of hating a teleprompter. I mean, it just seems so fascinating, something like we haven't seen at one of these inaugurations in maybe a long time.
HORSLEY: And we're told that Donald Trump has written out his own remarks. They're going to be shorter than, I think, a lot of inaugural speeches. But it'll be interesting to hear what he has to say, if there is any change in tone. When we heard him at the concert yesterday, he was still very much sort of in campaign mode. It'll be interesting to see if he adopts a different tone for the inaugural address today.
GREENE: And Scott, we spoke a little earlier. You were describing that there is a change in the photographs already taking place at the White House, which is so symbolic, it seems.
HORSLEY: It's sort of a half change. There are large photographs that usually show President Obama and the first family on their travels or events here at the White House that lined the corridor just outside the Oval Office. And those have all been taken down now. The empty frames are still hanging there waiting for, presumably, new photos of the new president and sort of the new story that's going to be told when Donald Trump is sworn in.
MARTIN: OK. NPR's Scott Horsley reporting there from the White House, a place in suspended animation, as you have put it as we await the next president of the United States. Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th president. You can stay with us for all the inauguration coverage. Watch it at npr.org. Of course, you can listen here and to your local public radio station.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There is another new president in Washington, D.C., at Gallaudet. It's the only liberal arts university devoted to the deaf and hard-of-hearing, and the school's newest president is the first deaf woman to lead the university. NPR's Parth Shah has this profile of Roberta Cordano.
PARTH SHAH, BYLINE: Gallaudet University President Roberta Cordano never attended a deaf school.
ROBERTA CORDANO: (Through interpreter) I grew up during a period of time where it was believed that American Sign Language was what they called a monkey language.
SHAH: That's Cordano speaking through an interpreter provided by Gallaudet. She grew up in a Deaf community. Her parents and big sister are Deaf, and so were many of her neighbors. Delavan, Wis., where she grew up, is home to the Wisconsin School for the Deaf. But even though her father was a teacher there, her parents sent her to the local public school instead.
CORDANO: (Through interpreter) They wanted to make sure that their children were going to do well. At that time, you know, it wasn't understood that American Sign Language was a language in and of its own right.
SHAH: Throughout the interview, Cordano whispers out in English as she signs. Going to a hearing elementary, middle and high school made her a pro at reading lips and pronunciation. She never had an interpreter in the classroom. In hindsight, Cordano says it was exhausting.
CORDANO: (Through interpreter) You know, I had worked all day long trying to understand people and focusing so much on what they were saying and then figure out what I was trying to be taught.
SHAH: She says she worked twice as hard as her classmates to keep up, but she didn't burnout. When time came to choose a college, Cordano decided to stay in a hearing environment. She went to Beloit College for undergrad and the University of Wisconsin-Madison for law school. She broke with family tradition. Her parents and older sister all went to Gallaudet.
CORDANO: (Through interpreter) They understood the value of understanding and appreciating the richness of both worlds.
SHAH: While Cordano says she enjoyed her college and grad school experience, she was often the only deaf person in the room. Her experience is night-and-day different from how Gallaudet students live their lives on campus.
ARIELLA DRAMIN: (Through interpreter) It's like another country, really. You know, it'd be nice if we had another country, but, you know, we don't.
SHAH: That's freshman Ariella Dramin speaking through a Gallaudet interpreter. Dramin says being deaf is a culture, not a disability. It's something many people outside of Gallaudet don't understand when they meet her.
DRAMIN: (Through interpreter) I hate when, you know, people, like, at a store try to say something to me, and I say, you know, I can't hear you, then they have this pity face, which is not something I want them to do. We're a community. We're fine. We have a language.
SHAH: At Gallaudet, students sit with peers in the lunchroom. They walk to class together. They carry out their conversations with their hands and facial expressions, instead of spoken words. Gallaudet feels like any other college campus, just quieter. Third-year Savannah Hobbs chose Gallaudet because she doesn't want to rely on someone to translate for her. She didn't enjoy having an interpreter when she was in elementary school.
SAVANNAH HOBBS: (Through interpreter) For example, when I went to lunch, the interpreter doesn't go with me to lunch. I mean, I was completely left out of any kind of conversation. But here, not only can I have my own conversation at lunch, but I can just look over to a table and see what other people are talking about 'cause everyone's using the same language. And that's something I never had before.
SHAH: Even though Cordano grew up in a deaf family, she brings an outsider's perspective to Gallaudet. She spent most of her personal and professional life in the hearing world. Her wife and two kids are hearing. She was the assistant attorney general for the state of Minnesota. She's also helped start two charter schools for the deaf and hard-of-hearing.
CORDANO: (Through interpreter) When I moved to Minnesota, I actually saw the model of bilingual education.
SHAH: Bilingual education meaning students are given equal instruction in English and ASL.
CORDANO: And so I grew to love and respect that model so very much because I realized it was an option that I was never given.
SHAH: Cordano never had a deaf school experience of her own where she could sign to her classmates and friends, but she doesn't feel like she missed out. She's an optimist.
CORDANO: I think have always navigated two worlds, and I have cherished both worlds.
SHAH: Parth Shah, NPR News, Washington.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Here's an idea that sounds pretty obvious. Before you spend lots of money on an aid program, wouldn't you want to run a test to make certain the program actually works? If you want to help farmers, should you buy them seeds or just give them cash? If you're trying to protect people from malaria, should you hand out millions of bed nets? For years, the answers to those questions were usually taken on faith. NPR's Nurith Aizenman reports on a growing effort to change that.
NURITH AIZENMAN, BYLINE: The world has spent billions to help the planet's poorest people. But in a lot of situations, it wasn't clear how much of a difference that was making. Amanda Glassman is chief operating officer of the Center for Global Development, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
AMANDA GLASSMAN: In the best-case scenario, people were measuring what the situation was on the ground before a program happened and after a program happened. But the problem was you really didn't know whether - when things changed - it was because of the program or because of something else.
AIZENMAN: Like good weather or overall improvements to the economy. And Glassman says even those types of studies were rare.
GLASSMAN: In many cases, they weren't collecting any data at all on what the impact of the program was.
AIZENMAN: So program designers largely based their decisions on what seemed logical. Take distributing bed nets in malaria-prone areas. It became a major priority because lab studies showed the nets really do cut down on mosquitoes. The trouble?
GLASSMAN: What really matters is not just whether the technology - in this case, the bed net - works but whether people actually use it.
AIZENMAN: In fact, on this very point, there was a big debate. See, even though bed nets weren't that expensive, people weren't buying them. Some aid experts argued this meant you should hand out the nets for free. Others said maybe the reason people don't buy them is because they don't think they're that helpful. Abhijit Banerjee is an economist at MIT.
ABHIJIT BANERJEE: You could argue that, look, if they don't believe in them, and you give it to them, they won't use it.
AIZENMAN: To settle a question like this, says Banerjee, you need a kind of experiment that's the gold standard in science, a randomized, controlled trial. Essentially, you randomly assign the people you want to study to two groups. One gets access to the program or, quote, "treatment" you want to test. The other group does not.
BANERJEE: If I now observe a difference between them, then it's much more likely that that's because of the treatment.
AIZENMAN: In 2003 Banerjee co-founded a network of researchers at nearly 50 universities dedicated to doing work like this. And by the late 2000s, some groundbreaking results were coming in. On the bed nets, they found that families that had gotten nets for free were just as likely to use them. It turns out that extremely poor people are just really sensitive to price, even for lifesaving products. For aid groups, this experiment was a game changer.
BANERJEE: Many organizations were very, very reluctant to go to zero price. And I think the weight of this evidence has moved a lot of them.
AIZENMAN: A lot of programs now offer bed nets for free or highly subsidized prices. Findings like this have fueled a surge in randomized, controlled trials. Banerjee's network alone has done more than 800 of them. And everyone from governments to the world bank does these studies now. But the Center for Global Development's Amanda Glassman says it's still a drop in the bucket.
GLASSMAN: We and some colleagues here have been looking at what share of the total aid portfolio is subject to these more rigorous methods. And it's such a small share. It's less than 5 percent still.
AIZENMAN: This includes major areas of U.S. spending.
GLASSMAN: For example, we have a huge HIV/AIDS program. It really matters whether the pills that we distribute are taken in the correct way.
AIZENMAN: Like, is it worth having a health worker actually watch patients take their pills, or is just giving people instructions enough?
GLASSMAN: There's just very few experiments that look at - what does that the best?
AIZENMAN: So, Glassman says, until these experiments take on a larger role in aid decisions, when it comes to helping the poor, mostly, we're still flying blind. Nurith Aizenman, NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Elliot Ackerman's new novel is about a man who escaped a conflict zone with his life and now wants to break into a new one. Haris Abadi is an Iraqi who worked for U.S. Special Forces during the Iraq War and who became a U.S. citizen. He wants to put his new life on the line to free Syria from the cruel rule of Bashar al-Assad. But Haris is turned back at the border, then robbed, then taken in by Syrian refugees who make him look into his own commitment. Is it to Syria or, ultimately, his own definition of himself?
Elliot Ackerman's book is called "Dark At The Crossing." And Elliot Ackerman, who's author of the previous novel "Green On Blue" is now based and writes in Istanbul. He is a former White House fellow and U.S. Marine who won the Purple Heart and Silver Star for service in Iraq and Afghanistan. He joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
ELLIOT ACKERMAN: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: Where does the character of Haris come from? In your own experience?
ACKERMAN: You know, I think he's a man of two identities. He is an Iraqi born in Iraq but a naturalized American citizen. And he's someone who stands in conflict with himself. He feels a draw back to that part of the world, specifically what's going on in Syria, you know, a cause that he feels, at least at face value, is just, meaning fighting for democratic reforms in that country - you know, as opposed to the experience he had had in his own country, fighting alongside the Americans in a war that he felt to be unjust. So, you know, he's a conflicted person.
SIMON: Do romance and revolution get all mixed up in your experience?
ACKERMAN: You know, absolutely. The person Haris meets, Amir, who is a Syrian refugee and a former activist in the revolution, is stranded in this border town, which is a place called Gaziantep, which today is a real crossroads for anyone engaged in the Syrian civil war. And Amir's there with his wife, Daphne. And as you quickly learn, they lost a daughter in the revolution and...
SIMON: In the bomb blast of their apartment.
ACKERMAN: In a bomb blast of their apartment in the revolution. Amir had rushed his wife across the border to get medical care. And when she basically came to, as a mother, Daphne is sort of unable to reckon with the loss of her daughter and is drawn back into Syria, whereas her husband won't go. And that's sort of - when Haris meets them, that's the rift in their marriage. She wants to return. He refuses to go back.
And so, you know, there are a lot of parallels that I could see, you know, in the emotional journey someone would take in a revolution. You know, if you think about it, in so many ways in our own lives at a more intimate level, you know, a marriage is sort of, in so many ways, a tiny revolution in and of itself. You know, we give ourselves completely to another person. We upend our world for whatever that nascent love is we feel.
And - but when a marriage falls apart, you know, there is a real reckoning with how you make a life again in the wreckage. And so I could see that type of parallel emotional journey with, you know, many of the people I'd come to to meet. And as I started writing the novel, I quickly realized, you know, this was the story of a failed revolution told through the prism of a failed marriage.
SIMON: Haris is presented with a choice that's a dilemma. He'd like to be with the Syrian Free Army, whom he respects. But on the other hand, ISIS seems to be making a more - how do we put it? - well, effective campaign against the government.
ACKERMAN: And when, you know, Haris arrives in this border town, Gaziantep, with these aims to cross into Syria to fight alongside the Free Army, which, at least in the revolution's early days, seemed fairly clear and seemed to be fighting for, you know, an irrefutable cause to bring democratic reforms to Syria. But as the revolution bogs down and gets mired in all the complexities of what is really a war of attrition, Haris's reasons for fighting and the people who are there fighting - their reasons are questioned.
You know, what is the motivation? You know, why are they fighting? And how do wars then just start to feed on themselves? And we see throughout the course of the book, you know, Haris as he is stranded just across the border. You know, his motivations are questioned. He himself questions them, as well as other characters.
SIMON: When you're making use of your experience for a novel, do you find yourself giving lines to characters that were something you wish you had said?
ACKERMAN: Am I writing a novel where I say, oh, I wish I had said that? Not so much. I mean, there are things that I've noticed I do in my writing that I initially thought were just sort of instinctual. But, like, for instance, when I'm writing a first draft, I have often noticed that I will give characters the names of real people that I know, even if they're different. And I do that early not because I'm crafting the character exactly around someone who's a real person.
But early on in the process of writing, it's very important for me to try to feel close to my characters. And by having them be a - having at least the name be that of a real person sort of allows me to get there a little bit quicker. And then, inevitably, that name no longer seems appropriate. And I change it. And then the character becomes their own person.
SIMON: What are your hopes for Syria now?
ACKERMAN: You know, I'll say the thing that captivated me the most and still does - you know, Faulkner has this great quote. It's from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, saying, the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. And often, as a novelist, sort of that's what I'm looking for because that's what I want to write about.
And, you know, sitting out at restaurants with friends of mine who are, you know, from Damascus or from Aleppo and talking to them if they'd been in the revolution, the thing that you could see is, you know, we would start a meal, particularly in 2013, 2014, with them very earnestly because I was the one American there - saying, Elliot, you don't understand. You know, President Obama needs to start supporting the Free Syrian Army with troops and with weapons. And, you know, we can still win this.
And then, you know, they would bring out the entree. And, you know, the dinner would proceed. And by the end of the dinner, you know, those same people will be sitting there as they'd been, basically extolling the virtues of the revolution. By the end of the dinner, they would be, you know, looking down on their dessert, saying, you know, I regret the whole thing. I wish we'd never gone out on the streets. I've destroyed my own home by doing this. And now I'm sitting across the border, relatively safe, while my family is suffering.
And you could see on the one hand, they were - you know, they're very proud and should be for going out in their time and standing in the streets and demanding democratic reforms against an authoritarian rule. I mean, how can you fault anyone for doing that? But the reciprocal has been that their homes have been destroyed. They can never go back to their country. A friend of mine, who's a Syrian poet, once made the point to me - he said, you know, Elliot, it's wonderful now. I'm a poet. And I've left my country. For the first time in my life, I can write whatever I want to write. He said, you know what the one problem is? You can't be a Syrian poet without Syria.
SIMON: Elliot Ackerman - his novel "Dark At The Crossing." Thanks so much for being with us.
ACKERMAN: Thank you for having me.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The one best wish I think I have for the country as a new administration comes to office is that there is a revival of respect. It can be depressing, especially on these days which celebrate a peaceful and democratic transfer of power, to recount the many times this year political rhetoric got coarse, borish and even cruel. I want to be fair about this, but in the news business, we can't pretend that one candidate didn't utter more of those kinds of remarks than any other - and he won. When he ran for office, President Trump questioned the courage of Senator John McCain and Congressman John Lewis, who have been honored for their bravery. He mocked a reporter who happens to have a disability, ridiculed opponents for their physical traits, boasted of the size of his manhood, insisted the father of one of his opponents helped assassinate President Kennedy, suggested a judge couldn't be fair because of his Mexican ancestry and insulted the grieving parents of a heroic soldier who happened to be Muslim. Most of us could recall a few more examples.
Yet anyone who spends time on a social media platform will tell you that the language of ordinary citizens over this past year has also often seemed abusive, dismissive and snide. And these comments can be from all sides of the political divide. A lot of people seem to be more interested in trying to verbally bludgeon people who have a different opinion rather than to see if they can understand and learn from one another. Boy, I know that must sound naive. Words like empathy and understanding have taken a beating over this last campaign season. There's been a lot of snarling. Many Americans of all political opinions have said they feel overlooked, dismissed and forgotten. President Trump said yesterday the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.
Everyone is listening to you now, but I wonder how many of those who feel forgotten are willing to hear people from other backgrounds who may have different opinions who say they feel overlooked or discounted too.
Part of the work we see as being important here, and maybe more important than ever, is the chance to let different and dissonant voices be heard with respect. They will all be challenged too about their facts and opinions because that's journalism. But if debates on social media platforms and public platforms aren't conducted with respect, I fear we might begin to look more like a bunch of kids engaged in a snowball fight that has lethal stakes than a democracy.
(SOUNDBITE OF RYAN TEAGUE'S "LIMINAL SPACE")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
And this weekend, there are protests in the streets of the nation's capital as a new administration is sworn into office. It is a weekend filled with hopes and anxieties, celebrations and chants. Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States yesterday.
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PRES DONALD TRUMP: The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: It's a remarkable day, and it's a blessing to be here to witness this.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Racist, sexist, anti-gay.
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting) Racists, bigots, go away.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: This is a takeover of our government by big money interests.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: And he's not after money. He's a millionaire, so he's not after money.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: It's about time that somebody spoke their mind, for better, for worse.
SIMON: NPR's Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Glad to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: There has been some sharp reaction to President Trump's inaugural address, hasn't there?
ELVING: Yes. And there have been some harsh assessments of it. But let's say at least that Trump chose to give a speech that was consistent with his campaign, doubling down on the themes of his campaign, rather than join the tradition, let us call it, of inaugural speeches in the past that were aimed at perhaps a wider definition of the nation. So this speech may not be, shall we say, carved in stone anywhere anytime soon, but it sent the signals that Trump wanted to send, and it served the purposes of his new regime.
SIMON: Where do you see it fitting into the history of inaugural addresses?
ELVING: There are always...
SIMON: With the advantage of a few hours of hindsight.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: Well, you know, George Will said it was going to be thought of as the worst inaugural speech. I think we need to remember that a lot of these people had already decided how they felt about Donald Trump and were waiting for there to possibly be a pivot. And we have talked about there being a big hinge at which point Donald Trump would turn into a different sort of a politician. But that has not happened, and it did not happen yesterday, and probably people should stop expecting it to happen.
SIMON: There are photos on websites and news organizations. What do we make of what appears to be the relatively small crowds and aggressive nature of many protests?
ELVING: As for the protesters, you know, there are always protesters. The great majority of them tend to be very peaceful, looking for a conversation perhaps more than a confrontation. But there were angry people in the streets yesterday. If you bring a hammer to a demonstration, you're not looking for a conversation. And that's what led to the scattered running street battles with the police and the arrests of more than 200 people. As for the crowds, you know, they weren't nearly as big as the Obama crowd, especially eight years ago. The number of people riding public transit was only about 40 percent the number that we had eight years ago.
Trump is not popular in the broad terms, perhaps, that Obama was then. He is a phenomenon in his own right but not that kind of phenomenon. And it's probably not fair to use the Obama crowds as a point of comparison. Swearing in the first African-American president meant a lot to a lot of people, including many right here in Washington. Trump's victory clearly meant a great deal to many other Americans whom he calls the forgotten man and woman, the silent majority. And there were tens of thousands of them here yesterday, but they may not have been quite as likely to get on buses in their hometowns and travel for days to get here.
SIMON: President Trump signed a number of executive orders last night, promised as - one as promised on the Affordable Care Act. What is this?
ELVING: It's a very broad one-page order saying that federal officials do not have to enforce the ACA if doing so imposes a burdensome cost on a state or a company or a person. What exactly that means will depend on how it's used in the days ahead. But it could have several purposes. Just this morning, it does put the bureaucracies on notice, and it honors - it honors Donald Trump's pledge to repeal Obamacare immediately.
SIMON: And last night, James Mattis confirmed as defense secretary, John Kelly, Department of Homeland Security, a couple of former generals; some more contentious picks ahead this week. Let me put this to you - Rex Tillerson, some Republicans don't like him at all. Is his nomination for secretary of state in danger?
ELVING: It depends first on Marco Rubio, on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voting this next week. He could be the swing vote that could withhold that panel's approval. But the nomination could still go from there to the floor where it probably will be approved. There are a couple of other Republican votes in question, but some Democrats will probably vote for Tillerson as well.
SIMON: NPR's Ron Elving, thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The Women's March on Washington has begun. A sea of pink hats spreads across the National Mall. The speeches are underway. The crowd has heard from America Ferrera, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Gloria Steinem.
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GLORIA STEINEM: We are here and around the world for a deep democracy that says we will not be quiet, we will not be controlled, we will work for a world in which all countries are connected. God may be in the details, but the goddess is in connections.
(CHEERING)
SIMON: There are similar assemblies that are occurring all across the country and in cities across the world. NPR's Sarah McCammon is in the District of Columbia at the main event. She's been listening to speakers, and, for that matter, marchers this morning. Sarah, thanks for being with us.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Yeah, good morning.
SIMON: What can you see?
MCCAMMON: Well, there are lots and lots of people, to put it mildly, Scott, here, just kind of off the Mall, where a lot of the big museums are in D.C. And I'm kind of just off where the main event is happening, the big rally with lots of speakers and music. And there are lots of people, many of them - most of them women but lots of men, too - sort of streaming away from the site right now. I think, you know, steering of some of them to - who've already marched through the city. And I've been walking around the last hour or so just talking to people. More and more people coming off the subways, so it just keeps getting bigger.
SIMON: What are the signs? What are the slogans? What are the chants?
MCCAMMON: Well, you know, that sort of central theme of this event is women's rights. It is, of course, the Women's March. And it was organized as a pushback to some of Donald Trump's rhetoric about women, including that "Access Hollywood" video that came out about him that was released about a month before the election in which he talks about grabbing women's genitals without their consent. In response to that, I'm seeing a lot of women with these pink - what they're calling pink pussyhats, like a cat ear. They have cat ears on them, and obviously it's a response to that. And lots of signs sort of to that effect - things like don't grab me. And then it's broader than that, too. There are signs about LGBT rights, a couple about climate change, and overall it's, you know, sort of billed as a Women's March, but it's about a lot more than that.
SIMON: There were questions raised really all throughout the process about the diversity of the leadership of this march and the diversity of the marchers. So I wonder what you see there that might reflect that.
MCCAMMON: Yeah, there had been some controversy, right, about the organization, about whether women of color were given enough of a voice in this. And, you know, I would say this crowd is majority white. But there is, at the same time, a lot of diversity. I have - I talked to a couple of - a family from Guatemala originally, lived in the U.S. for a long time, a mother and her two daughters. And, you know, you see people of sort of all shapes and colors here and certainly many generations, old and young. Not a lot of children, but I met a mother and her two daughters. So there is a range of people here, and certainly, like I said, some men. I talked to one man who said he's here because he has a mother and he cares about women's rights.
SIMON: And we have big tap on this afternoon, isn't there, at the march?
MCCAMMON: That's right. The real march itself kicks off this afternoon. A rally will be wrapping up, and then the group will march through D.C.
SIMON: NPR's Sarah McCammon, thanks so much for being with us.
MCCAMMON: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The African nation of Gambia may see its own peaceful transition of power but only after weeks of negotiation and threats of military intervention. After initially accepting election results that voted him out of office, the reigning president of 22 years then refused to concede for weeks - until today. When facing international pressure and dwindling support, reports came that he has agreed to step down. Ruth Maclean is the West African correspondent for The Guardian. She's in the capital of Banjul, Gambia. Ruth, thanks very much for being with us.
RUTH MACLEAN: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: And what did the president say today?
MACLEAN: Well, the president said last night in a midnight broadcast that he would step down and that he would act in the interest of the Gambian people. And that was the last that we heard from him. But he is still in State House. He hasn't left the country yet, and he hasn't ceded power as far as we know.
SIMON: So I guess it's premature to ask who would replace him.
MACLEAN: Well, the incoming president is currently in Senegal, the neighboring country to The Gambia. His name is Adama Barrow, and he's poised to come back just as soon as Yahya Jammeh gives up. But he has to wait for that. He has to wait until the final decision is made and everybody is just waiting for Jammeh to get on a plane.
SIMON: Ruth, how do we understand this situation? Is it simply the personal story of a national leader who just refused to accept being put aside or is there something more going on?
MACLEAN: Well, Yahya Jammeh has been in power for 22 years. And I think perhaps he got used to it. You know, according to sources that I have close to the presidency, he has a lot of yes men around him, and he was very surprised when the election results came in and he found that he'd lost. So perhaps that's why it's been a difficult transition for him. It's taken him some time to come to terms with the fact that he is on his way out. But, you know, he's also accused of doing many bad things, including ordering extrajudicial killings and torture. And he may be worried that he could be prosecuted.
So it's been difficult to know over the past few weeks whether what he was angling for was a deal in order to get him out safely and his family somewhere in another country and free from the threat of prosecution or whether he actually did just want to hang on to power and stay in The Gambia. One of the conditions that we understand he has asked for is to be allowed to run in the next election in three years' time.
SIMON: And are The Gambian people anxious?
MACLEAN: Yes, The Gambian people are tense. It's been a really difficult month for them. I mean, when the initial election results came out and when Yahya Jammeh initially accepted defeat, that triggered this outpouring of joy in the streets of Banjul. I was there. I was talking to people. You know, people were zooming down the street in their cars, hanging out of their windows, beeping their horns. They were shouting. Many were crying. It was just an incredible atmosphere of jubilation. So then a week after that, to see him say, no, I'm not accepting the results, and then to see the various other ploys he has tried, going through the courts, for instance, and declaring a state of emergency, it's been really up and down.
SIMON: Ruth Maclean of The Guardian in Banjul, Gambia, thanks very much for being with us.
MACLEAN: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Shortly after President Trump was sworn in yesterday, the Senate began the work of confirming his Cabinet. Two nominees were confirmed - James Mattis for defense secretary, John Kelly for Homeland Security. Here to walk us through what's next in the confirmation project is - process, forgive me - NPR's congressional correspondent Susan Davis.
Susan, thanks so much for being with us.
SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Good morning, Scott.
SIMON: President Obama had seven Cabinet nominees approved on his first day in office, five more by the end of his first week. Why just two for President Trump?
DAVIS: Well, we're falling into what is a familiar party-line fight over nominations in the Senate. This is fights that has been going on for years and sort of amplified over time. And Republicans say Democrats are just stalling for political reasons. They don't have the votes to hold up these nominees, but they want to drag out the process to undermine Trump's Cabinet. But Illinois Democrat, Senator Dick Durbin, he defended this slow walking. He - here he is on the Senate floor on Friday.
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DICK DURBIN: And some of them bring to this nomination some extraordinarily challenging financial data. Because of their companies, because of their lifestyles, because of the wealth, it takes longer to go through this - these documents than it does for people of modest means.
DAVIS: Now, remember, Scott, this is the wealthiest Cabinet in history. It includes several billionaires, like education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos and commerce secretary nominee Wilbur Ross. And Durbin's also referring specifically to things like in the confirmation process for Steven Mnuchin, who's the nominee for treasury secretary, that process disclosed last week that he did not reveal almost a $100 million in assets to the Senate Finance Committee. So they say they just simply need more time.
SIMON: Which nominees did the Trump administration want confirmed Friday that didn't make it yet?
DAVIS: They wanted to get their national security team in place and they wanted to include in that Mike Pompeo, he's a Kansas Republican, for CIA director. It's been held up by Oregon Democrat Senator Ron Wyden. He wants a more protracted debate on government surveillance. And he said they should have that in the light of day, not as senators were heading out to go to inaugural balls last night. But this has really angered a lot of Republicans, including Senator John McCain of Arizona. He says Democrats are just playing politics with the president's national security team.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHN MCCAIN: What's the point here? Is the point is we're just going to show the Republicans by slow walking their nominees? Is that what the point of this is? If it is, then in my view you're contradicting the will of the American people and the verdict of the American people.
DAVIS: Now, Democrats were able to delay that nomination. But he will just get a vote on Monday instead. And I should say, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also would like to move quickly on the nomination of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao because she is, of course, his wife.
SIMON: Any nominees facing a perceptibly rough path to confirmation?
DAVIS: Possibly, but remember, they would need to lose Republican support because all of these nominees just need 50 votes - 51 votes to pass the Senate. Two to keep an eye on this week, South Carolina Republican Mick Mulvaney for the Office of Management and Budget. He was revealed in the vetting process, he owed $15,000 in back taxes for a nanny. In the past, that kind of thing has derailed nominees, but so far Trump is standing by him.
And on Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's going to vote on the nomination for former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson for secretary of state. Keep an eye on John McCain and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, two interesting Republican votes to watch. But on the whole, you know, the Trump nominees are in good place. And if all of these first round picks make it through, he would be the first president in decades to get his slate approved without losing any of his nominees.
SIMON: NPR's Susan Davis, thanks so much for being with us.
DAVIS: Happy to be here.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
During yesterday's inauguration ceremony, thousands of demonstrators hit the streets for all sorts of reasons.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: I'm here because I believe this administration is indicative of the decay of capitalism.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: It's about the system. If Hillary had won, I would also be here.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: He lost the popular vote.
SIMON: NPR's Rebecca Hersher reports that protesters were united by one thing - they were not celebrating their new president.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS #1: (Chanting) Dump trump. Dump Trump...
REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: Protesters lined up at security checkpoints beginning nearly six hours before the president took the oath of office. At 1, the lines covered the length of two city blocks and were moving slowly.
SHERYL REESE: It's definitely an illegitimate election.
HERSHER: Sheryl Reese (ph) traveled from Olympia, Wash., for the inauguration and the Women's March.
REESE: You know, with the FBI letter that came out and it was designed for Hillary to lose and also misogyny. But I'm a radical, lesbian social worker, so of course I'm, you know, not happy about this.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS #2: (Chanting) No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here. No hate...
HERSHER: David Beigel (ph) is from nearby Maryland. He says he thinks the president lacks a moral compass.
DAVID BEIGEL: If we don't start protesting right off the bat, he's going to start doing things to take away our freedoms and harm the people in this country.
HERSHER: Beigel and Reese both joined an anti-war group that had an official permit to protest along the route of the inaugural parade. As Donald Trump was officially sworn in, people there drowned him out.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHN ROBERTS: Please raise your right hand and repeat after me. I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (Singing) (Unintelligible) Let me hear you.
HERSHER: Chris Winings (ph) of Clarksburg, Md., explained what he hopes to accomplish by protesting.
CHRIS WININGS: I do think that in the end he does care about what people think about him. If he sees a ton of people yelling at him, I think that might help, have something click in his mind.
HERSHER: Although most protesters were peaceful, a comparatively small group vandalized buildings and started fires. Police responded as WAMU's Patrick Madden reported live during NPR's election special.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
PATRICK MADDEN, BYLINE: A group of several hundred protesters all dressed in black who have been running through the streets and breaking windows, kicking over garbage cans, police have been chasing them.
HERSHER: The D.C. police say more than 200 people were arrested and six officers had minor injuries. But for the most part, across the city, the mood was peaceful, if tense. Even in areas where people there to protest mixed with people there to celebrate. Both gathered along the route of the inaugural parade to see the new president go by.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS #3: (Chanting) Not my president. Not my president...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Yes, he is.
HERSHER: Rebecca Hersher, NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Twelve states and the District of Columbia allow residents who are in the United States illegally to obtain driver's licenses. California passed its law two years ago. Now more than 800,000 immigrants have taken advantage of that right. But with the arrival of President Trump to power, some of those license holders worry that their private information could be used against them. NPR's Richard Gonzales reports.
RICHARD GONZALES, BYLINE: If you want to know what difference a driver's license makes, just ask 47-year-old Ramon Perez. The gregarious carpet layer from San Jose, Calif., says it brings him peace of mind.
RAMON PEREZ: You can have a better car, better life. You can go to the bank. Somebody stop you. Hey, here's my license. If the kids want to go to Disneyland, you can take them because you have a license. And you're not afraid at all that the police is behind me.
GONZALES: Perez is sitting in the office of an immigration advocacy group in San Jose called SIREN. That stands for Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network. In a nearby room, about a dozen clients are gathered as community organizer Erica Leyva launches a know-your-rights workshop.
ERICA LEYVA: (Speaking Spanish).
GONZALES: She's talking about the California law, AB 60, that has allowed 822,000 undocumented residents to get a driver's license. State officials say they expect to eventually issue almost a million and a half licenses. Diana Morales, an attorney for SIREN, says after the election of Donald Trump, a lot of the agency's clients wonder whether having that license would make it easier for the federal government to find and deport them. And she says they have a lot of questions.
DIANA MORALES: How is this going to affect me? Am I going to have my driver's license taken away now now that we have an incoming president that says that he does not agree with me being here?
GONZALES: One man who asked that we only identify him by his first name, Macario, says he's concerned that the feds will take the state information and use it to deport him.
MACARIO: You know, federal government can do that. They have several means to do that. And, yes, I'm afraid.
GONZALES: That's a concern in several other jurisdictions where undocumented residents can get a driver's license or an ID card. In New York, there's an ongoing debate over whether the city should destroy the personal-information records of undocumented residents who carry a municipal ID card. Some fear that information could be misused by the government. California officials say they protect the personal information of all license holders. But federal authorities, including immigration officials, can still get basic information such as the name, address, gender, date of birth or the license number. Artemio Armenta is a spokesman for the state DMV.
ARTEMIO ARMENTA: But none of this information includes any AB 60 identifier or legal status.
GONZALES: In other words, California's database doesn't distinguish between citizens and people in this country without authorization. And that's exactly the problem, says Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for Immigration Reform or FAIR, a group that advocates immigration limits. He says California has a record of shielding immigrants who are in this country illegally.
IRA MEHLMAN: It wouldn't surprise me that California built this into the system in the first place - that California built in the safeguards to ensure that the records couldn't be searched.
GONZALES: Still, DMV officials say the licenses issued to people in this country illegally are different. They clearly state that it is not acceptable for official federal purposes and can't be used to get a job, register to vote or any public benefit. And state lawmakers already have said they will resist any attempt by the new administration to target immigrants in California. Richard Gonzales, NPR News, San Francisco.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There's been little regulation of the chemicals used in nail salons, even though many have been linked to serious health problems. In California, one program is trying to change that by asking nail-salon owners to voluntarily improve safety. Jenny Gold explains.
JENNY GOLD, BYLINE: The first thing you notice when you walk into Mai Dang's nail salon on a busy street in Berkeley is what's missing, the stinging smell of nail products. That wasn't always the case. For a decade, Dang suffered from the effects of the chemicals she worked with.
MAI DANG: (Through interpreter) When you do nails, workers get itchy skin and watery eyes.
GOLD: Like more than 80 percent of California's nail-salon workers, Dang is Vietnamese. She says she used to have frequent headaches. One of her workers developed asthma. So when she heard about a way to improve safety at her salon, she signed up.
DANG: (Through interpreter) I work every day. I need the air to be pure, to be better for me. I have to take care of my health this way.
GOLD: The California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative was started by a community clinic in Oakland called Asian Health Services. Julia Liou is the group's co-founder.
JULA LIOU: Practically every worker was experiencing some kind of health issue. And we realized that this was an epidemic.
GOLD: Some of the chemicals used in nail salons are known to cause skin disorders and breathing problems among workers and possibly even cancer, miscarriages and birth defects. But the government doesn't require salons to minimize the risks. Liou is trying to get salon owners to make changes on their own.
LIOU: We don't want to create a fear where it's like, oh, nail salons are so scary that, you know, people can't go to them. But we want to create a space where both the owner and the customer can feel comfortable.
GOLD: Mai Dang had to make a lot of changes to be certified as a healthy salon, including buying less toxic nail polishes, thinners and removers. She requires her staff to wear gloves and masks when using certain products. And she bought a mechanical ventilation unit.
DANG: (Through interpreter) It sucks in the air when I do artificial nails so the workers don't have to breathe in the toxic chemicals anymore.
GOLD: In 2013 she got a healthy-nail certificate that she hangs in her window. But all these changes haven't come cheap. Dang says the safer products she uses cost about 30 percent more. Overall, she spent about $3,000 on the upgrades. To pay for it, she raised her prices by $2. I asked Dang's customer Genell Johnson whether she was willing to pay more as she sat getting her new set of nails filed.
GENELL JOHNSON: Yes, I would. You get what you pay for. That's what they always say, and it's true.
GOLD: A survey of customers by the collaborative found that 90 percent were willing to pay at least a dollar more for services they knew were healthier. Johnson says she's a regular at Fashion Nails but had no idea it was a healthy salon.
JOHNSON: Now I'm going to spread the word. This will be a perfect place, knowing that they're so health conscious.
GOLD: That's exactly what salons like Fashion Nails are hoping - that customers will vote with their feet. But there's a long way to go. There are more than 8,000 nail salons in California. And so far, only 120 have joined the program. Still, they're making progress. The EPA recently gave the Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative a grant to help offer microloans to salons that want to upgrade their safety. For NPR News, I'm Jenny Gold.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Brenda Barnes died on Tuesday at the age of 63. She was one of the highest-ranking women in corporate America when she chose to step down as president of PepsiCo North America in 1997 to be with her three children. She told NPR...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
BRENDA BARNES: The whole issue boils down to time. You know, I was faced with many times when I might not be at a school event or I wouldn't be there at a special moment, you know, for one of my children to tell me about or, you know, when you have very limited time windows, you are trying to force an interaction. That child might not be ready to talk about it. So just having that casual time to interact with your family is what I was finding that I was missing too much.
SIMON: Brenda Barnes would spend seven years with her children, and served on a few corporate boards, before she returned to full-time work as the CEO of Sara Lee. Erin Barnes is the daughter of Brenda Barnes. She is now 28 and joins us from Chicago. Thanks very much for being with us.
ERIN BARNES: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: Your mother always said she didn't make the decision she did for you, her children, so much as herself. Help us understand that.
E. BARNES: Yeah, she - we were very fortunate growing up to have a wonderful nanny who lived with us for about 11 years and really became part of our family. She moved with us eight or nine times. And my mom, you know, told us after the fact, when she made the decision to stay home, that she said, I knew my children were loved. They were fed. They were educated. They had happy lives. So it wasn't that we weren't being well taken care of, she just didn't want to miss another birthday. And her job had her travel so frequently that it did pull her away from home more than she wanted to be.
SIMON: Yeah, what difference do you think it made in your lives?
E. BARNES: Oh, it changed our lives entirely. It's hard to even quantify, you know, what that would be like. But if I look back on those years, both of my parents who left Pepsi around the same time were the parents who drove every kid to the mall, to the movies, to soccer games and practices. And they were just - they were there at our disposal 100 percent of the time, and we have such a strong family unit.
And I think my mom particularly stepping down when she was at such a pinnacle in her career really showed us what value we were to her and how important her family was. And she really - you know, her actions very much matched what she always preaches, which is that family is the most important thing to her.
SIMON: There was some criticism at the time, I gather.
E. BARNES: Yeah, yeah. She laughed. I mean, I - she really is blown away. And I think it was maybe in the interview she had with Katie Couric back in the day that she said, you know, I got famous for quitting my job. I think she just never in a million years would have thought that it would have impacted the business world like it did. And it sparked a debate of women feeling like she had a responsibility to other women, showing that you can have it all. And my mom would always just say there's 24 hours a day, seven days in a week, and you have to pick and choose what's important to you. So that's really all she did.
And people - my mom would always tell people the thing she hated most was this debate that women have, you know, kind of criticizing one or the other, whether it's working moms kind of pitting themselves against stay-at-home moms or vice versa. My mom just said, it is 100 percent a personal decision for you, for your family. And what she did find that upset her so much, and it was such a kind of lacking space just in our business world, is that these moms who do work and then stay at home to spend some time with their children don't lose their minds.
They don't lose any of their hard work, but they have a hard time coming back into the workforce. You know, that broke her heart because she said these women are brilliant, and running a household is no small feat. And they're running the PTAs and they're - you know, they're running communities. Why are we having a hard time getting these women back into the working world? So she did some work at Sara Lee with the Returnships Program. But, you know, she was just very much a supporter of people making individual decisions and encouraging women to support each other and not - you know, there's no right or wrong way to do anything. You just make your choices and choose what's important to you.
SIMON: You sort of have changed your career track, I gather, too.
E. BARNES: I did. And my whole family is in business, so I kind of got pulled in that world in college. And then through the experience - so I worked in advertising in Chicago. And then through the experience with my mom, I have decided - and in my last couple months of a career change and finish nursing school this spring. So it was a decision largely shaped by, you know, kind of the identity I found in myself caring for her during the last six and a half years and having so many of those medical professionals help us in such a meaningful time. It was just something that really resonated with me and I found that I was much happier, you know, when I was caring for her. So I made a change and I'm very happy with it.
SIMON: Sounds like you learned from her example.
E. BARNES: Absolutely. Yeah, she - you know, our parents, I think, never cared what we did as long as we were happy doing it and that we worked hard and treated people with respect.
SIMON: Well, it sounds like you and your mother have done that.
E. BARNES: Thank you. Thank you very much.
SIMON: Erin Barnes, her mother, Brenda Barnes, died this week at the age of 63. Thanks for finding time for us this week.
E. BARNES: Thank you. I appreciate it.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Love is the greatest inspiration for art - songs, poems, novels, movies, operas, stories that soar but also sometimes soothe hearts and settle scores. Love with entanglements may be at the heart of a lot of artistic experience. Catherine Lacey, a novelist, and Forsyth Harmon, a writer and illustrator, have put together a book that traces some of the illicit and/or interlocking, but often intended, relationships that have been formed, inspired or otherwise impelled the lives of artists - "The Art Of The Affair: An Illustrated History Of Love, Sex And Artistic Influence." Catherine Lacey joins us from Mexico City. Thanks for being with us.
CATHERINE LACEY: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: And Forsyth Harmon is in our studios in New York. Thank you very much for being with us.
FORSYTH HARMON: So glad to be here.
SIMON: I don't want to lay the good stuff, so let's begin by tracing the line that leads from Colette to her 16-year-old stepson to Martha Gellhorn to Hemingway towards all kinds of interesting people.
LACEY: Well, this is actually one of the first connections that I thought maybe there was something to maybe putting a book together. Colette had an affair with her 16-year-old stepson, Bernard (ph) de Jouvenel. And he grew up to marry Martha Gellhorn, who was previously married to Ernest Hemingway.
SIMON: Yeah.
LACEY: So this kind of overlaps different time periods because I think Colette's affair with her stepson happened in maybe the '20s, I want to say.
SIMON: But then this gets to Ford Madox Ford and Robert Lowell. I mean, we could go on. I don't know where to start or stop.
LACEY: (Laughter) Well...
HARMON: I have to say, these were some of the first portraits that I drew. And as I was drawing, I read a bit about each of the individuals and their relationships. And I was quite recently married at the time and suddenly became sort of terrified. Is this what the artistic life is like? The stories were quite overwhelming to me.
SIMON: Can we...
LACEY: Very few people in the book actually have marriages that lasted their entire lifetimes.
SIMON: Forsyth Harmon, as the artist, did you find your knowledge of the figures sneaking into the way you portrayed them?
HARMON: Absolutely. I took as much time as I could to learn more than I knew. I tried to read the books, listen to the music, think about how the work might sort of inflect itself in the features or in the mood of the source images that I drew from.
SIMON: Yeah.
HARMON: So, for instance, with James Baldwin, I was listening to "Giovanni's Room" on audiobook while I worked on him and was listening to "Potato Head Blues," I believe, when I worked on Tallulah Bankhead. She was a fan of that album.
SIMON: Catherine Lacey, can I give you another lineage to trace for us?
LACEY: Sure.
SIMON: Mercedes de Acosta to Greta Garbo to Isadora Duncan to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
LACEY: Yeah, so Mercedes de Acosta was living in Hollywood at the time when she fell in love with Greta Garbo. And their letters between each other are just - you know, they're just so young and so in love. And it's just - they both can portray that feeling so beautifully. I'm getting chills just thinking about it. But, of course, it wasn't OK for a woman to be in love with another woman at the time. And so Greta Garbo, being very famous, had to keep it very under wraps, and Mercedes de Acosta was sort of frustrated by this. So there was a lot of struggle over many years, but they were together on and off for a really long time.
Mercedes de Acosta also had an affair, I think sometime before, with Isadora Duncan. And then Isadora Duncan flirted one time with F. Scott Fitzgerald within shouting distance of Zelda Fitzgerald, who made a big fuss of it and threw herself down a flight of stairs in protest of this flirtation. And then once you get into the Fitzgeralds, then you're connected to Gertrude Stein and then there's just a bazillion connections off of that.
SIMON: And Hemingway all over again, you know? It all traces back to Hemingway.
LACEY: Oh, right. We're right back to where we started.
SIMON: Yeah.
LACEY: All the way back to Colette.
SIMON: Forsyth Harmon, there's a wonderful illustration of Isadora Duncan's scarf...
HARMON: Thank you.
SIMON: ...Toward the end of the book. In and of itself, that's an important object. But it begins to embody a whole lot more, doesn't it?
HARMON: Certainly, in terms of the story behind it. Isadora Duncan's scarf got caught in an Amilcar, I believe, if I'm remembering the story correctly.
SIMON: Yeah.
HARMON: It was assumed that she was on her way to consummate an affair and said - I believe the words were, off to love. And then the scarf was caught and she was killed, so quite a loaded object. And then I believe from there - and, Catherine, maybe you remember this quote - Gertrude Stein had something, I guess, quite funny and a bit harsh to say. Yeah.
SIMON: Yeah.
LACEY: Yes. Affectations are dangerous.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: Yeah. That's creative. Like, it's all in the accessories, right? So be...
LACEY: Yes.
SIMON: So be careful. Do we understand art a little differently after we've been through this book, do you think?
LACEY: I hope so or I'm - I've still kind of - you know, there's still threads of people's connections that I am still sort of researching and fascinated by. You can't ever really know what's transpired between two people. You know, relationships are just inherently a private thing and can't really be, you know, explained. But I think the art that does result from these relationships is sufficiently compelling. And, you know, I think it's that little bit that you kind of can't see that keeps you looking at art in different ways.
SIMON: Catherine Lacey and Forsyth Harmon, their new book, "The Art Of The Affair: An Illustrated History Of Love, Sex And Artistic Influence," thank you so much for being with us.
HARMON: Thank you.
LACEY: Thanks for having us.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG'S "POTATO HEAD BLUES")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
And protesters have gathered in the nation's capital for the Women's March on Washington, D.C. But first, some people are taking part in rallies before the big rally. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang joins us now from an event organized by the NAACP at D.C.'s Metropolitan AME Church. I know that church, Hansi. How are you?
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: Good morning, Scott.
SIMON: What's going on? What are people saying to you?
WANG: Well, the event is about to get under way here. There are more than a dozen folks, mostly African-American young people, fairly mixed between men and women. And this is billed as a youth rally called, Stay Woke And Fight. And I spoke to one of the attendees here. Her name is Rachel Lyons. She's 19, from Minneapolis, a student at George Washington University. I asked her why she wanted to come to this specific rally before the march. And here's what she said.
RACHEL LYONS: When people look at me, they see that I am black first, and then that I'm a woman. And, like, I feel like being black puts you at more of a disadvantage than being a woman in this country. And I mean, you think about, like, how white women actually voted for Trump, 53 percent. So for me, I just feel like my race is what puts me at the biggest disadvantage within this country. So I feel like first, I want to be with other women who know that and understand that and don't want to overlook that.
WANG: So again, that was Rachel Lyons, one of the marchers who will be out on the National Mall today for the Women's March.
SIMON: And, Hansi, what do you gather a lot of these protesters hope to achieve today?
WANG: Well, this march - some people are seeing it as a launch of a new era of activism, they say. And they want to mobilize against what they fear the Donald Trump administration will bring in terms of possible curtailing of voting rights and civil - other civil rights as well as criminal justice reform. And so it is a wide range of issues that people have on their minds, depending on who you're talking to.
SIMON: Now, Hansi, the event you're at there at the AME Church was organized by the NAACP. There has been controversy over how the Women's March was organized when it comes to the issue of race. What's your estimation of where things stand now?
WANG: Well, where things stand now is that we have national organizers. That is a fairly diverse group of women. And initially, it was only white women who organized this and first proposed this idea. I spoke to one of the national organizers. Her name is Carmen Perez. And here's what she said.
CARMEN PEREZ: The conversation around race has been intentional. I think our president, Donald Trump, in his campaign was extremely racist. And he was misogynistic. And he was talking about deporting and building a wall. We need to talk about these issues, and we need to have these courageous conversations. Some people call them difficult. I call them courageous.
WANG: And part of the courage that these organizers are asking participants to show here is to talk about racial inequities between white women and, for example, black and Latino women. And this is a discussion that really caused some discomfort for some of the mostly white participants who felt that this was possibly causing some divisions. Certainly, that's not the case going forward, where folks hope to bring about, you know, a more nuanced discussion about race and feminism and also a unified call to action.
SIMON: NPR's Hansi Lo Wang, thanks very much for being with us.
WANG: You're welcome, Scott.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Washington, D.C., is a swarm with both Trump supporters and protesters this weekend. And against all expectation, some of them are friends. Albert Kiecke retired last year after 35 years in the Houston Fire Department. He voted for Trump and was at yesterday's inauguration. He is sharing his hotel room with a friend of 50 years standing, Becky Dinsmore. She works at a large bank in Houston and voted for Hillary Clinton. She's in D.C. for the Women's March. Good morning both of you.
BECKY DINSMORE: Good morning, Scott.
ALBERT KIECKE: Good morning.
SIMON: A lot of people I think are wondering, first off, who gets to use the bathroom first, the Trump supporter or the protester?
DINSMORE: (Laughter) Well, I'm going to the march this morning, so I was up a little bit earlier and already used the bathroom.
SIMON: OK. How do each of you feel about this weekend? Albert, if we could begin with you.
KIECKE: I was very excited about it. I've never, you know, been in attendance of anything, you know, of that magnitude. I mean, it was just a part of history, and I enjoyed watching the inauguration.
SIMON: And, Becky, what did you do, just stay bundled up there in the closet during the inauguration?
DINSMORE: (Laughter) No, actually I worked in the morning until about noon, and then it was a travel afternoon for me. And it was...
SIMON: Oh, you flew in from Houston, yeah.
DINSMORE: I did. I flew with a lot of other marchers, so it was a rousing plane ride.
SIMON: And why is it important for you to be in Washington, D.C., this weekend?
DINSMORE: Well, from my perspective, I felt right after the election a flood of emotions. I was a little bit bereft, indignant. I just felt a call to action. So I'm here for what I would consider my civic duty.
SIMON: Well, let me ask a question of you both, beginning with you, Albert. How do you make this - how do you make this work, this partnership? Because I think a lot of Americans are wondering how to make the country work with these kind of divisions.
KIECKE: Well, I mean, we don't talk about it all the time, you know, but it, to me, it's just not getting - you know, worth getting that upset about. I mean, Becky and other people are going to have their opinion on politics, and I have my opinion on politics. And I'm not going to change your mind nor can I change anybody else's mind. So that's their opinion and that's - and they're welcome to that opinion. So that's just the way I feel about it.
SIMON: Becky.
DINSMORE: And I would say similarly, and not just with Albert but with all of, you know, my friends, acquaintances, co-workers, I think a lot of us are just treading lightly. And I will say I seem to have lost a few friends over my opinions about the election and the election results. But you know, I'm good with that. I think, you know, it's a pivotal time in history, and people are, as Albert said, you know, they're welcome to their own opinions and thoughts and actions. And I feel like I'm doing what I need to do for myself, which is to speak out and do what I can to make sure it's widely known that there's a lot of opposition to the policies that are being put forth.
SIMON: Albert, you worked in the fire department for 35 years.
KIECKE: Yes.
SIMON: What do you take from that experience? What did you learn there that the rest of us can learn from?
KIECKE: Well, I mean, I just - I was in people's homes, you know, people - underprivileged people, minorities and saw how they actually truly lived, you know, and how their - their existence. You know, they're just trying to scrape by day to day, you know, and provide for their families and, you know, send their kids to school. It's just basically a subsistence living for them, and they haven't really improved their, you know, their lives over time like they think they're doing. Things have to change there. So we'll have to see if he's able to do that.
SIMON: Becky Dinsmore, it sounds like your friend has a good heart.
DINSMORE: He certainly does. He does, and we consider him part of our family for sure. And I teared up a little bit at that because I, you know, again we don't talk about it, so, you know, it's lovely to hear Albert expressing his viewpoint.
SIMON: Well, we hope you both have a wonderful weekend in your separate ways (laughter).
DINSMORE: Oh, I'm sure we will.
SIMON: Thanks for spending a little time with us.
DINSMORE: You're very welcome.
KIECKE: Thank you.
SIMON: Albert Kiecke and Becky Dinsmore, they are lifelong friends.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Among the people who came to Washington, D.C., for Donald Trump's inauguration were bikers.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOTORCYCLE ENGINE)
SIMON: They started riding their motorcycles on Thursday, and the morning of the swearing in, the Bikers for Trump gathered in a plaza near the Capitol to celebrate. NPR's Adrian Florindo was there.
ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: Barry Gurney rode six hours from the coast of North Carolina. The whole way up, he imagined roaring onto the National Mall, sleeping on the ground next to his motorcycle and waking up by the dawn's early light to see Donald Trump place his hand on the Bible.
BARRY GURNEY: It was beautiful. I rolled all the way in. I had no traffic coming in. And there's a policeman there and I asked him and he says, no, man, you can't have a vehicle in there. And so then I left. I came back this morning on the metro (laughter).
FLORIDO: Not quite the same statement, was it?
GURNEY: No, not really.
FLORIDO: It wasn't the only disappointment for some of the bikers. Black Lives Matter protesters blocked the security checkpoint near where the bikers were meeting. So it took some bikers hours to get in. Chris Cox founded Bikers for Trump, and on Friday morning, he was annoyed.
CHRIS COX: You'd never see bikers acting like that, that's for sure.
FLORIDO: You might call it payback. Bikers for Trump came to national attention last summer when they showed up at the Republican convention in Cleveland saying they were there to help police control anti-Trump protests should they get violent. They had something similar in mind here. Bernadette Marie Luke is another leader of the bikers.
BERNADETTE MARIE LUKE: We were here to make sure that Donald Trump got sworn in with no complications.
FLORIDO: Though there were some violent protests, the bikers seemed to stay away. All the better for Bill Kirby, also known as Wild Bill. He made it here from Oklahoma in two days to celebrate the new president. He likes that Trump has promised to help veterans like him.
BILL KIRBY: I'm a hundred percent disabled veteran. I hope he does steps in and straightens out the V.A. for one thing. I don't even go to the V.A. hospital where I live.
FLORIDO: That's part of the reason the bikers like Trump. Many are veterans. But Kirby says there's more to it, and this is something he has thought a lot about.
KIRBY: Freedom is our thing. I don't like rules. I don't have to put on a seatbelt when I get in my bike, so I ride a bike. A lot of people just live in these little rules, and they're perfectly happy to stay in their lane. Not me; I'm going across the lanes. And a guy like that, you heard him, you've seen his speeches and stuff. He don't stay in the line. He's more like a shotgun man. And I like that.
FLORIDO: Other bikers had other reasons for liking Trump, like Vicky and Greg Harrel, who rode up on bumpy roads from Tennessee.
VICKY HARREL: It was rough riding. I must say my tail feathers got a little sore.
(LAUGHTER)
GREG HARREL: Yeah, 550 miles on a bike is not easy, especially when you're in your 50s (laughter).
FLORIDO: They're excited about Trump's plan to spend big on infrastructure because that might mean smoother rides. Adrian Florido, NPR News, Washington.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The Women's March is underway in Washington, D.C., and a number of other cities around the country. And while many people have turned out, there's some concerns about what the effect of the marches might be and if they include enough viewpoints. Kay Hymowitz has some of those concerns. She is the William E. Simon fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Thanks so much for joining us.
KAY S. HYMOWITZ: Good morning, Scott.
SIMON: You've expressed some misgivings about the march. Let me get you to share those if you could.
HYMOWITZ: Yeah. Well, this election exposed a Grand Canyon-sized divide in the United States. You've already been talking about that on this show this morning. Aside from the very endearing odd couple that you just interviewed, we are really hostile strangers to each other divided by geography. We're divided by class. We're divided by education, by culture, by where we get our takeout coffee, by what cars we drive, et cetera. And I think the march poses the danger of reinforcing and perhaps even widening that divide. I know that the organizers have a very different way of talking about the march. They keep using words like inclusive and solidarity. But I find those words very hard to square with the fact that 4 in 10 women voted for Trump, 53 percent of white women voted for Trump.
The media often leaves the impression that Trump was elected by white man and heavily opposed by women, but it's simply not true. And if you - you know, something that I came across recently that kind of surprised me, there's actually a much larger divide among women than there are among other identity groups. So, for instance, blacks voted for Clinton 88 percent - by 88 percent. Sixty-six percent of Hispanics, 65 percent of Asians voted for Clinton. That was only true of 54 percent of women, and that's less than the number who've - or percentage of women who voted for Obama and Bill Clinton. Now, that's certainly not the impression that we've been given.
SIMON: Now, for context, I gather you weren't a Trump enthusiast, let me put it that way.
HYMOWITZ: Far, far from it, and after yesterday's speech, even further away (laughter) from it. However, I do - I am very concerned about this divide that I'm talking about. I made it a hobby, really, to try to understand what was happening, how it was that I could look at a man like Trump and think he was completely disqualifying - disqualified for office and other people could find him - could get very excited about him. So I think that behooves all of us well, given this divide, which by the way is infecting countries all over Europe as well. There's a big gap between - in thinking between people who might have been winners in globalization and those who are often described as losers. So I think that, again, it really is an important thing for us to be thinking about what's going on here. It's not to say you shouldn't oppose some of or a lot of Trump' more outrageous vulgarity and rudeness, which by the way extends far beyond women, and many of his policies, I think we should.
SIMON: Yeah. In the minute we have left, forgive me for resorting to this phrase, but what do you - what would you suggest to heal that divide? Or is it, as some people have suggested, is it a time for people to take sides?
HYMOWITZ: Well, you know, they're going to have to take sides. There really are genuine disagreements. But one of the problems I think and one of the reasons we can't really have sustained discussions about this, or the courageous conversations that one of the organizers referred to earlier, is that it is so easily - so easily sparks accusations of racism and bigotry. You know, there's a big - there's...
SIMON: Just have a few seconds left, Kay.
HYMOWITZ: OK, a lot of space between David Duke and an open-borders person.
SIMON: Kay Hymowitz - she's the William E. Simon - no relation - fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the book "The New Brooklyn: What It Takes To Bring A City Back." Thanks so much.
HYMOWITZ: Thank you, Scott
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
No poem was read at President Trump's inauguration yesterday. Inaugural poems are fairly recent traditions. But poems might've abounded in the minds of many people. I thought of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Populist Manifesto No. 1."
(Reading) Poets, come out of your closets. Open your windows. Open your doors. You've been holed up too long. No time now for our little literary games. No time now for our paranoias and hypochondrias. No time now for fear and loathing. Time now only for light and love. Poets, descend to the street of the world once more and open your minds and eyes. Clear your throat and speak up.
Poetry is dead. Long live poetry. Don't wait for the revolution, or it'll happen without you. Poetry, the common carrier for the transportation of the public to higher places. Poetry still falls from the skies into our streets still open. They haven't put up the barricades yet, the streets still alive with faces, lovely men and women still walking their lovely creatures everywhere. In the eyes of all, the secret of all still buried there. Whitman's wild children still sleeping there. Awake and walk in the open air.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
People from across the country are in D.C. today to take part in the Women's March on Washington. And there are many others who would like to participate but just can't make the journey. So they are marching where they live. The website for the marchers estimates that there are 673 events that are taking place not just in the United States but around the world. We're going to check in on one of them. We're joined now by Brandi Calvert, who's organizing the women's march in Wichita, Kan. Ms. Calvert, thanks for being with us.
BRANDI CALVERT: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: And what made you want to organize your own march there in Wichita?
CALVERT: I wanted to take part in the march in Washington. And it wasn't feasible. We couldn't make it. And I thought, we have a voice here in Wichita. Why not do it here?
SIMON: What kind of...
CALVERT: Why not let our voice be heard?
SIMON: What kind of turnout are you getting?
CALVERT: Oh I wasn't expecting many people to pay attention. And I believe we are now over 1,700 and expect more.
SIMON: And what...
CALVERT: So it's pretty incredible.
SIMON: What kind of issues would you like to draw attention to?
CALVERT: Women's rights - to be viewed as human rights.
SIMON: Well...
CALVERT: I mean, there - we could be here all day, touching on all of the issues.
SIMON: We can take a minute or so. Tell us what's on your mind, please.
CALVERT: Violence against women and sexual assault in particular, especially regarding our college campuses. That's typically viewed as a PR problem instead of a human-rights problem. People do little to no jail time. I think we've seen that on national news. That's something for me. And everyone will be marching with their own torch for their own reason. And I have a now-20-year-old niece in college. And that's really scary to think about - that that would be viewed as more of a PR problem than keeping her protected.
SIMON: You mean a PR problem for the university, as opposed to a real human problem.
CALVERT: Correct.
SIMON: Yeah.
CALVERT: Correct. Yeah.
SIMON: What else would you like to - you have the public microphone now. What else would you like people to hear?
CALVERT: I think it is important for people to know that human rights is not a partisan issue. It is obviously a political issue. But it shouldn't be partisan. And if we can empower and educate and unify and keep the momentum of today going, I think love will win. I have seen on the news the rioting from yesterday. You can't fight hate with hate. You won't get anywhere.
SIMON: Yeah. I think that was a relatively small percentage of the people who had turned out, although, of course, you're right. You see...
CALVERT: Very small.
SIMON: ...Smashed windows and stuff. And that can be upsetting. Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Brandi Calvert is organizer of a women's march that's going to occur today in Wichita, Kan. Thank you so much for being with us, Ms. Calvert.
CALVERT: Thank you for having me.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Administrations come and go, but now it's time for sports.
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SIMON: President Trump is a golfer, so was President Obama, who was mostly a devoted basketball player. Does sports get politicized this year, too? NPR's sports correspondent Tom Goldman joins us.
Tom, thanks so much for being with us.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: My pleasure, Scott.
SIMON: There's been a fair amount of division in American sport over President Trump, hasn't there? Ranging in LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on the one hand...
GOLDMAN: Right.
SIMON: ...And then - let me get you to talk about Jim Brown, interesting figure now.
GOLDMAN: Very interesting case. You know, considered the greatest running back in NFL history, known for his activism when he joined other prominent African-American athletes like Muhammad Ali and Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as you mentioned, all speaking out during the civil rights movement. But, you know, Brown's form of activism was always different. He was more about practicality than protest. And it led to his controversial criticism of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and more recently Congressman John Lewis.
Journalist Dave Zirin wrote this week about spending time with Brown a couple of years ago and learning more about Brown's attitudes, which focused on building an economic base in African-American communities - business ownership, entrepreneurship as a way to resist racism. And Brown has spent many years doing kind of roll-your-sleeves-up work in those communities. And this apparently is what he believes the new president will encourage after having a recent meeting with Trump.
SIMON: And he's going to be talking about it, I gather, this week at a forum with a lot of other interesting people.
GOLDMAN: Yeah, yeah. He's scheduled to take part in an event at San Jose State University. It's a gathering to discuss athlete activism. And there will be, you know, traditional liberal voices from men like Dr. Harry Edwards and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And it'll be interesting to hear what comes out of it, perhaps some constructive dialogue that could be applied outside the world of sports.
SIMON: Tom, I got to tell you, I was at the White House this week with the Chicago Cubs.
GOLDMAN: Lucky guy.
SIMON: And - yes, indeed. And I - President Obama said something, in what might be the last remarks of his administration, I want to note. The president said - the last official remarks of his administration, he said, quote, "sometimes people wonder, well, why are you spending time on sports? There's other stuff going on throughout our history. Sports has had this power to bring us together even when the country is divided. Sports has changed attitudes and culture in ways that seem subtle but that ultimately made us think differently about ourselves and who we were." The president said, there's a direct line between Jackie Robinson and me standing here. There's a direct line between people loving Ernie Banks and then the city being able to come together and work together in one spirit.
GOLDMAN: That's nice...
SIMON: I told - I told his speech writers, the best presidential address I've heard since Gettysburg.
GOLDMAN: (Laughter) And I understand, like a great basketball move by the president, it was improvised.
SIMON: It was improvised indeed, yeah. The speechwriter told that to us. We got to talk about the NFL this weekend, Steelers versus Patriots, Green Bay versus the Falcons. A lot of people would love to see Brady and Rodgers - versus Rodgers in the Super Bowl.
GOLDMAN: Yeah. Well, that may very well happen. I think Brady's a pretty strong bet, you know, hard to imagine Pittsburgh coming into Foxborough, Mass., and beating New England on its home field. Pittsburgh's running back Le'Veon Bell has been the strength of the Pittsburgh offense. But he's going up against an amazing and kind of unheralded run defense of the Patriots. Atlanta-Green Bay - man, we've got visions of both teams scoring in the 40s or 50s. That's going to be a really exciting game, hard to call. And, you know what? We're out of time, so I don't have to.
SIMON: (Laughter) Way to vamp. NPR's Tom Goldman, working the clock. Thanks very much, my friend.
GOLDMAN: (Laughter) You're welcome.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
And back to inaugural news. We're joined now by Will Estrada. He's chairman of the Loudoun County Republican Committee in Virginia. Mr. Estrada was at yesterday's inauguration. Thanks very much for joining us.
WILL ESTRADA: Thanks for having me, Scott.
SIMON: Well, help us understand how you felt to be there.
ESTRADA: You know, it was incredible. It was, I believe, history in the making. As you can tell from my voice, I lost my voice yesterday, first cheering on our elected leaders and the peaceful transfer of power and then later on at the inaugural ball. But just to see so many tens of thousands - probably hundreds of thousands - of my fellow Americans. And then when President Trump said, this is about giving power back to the people, taking it away from D.C., I think that really resonated with everyone from what they heard about on the campaign trail.
SIMON: Yeah. You heard the inauguration speech, where - it sounded like a campaign speech. Were you - did you want something else, too, at the same time?
ESTRADA: You know, it actually sounded very different from a campaign speech. I had been at one of the campaign speeches, the one that he held on August 2 in Ashburn, Va., right here in my county. I'd watched many other speeches online and in the news. And I think this was a speech where he didn't speak to political parties. He spoke to all of us as Americans. He talked about a vision of helping everyone, whether it's our school kids who are suffering in failing schools or whether it's our minorities communities in the inner city or whether it's people in the Rust Belt.
And that was a message, I believe, of hope, of - I've heard you. And I believe Washington, D.C., has heard you, as well. And we are going to never forget you. And so if you're looking at it that he wasn't talking either Republican or Democrat but talking to Americans, it was an incredible speech, an incredible moment, I think, in American political history.
SIMON: Mr. Estrada, I have to ask you as a young, conservative, Latino Republican - and I happen to know you have an interracial family - how do you feel about the fact you've got all these people in President Trump's cabinet and not a single Latino?
ESTRADA: Well, you know, as a Latino, I always love to see other Latinos in government. But at the end of the day, I'm an American. I'm a conservative. I don't want people to be measured and selected because of their nationality or race or gender. I want people to be selected...
SIMON: But, I mean, surely, there were a lot of very qualified and intelligent and capable Latinos.
ESTRADA: Oh, absolutely.
SIMON: Yeah.
ESTRADA: And there are many of my friends who are being hired in positions as we speak, who are, I think, in the next couple of weeks going to be coming up for Senate confirmation - maybe not cabinet-level positions but other high-ranking positions. But at the end of the day, I want to see the best people that can work with this administration. They can work for America's, you know, best in the position. And that's more important to me than nationality or were race or where you come from.
SIMON: Do you agree with what President Trump said about borders?
ESTRADA: I do. Now, my family history is Puerto Rican. So we're U.S. citizens. I have many friends who are of Mexican, of Cuban descent. But ultimately, my wife is of Korean descent. Her mom was born in Korea, came here legally. You know, we want to welcome people to come to our country. But if we don't start with the rule of law - if we don't start with respect for our laws - I think it gets people off on the wrong foot.
Now, ultimately, you know, how you handle immigration reform - and I think we'll be seeing something from the Trump administration shortly - there's a political process in our country. We'll figure out what's best. But I think it's important that we remember that a nation has borders.
SIMON: Give me another issue that you hope President Trump takes on in the next hundred days.
ESTRADA: Well, my other two top issues and, in fact, why I voted for Mr. Trump in part are repealing Obamacare. I know so many people who have seen their premiums go up, who - health care is basically out of reach for them financially, despite what President Obama had promised. So that's a huge issue. And then getting a conservative justice who doesn't look at politics but who looks at the U.S. Constitution on the Supreme Court - those are other - two other incredibly important things for me and, I think, for many Americans.
SIMON: Will Estrada, who's chairman of the Loudoun County Republican Committee in Virginia, thanks so much for being with us.
ESTRADA: It was a pleasure, Scott. Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
President Donald Trump and Melania Trump appeared at three inaugural balls last night, including the Liberty and Freedom balls at the Washington Convention Center.
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PRES DONALD TRUMP: Well, we just want to thank everybody. This has been an amazing journey for all of us - not just me and not just Melania. It's been an amazing journey. And now the work begins.
SIMON: The Trumps did not dance to a song by B.J. Leiderman, who does our theme music, but instead to "My Way," the song made famous by Frank Sinatra.
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ERIN BOHEME: (Singing) I traveled each and every highway. And more, much more than this, I did it my way.
SIMON: They made their way to the Salute Our Armed Services ball at the National Building Museum. That's where NPR's Elizabeth Blair spent the evening.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: As soon as the doors opened, men and women, most of them in uniform, streamed in to the Armed Services ball, filling the great hall of the National Building Museum. Luis Colon flew to Washington from Clearwater, Fla., where he served in the National Guard.
LUIS COLON: So what are we doing that for? So that we can actually have a prosperous country and not be strangled. So I'm really excited about this. That's how I feel.
BLAIR: The National Building Museum is a massive space with high ceilings and enormous columns that were bathed in gold lighting. A pattern of stars and stripes were projected overhead. Before the entertainment began, one of the speakers, Col. Reggie Ash, pointed out an empty table that he said was there to honor POWs and MIAs.
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REGGIE ASH: In addition to honoring President Trump and Vice President Pence tonight, we also honor those who cannot be with us.
BLAIR: Later in the evening, there was a live video conference with troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Leading up to the festivities, there were questions about who would perform at the Armed Services ball. It was 1970s pop singer Tony Orlando and country newcomer Josh Weathers.
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JOSH WEATHERS: I know nobody in this room knows who I am.
BLAIR: And yet the young singer from Fort Worth, Texas, got to serenade the 44th president of the United States and first lady. But first, Mr. Trump addressed the crowd.
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TRUMP: But I just want to thank you on behalf of Melania and myself and the family and, really, millions and millions of people all over the world. The job you've done is absolutely incredible - absolutely incredible.
BLAIR: This was the last official ball of the evening. After dancing twice to "My Way" at the two other balls, the president and first lady Melania Trump ended the night with Josh Weathers singing something more romantic.
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WEATHERS: (Singing) And I will always love you, baby. Yes, I, baby - I will always - I will always love you.
BLAIR: In keeping with tradition, they also danced with service members. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News, Washington.
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WEATHERS: (Singing) I will always love you, baby.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
We've been covering what's turned out to be a massive march in Washington, D.C., the Women's March. People are gathering for similar marches around the country and even around the world. We turn now to Boston. WBUR reporter Deborah Becker is standing by. Deborah, thanks for being with us.
DEBORAH BECKER, BYLINE: Hello. Well, thanks for having me.
SIMON: I've seen pictures - looks like an enormous crowd there in Boston.
BECKER: (Laughter) It is an enormous crowd, and you can barely walk anywhere or move. It is shoulder to shoulder. It's really quite amazing, and, of course, a sea of pink - many folks wearing those pink cat hats that are sort of the unofficial symbol of this women's march today.
SIMON: Who can you see in the crowd? What kinds of people are there? Who have you met?
BECKER: All kinds of people, really - a lot of women, obviously, but men, children. Many folks from indigenous tribes in Massachusetts are here and are part of the speaking program, as well. There are a lot of politicians here, a lot of advocacy groups from Massachusetts here. It really is a diverse group of people. And they all say something sort of similar. But they have different reasons for coming, too.
You know, mostly, the message they say they want to bring today is one of solidarity. They want to say that the voices of these people and the things that they believe in are not going to be trampled on, and their voices will be heard - that they're going to continue to fight.
A lot of folks fighting for rights for the disabled. Obviously, a lot of women issues are being mentioned, as well, for reasons that brought people out today. And just a sense of equality - and people say they want to fight for dignity that they feel is under threat right now.
SIMON: Yeah. What are some of the slogans you're seeing?
BECKER: Well, the slogans are hate does not make America great. Let's make America sane again. Climate change is not a hoax. Let's make America kind. Mind your own uterus. If my uterus were a corporation, would you stop regulating it? Some very unique signs here today...
SIMON: (Laughter).
BECKER: ...And, you know, other ones are a little lewd. I can't repeat.
SIMON: Yeah.
BECKER: One says, grab him by the Putin - and different things like that. So it's all kinds of signs. It's a sea of signs, balloons and all types of people here today.
SIMON: You can always count on Boston for a scholarly reflection.
BECKER: (Laughter) And, you know, we also had Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Ed Markey address the crowd today - several politicians. Senator Warren very fired up of course - she's already known for some of the heated criticism, particularly of some of Trump's cabinet appointees. And she said she was rallying the crowd to continue to fight. And Senator Markey said this was the birthplace of the revolution many years ago, and it may be the birthplace of the revolution again.
SIMON: Well, Deborah Becker, reporter for WBUR in Boston, who's there covering the events in Boston as they unfold today and the day of the Women's March in Washington, D.C. - and similar events all around the country and around the world. Deborah Becker, thanks so much for being with us.
BECKER: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Washington D.C.'s National Cathedral hosted a prayer service this morning for the nation's new president and vice president.
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UNIDENTIFIED CHOIR: (Singing) (Unintelligible).
SIMON: It was an ecumenical service, which featured prayers from Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus, among others. This, of course, is President Trump's first full day in office. And he has already signed an executive order related to the Affordable Care Act. NPR's Scott Horsley joins us.
Scott, thanks for being with us.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning.
SIMON: This prayer service at the National Cathedral has become ritual after inaugurations. What stood out for you today?
HORSLEY: Well, a lot of it was what you'd expect, some wonderful music, as we just heard, both patriotic and liturgical. There were prayers for the incoming leaders along with prayers for the military, diplomats, even school board members. Most of those prayers were not overtly political. But the dean of the National Cathedral, Reverend Randall (ph) Marshall Hollerith, did make what could be heard as a pointed appeal directed at President Trump.
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RANDOLPH MARSHALL HOLLERITH: Look with compassion on the whole human family. Take away the arrogance and hatred, which infect our hearts. Break down the walls that separate us. Unite us in arms of love.
HORSLEY: That's in contrast to the sermon that was preached for the president-elect at St. John's Church yesterday just before the inauguration, which was drawn from the book of Nehemiah all about rebuilding walls around Jerusalem.
SIMON: Let's go from wall building to fence mending. President Trump is paying a visit to the headquarters of the CIA today. What's that seemed to be about?
HORSLEY: Trump's new press secretary, Sean Spicer, says the president is excited to thank the men and women of the intelligence community. Obviously, Trump has had a somewhat fraught relationship with that community since intelligence agencies came out a month before the election and said Russia was trying to meddle in the presidential campaign. Initially, Trump disputed that finding. He has more recently sort of grudgingly accepted it. But he has also pointed to pass missteps of the intelligence agencies like the erroneous conclusion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. So this is a chance for Trump to sort of extend an olive branch to those agencies on whose intelligence he will presumably be relying now that he's in the White House.
SIMON: And last night, the president signed his first executive order. It directs the government to - I'll quote now - do what it can to, quote, "ease the burdens of the Affordable Care Act," while the administration works with Congress to develop a replacement. Help us understand this.
HORSLEY: You know, the short answer was don't - we don't really know what the practical effect of this order's going to be. The administration's given very little guidance. Certainly, it is a signal right out of the gate that Trump is serious about his campaign pledge to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something. We don't know what. But the administration's also mindful that any abrupt moves could really cause a lot of damage to the already fragile insurance market - the individual insurance market. So as a practical matter, we think they might tread carefully here.
SIMON: NPR's Scott Horsley, thanks very much for being with us.
HORSLEY: You're welcome.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Huge crowds have been gathering, really, all across the globe today for women's marches in response to the one in Washington, D.C. Demonstrators in D.C. are about to make their way to the White House. NPR's Sarah McCammon is at the main event. Sarah, thanks for being with us.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Yeah, hi, Scott.
SIMON: Numbers seem to have been growing, right?
MCCAMMON: Yeah. Just, you know, I've been out here near the mall for several hours here in D.C. And, really, just people have continued for most of the morning and now into the early afternoon to march through the streets, to come off the subway. You know, the morning was dominated by - has been dominated by a rally. And the official march kicks off a little bit later here this afternoon. But, already, people are marching through the streets. I don't know if you can hear the drums behind me. And it's kind of a celebratory mood but also serious in certain ways.
SIMON: Well - and what are you hearing from the people gathered there? What are they telling you about what brings them all there?
MCCAMMON: You know, a lot of concerns about what this new Trump administration means for women's rights. Certainly, that's sort of the focal, unifying message here - but also for lots of other issues. I've heard people mention health-care coverage, climate change, regard for science, immigrants' rights, how minorities are treated in society. You know, I've heard lots of concerns.
One woman was holding a sign that just said, I'm afraid. And a lot of people are telling me that they are concerned about the tone that was set during this campaign and what that means going forward. But, of course, it is the Women's March, so women's issues are sort of the unifying and central theme here.
SIMON: From the - if this could be said to be a vantage point that we have here in the studio, it's become obvious that there are - forgive me - marchers, really, all over the country, all over the world that have grown in size, I think, much larger than anyone in our industry had been anticipating. And I wonder if the people there on the mall are aware of that.
MCCAMMON: Yeah, I mean, I've heard people mention that - that this is, you know, bringing people from all over the country to D.C. and that they're part of something bigger. You know, one young woman, a college student here, said she just, you know, was excited to be there. You know, there's been a little bit of controversy earlier on amongst the organizers and about the organization - whether, you know, enough diverse voices were included in putting this together.
But I spoke to one African-American, young woman who said she feels like, you know, that's kind of behind her. And she is excited with sort of the unity she's seeing here for people all over the country. And I am also hearing people say that they plan to go back home and get involved in their local politics, which - no doubt some of these folks across the country holding marches in their local communities plan to do the same.
SIMON: What happens next this afternoon?
MCCAMMON: Well, the rally is scheduled to wrap up around 2 o'clock Eastern time. And that's when the official march is going to kick off. And, I mean, it's safe to say many thousands of marchers will be marching through D.C. Already, I am looking at a crowd of marchers who can't get into the rally and are marching through the streets right now.
SIMON: NPR's Sarah McCammon, thanks so much for being with us and your coverage all day.
MCCAMMON: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
In addition to the main demonstration in Washington, D.C., there are other marches happening across the country and outside of the United States, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle, London, Sydney and more. We go now to Raleigh, N.C., where Jess Clark of member station WUNC joins us. Jess, thanks for being with us.
JESS CLARK, BYLINE: Yeah, no problem.
SIMON: What's the day been like in Raleigh?
CLARK: Well, there have been a lot of people here - a lot of people - I would say definitely several thousands. The march started around 10:30 in the morning. And police had planned for it to be a sidewalk march, actually, where the crowds would only take up the sidewalk. But by noon, there were still people filling up all lanes of traffic, pouring into the main Moore Square, filling up that green space. So definitely several thousand people - just a lot of - like, huge crowds.
SIMON: Yeah. And like in substantially larger cities, this is a much larger crowd than, I guess, what local authorities and police officials had been expecting, wasn't it?
CLARK: Yes. Yes. Definitely, yeah. As I said, they planned for just the sidewalk march. And so they hadn't planned to block off - looks like they didn't really plan to block off enough streets. And so you had backed-up traffic. And there was actually buses that were trying to come through to use the bus stop here on one of the main streets. And they couldn't get to the bus stop because there were so many people.
SIMON: Tell us about some of the conversations you've been having, who you've been talking to, what they've been telling you.
CLARK: Yeah. Well, I think there - people are here with a lot of different issues that they care about. And, you know, there's definitely a lot of concern about reproductive rights. I talked to one woman who is a nurse in labor and delivery. And she was there. She had a big sign that had - you know, had the words don't touch my uterus on it and a big drawing of a uterus. And she is very worried about what a Trump administration might mean for reproductive rights and the right for women to choose to have an abortion.
There were also a lot of people that were worried about xenophobia. I talked to a woman named Vivian who is Columbian-American. Her father came over and was undocumented for a while. And she worries about other undocumented people who may have a lot of fear about the election of Donald Trump. So just a wide variety of issues.
SIMON: Jess, I know this puts you on the spot, but why did this march get so much bigger than what people had thought? Any idea based on what you heard from people?
CLARK: Well, I'm not really sure. I mean, I think Facebook, obviously, has, you know, a big reach. But, also, North Carolina has a pretty active protest scene right now. It's a state that has a Republican-led legislature that has enacted a lot of policies that places where you have a lot more Democratic, liberal-leaning populations really take issue with - for example, some of the voting restrictions that were passed in 2013. So there is kind of, like, already a grass-roots, really large, very organized network of people who are already politically active. So I think that might have something to do with it.
SIMON: Jess Clark, reporter for WUNC in Raleigh. Thanks very much for being with us, Jess.
CLARK: Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
A secret diary, a hidden history. Julia Alekseyeva discovered her great-grandmother Lola's memoir, and she turned it into her debut graphic novel. It's called "Soviet Daughter." It tells the story of Lola, a barely educated Ukrainian woman who lived through the creation of the Soviet Union and its eventual collapse. Julia Alekseyeva, thanks so much for being with us.
JULIA ALEKSEYEVA: Thank you so much for having me on the show.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So tell me first how you discovered your great-grandmother's writing.
ALEKSEYEVA: So my family emigrated from what had just become Ukraine in 1992, and she slowly started writing certain things in a notebook and sort of keeping them hidden from everyone. And then after she died, it was discovered. And she had actually written a little note in the beginning, do not read this until my death. And so...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wow.
ALEKSEYEVA: ...My grandmother and I read it. And I just thought it was completely extraordinary because it had so many details from the Revolution through the Civil War and then World War II and then the thaw - all of that was completely there and in writing.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So when you opened this book, this sort of history, what was written there? What surprised you? Were there things that you didn't know?
ALEKSEYEVA: There were. She put as many details in there as she could remember. I think it was also a way for her to stay lucid in the last 10 years of her life because she lived to be 100. And she put in all of these details, many of which were kind of unnecessary in the context of the book, like which cousin married which other person that they knew, how they got together. You know, all of that was cute, but...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All the minutia of a family. Exactly.
ALEKSEYEVA: Exactly - and that this person liked apples. And I was like, all right, fine. But there were a lot of sort of surprising details. Something that was, I think, kept from me as I was growing up was the extent to which she was kind of a wild child, you know? And, you know, would go out on dates and have all these affairs and then just drop them, be like, oh, not interested anymore, sorry. Which was not something that was praised in - (laughter) in my family. And so - but...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And probably not very well known. It's not very often that one's great-grandmother will sit and discuss the affairs of their youth. Did that make you feel this connection? All of a sudden she became a much more real person. Her story became much fuller, more nuanced.
ALEKSEYEVA: Absolutely. It did. Although I have to say that she - weirdly enough, we did have that strong bond in person. So I was left alone with her a lot as a young child. When we first emigrated to the United States, my mother was trying to find work and my grandparents were trying to help out in other ways, so I was pretty much left with Lola for the bulk of my early childhood. And we just bonded.
And something I talk about in the story is that when I was 20, I had this janitorial gig when I would go to her apartment and sort of clean it, and then she would give me tea and we would chat for a couple of hours. And she would tell me all of these stories, but I didn't write them down. I just sort of took them in. And at that point, as a 20-year-old, I was going through breakups. I thought everything was the most dramatic thing in the entire world. So it gave me an interesting perspective.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You came here together with your great-grandmother. You moved from Kiev to Chicago right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why did your family come here?
ALEKSEYEVA: So something that I had always assumed and what was on the official paperwork was that we were refugees due to being Jewish and due to anti-Semitism. The real reason that I think many people emigrated and - but this was made clear to me two, three years ago - was that it was actually due to Chernobyl. Everyone sort of thought, we have to leave here. We don't know what this cloud is hanging over Kiev in 1986. And I was born two years later, and there was a sense in which they didn't know what would happen to all of these kids that were born around this time. And so a lot of families, even though there was anti-Semitism, chose to leave for other reasons. And Chernobyl was that moment where a lot of people decided, we have to go.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Were you sick?
ALEKSEYEVA: I was not sick as a child, but I found out that I had thyroid cancer as a senior in college. And got treated and it's fine now, but I think this happens to a lot of people that were emigrating from the USSR at that moment, especially young children.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why did you choose to make it into a graphic novel and not a more sort of conventional novel?
ALEKSEYEVA: So my great-grandmother was a very, very bright person, but she was not educated in the classical sense of the term. She stopped going to school in fourth grade in order to take care of her siblings and to sort of run her household in a crazy way, so she didn't have the kind of diction that one would expect from a writer. There were a lot of run-on sentences, some words that were a little too casual. And so she wasn't...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Educated.
ALEKSEYEVA: Well, she was - she was self-educated.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right.
ALEKSEYEVA: So it's a very different kind of intelligence. And if I had just translated directly from Russian to English, it would lose that kind of aura. And also, that way, people could actually visualize what was happening in this book because I think it's hard for a lot of people who didn't grow up with the same imagery to really understand what was going on in those regions - the uniforms, the parks, the idea of just Soviet living.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In this work, you also talk about the sometimes difficult relationship with your own mother. How did your family react to having this story told?
ALEKSEYEVA: My family is not necessarily with it in terms of, like, literary activity. They're not big readers. At least my mother is not a big reader. So she didn't realize that this genre existed. So she just thought, oh, it's just some activity that she has going on. And so once I got a publishing deal it became very, very serious. And I don't think the majority of my family was very happy.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why?
ALEKSEYEVA: I think to them it's like airing dirty laundry. You know, like, why would people want to know these things? We're not so special. What are you going to say? That's not something that we want everyone to hear. I think they would never think of this story being useful for others. I, of course, disagree (laughter). But it varied, and my closest family members were not very happy with what ended up happening with the book.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Has that been difficult for you?
ALEKSEYEVA: It has because I started the book to pay homage to a family member that I loved very deeply. And what ended up happening is that it kind of pulled a lot of my family apart. So unfortunately, I think these things kind of happen. I think once they realize that they're not getting phone calls saying, leave the United States now, we don't want you here, you know, kind of thing - I think it'll get a little better with time. But right now it's still a very stressful situation with my family.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Julia Alekseyeva's debut graphic novel is "Soviet Daughter." It came out this month from Microcosm Press. Thank you so much.
ALEKSEYEVA: Thank you so much. This was wonderful.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Last year, Brazil lost one of its most famous musicians, Nana Vasconcelos.
(SOUNDBITE OF NANA VASCONCELOS COMPOSITION)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: He put this instrument, the berimbau, on the world's musical map. It's kind of bow with a gourd attached. And it is the inspiration for a new album, "MeiaMeia: New Music For Berimbau," by the group Arcomusical. The album is dedicated to Nana Vasconcelos, and it features a whole range of berimbau instruments.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCOMUSICAL PERFORMANCE OF GREGORY BEYER'S "BERIMBAU SEXTET NO. 1, 'KORA'")
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Gregory Beyer is artistic director of Arcomusical. He's also an associate professor and head of percussion studies at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. And he joins us from the studios of WNIU. Hi.
GREGORY BEYER: Hi. How are you?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm good. You brought a berimbau with you. Can you give us a quick demonstration?
BEYER: Delighted to. I actually have two instruments here - a traditional instrument, the likes of which you heard Nana Vasconcelos playing just there in the audio clip. It sounds like this (playing berimbau). And then I have another instrument, which the group Projeto Arcomusical plays on the recording "MeiaMeia." This particular instrument's tuned a little bit higher. It sounds like this (playing berimbau).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Such an interesting pair of instruments. You know, they have African roots. Their use blossomed in Brazil in capoeira, the Brazilian martial art, in Afro-Brazilian religions. What intrigues you about their history?
BEYER: The instrument's history is extremely deep. Cave paintings depict people with musical bows thousands of years ago. But the more recent history shows that the instrument has its tradition among the Bantu-speaking peoples throughout the region of southern Africa.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, this album is called "MeiaMeia," which means half and half in Portuguese. So half of the compositions are written by you, half by Alexis Lamb. She was your student, and she's now Arcomusical's co-director. Let's listen to a bit of her piece called "Um So."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCOMUSICAL PERFORMANCE OF ALEXIS LAMB'S "UM SO")
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So along with the berimbau, there's another rattle-y (ph) percussion instrument we're hearing. What is that?
BEYER: That's called the caxixi. It's a small woven basket with a piece of gourd on the bottom. And so when you throw it in different directions, it articulates the urshat (ph) or seed inside the basket. And when you throw it down, you get a very sharp sound against the gourd. When you throw it to the side, you get a very soft sound against the wicker.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let's talk a little bit about Nana Vasconcelos. When I was based in Brazil I did have the opportunity to interview him once in Recife. A huge talent, a great legend and a wonderful raconteur. You spent time with him at his home in Recife. What did he tell you about how he used this instrument?
BEYER: When he moved from the Northeast to Rio de Janeiro to work specifically with Milton Nascimento, he moved into a small apartment where his drum set was no longer acceptable to his neighbors. And so the berimbau became an ersatz drum set for him. He started practicing it in the late hours.
And he realized that he actually could play drum set-like sounds on the instrument. He had low notes, he had high notes, low notes that would represent a bass drum, high notes that would represent a snare drum. And the caxixi was something of a high hat. And he put all these things together and created just an incredibly inspired performance style that was like nothing that anyone had heard before. He really pioneered a new virtuosic style of music making with the instrument.
(SOUNDBITE OF NANA VASCONCELOS COMPOSITION)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: For those of our audience who may have never been in northeastern Brazil or Brazil at all, describe what northeastern Brazil is like, the place that, you know, gave birth to Nana Vasconcelos and so many other musicians.
BEYER: Well, Brazil is a vast territory, right? So to speak of different regions is necessary because we cannot talk about Brazil as a single unit. I mean, the berimbau really grew up not so much where Nana is from in Recife, but rather in Salvador, in the capital city of Bahia.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right next door.
BEYER: Exactly. Yeah, the state just to the south and west. And because Salvador was a huge port of entry for the transatlantic slave trade, when you travel to Salvador you really are stepping into effectively a kind of an African city. It really feels that way. It feels remarkably different than being in Sao Paulo, than being in Rio de Janeiro, this kind of thing.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let's listen to one more of your compositions. This is part of the berimbau quartet.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCOMUSICAL PERFORMANCE OF GREGORY BEYER'S "BERIMBAU QUARTET NO. 1, 'CHIP'")
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You're not Brazilian.
BEYER: No.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And Brazilians are very proud, fiercely proud of their musical and cultural heritage. What has been the reaction from them to, you know, your music?
BEYER: Well, just after the recording sessions of "MeiaMeia," through the generosity of Northern Illinois University I raised enough funding to take the group Projeto Arcomusical with me on my first month in Brazil. And we performed in Brazil six times, in Minas Gerais and in Bahia. And the last performance was the most meaningful because we went to a place called the Barracao D'Angola, which is run by, as it turns out, my very first teacher of the berimbau, whom I met in New York City, Mr. Cabello (ph).
And Mr. Cabello, when I first met him, I played some of my transcriptions of Nana Vasconcelos for him. And he was happy, but he looked at me and he said, you know, Greg, you've learned well, but you are not Nana Vasconcelos. What are you going to do with the berimbau that will give something new to the world? And I was angry because I was like, man, I want to be Nana Vasconcelos. You don't understand.
But then I realized - you know, maybe a week later I realized he challenged me. And you're right about the pride of Brazilian people. But everyone - unanimously, I would say - came up to us and said, you know, we thought we knew this instrument. We had no idea how beautiful it could be.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Greg Beyer is artistic director of Arcomusical. Their new album is called "MeiaMeia: New Music For Berimbau." He joined us from the studios of WNIU in DeKalb, Ill. Thanks so much for being with us.
BEYER: Really my pleasure, Lulu.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Margaret Wise Brown's children's books are some of the most loved. Here's a hint to help you think of one - just two words - "Goodnight Moon." There are countless others, including "Runaway Bunny," which happens to celebrate its 75th anniversary this year. And now a previously unpublished book called "North, South, East, West" will hit the shelves and bedside tables this week.
Our books editor Barrie Hardymon joins us to chat about that new book and the fascinating woman who wrote it.
Hey there.
BARRIE HARDYMON, BYLINE: Hi.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So tell us about her.
HARDYMON: I think most people think that Margaret Wise Brown was, like, the old lady whispering hush in the "Goodnight Moon" books. But first of all, she was actually kind of a babe. And second of all, in real life, she was this really intrepid woman. She was quite adventurous. There's a new biography out of her now by Amy Gary called "In The Great Green Room." And in that biography, we come to find out that she was this real rebel in a lot of ways. She was born into a world of privilege but was this very mischievous child who drank and smoked and then went on to pursue a really quite successful career in children's literature.
But the interesting thing is she actually really wanted to succeed as a writer for adults and wasn't that fond of children. In fact, at one point she told a reporter that she didn't especially like children and that she wouldn't let anybody get away with anything just because they're little.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I think to some people who don't like "Goodnight Moon," who actively hate "Goodnight Moon," that would not be surprising (laughter).
HARDYMON: Right, right. Well, because the sound of these books can be quite odd. She is a very, very strange woman, and her life kind of reflected that. My favorite anecdote about her comes at her death, actually. She died at the age of 42. She had these tumultuous relationships with both men and women. And when she finally found love with this man named James Stillman Rockefeller - he was of the actual Rockefeller - junior...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Oh.
HARDYMON: And on their honeymoon, she was meeting him to go on this three-year, round-the-world trip. She...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: As you do.
HARDYMON: Right - As one does, as one does. She had an emergency appendectomy and was on bed rest. And when it came time to leave the hospital, a nurse asked her how she was feeling. She kicked up her leg like a Rockette and loosed a blood clot...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Oh.
HARDYMON: ...That killed her almost immediately. So it is certainly a telling anecdote about her.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: This irrepressible spirit, this rebel almost - what do you think about her life and her work appeals to children?
HARDYMON: First of all, the thing that sometimes annoys parents, the incredibly spare style - part of that is that she was part of this - you know, her friends included playwrights and New Yorker editors and, you know, Gertrude Stein was her idol. So there's - I think it influenced her style very much. But I think there's this other layer to it, which I think you can see with "The Runaway Bunny," which is this book that people either find very reassuring or...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Terrifying.
HARDYMON: ...Completely terrifying, where a little bunny who is about to - you know, wants to run away. And children have that feeling. But then the mother says, I will always run after you. And each page is another place that she will find it. So children want that sense of independence. They want to get away, and yet they also want to know, like at the end of the book, that Mom is there and she's got carrot snacks.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You actually gave me "North, South, East, West," and I read it to my 4-year-old. And she loved it. And that's a different kind of book than "Runway Bunny."
HARDYMON: It's almost like a bookend - right? - to "Runaway Bunny."
GARCIA-NAVARRO: A little bit.
HARDYMON: It's sort of the same set up with birds. So there's a little bird who wants to discover the world. He tries north. He tries south. He tries west. But of course, he wants to be east, which is where home is. And there's this lovely ending where the little bird moves on and is telling the same story of "North, South, East, West" to her own eggs as they're hatching out into the world.
So it's a little less intense than the mother bunny following you all over the world. And that is the thing, I think, that really appeals to parents when it does, which is that this relationship that you're having with your child - you are - it's - they're striving for independence. You're trying to keep them safe. You are marching further and further towards separation. And so - and it's sort of a pleasure to read an author who really understands that the process of parenting is - the real heartache of it is that you are going to lose some part of your child as they...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: This is making me so sad.
HARDYMON: I know. I know. But I also think there is this sort of wonderful thing - right? - that kids also can see that the world is so wide.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yes.
HARDYMON: You know, my - I read, of course, "Goodnight Moon" to my littlest guy. And when you get to that bit, you know, goodnight, nobody. He said - Mama, who's nobody? And it's like, well, guess what. Infinity is out there, my friend. But I'm right here. And that's kind of this wonderful thing - right? - that she gave us these wonderful books that showed children the width of the world and give parents and children the feeling that they still will always be together.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Barrie Hardymon on the very deep books of Margaret Wise Brown. She is our books editor here at WEEKEND EDITION.
HARDYMON: Thanks, Lulu.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
After a momentous week in news, let's tune out of politics for just a moment and tune into The Puzzle.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Will Shortz is the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzlemaster.
Good morning, Will.
WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Good morning, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Remind us of last week's puzzle.
SHORTZ: Yeah, it came from listener Peter Collins of Ann Arbor, Mich., - sounded a little more complicated than it was. I said, take the first and last names of a famous comedian. The first three letters of the first name plus the first letter of the last name, in order, spell the name of a god in mythology. The fourth letter of the first name plus the second through fourth letters of the last name, in order, spell the name of another god. Who's the comedian and what gods are these? And the answer was Martin Short, which works out to Mars and Thor.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Mars and Thor. We received nearly 1,100 responses. And the winner is Michael Konopka of Akron, Ohio.
Congratulations.
MICHAEL KONOPKA: Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So how long have you been playing The Puzzle?
KONOPKA: I've been playing The Puzzle off and on since the postcard days when I was a young kid listening to it in my parents' car on the way to church on Sunday.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wow. And I hear solving this week's puzzle was a family effort. How did you do it?
KONOPKA: It was. So my wife, Catherine, she started thinking of names of gods that were four letters. And we came up with - thought that Mars, M-A-R, would be the most likely to be a first name. And I got Martin Short from that. But it was really my son, Will, who kept reminding us to enter - that I kept forgetting. And so it was the last day that I entered. And luckily enough, I was selected.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Glad that he pressured you because you are our winner today. And are you ready to play The Puzzle?
KONOPKA: Yes, I am.
SHORTZ: All right, Michael and Lulu, today I brought a game of categories based on the word combs. And you probably know how this works. I'm going to give you a series of categories. For each one, name something in it starting with each of the letters, C, O, M, B, S. For example, if the category were three-syllable boys' names, you might say Christopher, Oliver, Mathias, Benjamin and Sebastian. Any answer that works is fine, and you can give the answers in any order.
KONOPKA: OK.
SHORTZ: So your first category is musical instruments.
KONOPKA: Let's go with...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Cello?
SHORTZ: Cello, excellent.
KONOPKA: Oh, yes. Oh, oboe.
SHORTZ: Oboe, yes.
KONOPKA: Bongo drums.
SHORTZ: Bongo, good - M and S.
KONOPKA: Maracas.
SHORTZ: I'll give you maracas - marimba, mandolin. And all you need's an S. And I can...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Saxophone.
KONOPKA: Saxophone. Yeah, OK.
SHORTZ: Nice job. Category number two is cities in Florida.
KONOPKA: We'll go Orlando, Miami.
SHORTZ: Yes.
KONOPKA: Boca Raton.
SHORTZ: Yes.
KONOPKA: C and S.
SHORTZ: Yeah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm actually from Florida and I'm blanking (laughter).
KONOPKA: OK. Wait, isn't there, like, a Sealand (ph) or - I can't remember. Trying to think of C.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Cape Canaveral.
KONOPKA: Oh, there's a good one.
SHORTZ: OK, Clearwater, Cocoa Beach. There are several others. And all you need's an S. And what's the one...
KONOPKA: Oh, Sebring, Sebring.
SHORTZ: Sebring, OK.
KONOPKA: I think there is.
SHORTZ: And St. Petersburg, St. Augustine and Sarasota would work. All right, try this one - wild mammals in America.
KONOPKA: Cougar.
SHORTZ: Good.
KONOPKA: Badger.
SHORTZ: Badger, nice. I didn't think of that one.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Otter?
SHORTZ: O, M and S.
KONOPKA: Mountain lion.
SHORTZ: Otter, yes. Mountain lion, yes. All you need's an S.
KONOPKA: Mammals...
SHORTZ: And there's an S that runs around my yard all the time.
KONOPKA: Skunk?
SHORTZ: Skunk, OK. I was going for squirrel...
KONOPKA: Oh.
SHORTZ: ...But skunk's also good. And here's your last category - people and things seen in a church.
KONOPKA: Choir.
SHORTZ: Good.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Organ.
SHORTZ: Organ, good.
KONOPKA: Musial (ph). Missal. Bible.
SHORTZ: OK, also minister. Bible is good. All you need's an S.
KONOPKA: Let's go string guitar?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I would say sacraments.
SHORTZ: String guitar.
KONOPKA: Sacraments, yes.
SHORTZ: Sacraments, nice. And I had stained glass window. OK, nice job.
KONOPKA: Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Those were fun, actually. I enjoyed that, although being from Florida, it's embarrassing that I didn't get more of those. For playing our puzzle today, you'll get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin as well as puzzle books and games. You can read all about it at npr.org/puzzle.
Michael, what member station do you guys all listen to there?
KONOPKA: Two stations - WKSU, that's 89.7, and WCPN 90.3
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Michael Konopka of Akron, Ohio, thanks so much for playing The Puzzle today.
KONOPKA: Thank you very much for having me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right, Will, what's the challenge for next week?
SHORTZ: Yeah, it's an unusual one. It comes from Dan Pitt of Palo Alto, Calif. The numbers 5,000, 8,000 and 9,000 share a property that only five integers altogether have. Identify the property and the two other integers that have it. So again, the numbers are 5,000, 8,000 and 9,000. They share a property that only five integers altogether have. What's the property and what other two integers have this?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you have 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 26, at 3 p.m. Eastern. So include a phone number where we can reach you at that time. 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 WEEKEND EDITION's puzzlemaster, Will Shortz.
Thanks so much, Will.
SHORTZ: Thank you, Lulu.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
In the last two days, we've seen the inauguration of a new president, the reaction to it and Donald Trump's reaction to the reaction. Donald Trump took the oath of office on Friday in front of a crowd of supporters on the National Mall, and he did not like the reports that his crowd was smaller than several previous inaugurations. Yesterday, at the CIA, he said this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But we had a massive field of people. You saw that - packed. I get up this morning. I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field. I said wait a minute, I made a speech. I looked out, the field was - it looked like a million, million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Also yesterday, hundreds of thousands of women marched in Washington and cities around the country and the world. We're joined now by national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let's start with those marches yesterday. What's the significance, in your view, of events like this? Will the protests have any effect on President Trump and his administration?
LIASSON: That depends on whether the protests turn into the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street, whether these marchers stay engaged, turn out to vote in 2018 and 2020 for Democratic candidates - or if they fade away. I think Donald Trump has really said it all this morning when he tweeted, quote, "we just had an election. Why didn't these people vote?" Trump also does not like the size of his assets questioned, whether they are buildings, finances or especially crowds. You heard him at the CIA yesterday.
And today he also tweeted that 31 million people watched the inauguration on television, which he said was 11 million more than four years ago. And yesterday, you can see that these marches are already having an effect on the Trump administration because his press secretary, Sean Spicer, came to the briefing room at the White House to admonish reporters that they had been underplaying the size of Trump's crowds. Here's a little bit of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SEAN SPICER: This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We should say here, Mara, that was a lie essentially. President Trump's first full day in office, he made an important stop to the CIA. Tell us why he went and what he did there.
LIASSON: The purpose of that stop was to reassure the intelligence community that they had his full support, which he did say. He said, I'm with you 1,000 percent. This is after he had compared them to Nazi Germany. He stood in front of the Wall of Heroes at the CIA - those are the plaques for CIA agents who died in service to the country - and then he started lashing out at the media. He blamed them for creating the feud between him and the intelligence community.
And as you just heard, he talked about the size of his crowds.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let's talk a little bit about Friday and the inaugural address. Commentators are saying it's a speech like no other.
LIASSON: It was a speech like no other - very dark. I think it was directed at his base. And these kinds of speeches, very similar to the one he gave at the convention, have been very effective for him. I think around the world, our allies blanched at his slogan, only America first - sounded like he was declaring an end to the American idea where America stands up for democratic values around the world and sees our economic and national security interests in a stable world with as many democracies as possible.
But what's interesting to me about the speech is, so far, the deafening silence from Republicans in Congress about the speech and the themes. He really laid out a very different path for the Republican Party. And so far, you aren't hearing a lot of Republicans saying, yes, America first - only America first is our new slogan.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And really, just in a few sentences, will these protests affect how President Trump will govern?
LIASSON: I think that depends on who co-opts who. The Republican Party wants to manage Trump. Trump wants to co-opt them, harness them for his new nationalist, protectionist agenda. I think we'll see if he can pass that $1 trillion infrastructure plan. But that being said, despite small crowds, despite low approval ratings, Donald Trump is in a very strong political position. He has both houses of Congress, and he has a growing economy, growing GDP, shrinking unemployment, growing household incomes. Now the question is, what will he do with it?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Mara Liasson, thanks so much.
LIASSON: Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
This political acrimony doesn't just play out in Congress. It also divides families and friends. My niece lives here in Washington. She's a Democrat. And her really good friend and roommate is a staunch Republican. I wanted to know how they make it work, so they came by our studios to talk to each other about politics and friendship.
ALEXANDRA URIARTE: My name is Alex Uriarte. I'm 28 years old. I'm a congressional staffer for a member of the Democratic Party.
STEVEN CRUZ: My name's Steven Cruz. I am 26, recently turned, and I run the digital operations for a conservative outreach group.
URIARTE: I remember meeting Steven for the first time while we were still in college.
CRUZ: At this point I had just started working with our student government when we were hosting a big event, and Alex worked on campus. And she saved my life because all of our equipment was nowhere to be found and I was running around, trying to figure out what to do, and so Alex saved the day then. And so I remember her fondly.
She had been living in D.C. for about a year before I moved to the city. A mutual friend of ours was like, oh, you should meet Alex. And it came time to move for both of us, coincidentally. And I remember we were having - we were having brunch and we were just talking about life and things. And a few mimosas down we're like, we should do this. And a month later, we were both moved in together.
URIARTE: We both love wine. We both love to have dinner parties. We have friends from all across the political and, you know, social spectrum. And so we found ourselves to be the kinds of people who could make a little hub out of our home.
CRUZ: I don't want to say it's a politics-free zone because it's completely the opposite, but it's certainly strife-free. So, like, we - there's no topic that's off limits. And sometimes that gets a little contentious.
URIARTE: We both have the same goals for what we would like for other people - to live better lives, to have more elevated lives. And how we go about doing that is very different. And that is where sometimes things get tense because there are logical pathways for how I see things and how he sees things.
CRUZ: I'll give you an example. The night we heard Fidel Castro died, we had a bit of a disagreement on how we approached things. And it's funny because both being from Miami - and while I myself am not of Cuban descent feel very, very strongly about the plight of the Cuban people. So we started with agreements like, OK, well, you know, the dictator is dead. Hopefully it's a new day for democracy and progress in Cuba. But then we really started talking about what that meant for U.S.-Cuba relations. And there we started disagreeing. And we got a little animated. I mean...
URIARTE: (Laughter).
CRUZ: ...You know, we started going back and forth about the measures that the Obama administration had taken.
URIARTE: As a - you know, the daughter of Cubans and as someone who cares a lot about the Cuban community, I still supported the moves that were being made to kind of help free up Cuba.
CRUZ: We kind of started honing in on a lot of what that meant. There was some cheering that went on at home. I might or might not have been dancing around our apartment.
URIARTE: You made Cuban food.
CRUZ: (Laughter) We started frying things. And so it was just this whole big hoopla. But we kept coming back to the fact that we just disagreed fundamentally on how our strategy on Cuba was being carried out because of what I consider a healthy dose of skepticism. I just did not and do not see our approach there bearing fruit. Thankfully, amidst wine and some contraband bottle of Cuban rum...
URIARTE: (Laughter).
CRUZ: ...We decided that on the balance this was a good thing even if we disagreed on the particulars.
URIARTE: You can't hate people if you know their story. That's something that I've heard before, and that's something that has stuck with me. And the source of our friendship has come from knowing each other and respecting each other and admiring each other and how we feel about things and how we think about things.
CRUZ: As Alex mentioned, it's very difficult to dislike somebody or distrust their motives when you can understand where they're coming from and where they're trying to go.
URIARTE: That is the nature and the flow of how we are as friends and as roommates and as people who really genuinely care about each other.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Alexandra Uriarte and Steven Cruz. They're housemates in Washington, D.C.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
If you caught a glimpse of the Women's Marches on TV or social media Saturday, you probably noticed a sea of pink, knitted hats with catlike ears. They've been dubbed pussyhats. And as NPR's Brakkton Booker reports, yes, it was a symbol of solidarity for women's causes. But it was also a defiant message.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) We will not go away. Welcome to your every day.
BRAKKTON BOOKER, BYLINE: Thousands marched through the streets of the nation's capital yesterday and eventually made their way to the White House. Jamie McGovern marched with her sisters, her baby daughter Helen strapped to her back.
JAMIE MCGOVERN: We decided that we just had to come and march. And my mom knit us all pussyhats.
BOOKER: McGovern acknowledges some may find the name of the hats vulgar. But...
MCGOVERN: I feel like we kind of had to take it back - make it a feminist word.
BOOKER: A 2005 video of Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women by their genitals inspired the hat's creation. Deepti Sethi marched with her mom and sister - all wearing the hats. She says it's empowering to reappropriate the word.
DEEPTI SETHI: I think sitting there and saying I'm wearing a pussyhat and not having it reflect something vulgar, something that you should shy away from.
BOOKER: Mom Hema Sethi jumps in with a message to President Trump.
D SETHI: We've got brains. We've got hearts. We've got everything else. You can't just reduce us to just a single anatomical element of our bodies.
BOOKER: At his inauguration Friday, President Trump spoke before a crowd wearing red, make America great again hats. On Saturday, protesters were united wearing pink hats with pointy ears.
Brakkton Booker, NPR News, Washington.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
One of President Trump's central campaign issues was building a wall on the border with Mexico and halting illegal immigration. In a moment, we're going to speak with a Dreamer, but first we want to talk about the border itself.
Pete Saenz is the mayor of Laredo, which sits on the Texas border with Mexico. He's an independent, but he voted for Trump and he greeted the now-president when he visited Laredo in 2015. He joins us in San Antonio this morning on his way back to Laredo from the inauguration. Thanks for being with us.
MAYOR PETE SAENZ: Good morning. How are you, Lulu?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Very well, thank you. Let's start with your views on the wall. Are they in line with the president's?
SAENZ: No, they're not. And yes, we've been very clear there at the border. Keep in mind, Laredo's the No. 1 land port for the Western Hemisphere. We do over $200 billion worth of trade there at a border. Just our port alone, you know, we're second in port value behind Los Angeles. As a customs district, we're third in the entire nation. So we command a lot on trade there.
And obviously, that is the result of a good-neighbor policy that we have with Mexico - and other countries as well but more so Mexico. So that relationship we've also (unintelligible). I've realized that the immigration issue and other border issues are important as well. But the economic development for our nation is also very important.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I've been to that border area. Obviously, there's a huge flow of people back and forth over it. He's talking, though, about illegal immigration. How would the wall, if indeed it is built, affect your town?
SAENZ: Well, it'll be a disaster, frankly. We're a - based on the numbers that I gave you, we're a transportation, trade, commerce, distribution center, warehousing - so we're a trade town. That's our backbone and our bread and butter frankly. So if the wall is there - and it's very offensive, frankly, to the people that - well, to Mexico primarily. And the people there in Laredo and the border area do business with Mexico.
I think we can - by way of a virtual wall - and we can into that if you wish - I think we can accomplish that. And besides, it's impractical. It's a river. We have creeks that actually feed into the river. We have livestock that actually water there in the river, wildlife. I mean, it's just not practical to build a wall, you know, the thick wall he says and the tall and deep wall. So I just don't see it, frankly, even if it were possible. I don't think it is.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We don't have very much longer left. But you just spoke about a virtual wall. You are a Trump supporter. You voted for him. What would be your message to President Trump about what's needed there?
SAENZ: Well, what we need is a virtual wall, frankly. You know, technology is so advanced nowadays. Obviously, people - more Border Patrol - we have plenty now. If he wants to send more, that's fine, too. Truly, what we need is to clean our river, to provide more visibility on both sides - on the Mexican side and on the U.S. side. There's all these invasive species. We have a plant species, which is called carrizo. It's a cane, and we also have a tree-like a shrub.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So your concerns are more environmental?
SAENZ: Accessing, yes - and also River Road. If you want to, you know, clean up where there's more accessibility and visibility, that would go a long way. And then with your vigilance through technology and Border Patrol, people - we work very closely there on the border with the Border Patrol people. So that, I think, would go a long, long way. And - in lieu of a wall.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Pete Saenz, mayor of Laredo, Texas. Thanks so much.
SAENZ: Well, yes ma'am. Thank you for the opportunity. Take care.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Wrapped up in the debate over immigration policy is the fate of the roughly 700,000 undocumented young people known as DREAMers. Under President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, they were given two-year work permits and have temporary relief from deportation. But the future of DACA, as it's known, is unclear. President Trump during his campaign said he would put an end to the program.
So we're going to talk now to Ciriac Alvarez Valle. She is a DREAMer who was brought to Salt Lake City from her family's native Mexico when she was only 5 years old. She's now 22, and she's wrapping up her last semester at the University of Utah. Ciriac Alvarez Valle joins us now. Good morning.
CIRIAC ALVAREZ VALLE: Good morning.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you first applied for the DACA program when you were in high school. What did that mean for you in furthering your education and for your life generally?
ALVAREZ VALLE: For me, I was able to apply at a pivotal age, you know, when I was graduating high school. That way I had more options versus someone who didn't have DACA when they were seniors just because I knew that funding was limited for undocumented students to college. So I was able to work and save up for my college tuition, for my books and for my supplies. And so being able to apply for DACA during my senior year gave me some hope.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It must have been nerve-wracking, though, to actually take the step to apply for DACA, to, as some people say, come out of the shadows.
ALVAREZ VALLE: Yeah, it definitely was because we had to give all of our information - where we live, where we've been these past 15 years and just everything that I've done my whole life from certificates, from church records, school attendance records, grades, et cetera. It was a bit nerve-wracking, right? There's still that fear in the back of my head that this information could be used against us. There's still that small possibility that it might. And that still looms in the back of my head.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What is it like being undocumented in America today?
ALVAREZ VALLE: It's frustrating because a lot of people don't understand and don't want to understand issues of undocumented people. They just say, get in the back of the line. You should have done it right. And it's not like that for a lot of us. It's scary being undocumented, especially for people who aren't young like me, who don't have DACA available to them. It's really uncertain what's to come.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What did your family tell you about being undocumented when you were growing up?
ALVAREZ VALLE: It was something that I always knew. My mom would always tell us not to tell people where we were from, that we didn't have papers. Like, (speaking Spanish) is what they would tell us.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why have you decided to go public about being a person without documents in the United States?
ALVAREZ VALLE: Because I don't think people realize how many undocumented immigrants they talk to on the - on a daily basis. I think a lot of people are not - are kind of ignorant in not knowing that they talk to them, that they work with them, that they see them every day. And, like, telling them my status and being open to answering questions, it definitely gives that opportunity to have the conversations that we need for immigration reform, for things to actually change.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: People listening to this might say your family broke the law when they came into this country without the proper documents and the proper authorization. Why should you be allowed to stay?
ALVAREZ VALLE: Yeah. And we did, but it's because the laws are made this way. And it's unfair to have everything else be able to migrate except humans. Everything else has been globalized and changed. And migration is part of, you know, the globalization process. And if we could have done it legally, we would have, but the opportunity wasn't there for us. And so my parents took the risk. And they knew they were taking that risk to do it because there is more opportunities here in America. And being able to say that I'm about to graduate college, I can affirm that, to say that there was more opportunities for my family.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What are you hoping now for DREAMers like yourself?
ALVAREZ VALLE: I do hope that there's more than DACA. As we see now, there's a lot of fear and anxiety as we await for President Trump to do something, whether he's going to take it away or not. And so I hope that there's more actual change that can keep us away from that fear of deportation looming over our heads or the fear that DACA will be taken away, that fear of uncertainty again. I do hope there is more than just DACA.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Ciriac Alvarez Valle is a senior at the University of Utah and a DREAMer. We're going to be checking back in with her over the next few months as President Trump's immigration plan unfolds. Thank you.
ALVAREZ VALLE: Yeah, thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Later tonight, we'll know who's going to the Super Bowl.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Matt (ph) loads, throws, takes the shot, touchdown.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Big Ben, Tom Brady, two of the top three quarterbacks. This is one for the ages.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: Throwing a goal. And Rodgers (ph) throws to the inside, and that is a touchdown.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: If you're not sure which team to support - the Falcons, the Steelers, the Patriots or the Packers - you might consider following the lead of our next guest. For this week's edition of Out of Bounds, our ongoing conversation about sports and culture, we're talking to Blythe Terrell. This lifelong St. Louis Rams fan didn't cry when her team moved to LA. Instead, she got scientific. Terrell is senior science editor for the news website FiveThirtyEight. And she came to our studios in New York, where she now lives, to tell us about the mathematical process she used to pick a new team. Thanks for being on the program.
BLYTHE TERRELL: Yes, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let me ask you - is it inconceivable to keep rooting for the Rams even though they moved to LA? You know, there are some fans who never leave their team even if the team leaves them. You know, why did you decide to move on?
TERRELL: For me, there were several factors, one of which is the owner of the Rams, Stan Kroenke, created a lot of bad blood. It was not a pretty departure. It was an ugly divorce. And watching that happen, you know, as a fan, I think a lot of St. Louisans were hurt by that and were frustrated with how things went down. And really, my heart would not have been in it had I tried to stick with the LA Rams. It just didn't feel right.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK, so tell us about the process that you went through to help you choose a new team. It involves science.
TERRELL: Yes. Yes. So I work at FiveThirtyEight, where there are many smart people who know how to do many interesting things with data. So I went to one of my colleagues, Neil Paine, one of our excellent sports writers, and said, hey, Neil, this is my problem. I lost my team. I'd like to pick a new one, but I want to do so in a way that involves data so I know that I'm picking the best team that's a good fit for me. Like, I want to pick a new forever team.
So what we did is we came up with a list of criteria that we thought might matter to me. There were 16 of them. It was things like player suspensions, you know, in terms of - there were players being accused of crimes with particular focus on crimes against women. There was ownership. That was a huge one. Obviously I had some challenges with the St. Louis ownership.
So essentially, Neil put all these into a website where I was able to look at side-by-side comparisons and pick which factor was more important. So, you know, it was like uniforms versus ownership and I'd click ownership. And I did that, like, 3,000-some times.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wow.
TERRELL: Yeah. And so we came up with a list of the factors ranked. And then Neil was able to build a model where the different teams fit into the rankings with those factors, and then out popped...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The magical team.
TERRELL: ...The magical team.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And the team it came up with was...
TERRELL: Was the Green Bay Packers.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Such an easy team to love.
(LAUGHTER)
TERRELL: Absolutely. I know (laughter).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It doesn't feel like it's moving out of the box there. Were you happy with the answer?
TERRELL: I was happy with the answer. I wasn't shocked by the answer. But I think that was OK because I knew that it probably ranked high in terms of some of the factors I cared about. You know, it's not that far from St. Louis, for example, not that I live there now. But it's kind of a nearby team. It's a team I watched a little bit growing up. It's a team that I had, like, fairly good feelings toward. You know, they weren't routinely beating my team in important games. They were beating them in other games. But yeah, I mean, it was a team that I felt I already have had a little bit of affinity for and I felt like I could really get behind. So I was pleased.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The fact that you did this with science - it didn't come from your heart. It came from your head. Can you really feel that kind of passion for the team?
TERRELL: I would say it is a starting point, you know? I mean, I think passion is something that you build over time as you create a relationship with a team. And I think that you can start with a team that fits into all these boxes that you think are important to you and build actual real passion from that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what's it like to be a Packers fan in New York City? Is there, like, a big Packers community with cheese heads on that you guys sort of have secret meeting places?
TERRELL: (Laughter) I'm not deep into the Packers fandom in New York City. I'm hoping to get there. I've heard tell of various Packer bars where everyone congregates, but I haven't been to any of those yet. You know, now that they're playing for the NFC championship, I think that's going to be our goal, to go find some place to watch it where we can be around people who are kind of flipping out.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Blythe Terrell is FiveThirtyEight's senior editor for science and a Green Bay Packers fan now. Thanks for joining us.
TERRELL: Thanks, Lulu.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRIBECA SONG, "GET LARGE")
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Millions of people around the U.S. and the world took part in Women's Marches yesterday. One of the larger ones was held in Los Angeles. NPR's Ina Jaffe reports that people at the march said they hope California will play a leading role in the resistance to President Donald Trump.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GINA BELAFONTE: Good morning, Los Angeles.
INA JAFFE, BYLINE: Actress Gina Belafonte greeted tens of thousands of people gathered Pershing Square downtown.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BELAFONTE: Welcome to the Women's March LA.
(CHEERING)
JAFFE: Many more thousands missed that welcome. So many people turned out for the march that the public transit system couldn't cope. Train platforms across the city were crowded with would-be passengers who watched as train after jam-packed train passed by without accepting them.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Unintelligible).
JAFFE: But that was OK. It was still part of the Women's March experience.
VICTORIA MARX: Well, I have tears in my eyes. I just think it's so moving.
JAFFE: Said Victoria Marx.
MARX: I feel like we are called upon to act and to figure out how to be good citizens right now, so this seems like a good start.
JAFFE: Downtown, the crowd continued to grow. When it was time to march from Pershing Square to City Hall, one street could not contain everyone, so there were three separate marches on parallel streets. That's one reason the Los Angeles Police Department couldn't determine the exact size of the crowd, though various estimates place it in the hundreds of thousands.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting) This is what democracy looks like.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Chanting) This is what democracy looks like.
JAFFE: The signs were as diverse as the people who carried them. Some said a woman's place is in the resistance and featured a picture of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in "Star Wars." Another played off the Russian word for no - nyet my president. That was pretty much the attitude of both marchers and speakers. Hilda Solis is an LA County supervisor.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HILDA SOLIS: Let's show Trump that he doesn't represent Los Angeles County in California.
JAFFE: California's elected officials, predominantly Democrats, have been defiant since Trump was elected. State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon says that Californians don't need to heal from the results of the election. They need to fight.
ANTHONY RENDON: The Trump administration's an existential threat to not only the gains that we've made as a state but actually, I think, to democracy itself.
JAFFE: There was a lot of California pride among the marchers, including Nancy Ambriz and Brittany Smith.
NANCY AMBRIZ: California's such a mesh of different cultures. Like, I'm Mexican. Brittany's black. I have, like, Salvadorian friends. I have Jordanian friends.
JAFFE: But Brittany Smith added that LA's easygoing embrace of difference could be in peril.
BRITTANY SMITH: With our new president, a lot of hate has definitely swarmed.
AMBRIZ: Yeah.
SMITH: And it's concerning for a lot of people, a lot of us who are women or minority or not heterosexual.
JAFFE: This was the first time that Ambriz and Smith had ever been to a demonstration. Christine Stangeland, who's in her mid-70s, hopes they make a regular thing of it.
CHRISTINE STANGELAND: It's way overdue for the next generation to step up to the plate after all the years that I, myself, personally have tried to make an effort to be supportive of not only my rights as a woman but the next generation's.
JAFFE: Younger people need to know, she says, that you can march for decades, as she has, and still find there's a long way to go.
Ina Jaffe, NPR News.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Jim Halpert, office prankster extraordinaire from the TV show "The Office," would be very, very proud of our next guest. He's a mechanical engineer who works at a big Silicon Valley tech company, and he designed and built - and you may ask why - a huge Nerf gun in the hopes of one-upping his coworkers in an office Nerf gun battle. This apparently does happen at his office. Mark Rober joins us on the line from California. Thanks for being with us.
MARK ROBER: Good to be here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK, you could have pulled any number of pranks on your coworkers. Explain the Nerf gun.
ROBER: (Laughter) Yeah. So basically, you know, the first day on the job you get there and you realize everybody has a Nerf gun. They had, you know, the smaller ones that shoot the darts. So part of the rite of passage of coming to the company is you have to get your own. And so you had these wars, but it soon became where, you know, someone got the biggest one. And we're all engineers, so somebody modified his to have, like, a high-strength spring loaded actuator inside so it shot really hard.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So it was like a Nerf gun arms race.
ROBER: Yeah, exactly. It was exactly an arms race. So I think the way you win the arms race is just get the bunker buster, right? Just go completely to one extreme. So I built a six-foot Nerf gun that shoots these darts that are made of pool noodles as the shaft and then, like, a toilet plunger as the suction. It shoots them 40 miles an hour about 50 yards. So that, if...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That sounds dangerous. I bet you nobody was going to mess with you after that, right?
ROBER: Yeah. Darts generally flew less in my direction after I kind of flexed my engineering prowess and muscles.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In most office cultures, first of all, there's not Nerf gun wars. And secondly, how do you have the time to, like, engineer a giant Nerf gun? These are questions when the story came up that were flying around. We want to know the answer to those questions.
ROBER: Yeah, so I have, like, a YouTube channel where I kind of use my engineering background to make sort of ridiculous things. So this seemed like sort of a perfect fit, two birds with one stone type of thing. And as - funny enough, it actually became - so I've always wanted to be a Guinness world record holder. And believe it or not, before I made this there was not a category for world's largest Nerf gun, but there is now.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That is such a surprise (laughter).
ROBER: Yes (laughter). And I am the holder, at least for the moment. Until maybe my coworker makes a six-and-a-half-foot Nerf gun, I'm the proud holder of a world record.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Mark Rober, mechanical engineer. He designed a Nerf gun that is now in the Guinness Book of World Records for world's largest Nerf gun. Thanks for being with us.
ROBER: Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Glad you don't work in my office. Bye.
(LAUGHTER)
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
On Friday, the nation's first black president ended his time in office. And a new president, Donald Trump, who has a complicated relationship to issues of race, took over. So we thought it would be a good moment to take a closer look at where we're at when we talk about race in America.
We're joined by three African-American writers who have been thinking about this transition. Here with me in our Washington studio is Debra Dickerson. She's a freelance journalist and the author of "The End of Blackness." On the line, we have Damon Young. He's the editor-in-chief of the black culture website Very Smart Brothas and a columnist at GQ. Also on the line is Jason Riley. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Wall Street Journal columnist.
Thanks for being here everyone.
JASON RILEY: Good to be here.
DEBRA DICKERSON: Glad to be here.
DAMON YOUNG: Thank you for having us.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So a lot of people believed that the fact of Barack Obama's presidency, the first black president, signified a measure of racial progress. In a few words from each of you, what is Obama's legacy on this issue? Let's start with Debra.
DICKERSON: Obviously impossible to encapsulate in a few words - but Barack Obama had to happen. There had to be a first black. And he had to be the safest possible choice. And there was no safer choice than Barack Obama. He's everybody's starter negro.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Damon?
YOUNG: I think that this election proves, or proved, that America ultimately wasn't ready. I kind of equate it to a bank accidentally putting a whole bunch of money into your account and then realizing they made the mistake and then taking all the money out and your money, too. It feels like that we've regressed from where we were before.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And we'll talk about why in a minute. But Jason, I want to hear your thoughts on President Obama's legacy.
RILEY: Well, I do think we've regressed. I agree with that. And the polls, I think, bear that out. And I think that has partly to do with the high expectations that Obama came into office with and partly to do with how he's governed. So there are some things within his control that have affected that and some things, I think, outside of his control that have affected that.
For instance, crime overall is down, at least from where it was back in the early 1990s. But it spiked in many major cities like Baltimore and Chicago and Los Angeles. And I think given the high rates of black crime, that's going to impact race relations.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Debra, I read a piece by Carvell Wallace in The New Yorker just in the past few days. In his last line he writes, what President Obama left me with is power. He felt empowered by the simple fact of a black presidency. You don't feel that, though.
DICKERSON: Well, I don't think it can be gainsaid that having had a black president changes things. Even if his tenure had been disastrous, America survived eight years of having a black president. And that changes things. And I think that for a lot of black people, the fact that we had a black first family that conducted itself so well - sadly, respectability politics is still real. So I think it's the kind of shot in the arm, sadly, that black people need because we're still in a place where when something bad happens, black people text each other and go - oh, God, please tell me they weren't black. You know?
So I think that will be emboldening of a lot of black people to push harder for progress in the face of some really virulent pushback.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Jason, I want to move on from President Obama and talk a little bit about President Trump. He alienated a lot of people during the campaign using racially charged language. What do you make of this moment, transitioning from President Obama to a President Trump with such a complicated history?
RILEY: Well, I think it's hard to discuss Trump without discussing Obama because I think Trump is Obama's legacy. You know, Obama entered the national stage talking about no red America, no blue America, no white America, no black America, then he gets elected and allies himself with people like Al Sharpton, one of the most racially divisive figures in America over the past 30 years. People were taken aback by that.
Obama embraced the Black Lives Matter movement, a very controversial protest group - appoints one of their leaders to his presidential task force on policing. And then, subsequently, we get this alt-right nonsense rising, which I think is the flip side of the Black Lives Matter protest movement. And then, you know, we have them feeding into Trump. I don't think that that's why Trump got elected necessarily. I think he got elected because he flipped a lot of Obama voters. But clearly, he tapped into something there that I think is part of Obama's legacy.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm assuming, Damon, that you disagree with what Jason just said?
YOUNG: Yeah, I...
DICKERSON: As does Debra.
YOUNG: ...Disagree with a lot.
(LAUGHTER)
YOUNG: I'm hearing right now...
(LAUGHTER)
YOUNG: ...I don't know if I have time (laughter)...
DICKERSON: Yeah.
YOUNG: ...To go into each of it. You know, I guess I'll start with the last - well, one of the last things that Jason said about the alt-right movement being the equivalent of Black Lives Matter. I just find that to be absurd, maybe even a little ridiculous just because the Black Lives Matter movement, I mean, literally is just saying black lives matter. And that in itself was a pushback to - I don't know - an idea that black lives had been devalued and, you know, just not treated with the same preciousness and the same regard as other lives. And to equate that with the alt-right movement, which is a movement which is saying black lives don't matter, ultimately, I can't - and I think that even, like, a statement like that, a thought like that just goes to just this normalization of ideas that belong on a fringe. And it's, like - it's almost enraging.
RILEY: Well, can I respond to that?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, this is a conversation.
RILEY: They're similar in that they're both forms of identity politics. I think it's bad for our country to indulge in this sort of thing. And I'm saying President Obama played this game. He made explicit racial appeals to people. He went on black radio and said, I will be personally offended if you do not vote for me, black people - or vote for Hillary Clinton, black people. And he took it even further than that in many of the policies he pushed, you know, equating support for voter ID laws to black disenfranchisement.
DICKERSON: There's a direct relationship between those two things that is readily historically provable. But you introduced the notion of identity politics. Well, identity politics is what started this entire problem. You know - who are the people who can be enslaved? Who are the people who have to sit in the back of the bus? It was on the basis of a particular identity. And when, you know, people start to embrace that identity and push back, you can't then have a problem with identity politics.
And when you hear Trump voters enunciating some of their reasons for embracing Mr. Trump, it's very, very clear that they see what I would call rising equality as a loss for them. They used to be at the top. They used code words, but these kind of jobs used to go to white people. We used to be able to live in this kind of neighborhood, and now we cant.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You're saying that white people feel threatened?
DICKERSON: Well - and that whiteness is currency - that there are very specific privileges that attach to it that they feel are being taken from them.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So Damon, while some accuse President Obama of using identity politics, certainly many people accuse President Trump of using identity politics to get elected. What tangible steps do you think this administration could take on matters of race?
YOUNG: I just don't see anything that Trump or his administration can do that can heal or even stem any type of racial divide. Like, I think that it's completely out of his hands. He'll just - only thing he could do is just make things worse and exacerbate whatever issues. So it's up to the people who are feeling down (laughter) this week and feeling angry and feeling depressed to do something.
DICKERSON: This is a moment for white people. I really believe this is like the Missouri-Kansas border wars, you know, that led to the Civil War. I think this is a war - we're being torn apart in this country. Are we going to be...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You feel this is a civil war?
DICKERSON: Yes. Are we going to be turning each other in? You know, ooh, I saw this one secretly wearing a hijab, you know. You know, I think this one's secretly illegal. And you read these kinds of things going on being collected on the internet.
This is a moment that needs to be led by white people, I really believe. And I read about, like, book clubs forming all over the country with white people learning about privilege and learning the history that has been, quite consciously, kept out of the curriculums. White people need to wake up. They need to get woke and stay woke. I think if you actually look at this country and say - I don't like the way things are. Let me see what my role in it is. And then afterwards, if you tried to educate yourself, if you still feel everything's fine - fine.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So your prescription is education. Jason, where do you think President Trump needs to go to end this discussion?
RILEY: Well, I spent some time a few days after the election in Harlem speaking to black residents and getting their reaction. And a lot of the blacks I spoke to - you know, these were shop owners. These were retirees and business owners and ministers - and they want what everyone else wants. They want safe neighborhoods. They want good schools.
And I think if Trump can deliver on that - they want good jobs - he'll be fine. The country will begin to heal. So I think it's going to be whether he can get this economy going. Job growth will be very important. He wants to do something with education reform. He's a fan of school choice, so are a lot of black people, particularly poorer black people. And so I think he does have an opportunity here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Debra Dickerson, freelance journalist and author; Damon Young, editor-in-chief of Very Smart Brothas and Jason Riley, Wall Street Journal columnist, thank you so much for talking with me today.
DICKERSON: It was fun.
YOUNG: Thank you.
RILEY: Thank you.
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LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
President Donald Trump outlined his governing vision this way.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: From this day forward, it's going to be only America first - America first.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: President Trump used that phrase during the campaign to define his approach to foreign policy. But in his inauguration address, he applied it more broadly to trade, taxes and immigration as well. And it's a philosophy that our next guest shares. Pat Buchanan served as an adviser to three Republican presidents and ran for president a few times himself.
Welcome to the program, sir.
PAT BUCHANAN: Hi, Lulu. How are you?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm very well.
BUCHANAN: Good.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I want to focus on foreign policy for a moment. President Trump said that the U.S. should seek friendship with other nations but should also understand that every country has the right to, quote, "put their own interests first." How would that approach, in your view, refocus American policy?
BUCHANAN: There has been sort of, if you will, a moral interventionism on the part of the United States trying to reshape countries in our own image. Now, we had to go into Afghanistan. We didn't have to go into Iraq. But the idea that you could create a Vermont in the Middle East like that was naive from the beginning.
In other words, nations decide upon their own destinies, and those choices are not the business of the United States if they do not threaten the United States. For example, we have Mr. Putin in Russia. And he appears to be a popular president of Russia. And I don't think it's the business of the National Endowment for Democracy or American diplomats or American foreign policy to try to change the nature of that government.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But America first seems to mean, some would interpret, giving up global influence, giving up being a superpower.
BUCHANAN: No, it does not. What America first means is we put the national interests of the United States and the well-being of our own country and our own people first. Our foreign policy, first and foremost, should be focused on the defense of American freedom, security and rights. That, of course, can entail, given the nature of the world, alliances with Great Britain. And during the Cold War, all of us supported the NATO alliance.
But when you have a situation where the Soviet Union disappeared, worldwide communism has disappeared, do you really need the same alliance we needed in 1956? Lulu, does anyone think that all 28 or 29 NATO countries would go to war if the Russians move back into Estonia? Should they? Should we have a nuclear war over issues like that, or should we really be confronting Russia in eastern Ukraine, for heaven's sakes?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But sir, taking that off the table, saying that we will not get involved, that we will not stand by our allies, many argue it makes the world a more volatile, dangerous place because it encourages countries like Russia to make actions that might destabilize an entire region.
BUCHANAN: Well, there's no doubt that an American guarantee to go to war on behalf of however many countries we are committed to now - 28 some in NATO, you've got the South American countries. You got South Korea, Japan. You had Taiwan. You have the Philippines. The point is, the world has changed, and the United States needs to change with it. We cannot commit to go to war on behalf of 50 countries around the world because that is the formula that is one day going to break down and break out into war.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I want to discuss the phrase America first.
BUCHANAN: Sure.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You know, one historian at CNN described it as the legacy of a, quote, "isolationist, defeatist, anti-Semitic national organization that urged the United States to appease Adolf Hitler." She's referring, of course, to the America First Committee, which opposed World War II. You used it in your campaigns. Donald Trump is now using it as well. Is this really the slogan of our times with such a troubled history?
BUCHANAN: Well, troubled history to MSNBC perhaps. But who supported the America First movement in the 1930s? John F. Kennedy contributed a hundred dollars. It began up at Yale, and one of the founders of it was Gerald R. Ford. It was supported by Herbert Hoover. It was supported by the American Legion.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It doesn't mean it's not a discredited organization?
BUCHANAN: It's - in your eyes, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Not in mine. I'm asking.
BUCHANAN: Well, not in my eyes. I would not have used the slogan if it were some slogan which - to me, it is an honorable group of American patriots who wanted to keep us out of the insane World War II where the British and German - all of them were killing one another - as we had mistakenly gotten into World War I and gotten all those Americans killed so that the European empires could expand.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So there's no war worth fighting in your view? You think Donald Trump, as the new president...
BUCHANAN: There was a war worth fighting, the American Revolution.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: As the American president, your advice to him would be to not get entangled in any foreign conflicts?
BUCHANAN: I would certainly - as I - I told President - or told President Bush - I started a magazine, 2002, along with two other patriotic fellows to keep the United States out of Iraq. We implored him not to go to Iraq. Don't march up to Baghdad because when we get there, we're going to meet some of the other imperialists who've gone before us. That was the greatest diplomatic disaster in my lifetime and perhaps in American history. And it had gotten us involved in a Middle East where it's - there's constant bloodshed going on and no resolution. That was a horrible mistake. People who stand up against wars aren't necessarily always wrong.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Pat Buchanan is the editor of The American Conservative. Thanks so much for being with us.
BUCHANAN: It's a pleasure, Lulu.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Protesters filled the streets in cities around the country and the world on President Donald Trump's first full day in office. Some demonstrators who traveled to the Women's March on Washington are now heading home, and many participants are wondering what's next. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: Their voices echoed across the U.S., from New York City...
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) We go high when they go low.
WANG: ...To Park City, Utah...
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Love, not hate, makes America great. Love, not hate...
WANG: ...And Sioux Falls, S.D.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Native lives matter. Native lives matter.
WANG: For some, the Women's Marches were their first steps into activism, including Felipe Ortiz who attended a rally in Wichita, Kan.
FELIPE ORTIZ: I'm 82 years old, and I'm going for my first long walk for all the women. I won't be here forever, but I'm helping.
WANG: In New York, city officials estimate that more than 400,000 protesters came out for Saturday's march. Amy Mitchell was in the crowd and said she and others were standing up against President Donald Trump.
AMY MITCHELL: I think he's bringing people together in a way that he may not have expected. And if we can all come together, maybe it will only be one term - hopefully.
WANG: Anti-Trump messages also dominated the Women's March in Washington, D.C., which drew some of the biggest names of the feminist movement, including Gloria Steinem.
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GLORIA STEINEM: We are here and around the world for a deep democracy that says we will not be quiet, we will not be controlled, we will work for a world in which all countries are connected. God may be in the details, but the goddess is in connections.
WANG: In D.C., the crowd appeared to be mostly white. Some critics of the Women's March say the organizers failed to fully connect with women of color, even after diversifying the leadership team and broadening policy demands.
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ROSLYN BROCK: The silence in America has been deafening for black women and our families, who also feel forgotten and blocked out of a prosperous society.
WANG: Roslyn Brock is the chair of the National Board of Directors at the NAACP. Her speech to the D.C. crowd touched on the history of women of color often being left behind by the women's suffrage movement.
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BROCK: And so I call upon you, my sisters, in the words of my ancestral she-ro (ph) Sojourner Truth - ain't I a woman?
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WANG: The marches did bring out many families. Thirty-one-year-old Kristina Apgar of Brooklyn, N.Y., came to Washington with her mother and younger sister.
KRISTINA APGAR: I would be here no matter what by myself. But the fact that my mom and my sister are here - it means so much more that we're all now proudly feminists.
WANG: Apgar's mother, Ruth, said her main concern is Republican lawmakers cutting funding for Planned Parenthood.
RUTH APGAR: That's where we went for the medical advice and, quite frankly, birth control. I mean, I came from a middle-class area, but my parents wouldn't talk about that sort of thing. And women today are still using it. And for them to cut the funding, that's outrageous.
WANG: The marches can be an effective way to start a broader campaign, according to Nandini Deo, who studies social movements at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.
NANDINI DEO: It helps all of us, you know, connect with each other, realize there's a lot of us out there. It helps us become more firm in our identity as activists.
WANG: Deo took a bus herself from Philadelphia to D.C. with her husband and two sons, plus some friends and neighbors. But she says what really matters is what protesters decide to do after the marches.
DEO: People's energies can get channeled in lots of different directions. So how do you keep everyone together?
WANG: Deo says she plans to get more involved with congressional elections to support progressive candidates. It's a localized strategy that many marchers say they're ready to take on.
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News, Washington.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
So the question now is - how significant were these massive protests, and what will come out of them? For another perspective, we're joined now by Leah Wright Rigueur. She's an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and an expert on U.S. political and social history. She's on the line from Hartford, Conn. Hi.
LEAH WRIGHT RIGUEUR: Hi. Thanks for having me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Great to have you on the show. This was President Trump's first full day on the job. Has this happened to other presidents so quickly, so early in their tenure?
RIGUEUR: Well, I think we've seen it happen actually before with some of the presidents. We've seen it happen with, say, Woodrow Wilson, and interestingly with the same kind of context, women marching for their rights. The difference with this is the size and the scope. This wasn't just a domestic march. It was a global march with women all over the world and men and their allies participating, you know, in countries across the nation and in cities across the country.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: How significant were they, in your view, in this historical perspective?
RIGUEUR: In this historical perspective, I think it's one - it's a historic moment. So we have one of the largest marches on Washington, but also in cities across the country and across the world. And all told together in the United States, we're now looking at statistics of about - a movement of about - it's between 2 and 3 million people marching for women and for women's rights. That's massive. And I think it's important to consider that, you know, in this contemporary moment it suggests that there will be resistance and there will be dissent for our incoming administration.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I guess the question is what turns a political protest, maybe a one-off, into a movement, something that can be sustained? What needs to happen to this anger?
RIGUEUR: Absolutely. So I think actually that the anger and the motivation that the people, the participants in these marches had is actually - is incredibly valuable. But that has to translate into something that is institutionalized and has structure. So we have to move - right? - from protest to something else because while protest is an excellent way of people voicing their dissent - it's incredibly patriotic, it's a way for people who have felt powerless to have their voices heard and to get people who have never been active in politics before finally active - it has to translate into something concrete, tangible that will actually resist in the face of all of these - you know, the potential for all of these policies and significant political change.
So if we can't - if we don't see institutions and structures come out of this moment, then it becomes simply a visible kind of protest movement when really what we're looking for is something like longevity.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. Looking at who was at these protests yesterday, you're seeing so many disparate groups. They have a lot of different interests, things that they were pushing. How do you bring those people together? If you look at other protest movement in the past, what has created change in government policy?
RIGUEUR: Right. So I want to - you know, some of the most effective protests that we've seen in the past, something like the March on Washington movements both in the 1940s and in the 1960s, one of the big things in addition to visibility is the long-term organizational and institutional groundwork that goes into those moments, right? So when A. Philip Randolph or Bayard Rustin are organizing, they're doing that - or Ella Baker, they're doing that before, right? There's a lot of work that goes into that. And then they're immediately translating that into some kind of force, whether it be lobbying, whether it be having people run for Congress, whether it be organizing on the ground or on a state-by-state level.
Those are the kinds of things that we're going to see - that we need to see. Additionally - and this I know has been a sensitive issue with the women's marches - intersectionality or the kind of positioning of women of color, of, you know, LGBTQ, of class issues. Those are going to be instrumental to having a unified and a solid kind of protest movement that turns into something tangible.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Reaching out to other people across the line. Leah Wright Rigueur from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She joined us on Skype. Thanks for being with us.
RIGUEUR: Oh, thanks for having me.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
It's been nearly two months since a plane crash killed almost an entire soccer team in Brazil. The team's home city of Chapeco has been trying to rebuild, and so has the team. In December, to honor the dead, fans gathered in the stadium, which was filled with coffins. Yesterday they were back again, this time to see the team's first game since the disaster.
PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: Nineteen players were killed in the crash. Today their fans are introduced to the new team. There are tears. The stadium's decorated with tiny paper birds in remembrance of the tragedy and big signs thanking the world for its support. For this small city in south Brazil, this day is about renewal.
There's a big welcome for the families of the dead when they walk onto the field, and also when the reserve goalkeeper arrives in a wheelchair because of his injuries in the crash. There are fireworks when the team is officially awarded the trophy for the big South American competition that, though underdogs, they had hoped to win on the field. They were awarded it after the tragedy in honor of the dead. The crash happened when they were on their way to the finals in Colombia. Radio commentator Rafael Henzel is the only journalist who survived the disaster. Today he's back behind the microphone for the first time.
This is a cafe close to the stadium. The Chapecoense players often came here for breakfast and coffee. Marcio Cecon, an accountant and a lifelong fan, saw them here all the time.
MARCIO CECON: (Through interpreter) They were always very nice. They took photos with us and chatted, so we felt close to them.
REEVES: When the tragedy happened, this city was engulfed by a massive silence, says Cecon. Bruna de Lima, a shop assistant, is a die-hard fan who goes to every game. They say here that this is a city in the countryside that's all about family, church and football, as they call it here. Today, like many, de Lima's wearing the green team shirt honoring her club. She can't stop thinking about the air crash.
BRUNA DE LIMA: (Through interpreter) I do feel angry.
REEVES: The plane plowed into a mountainside in the Andes because it ran out of fuel. Since that day, November the 28, de Lima's been struggling.
DE LIMA: (Through interpreter) The first month was really sad. I cried a lot and couldn't work.
REEVES: The game kicks off under sunny skies just before quarter to 5. Life begins again for Chapecoense. The crowd finds its voice, especially when Chapecoense scores.
(CHEERING)
REEVES: Soon it sounds like every other crowd in this soccer-addicted land. At the 71st minute, the game stops to remember the 71 victims of the air crash - players, club officials, journalists. The players on the field stand and applaud. This game is what they call in soccer a friendly against Brazil's league champions, Palmeiras. For the record, it ends 2-2. Somehow, radio commentator and crash survivor Rafael Henzel makes it to the final whistle.
RAFAEL HENZEL: (Through interpreter) It was a tough day, seeing people and relatives crying. I know the pain doesn't go away.
REEVES: Henzel says he also felt joy. This is the first match of the club's new life - and of his, too, he says. In a bar where the fans go to drink after the game, the new team gets good reviews.
PAULO FEIJO: (Through interpreter) We are on the right way. We built our team quite quickly, so it seems that it's going to get good.
REEVES: They're on their way, says Paulo Feijo. So are their fans. So is this city.
Philip Reeves, NPR News, Chapeco.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
It costs the American health care system twice that of treating diabetes. And yet, it's not really a disease. Psychosomatic illness, where your body acts as if it's sick but there isn't anything wrong, is common and also very misunderstood, according to a new book "Is It All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness" (ph). In it, neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan describes some of the extreme cases she has treated and what may be behind them. She joins us now from member station KUOW in Seattle.
Thanks so much for being with us.
SUZANNE O'SULLIVAN: Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So let's start with a definition. What is psychosomatic illness?
O'SULLIVAN: So psychosomatic illness is a disorder in which people get real physical symptoms that cannot be explained by physical examination or medical tests. No disease can be found to explain them. And there is usually believed to be a psychological or behavioral cause.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: One of the things that's so fascinating about this is how these things manifest themselves. How can you tell when something is imaginary?
O'SULLIVAN: I use the word imaginary in the title of this book. But really, it's to imply that these symptoms come from the imagination, but they're not imaginary. They are incredibly real.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right.
O'SULLIVAN: And when I say that they come from the imagination, it's very much to say that when you develop a disability, it must come from an idea that you have. And that idea exists in your mind. It exists in your imagination, and it's probably drawn from your personal experience. These symptoms are all often based on our ideas about our bodies, what illness we've been exposed to in the past. And then when we're faced with a particular stressful situation, those worries channel themselves into something. And unfortunately, we can make them real in that way.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In the book, you detail some of the cases that you've dealt with. You introduce us to some of your patients. Talk us through one of your cases.
O'SULLIVAN: So just to give you an example of Yvonne (ph). So even as a woman who suffered a minor injury when cleaning fluid was sprayed into her eyes. She had the appropriate first aid immediately after the accident. But the following morning, she woke up and found herself to be profoundly blind. She was obviously taken to the hospital and fully investigated for this. And they couldn't find any explanation for her blindness. But Yvonne's experience was, to give you an example - in unconscious moments, she would reach out and pick something up off a table that she couldn't possibly have picked up if she had not been able to see it. But if you asked her if she could see it, she would say that she could not.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So people aren't doing it on purpose. It's mind over matter almost.
O'SULLIVAN: Absolutely. It is a completely unconscious process. I think one of the things that the sufferers really worry about is that they will be accused of doing it on purpose.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What is the treatment for someone who comes in with a psychosomatic illness of this degree?
O'SULLIVAN: The treatment is very individualized. So it's unlikely that two people will have the disability for exactly the same reason and will require the same treatment. So if you see someone who has suffered a significant psychological trauma that has led them to manifesting physical symptoms, that person will need help of a psychologist and a psychiatrist.
But on the other hand, if you see somebody who has something like a paralysis that has been the result of a maladaptive response to injury, that person isn't going through any specific stress other than the stress of their actual disability. What that person needs is a focus on physical treatments. That person will probably benefit more from a really psychologically-minded, motivated physiotherapist and occupational therapist than they will from the help of a psychiatrist.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you think Western medicine needs to change? When I say Western medicine, this idea that somehow the body and the mind are treated separately - do you think there needs to be a sort of a more holistic approach?
O'SULLIVAN: Absolutely. And I think that this applies to both psychosomatic disorders and to diseases in general. You know, most people with diseases like asthma, diabetes and so on will say that their symptoms are an awful lot worse during periods of psychological distress. So in every sense, our minds and our physical well-being are very closely interlinked. But unfortunately, the way we practice medicine is that the fields of psychiatry and psychology are very separate to the fields of physical medicine. I think a lot of people's lives would be made a lot easier if they could be treated both psychologically as well as having their physical disabilities treated.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan, author of the book "Is It All In Your Head: True Stories Of Imaginary Illness."
Thanks so much for being with us.
O'SULLIVAN: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
And now a new medical device inspired by a children's toy. NPR's Madeline Sofia reports on this low-cost diagnostic tool that could help save lives around the world.
MADELINE SOFIA, BYLINE: The inspiration for the low-tech medical innovation was the whirligig. Maybe you played with one as a kid. It's a disk with a string running through the center, pull the string and the disk spins. Manu Prakash is a biomedical engineer at Stanford University. Most people look at the whirligig and see a toy, Prakash saw potential.
MANU PRAKASH: Nobody had really thought hard about, how does this very simple thing actually work?
MARTIN: Prakash thought he could turn the toy into something health care workers in developing countries desperately needed - a centrifuge, a cheap lightweight centrifuge that didn't require electricity. Centrifuges are machines that spin things like blood samples. The machine spins so fast that the blood separates into different cell types. It's the first step in diagnosing malaria and other diseases.
PRAKASH: It is an incredible tool that's very, very important to have, and it's just - it was completely missing, and most of the time you don't even have power.
SOFIA: So Prakash built a hand-powered centrifuge called the Paperfuge. Based off the whirligig, it's made from a string that passes through a central paper disk that's loaded with blood samples. Pull the string and the blood samples spin just like in the traditional expensive centrifuge, and it really spins.
PRAKASH: To the best of my knowledge, this is the fastest spinning object using human power.
SOFIA: The Paperfuge has already been used to help diagnose malaria in Madagascar, and Prakash is busy at work designing Paperfuges that can be used to test for other diseases. Madeleine Sofia, NPR News.
MARTIN: Is Madeline Sofia is a producer on NPR's special project Joe's Big Idea.
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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Kangaroo mother care, it's a technique for mothers to bond with their newborns immediately after delivery. And the name kind of gives away what this is all about. Naked newborns are placed on their mother's bare chest, a little like a baby kangaroo in its mother pouch.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Aw, that sounds kind of sweet.
MARTIN: Yeah.
INSKEEP: Did you do that as a new mom?
MARTIN: I did.
INSKEEP: Of course.
MARTIN: In fact, I should note though, my husband did it, too.
INSKEEP: Oh, very nice - and people do encourage fathers to kind of bond with the child that way. This is common practice, especially for children who were born prematurely. And it's growing popular for healthy full-term babies, too. Here's NPR's Patti Neighmond.
SALMA SHABAIK: Do you want to say something?
ALI: (Cooing).
PATTI NEIGHMOND, BYLINE: Salma Shabaik nuzzles her newborn little boy, Ali.
SHABAIK: Hello? I think you want to tell us that you just want to sleep (laughter).
NEIGHMOND: Ali was born just two weeks ago - 8 pounds, 3 ounces, 20 inches long - with a full head of shiny black hair. He was delivered at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, where kangaroo mother care is routinely practiced.
SHABAIK: After he delivered. Immediately after, he was on my chest. Cleaning him off, like, rubbing him, all that happening while he was on my chest. I don't know if it was a pediatrician or a nurse practitioner, but whoever was examining the baby examined him also while he was on my chest - so listening with the stethoscope and looking at him and whatnot, everything happening while he was laying on my chest.
NEIGHMOND: Which was different than her firstborn son, who was whisked away to a warming crib and weighed, measured and examined there. He cried a lot, she says. But within seconds of being placed on her chest, Ali stopped crying.
SHABAIK: I loved it. It was really nice to kind of have baby right there with you, rather than watching, trying to see what they're doing, you know, from the bed. When he's right there and I could feel him and touch him and kiss him and all of that - so I think it just added more depth to the delivery.
NEIGHMOND: And there are clear physical benefits for the baby. UCLA OB-GYN, Dr. Lydia Lee.
LYDIA LEE: It improves body temperature, so the baby doesn't cool off. It seems to lower the heartrate of the baby, stabilize the blood pressure. They seem to cry less and not grimace as much.
NEIGHMOND: When babies receive kangaroo mother care, they're better able to breast-feed. And mothers tend to breast-feed for a longer period of time. All good, says Lee, because breast-feeding is well known to keep babies healthy and avoid illness.
At UCLA and at hospitals nationwide, Lee says there's another growing practice aimed at naturalizing the birth experience - delaying cutting the umbilical cord. After the baby is put on the mother's chest, the cord is left attached for about one minute.
LEE: And that allows some of the blood from the placenta to continue going to the baby. And that increases the iron store in the baby.
NEIGHMOND: Allowing not only iron but also other nutrients to continue flowing from mother to baby even after delivery. Pediatrician and researcher Dr. Larry Gray with the Comer Children's Hospital at University of Chicago Medicine did a study that shows kangaroo mother care also seems to mediate pain.
He looked at how babies respond to a heel prick to draw blood - a procedure to screen newborns for diseases that can be identified in the first day of life. Gray found babies cuddled with their mom in kangaroo care seemed to feel less pain.
LARRY GRAY: There was essentially no evidence of the rise in heartrate to suggest that the baby felt pain, compared to the babies who had been swaddled and had that blood procedure in their bassinets sort of alone.
NEIGHMOND: The first place to document how this technique works with premature babies was in Bogota, Colombia. In poor areas where there was no access to incubators and other high-tech equipment, preemies were often sent home with no expectation they would live. But doctors were surprised to see babies whose mothers carried them close, skin to skin, not only survived but thrived. Gray says one likely reason, so-called hidden regulators, which cement the attachment between mom and newborn.
GRAY: It's not just that the mother and the baby are being held together but that the mother in some ways is programming the baby - programming the baby's breathing, programming the baby's temperature, learning the baby's cues. And so there's some magic that happens.
NEIGHMOND: That magic can happen between a baby and a father too, he says, if there's skin-to-skin contact. Now, if mothers or babies are sick and need to be isolated, Gray says just take any opportunity you can to hold your infant skin to skin. Even a little bit of kangaroo mother care, he says, can help. Patti Neighmond, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
On his first day on the job, President Trump made some changes to the Oval Office. He installed gold drapes and moved some statues. First families do have some leeway to make changes to the White House, including changes throughout the house to the art on the walls. NPR's Elizabeth Blair looks at how art gets to the most powerful address in the world.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: A gallery in New York, a curator in Washington, a wealthy couple from Texas - it can take many hands for just one work of art to make it into the White House. Here's an example. The Obamas had a large painting by Susan Rothenberg hanging in what's called the Treaty Room. Mark Rosenthal has admired it since the mid-'70s.
MARK ROSENTHAL: It's an unbelievably energetic, beautiful sort of thing in which a black horse, whose body is only somewhat defined, is seen running across a kind of crimson field.
BLAIR: When Rosenthal became a curator at the National Gallery of Art 20 years later, he still remembered the painting and set out to acquire it. For that, he needed money. So he convinced Texas donors Nancy and Perry Bass, whose money came from the oil industry, to purchase it for the museum.
ROSENTHAL: The other thing that was notable about them was that they were revered conservationists.
BLAIR: Rosenthal thought the picture of the horse might speak to them. It did, and the painting entered the National Gallery's collection. Jump ahead to 2009 when the Obamas moved into the White House. The National Gallery's current staff preferred not to be interviewed, but Rosenthal says, typically, the new first family sends someone there and to other museums to pick out art for their private living quarters.
ROSENTHAL: And it might be a friend. It might be a decorator. It might be anybody. It's very much a kid in a candy store.
BLAIR: In the case of the Rothenberg horse painting, that lucky kid was the Obamas' decorator. But when it comes to public areas in the White House, the rules are different.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "A TOUR OF THE WHITE HOUSE WITH MRS. JOHN F. KENNEDY")
CHARLES COLLINGWOOD: Well, now, can you make these changes according to your own personal tastes and desires?
JACQUELINE KENNEDY: Well, no. I have a committee which has museum experts and government people and private citizens on it.
BLAIR: In the early 1960s, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy helped bring some order to the process of how art should enter the White House and be paid for. For decades, it was pretty haphazard, says art historian Bill Kloss.
BILL KLOSS: In the 19th century, in particular, one of the ways that Congress had to express their unhappiness with a particular administration incoming was to give them little or no funding for new furniture or new rugs or anything that was needed. So on more than one occasion, they held a big sale on the White House lawn in front and sold what they could to raise funds to buy new furnishings.
BLAIR: Today, those funds come from a nonprofit that raises money from private donations and merchandise.
BETTY MONKMAN: Through the sale of their books and their publications and their Christmas ornaments and so forth.
BLAIR: Betty Monkman is a former White House curator. She started out at the White House in 1967, a few years after President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order establishing the curator position. She says the goal is to collect a work by and about Americans, and there were gaps in the collection.
MONKMAN: We only had copies of a lot of 19th-century paintings, so we always were on the lookout for life portraits of, for instance, John Adams or someone - or Abigail Adams, which we still have not acquired because there are so few of them out there - but also, then, to have paintings that represented certain regions of the country.
BLAIR: A New Mexico gap, for example, was filled in during the Clinton administration with a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe. First ladies Laura Bush and Michelle Obama also modernized the collection. Obama acquired a vibrant abstract work by the late Alma Thomas, the first African-American woman in the permanent collection. Bush acquired a painting by the African-American artist Jacob Lawrence for the White House Green Room. In 2008, she told C-SPAN the White House should showcase American traditions of the past but also stay relevant.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO, "WHITE HOUSE TOUR WITH LAURA BUSH")
LAURA BUSH: The White House goes on, and history continues to be made here. And so I also want the White House to reflect more modern presidents and more modern times.
BLAIR: It's too soon to say what impact Mr. and Mrs. Trump will have on the White House art collection, but former curator Mark Rosenthal says that these decisions are worth watching.
ROSENTHAL: What a person or family chooses to live with is incredibly telling about their openness to visual experiences. One ought to be expanding one's horizons all the time.
BLAIR: The White House is actually an accredited museum with a curatorial staff and a committee dedicated to its preservation. So if Mr. and Mrs. Trump do decide to add to its collection, they'll have plenty of help.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News, Washington.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The future of the Affordable Care Act means a lot to the people we're about to meet in Ohio. Republicans in Congress are moving to repeal the law and have not said what they want to replace it. One part of the law known as Obamacare allowed states to expand Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor. Some States declined that opportunity, but Ohio's Republican governor, John Kasich, took it. Nick Castele of WCPN Ideastream met people who were affected.
NICK CASTELE, BYLINE: It's lunchtime at a social services drop-in center in Cleveland. In the back of the cafeteria, a pair of health care navigators are making calls to help people sign up for Medicaid. Nearby, Evelyn Johnson says health insurance has really helped her.
EVELYN JOHNSON: So far, I've gotten a pair of glasses. And they're going to do my teeth.
CASTELE: Johnson is living with a friend, does not have kids and makes some money babysitting. She says without Medicaid, she would not be able to get the various prescription drugs she needs.
JOHNSON: If I had to pay for my medical costs, I wouldn't be taking no medicine. There's no way. I take too many pills.
CASTELE: Around 700,000 Ohioans have signed up for expanded Medicaid since January 2014. It used to be limited largely to low-income children, parents and people with disabilities. Now all individuals making at or below $16,000 a year for a single person can be covered. Ohio Governor John Kasich staked out an unpopular position among many Republicans. He fought his own party and then sidestepped the state legislature to get the expansion done. At an event with business leaders this month, Kasich argued it's been a good deal for the state.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHN KASICH: If they don't get coverage, they end up in the emergency room. They end up sicker, more expensive, and we pay one way or the other. And so this has been a good thing for Ohio.
CASTELE: Also defending their decisions to expand Medicaid are such Republican governors as Rick Snyder in Michigan and Brian Sandoval in Nevada.
JOHN CORLETT: You pull on one thread, you topple the whole tower.
CASTELE: John Corlett ran Medicaid in Ohio under the previous Democratic administration. Now he runs a think tank in Cleveland called the Center for Community Solutions.
CORLETT: There's nothing to say that the program can't be improved - that it can't be, you know, made better. But to - just to say we're going to get rid of all of it and then we'll figure out how to make it better, I think, would be really disruptive. It'd be disruptive to health care providers, to patients.
CASTELE: Medicaid covers about 1 in 4 people here in Ohio. So if there are cuts, doctors and hospitals will see a financial impact. Last year, the state asked the federal government to require beneficiaries to pay into health savings accounts. The feds denied it. But with a new administration, there could be changes on the horizon.
GREG LAWSON: Well, I think that with the constellation in Washington the way that it is, that there's going to be an awful lot of opportunities.
CASTELE: Greg Lawson is a senior policy analyst with the Buckeye Institute, a conservative think tank in Ohio that opposed expansion. He'd like to see limits on federal spending per state. And he hopes Ohio will get more freedom to alter Medicaid, such as by adding a work requirement for some beneficiaries.
LAWSON: I don't think you're going to see the light switch, probably, just get turned and, you know, one day it's all going to just disappear. I think what you're more likely to see is major structural changes to the program that, over time, will have budgetary impacts.
CASTELE: But it's not clear yet what shape those changes will take or whether the governor who expanded Medicaid here will support them.
For NPR News, I'm Nick Castele in Cleveland.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Here's what Germany's foreign minister said over the weekend. The old world of the 20th century is gone. What the world of tomorrow will look like is yet unclear. That was a response to the inauguration of President Donald Trump and what he had to say at his inaugural address.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it's going to be only America first - America first.
INSKEEP: Let's talk about that with Anthony Gardner, who until last week was the United States ambassador to the European Union. He joins us from Venice.
Welcome to the program, sir.
ANTHONY GARDNER: Thank you very much. It's good to be on the program.
INSKEEP: First, excellent choice to be in Venice for one of your first days off of work. Let me just ask about what the president said there. By insisting that the United States is going to put its own interests first - well, I mean, every president would say that in some fashion or other. What is different here?
GARDNER: Well, he said two things in the address that weren't quoted there but certainly struck me and struck many, many people in Europe. And the first thing he says - I'm quoting - "protection will lead to great prosperity and strength." And the second thing he said is "we will follow two simple rules - buy American and hire American."
Those were among the two things that really raised considerable concerns over here in Europe because imagine if every country were to follow those rules - protection, close the borders, and only buy national. It would be a disaster.
INSKEEP: When you say the system we helped to build after the second world war, you're referring to the same system, I think, as Germany's foreign minister whose words we heard.
GARDNER: Absolutely.
INSKEEP: Would you explain what it is?
GARDNER: Well, it's an open world trading system - liberal international economic order, where we believe in globalization. That system has made us rich and has made Europe rich. And if really the vision is now we close our borders, we start taxing imports, we only buy national... Again, just imagine what that means. If Mexico says, we're not going to buy U.S. goods. Germany says, we're not going to buy U.S. goods; we only buy German goods, and Mexico only can buy Mexican goods. The international economic system that we've built simply falls apart. And a lot of people will suffer, including many of the people who voted for this president.
INSKEEP: Could that system survive some tweaking though - the United States pushing for better trade deals, but there's still trade, for example?
GARDNER: Well, of course. We all believe in good trade deals. And I think that we were well on the way to striking good trade deals. I think the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement would have been not only important economically to raise economic growth but also, importantly, to help us write the rules of global trade, which is what we've been doing for decades. The irony is that by ripping this up, we will hand to China the opportunity to write the rules of global trade. I don't see how that benefits us.
INSKEEP: Let me ask, Ambassador, because you were the ambassador to the European Union, an institution that I think it's fair to say is in a lot of trouble at the moment. Even before Britain voted to leave the European Union, there was much talk of the collapse - or the dissolution of the European Union. There had been for several years.
GARDNER: Well, that's a great question. You know, a lot of people have focused on the president's statements about the upending of decades of policy on China and the reversal of policy on Israel and the reversal of policy on climate change, Iran and Cuba. But fewer people have focused on the reversal of policy with regard to the European Union.
He said in an interview last weekend that, at best, he doesn't really care whether the EU stays together or falls apart. He said it was a vehicle for German power and that it was set up simply to beat us in trade. All of those, I think, are inaccurate statements. And remember that Prime Minister May, in her speech about Brexit, said while Brexit needs to continue - that's what the people wanted - she emphasized the importance of the EU staying together and being an effective force.
And I can tell you, I've followed in the line of 60 years of bipartisan policy - 60 years. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have all seen it in our fundamental national security interest to promote European integration and the EU.
INSKEEP: Does it matter to the United States, though, if the European Union falls apart?
GARDNER: It matters tremendously. Look, just talk to the U.S. business community that has been among the strongest supporters of the integration project because the single market has been very beneficial to U.S. exports, also to European growth and its ability to be an effective partner on many regional and international issues of concern. If it fragments - if there are more Brexits, so that Europe will be weak, it'll import less from the United States. And it will not be a partner. I don't see how that could benefit us.
INSKEEP: And you mentioned Prime Minister May. Of course, you're referring to Theresa May, the prime minister of Britain, who's going to be the first foreign leader that the new president will meet with. He's already spoken of trying to quickly reach a trade agreement with Great Britain. Can that be beneficial to the United States?
GARDNER: Well, sure. It'd be beneficial to the United States, but we need to be realistic here. And I want to emphasize that point. Doing a free trade agreement between the United States and the U.K. won't be simple. And it won't be quick. Now, before we can really negotiate a free trade agreement with the U.K., we have to know the contours of their own deal with the European Union. And that will take two-plus years before we could even start. The U.K. can't start negotiating before they leave the European Union. So the idea that they're going to get a deal done with us quickly is just not based on reality.
INSKEEP: Anthony Gardner was U.S. ambassador to the European Union in Brussels during the Obama administration. Thanks very much.
GARDNER: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Donald Trump talked a whole lot about building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico when he was a candidate. Now that he's president, it's unclear just what that wall is going to look like and when it might get built. What we know so far is that it's likely to be a fence, not a wall. It won't extend the length of the border, and it will be very unpopular with our southern neighbor. NPR's John Burnett reports.
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: At the moment, about a third of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico is fenced. There are three kinds of fencing - some 10 feet tall, some 20 feet, some wire mesh, some steel posts. You can see all three types here in the gritty, no man's land between Tijuana, Mexico, and Imperial Beach, Calif. This is the oldest.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING ON METAL)
JAMES NIELSEN: This fence that I just struck is landing mat material from the Vietnam War.
BURNETT: James Nielsen is a Border Patrol agent in the San Diego sector.
NIELSEN: And we use it as our primary fence, which is a vehicle barrier so vehicles wouldn't easily be able to drive from Mexico into the U.S.
BURNETT: Border enforcement officials have been telling Trump's transition team that a fence alone is not enough. You also need agents, camera towers, stadium lights and sensors. If the president insists on a great wall to deliver on his signature campaign promise, Customs and Border Protection has identified 400 miles where the fence can be extended or reinforced. But there are clearly sections where it remains impractical. For instance, the border fence stops at a gnarly mountain range at Otay Mesa, about 15 miles east of the Pacific Ocean. The view from here is open country - no dividing line, no nothing.
Again, Agent James Nielsen.
JOSHUA DEVACK: At the time that this fence was built, it was too expensive to continue. And there's also this natural barrier here that a lot of crossers choose not to climb this mountain. They prefer to have easier access to roads and civilization.
BURNETT: According to an 8-year-old estimate by the Government Accountability Office, the border fence cost the government $3 million to $4 million a mile to build. Estimates for additional fencing in harsher terrain could surpass $10 million a mile. Trump still claims he'll give the bill to Mexico. Earlier this month, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto restated that his country, of course, will not pay. The existing wall and talk of more wall remains unpopular with Mexicans.
As the border agent is interviewed, a 15-year-old Mexican girl named Carla Martinez watches from a park on the Tijuana side. I thrust a microphone through the narrow space between the thick iron posts.
(Speaking Spanish).
CARLA MARTINEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
BURNETT: "We're against it," she says. "We won't pay for it. It's bad because it's racist. There has to be a border between different countries. But this is just going to divide us more."
CARLA: (Speaking Spanish).
BURNETT: Mexico has not made the fence-building easy. In the mid-2000s, a company called Sundt Construction erected about a hundred miles of fence in the remote West Desert. Company president Mike Hoover says the U.S. government told his construction crews not to set foot across the international divide.
MICHAEL HOOVER: So we had a tight working area. That was a challenge. It was unusual. But with proper planning, we could work our way through that.
BURNETT: There were other challenges. In one stretch near Yuma, Ariz., the soil was so soft they had to tow their equipment in with bulldozers. In some places, they had to blast through solid rock to set the fence panels. Summer temperatures soared above 100 degrees. Workers had to take frequent breaks to avoid heatstroke. And because some Mexicans were hostile to the fence, Hoover says federal border agents and private security guards had to protect his construction crews 24/7.
HOOVER: We did have some instances of rock-throwing from the Mexican side. I know of at least one instance where we had some shots fired in our direction, close enough that we were plenty worried.
BURNETT: Despite the challenges, if Trump gets his wall Sundt Construction hopes to win a new contract and return to the border to continue the international fence.
John Burnett, NPR News, Chula Vista, Calif.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In the audio, the following quote should have been attributed to Border Patrol spokesman Joshua Devack, not agent James Nielsen: “At the time that this fence was built, it was too expensive to continue. And there's also this natural barrier here that a lot of crossers choose not to climb this mountain. They prefer to have easier access to roads and civilization.”]
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There's been renewed fighting over the weekend in Yemen, with dozens of people killed. That's according to local media. The conflict there is complicated because of the different international players. Saudi Arabia is backing the Yemeni government and leading airstrikes against the Houthi rebels - that's a group that has backing from Iran. The U.S. is involved, too. America is Saudi Arabia's ally and chief arms supplier. And the U.S. is conducting its own drone strikes against al-Qaida in Yemen.
To get a sense of how people are living through this crisis at this moment, we're going to speak now with Hisham al-Omeisy. He's an independent political commentator who lives in the capital, Sana'a.
Thank you so much for being with us.
HISHAM AL-OMEISY: Thank you for having me, Rachel.
MARTIN: I understand you live in Sana'a with your family. Can you just give us a sense of what a day is like in Sana'a?
OMEISY: Well, the situation has been rapidly deteriorating. The Saudi-led coalition has been imposing a nationwide blockade in addition, of course, to the war. And since Yemen imports almost 90 percent of its food as well as fuel, it's choking the local population. It's a really bad situation on the ground.
MARTIN: How do people make ends meet? I mean, literally, what do you go through to have to get food and supplies?
OMEISY: Well, my family is one of the fortunate ones. I'm well-off, when almost 95 percent of the Yemeni population are not. I can go out and buy some stuff, whatever is still available. The prices have almost tripled for foodstuffs, and there's little left in the market. And a lot of people depend on alms - some of the well-off people give the poor some money - but that's not enough, which is why a lot of people are reliant on aid organizations. You see long lines of people, like, for wheat, for rice, for water. The U.N. has repeatedly said it's one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world today. Yet, aid is not flowing in.
MARTIN: Are schools still open? Are your kids still in school? Are their friends still in school?
OMEISY: I'm sure you must have heard of repeated airstrikes against schools. The Saudis have justified those airstrikes because they say the Houthis are basically recruiting child soldiers. But there are still some schools open. Unfortunately, in my case for instance, I let my kids go to school, but three times a week, I run and I pull them out of school because of the airstrikes intensifying. I don't want them to just stay home. They need to go to school. But I also don't want to risk it.
MARTIN: So what does this mean for you, for your family? Do you imagine that you will still be able to build a future in Sana'a, in Yemen?
OMEISY: Well, currently, we're hoping that the U.N. is going to intervene with a solid plan. Unfortunately, the track record for the U.N. has been really bad. For the last three attempts, they fell apart. Secretary Kerry actually came up with a really good plan. But unfortunately, the Saudis backed out of it, the Yemeni legitimate government backed out of it, and Secretary Kerry ran out of time. He proposed that plan in October, which was near his term, so nobody really took it seriously. And when he left office, they dropped the plan and came up with a totally different and new plan. They're hoping that it would run into play, but I highly doubt it will. So for us here in Yemen, we know we're in it for the long haul.
MARTIN: Hisham al-Omeisy - he spoke to us from the Yemeni capital of Sana'a. He lives there with his wife and children.
Thank you so much.
OMEISY: Thank you for having me, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin bringing you the most important story you're ever going to hear. OK, you can hear that hyperbole a mile away. But sometimes, it can be more complicated to sort out the truth from fiction these days, which is why the University of Washington is considering a new class offering with a provocative name, calling b.s. Dr. Jevin West says it's about teaching better critical thinking skills - identifying b.s., sifting through b.s. and being able to respond to b.s. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Let's head out now to the center of the country, to Kansas to be precise. That's where we have reached our colleague Melissa Block. She is just starting out on a road trip that will take her all over the country over the next few months. She'll be profiling communities, big ones, small ones.
Melissa, you are in Kansas now. Where exactly are you?
MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: We have pulled off the side of the road, Rachel, in Gas, Kan., of all places. We wanted to start this road trip in the heartland of the country. We're launching this series of stories that we're calling Our Land, and we're really looking for a sense of how people's identity is shaped by where they live.
I'm really curious to talk to people about the meaning that people get from their land or maybe the history of the place they're from, how where they're from shapes who they are and how they see the country. And what we hope is that along the way, with these stories, the characters that we meet, we're going to sketch a portrait of who we are as a country at this point.
MARTIN: And you're just starting out on your big journey, Melissa. But you're going to introduce us, I understand, to a family that is embarking on a different kind of journey of their own, right?
BLOCK: That's right. We're about to spend some time with the Rahimov family. They're in Kansas City, Mo., and they welcomed us into their home with a feast from their homeland.
LIMARA RAHIMOV: OK, this is plov. It's Uzbek national dish.
BLOCK: Rice plov with beef, tangy beet salad and pickled cabbage - the flavors of Uzbekistan transported to Kansas City, Mo.
For Erkin and Limara Rahimov, it's the prelude to a big event.
ERKIN RAHIMOV: Tomorrow is a big day for us.
L. RAHIMOV: Very important day tomorrow.
BLOCK: After living in the U.S. for seven years, the Rahimovs are about to become naturalized as U.S. citizens.
E. RAHIMOV: I remember, like, when we came to Kansas City with two small kids and three suitcases (laughter). It was challenging first time.
BLOCK: The Rahimovs got lucky. After years of trying, they finally won the green card lottery to immigrate to the U.S. So in 2010, they left Uzbekistan, a harsh authoritarian state, and landed in Kansas City with their 6-month-old and 9-year-old sons and not much else.
E. RAHIMOV: The first days, we were sleeping on the carpet. We just put sheets on it. And slowly, slowly, we started to work and buy some stuff.
BLOCK: Now they own their home, a spare, tidy duplex in Kansas City. They just leased a new car. Erkin is a civil engineer. He works in product support for a company that makes harvesting equipment. Limara taught math and physics in Uzbekistan. Now she works with kids at an after-school program, and she's studying for a degree in computer science. Their sons are thriving. Rasool, now 7, is a Pokemon fiend.
RASOOL: This one is stronger because it can faint Charizard EX.
BLOCK: Sixteen-year-old Murad, who spoke no English when he arrived here, is an honors student on an accelerated track through high school. He loves astronomy, and his dream is to work for NASA.
MURAD: It's amazing that my parents managed to get me and my little brother here for us to have a really bright future ahead of us. And I'm really proud of my parents.
BLOCK: Even though the Rahimovs came in as legal, permanent residents with green cards, they tell me this step, becoming U.S. citizens, really means something.
L. RAHIMOV: We will be, I think, real Americans, right?
BLOCK: What is it that America symbolizes for you at this point? What is it that you're joining?
E. RAHIMOV: Freedom. Freedom. Even my name means freedom.
L. RAHIMOV: Yes (laughter).
E. RAHIMOV: Erkin. My name is translated like liberty or freedom, Erkin.
BLOCK: So it's part of your DNA.
E. RAHIMOV: Yeah.
BLOCK: Erkin and Limara share a family history that's etched with sadness. They each have parents who are Crimean Tatars. The Tatars were forcibly deported from Crimea in 1944 in a mass expulsion on orders of Joseph Stalin. The Rahimovs know well that freedom is something to be cherished.
AUTOMATED VOICE: Turn left at the traffic light.
BLOCK: The next morning, we head out for the ceremony. Erkin is wearing a somber suit and tie, Limara, an elegant black wool dress. We're joined by Erkin's 26-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Sabikha, a financial analyst with an MBA. She's taken a day off from her new job in New Jersey to become a citizen with them.
SABIKHA RAHIMOV: Almost to the finish line, right? Well, maybe just new beginning actually (laughter).
ARTHUR FEDERMAN: All rise. Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye.
BLOCK: Courtroom 8C at the federal courthouse in Kansas City, Judge Arthur Federman presiding.
FEDERMAN: It's rare that we have an occasion in the courthouse where everyone leaves happy. And hopefully, this will be one of those days.
BLOCK: Before him sit 59 immigrants from 29 countries...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Bangladesh.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Burma.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Jordan.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Benin.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: From Mexico.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Somalia.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: Haiti.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: Jamaica.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #5: From India.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #5: Ireland.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #6: Poland.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #6: South Sudan.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #7: From Iraq.
BLOCK: ...All about to become U.S. citizens. With rapt attention, they raise their right hands and recite the oath of allegiance.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #8: I do hereby declare.
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: I do hereby declare.
BLOCK: They pledge to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #8: So help me God.
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: So help me God.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #8: Congratulations.
FEDERMAN: Congratulations. Please be seated, everyone.
BLOCK: For Judge Federman, this ceremony has special resonance. As he tells the immigrants, he is himself the child of naturalized citizens. His parents survived the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps and forged a new life in America. As Erkin Rahimov listens to the judge, he gently dabs away tears that roll down his cheeks.
FEDERMAN: We need to recognize that we are a nation of immigrants. And in the same way I told you my family's story, I hope that you will tell your story to us and to our children so that we can all appreciate the great diversity that makes up our country.
BLOCK: Later, as the Rahimovs leave the courthouse, their eyes are sparkling. They're holding copies of the U.S. Constitution and small American flags.
E. RAHIMOV: We are American citizens now.
S. RAHIMOV: I am so excited, and I want to make this country better. It's gave so much to me. I want to give back.
BLOCK: And Rachel, after that ceremony, just about all of those 59 newly minted U.S. citizens walked out of the courtroom and registered to vote on the spot.
MARTIN: Our colleague Melissa Block - she's on the first leg of her reporting road trip. And Melissa, where are you off to next?
BLOCK: We're headed to three cities, all called Independence. We're starting in Independence, Kan.; then we're moving up to Independence, Mo., hometown of Harry Truman; and finally ending up in Independence, Iowa.
MARTIN: I like it. OK, Melissa, we'll talk to you later.
BLOCK: You bet. Thanks, Rachel.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE END OF THE OCEAN'S "VERSES FROM OUR CAPTAIN")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's talk about the new president and the media. President Trump and his advisers certainly are. And NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik is here to talk about it.
Hi, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: So how'd the new White House start off with the press corps?
FOLKENFLIK: What's rockier than rocky? Boulders? What do you want to say...
INSKEEP: Stony?
FOLKENFLIK: It was brutal. They decided, in the first full day of office, both the White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and, for that matter, President Trump himself to come out swinging, to hit back at the press for coverage of the crowds at the inauguration, the comparisons with President Obama's first inauguration or with the march in Washington and other cities were odious, those comparisons and that Trump was being disrespected by what they claimed was dishonest coverage.
And by the way, relying on assertions in the Press Secretary Sean Spicer's account that were disprovable before he even uttered them - that is, a series of factual claims that were disproved by the nation's top media organizations, you know, within moments.
INSKEEP: And you can just look at the photos of the inaugural crowd size. It was a big crowd. There was a bigger crowd at the Obama inauguration and some other events, end of story. And it's a ridiculous discussion, as Chris Wallace of Fox News called it over the weekend.
FOLKENFLIK: End of story and it shouldn't be a story. It should be a sentence somewhere. Instead, this is what the president and his top aides really decided to make part of their rhetoric and refused to yield any ground. There was a single, perhaps, acknowledgment from Donald Trump's own Twitter account that dissent and protest is part of the American experience. But other than that, really a rejection of the idea that the press has the ability to cover things in a way different from what the administration would want.
Sean Spicer ended his very angry press briefing by saying, you know, we're going to hold you guys accountable, then didn't take questions. That's really a bravura performance if you want to indicate the degree of anger at what is seen as part of the workings of democracy.
INSKEEP: And the next morning, the presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway was on NBC's "Meet The Press." Chuck Todd, the host, asked why Sean Spicer, the press secretary, would utter, quote, "provable falsehoods," and Conway replied this way.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MEET THE PRESS")
KELLYANNE CONWAY: Chuck, I mean, if we're going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think we're going to have to rethink our relationship here.
INSKEEP: Rethink our relationship?
FOLKENFLIK: Right. So there's a rebuke that carries an implied threat - that the White House was already toying with the idea of moving reporters out of the White House for briefings and some lingering idea that they would bring in a lot of other nontraditional - perhaps more Trump-friendly - press. But also, she went on to say that Sean Spicer was offering alternative facts. He wasn't offering different facts that he thought would shed different kind of light on things. He was offering items of information that weren't true and were disprovable in many cases. And that's more of an alternative reality than alternative fact.
INSKEEP: Does this matter, David Folkenflik? There are far more serious things that this administration had promised to be doing at the very beginning of the administration, involving health care, security, ethics, trade, on and on.
FOLKENFLIK: On one hand, it is trivial, as a lot of people have said. I think the rhetoric matters because it's serving to undercut the role that the press plays, perhaps undercutting the media's credibility with at least the most loyal part of Mr. Trump's base should exposes come forward, investigations get launched by news organizations - the hope it'd undermine that.
I think also there's the question of what to believe. Little more than a decade ago, Scott McClellan had to resign as President George W. Bush's press secretary some months after it became clear he had misled reporters - unwittingly but nonetheless - about actions of senior White House officials.
And this really is chipping away at the credibility of senior White House officials from day one with the press. The question is whether or not Trump can maintain his credibility with more than his most ardent followers. A few - and his top aides are going to offer statements that are so immediately disprovable about matters minor, like this, or more consequential in the months ahead.
INSKEEP: That's NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik.
David, thanks.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Awards for the best kids books of the year were announced this morning by the American Library Association. The Caldecott Medal for best picture book went to a book called "Radiant Child: The Story Of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat." And the Newbery for best children's literature went to "The Girl Who Drank The Moon." NPR's Lynn Neary looks back at the impact of these awards.
LYNN NEARY, BYLINE: Everyone, it seems, has a favorite children's book. Adults often fondly remember the first book that really touched them. And when those who write and illustrate kids books win the Caldecott and Newbery Medals? Well, last year's Newbery winner, Matt de la Pena, says it was an unreal experience.
MATT DE LA PENA: I thought, this is probably an episode of "Punk'd." I just couldn't believe it.
NEARY: There's good reason for the excitement, as retired librarian Rita Auerbach noted in 2013, when the called Caldecott Medal celebrated its 75th anniversary.
RITA AUERBACH: It's a little bit like winning the Nobel Prize in that forever afterwards, you are the Caldecott-winning illustrator. That phrase accompanies your name wherever your name appears.
NEARY: But it's even more than that because winners of the Caldecott and Newberry often go on to become classics such as Caldecott winners, "Make Way For Ducklings" and "Where The Wild Things Are" or Newbery winners, "A Wrinkle In Time" or "Bridge To Terabithia." Chris Allsburg has won two Caldecotts for "Jumanji" and "The Polar Express."
CHRIS ALLSBURG: Years ago, I signed it for parents giving it to their children. And their children have subsequently become parents themselves. So now I'm signing it for, you know, for that generation. So that's a terrific feeling.
NEARY: When Matt de la Pena won last year's Newbery medal for "Last Stop On Market Street," there was an extra reason to rejoice.
DE LA PENA: The inclusion of diverse literature is so important to me. And I've been doing this for 10 years, writing diverse characters. And I just want to honor every Hispanic author who's come before me.
NEARY: And in addition to becoming classics, the Caldecott and Newbery winners often become best-sellers as well.
Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump begins his first full week in the White House today. He's made a lot of promises about what he plans to accomplish in his first few weeks in office. That didn't stop him and his staff from getting locked in a back-and-forth with reporters over the weekend, mainly over how big the crowds were at Trump's inauguration. Here's White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SEAN SPICER: This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration - period.
MARTIN: That statement is not true. Spicer didn't take any questions. But photos and public transit figures make it clear his statement on inauguration attendance was false. For more on Trump's first week in office, we're joined by NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith. Good morning, Tam.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So Trump did try to get down to work in his first few days. He signed an executive order on rolling back the Affordable Care Act, which we'll talk about a little later. He reached out to Israel. He's going to meet with the president of Mexico to start negotiating over NAFTA. That was announced. So with all that, walk us through how the size of the inauguration crowds became such a big deal.
KEITH: Well, the president brought it up. He was delivering remarks at the CIA on Saturday. And he was there to mend fences, but he ended up spending a lot of time talking about the crowd at his inauguration, saying things that simply weren't true, like that the crowd extended all the way to the Washington Monument. It didn't. And then his press secretary came out and amplified his claims, adding evidence to back it up that was verifiably untrue, like the Metro ridership figures that just weren't accurate.
So then this became an issue of the president and his press secretary saying things that were not true about something that doesn't even really matter that much in the grand scheme of things. And why the crowds? Well, they've been a focus of Donald Trump since the very first day of his campaign. And even when he had huge crowds, he would often exaggerate the size. In part, it's an affirmation of this movement that he says, and he said in his inaugural address, that he is leading.
MARTIN: Let's talk about tax returns. This was a big issue on the campaign trail. Now people in the Trump camp in the administration suggesting Trump might not release them at all.
KEITH: That's right. All of this came up because of a petition on the White House website. Much of the White House website was completely scrubbed - you know, new people in office. But one thing that stayed up was this feature that allows people to create petitions. All the old petitions went away.
But as soon as new petitions went up, there was one that said that President Trump should release his tax returns and comply with the Emoluments Clause. Already, it has more than 250,000 signatures. The site says if it gets more than 100,000 it will get an official response. And Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to the president, was asked to respond on ABC yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE ABC BROADCAST)
KELLYANNE CONWAY: The White House response is that he's not going to release his tax returns. We litigated this all through the election. People didn't care. They voted for him.
KEITH: Polls indicate a strong majority of Americans, including about half the people who voted for Donald Trump, want him to release his tax returns.
MARTIN: Lastly, I want to get back to the Affordable Care Act because President Trump did sign this executive order this weekend as an initial step toward making the repeal happen. Asking a lot of you in 30 seconds, Tam, but what did he do?
KEITH: Well, the order talks about easing the burden of the Affordable Care Act on individuals, insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, even medical device makers. How this plays out isn't entirely clear yet. But federal agencies enforce a lot of the Affordable Care Act, like minimum coverage requirements and also the mandate that people buy coverage. If that mandate weren't enforced, some experts say that it could destabilize the insurance market and Obamacare.
MARTIN: NPR's Tamara Keith. Thanks so much, Tamara.
KEITH: You're welcome.
MARTIN: And the president is expected to sign executive orders later this morning. So we will check back in with Tamara then.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now let's visit a Georgia town devastated by tornadoes. Violent storms across the Deep South killed at least 18 people over the weekend, and Adel, Ga., was especially hard hit. Here's Grant Blankenship of Georgia Public Broadcasting.
(SOUNDBITE OF PHONE RINGING)
GRANT BLANKENSHIP, BYLINE: First Assembly Church of God in Adel became the hub of storm relief efforts by noon Sunday. The Fellowship Hall is filled to the brim with the essentials people lost - clothes, diapers, shoes. Pastor Eric Gordon says the congregation got to work not long after the storm blasted through.
ERIC GORDON: We began to make phone calls and put the word out on social media, and that's when everything just - it has just spiraled from there.
BLANKENSHIP: Georgia's governor has declared a seven-day state of emergency for seven South Georgia counties. Gordon says he's never seen anything like this.
GORDON: I'm 38 years old, raised here for most of my life and can't tell you the last time this has happened.
BLANKENSHIP: You get a sense of what he means a little south of Adel, where the tornado tore up an area about the size of four football fields. Andrea Watts is trying to get in past a sheriff's roadblock there. She's a home health nurse, and she's trying to find her elderly patient.
ANDREA WATTS: The lines are down, and the roads are messed up really bad. And they said it was a thunderstorm, this is a little more like a tornado. And I should be here hours ago.
BLANKENSHIP: She's turned away at the roadblock, and her patient isn't answering the phone. Not far from there, it's obvious the tornado has passed through - pine trees are snapped in half, pieces of houses are in the trees. The home in the middle of the Bullard family's vegetable farm is obliterated. Jenny Bullard has her arm in a sling and wears a hospital bracelet as she talks with friends in what was the family kitchen. She gestures past the rubble.
JENNY BULLARD: That's my bedroom right there.
BLANKENSHIP: She says when the storm woke her at 3:30 in the morning, her windows were bulging in and out like sheets of plastic.
BULLARD: I grabbed my phone and I opened my door. And as soon as I opened it, that wall right there just came over on me.
BLANKENSHIP: She dug herself out. Neither Bullard, nor her parents were seriously injured.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I'm glad you fine, though.
BULLARD: Thank y'all for coming.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Let me get some love. I love you.
BLANKENSHIP: A few hours later, another tornado touches down about 75 miles to the north. For NPR News, I'm Grant Blankenship in Adel, Ga.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In South Africa, an estimated 7 million people live with HIV. Despite prevention efforts, there are a thousand new infections every day. And researchers now have launched a big vaccine trial in the country. Peter Granitz reports from Pretoria.
PETER GRANITZ, BYLINE: The Setshaba Research Centre is one of 15 sites across South Africa where the HIV vaccine trials are taking place. Setshaba sits in a sprawling mostly poor township north of Pretoria called Soshanguve. More than a dozen women sit along the walls of the lobby looking at cell phones, chatting in Sotho and Setswana. It's hot, and the lobby door remains open. There's a poster on the wall advertising the HIV vaccine trial.
Dr. Mookho Malahleha directs the research center and is co-chair of the South African trial. She says her goal is to ensure the vaccine regimen is safe and useful in more than 50 percent of recipients, something she says she does not know is possible.
MOOKHO MALAHLEHA: If you have a vaccine that has 50 percent efficacy, you would have prevented 50 infections out of that group of hundreds that would have become infected. So to us as a country with a huge HIV burden, that 50 out of a hundred is huge.
GRANITZ: A young woman who identifies herself as Jane Makhane volunteered to take part in the study. She's 21 years old and studying human resources management in college. The study is anonymous, so Jane is a pseudonym. Makhane is short and polite, and from time to time she nervously laughs. She says a friend who volunteered to participate convinced her to do the same.
JANE MAKHANE: It makes me happy and nervous at the same time because it hasn't been proven that I will be safe. And I know that I might be safe, so it makes me happy knowing that I might be safe.
GRANITZ: The trial will involve 5,400 sexually active men and women between the ages of 18 and 35. All of them must be HIV negative. Half will receive the vaccine regiment and half will receive a placebo. This study is double blind, meaning neither Makhane nor the doctors administering the drugs know if it's a placebo.
Makhane's dated the same guy for three years, doesn't use drugs, and she considers herself largely safe from HIV infection. She knows many friends who are infected. Her uncle has HIV and his wife, her aunt, died from the disease. Her parents did not want her to participate in the trial.
MAKHANE: Because they thought that I might also be infected by the injection.
GRANITZ: The vaccine does not contain the live virus, says Dr. Malahleha. Instead, it contains bio-engineered pieces of the virus, causing the body to react and create an immune response. The vaccine targets HIV subtype C, the prevalent form in Southern Africa.
MALAHLEHA: You would receive the vaccine which will now trick your body or teach your body to create these antibodies - or your immune response - which will then be able to protect you should there be an actual real exposure to the HIV virus.
GRANITZ: The vaccine requires 5 injections within a year, then researchers will follow up for the following two years to test whether the vaccine regimen works. Results for the vaccine study are expected by 2020. If it meets the 50 percent threshold, it could be licensed, manufactured and sold after that, says Nancy Fee, the senior policy adviser at UNAIDS in South Africa.
NANCY FEE: I'm not saying this would be the ultimate answer, but it certainly would make a huge contribution.
GRANITZ: A huge contribution, but not a solution. There's still no cure, and the millions of people who have HIV need to take antiretroviral drugs for the rest of their lives.
FEE: Prevention has its challenges, particularly on this scale, and also because it needs to be lifelong. People need to commit to this literally for their whole life.
GRANITZ: Whatever the outcome, researchers will base future trials on the results of this one. For NPR News, I'm Peter Granitz in Pretoria.
(SOUNDBITE OF ABDULLAH IBRAHIM SONG, "BLUE BOLERO")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.
When you're a mayor, you're allowed to root for the local college basketball team, you do not have authority to step on the court. Mayor Tom Norton of Greeley, Colo. had a courtside seat at the University of Northern Colorado. The Greeley Tribune reports he walked on the floor to protest a referee's call and was ejected. The mayor insists he was not really on the court. He was later let back in the arena and watched the game from several rows up.
You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Days before his inauguration, President Trump compared U.S. intelligence agencies to Nazis. Complaining that the public had learned that Trump was briefed on claims that Russia had compromising information about him, Trump said, quote, "one last shot at me, are we living in Nazi Germany?" He later expanded upon that in a news conference. After his inauguration, the president visited the CIA and said he is now with them, quote, "a thousand percent."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The reason you're my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth.
(APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: Right? And they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community. And I just want to let you know, the reason you're number-one stop - it is exactly the opposite.
INSKEEP: NPR national security correspondent Mary Louise Kelly is in our studio. She's been speaking with members of the intelligence community, past and present. Good morning, Mary Louise.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: OK, so he's not saying, I'm making up with the intelligence agencies. He's saying, I never had a problem with you to begin with.
KELLY: That's what he said. And that is false. President Trump is on record in statements, in tweets, in that news conference you just mentioned that he held as president-elect. And he is on the record ridiculing and attacking U.S. intelligence officials. So to suggest that the media made up this feud...
INSKEEP: His own statements.
KELLY: ...It's provably not true. In that same speech out of the CIA this weekend, Trump also falsely inflated the size of the crowd at his inauguration. In talking about the weather, he described that when he began to speak at his inauguration, the rain stopped immediately. And in fact, you could see water beating on the lapel of his coat. Now, does it matter whether it rained or not?
INSKEEP: No.
KELLY: Who cares? But it does matter to the CIA veterans, who I was reaching out to this weekend. It rankles because he made these untrue claims and of where he made them, in the lobby of the CIA.
INSKEEP: And not just any lobby - there's a wall of stars behind him as he was speaking. And those stars represent something.
KELLY: They represent CIA officers who have died in the line of duty. And it's interesting. One of the former intelligence officers who I reached this weekend said there's the stars. And those are sacred if you work at CIA. But this person said, remember what's on the opposite wall, what Trump was looking at as he spoke.
And I have crossed that lobby, Steve, many times on my way to interview officials who work there. And carved in the marble on the opposite wall is this. It's a quotation from the Bible. And it reads, "and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
INSKEEP: OK, so that's what the building says. Now, the former CIA director is also talking. What did John Brennan say?
KELLY: John Brennan, who led the CIA, he's very recently former. He was head of the CIA until last Friday at noon. And through an aide who put out a statement, he has said he is deeply saddened and angered at what Trump said. He called it a despicable display of self-aggrandizement. And he said Trump should be ashamed of himself.
INSKEEP: I want to ask about something we heard on that recording, Mary Louise. We heard people applaud the president for quite some time. And these are CIA officers. They're professionals. But who exactly was in there applauding?
KELLY: There were, we are told, about 400 CIA officers packed into that room. These are people who volunteered to come in on a Saturday on their day off. It is hard to gauge how much of the applause was coming from CIA versus White House aides who traveled out to Langley with the president.
INSKEEP: So how awkward is it that the new president has taken office - the new administration has come in - and there is still, so far as we know, an investigation of the president's ties to Russia?
KELLY: It is awkward. And the latest twist is The Wall Street Journal reporting this morning that Trump's national security adviser, Mike Flynn, is under a counter intelligence investigation because of suspected ties to Russia. The Senate Intelligence Committee is also investigating that very question.
So here - here is the question that another CIA veteran put to me after watching Trump's speech this weekend. This is Steve Hall. He was CIA chief of Russia operations. And he asked, what happens when the CIA collects a stellar piece of intelligence that maybe puts Vladimir Putin in a bad light? Steve Hall said, what happens when the CIA briefs Trump, and he wants to know the source? And Hall's quote directly to me was, how can you say, no, we don't trust you with the sourcing of that information? That is a live question today at Langley.
INSKEEP: Mary Louise, thanks very much.
KELLY: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Mary Louise Kelly.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There was another presidential transition of power over the weekend, this one across the Atlantic in the tiny West African country of Gambia. Gambia's longtime leader is gone. He's in exile, but he did not leave empty-handed. Here's NPR's Eyder Peralta.
EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: As former Gambian President Yahya Jammeh got ready to leave the country, he told state television that sometimes God has plans you cannot understand.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
YAHYA JAMMEH: Sometimes, something is wrong. It is very wrong. But that's your fate. Allah is testing your faith. Sometimes, something is right - you think it's very right, and it's wrong. Still, Allah is testing faith.
PERALTA: Jammeh, who once said he planned to rule for a billion years, lost a democratic election in December. And even though he at first refused to accept the results, a foreign troop invasion and calls from fellow West African presidents convinced him to step down. So Jammeh, dressed in his traditional white garb and with a Quran in one hand, walked across the tarmac and got onto a waiting plane, ending 22 years of a ruthless presidency.
What didn't become clear until much later is what Jammeh had taken with him.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MAI FATTY: As we take over a new government, the Gambia is in financial distress. The coffers are virtually empty.
PERALTA: That's Mai Fatty, a spokesman for Gambia's new president, Adama Barrow, speaking at a press conference. He says that Jammeh filled a cargo plane with fancy cars and other goods, and then he withdrew $11.3 million from the country's central bank.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FATTY: The Gambia is really poor. We have serious problems.
PERALTA: Jeggan Grey-Johnson, who is Gambian and works for the Open Society Initiative, says yes, those things are regretful. But Gambians and the world should not lose sight of the bigger story, that Jammeh's exile marks the end of an era.
JEGGAN GREY-JOHNSON: It's an end of tyrannical government. It's an end of rampant corruption. It's an end, in itself, of total impunity.
GREY-JOHNSON: Barrow, who was sworn in in neighboring Senegal, has yet to return to Gambia. Local and foreign troops are currently sweeping the country's capital to make sure it is safe for his return. If all goes as planned and Barrow returns to Gambia, it would mark the first time that the country has transferred power democratically and without bloodshed.
Eyder Peralta, NPR News, Nairobi.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE SHAOLIN AFRONAUTS' "INTERSTELLAR GRIOT, PT. 2")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Last week, government scientists said 2016 was the hottest since record-keeping began in the 1800s. And one place feeling the heat is the Austrian Alps, which is taking a toll on the country's ski resorts. NPR's Frank Langfitt has more from the village of Lech.
(SOUNDBITE OF SLEIGH BELLS RINGING)
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: This is the sound of Christmas in the Austrian Alps, a horse-drawn sleigh - except this sleigh isn't gliding through the snow on steel runners. It rolls along Main Street on rubber tires. That's because for the third December in a row, Lech saw almost no snowfall. That depresses longtime visitors like Siobhan Peterson. She spoke on a bus on the way to the slopes.
SIOBHAN PETERSON: I honestly was very sad and disappointed. Normally, there's - it's white enough to be, like, oh, magic - it's wonderland. But this year, it's all - it's nothing.
LANGFITT: Peterson's been coming here from England since she was 5. During Christmases back then, snow blanketed the steep mountains and piled up on the roofs of the wooden chalets that dot the valley. This Christmas was brown, the color of the bare mountainsides. Like many skiers, Peterson, now 22, blames greenhouse gas emissions for the change.
PETERSON: I think it's definitely global warming because, in general, all the snow in the Alps is bad.
LANGFITT: Scientists say you can't attribute one bad season to climate change. But even some locals say temperatures are rising.
HERMANN FERCHER: These high temperatures are our problem.
LANGFITT: Hermann Fercher runs the tourism office in Lech. He says the town got nearly 5 feet of snow in November when a warm wind blew in from Italy - temperatures in the 60s. That's almost 10 degrees higher than years before.
FERCHER: This is, in my opinion, a big difference to the past. Suddenly, it only takes five, seven days and then one and a half meters of snow is gone.
LANGFITT: The lack of snow took a toll. One leading hotel operator said occupancy in town for Christmas was down at least 20 percent from the year before. Elsewhere in Austria, the impact has been even worse.
ANDREAS GOBIET: Where I live, in the last three years, most of the smaller ski resorts had to close.
LANGFITT: Andreas Gobiet is an Austrian scientist who studied climate change in the Alps for more than a decade. We spoke over Skype.
GOBIET: One reason is that they don't have the resources to invest huge amounts of money in artificial snowmaking. And the other reason is that the smallest skiing resorts are typically at low elevations and just don't get the conditions anymore to get natural snow and to produce snow.
LANGFITT: Lech is high enough and cold enough to produce artificial snow, which is what you hear everyone skiing on right now. The problem? Michael Manhart says the town can't make enough of it. Manhart runs Lech Ski Lifts. He operates 400 snow cannons, but that's only enough to cover half the ski runs. Manhart says he needs another 600 cannons to complete the job.
MICHAEL MANHART: I could make enough snow on all the main runs within five days. Actually, five cold nights would be enough.
LANGFITT: A lot is at stake in Lech, where gross annual revenue is about $420 million, most of it coming during ski season. Franz Prettenthaler says if temperatures rise about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit from pre-industrial levels, ski resorts across the Alps could lose millions of overnight stays each winter. Prettenthaler runs a research institute on energy, climate and economics in Austria.
FRANZ PRETTENTHALER: So if all these revenues are lost, then one really could talk about devastated villages so that most of the rural population will move to the cities.
LANGFITT: After another late start, Lech finally got some snow. More than 30 inches fell in the mountains after New Year's.
Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Lech, Austria.
(SOUNDBITE OF EPIGRAM'S "THE STRANGERS WE ARE BECOMING")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There was a gathering here in Washington, D.C. last week that had nothing to do with the inauguration or with politics. It was an occasion for matchmaking, although not a romantic kind. Here, farmers got set up with chefs in an effort to put more local food on restaurant tables. NPR's Dan Charles was there.
DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: Here's the scene - a sleek and stylish restaurant and brewery called Bluejacket built inside an old factory. The dining room is framed by tall steel fermentation tanks, and sitting in a booth on one side looking expectant and a little tense are Ashley Heaney and Mark Heaney from Green Acres Family Farm in Gapland, Md. They have a cooler full of eggs with them from their pasture-raised chickens because this is their chance to introduce those eggs to big city chefs who want food from local farms.
ASHLEY HEANEY: When I heard about it, I basically filled out the application right away, and I was very excited about it.
CHARLES: Now that you're here, how are you feeling?
A. HEANEY: A little nervous (laughter).
MARK HEANEY: Kind of out of our element, you know? We're farmers, we're not used to being in large groups of people, kind of used to being out and working by yourself.
A. HEANEY: But I think it's going to be fun.
CHARLES: The matchmaker here is Pamela Hess, founder of the Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture. She calls this annual event speed dating for farmers and chefs, and she's already lined up some of the dates.
PAMELA HESS: We connected folks based on where they're located, what they grow, what they want to buy.
CHARLES: A lot of farmers and chefs want these relationship, she says, but they don't happen naturally. Farmers and chefs generally live in different places, they work on different schedules. And according to the executive chef at Bluejacket, Marcelle Afram, they're often very different people.
MARCELLE AFRAM: We have stereotypes in the industry that the farmer is shy and the chef is ferocious so, you know, some mitigation with a couple of beers might help.
CHARLES: Is there some truth to that?
AFRAM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, absolutely (laughter).
CHARLES: I meet one farmer, though, who doesn't seem shy at all.
CLEO BRAVER: I'm Cleo Braver from Cottingham Farm. Cleo Braver. You're brave, I'm braver.
CHARLES: Braver grows vegetables and hogs. They aren't just any old hogs.
BRAVER: I happen to have the pinnacle of certified organic pasture-raised, organic vegetable-fed, GMO-free sprout-fed, transitional organic grain-fed, you know, heritage hogs available this week and next week.
CHARLES: I've approached this event with a pretty lighthearted attitude. It must be showing in my questions because they don't sit well with one chef, Spike Gjerde from Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore.
SPIKE GJERDE: I think it's anything but lighthearted. What this is about is confronting some of the most serious aspects of our food system, and what we're trying to solve here I think are some of the ways that our food system is failing us.
CHARLES: Gjerde introduces me to a farmer standing nearby who grows old-style grain and mills it into flower. It's spectacular food, Gjerde says, but you have to understand the effort that went into it.
GJERDE: And then to get that on a table somewhere and get somebody to understand what that whole thing costs is a huge challenge.
CHARLES: The room is crowded now, and loud. The farmers have green name tags, chefs have red ones. There are way more farmers than chefs though, nobody's quite sure why. Even with that hiccup, by the end of the evening most of the farmers and chefs I talked to were going home happy. They'd made some promising contacts, they said. One farmer had sold a whole lamb right on the spot. And the Heaneys, the farmers who'd gone in a little nervous, were smiling - three chefs were interested in their eggs. Dan Charles, NPR News.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Affordable Care Act includes special provisions that make it easier for coal miners to get black lung benefits. If the ACA goes away, obtaining those benefits could become harder. Kara Lofton of West Virginia Public Broadcasting has more.
KARA LOFTON, BYLINE: At the Pulmonary Rehabilitation Clinic in Scarbro, W.Va., oxygen tubes dangle from the noses of three miners slowly pedaling on stationary bikes. All of these men have black lung, a disease caused by breathing in coal dust. Over time, the dust coats the lungs and causes them to harden. Hard lungs are difficult to expand and contract which makes it hard to breathe.
JAMES BOUNDS: You try to get air in them, and they don't want to cooperate with you like they did before.
LOFTON: That's James Bounds, one of the retired miners at the clinic. Not every coal miner gets black lung in the same way that not every smoker gets cancer, but for those who do, the disease is devastating.
BOUNDS: As your disease grows more in you, there's no cure for it at all. It keeps getting harder and harder until, I guess, one day when you take your last breath, and they just won't expand for you no more.
LOFTON: Bounds is currently one of about 38,000 miners and dependents receiving black lung benefits, compensation for the physical damage he sustained while doing his job. It took him four and a half years to get approved, despite the fact that his lungs are so bad, he has to stop moving to talk.
Debbie Wills is black lung program coordinator for Valley Health primary care system. She says that prior to the Affordable Care Act, it was almost impossible to qualify for the compensation benefits. Coal companies pay the benefits and also pay into a federal trust fund that pays when coal companies can't.
DEBBIE WILLS: Coal company lawyers would doctor shop around the country and find two, three, four, five, seven doctors to say, yes, this miner is disabled, but it's not because of black lung.
LOFTON: Now it's a little bit easier, and the process often goes more quickly. That's because the Affordable Care Act includes something called the Byrd Amendments. One part shifted the burden of proof. Wills explains that instead of miners having to prove that mining caused their black lung, the coal companies have to prove that mining didn't.
WILLS: Once we had the Byrd Amendments, you still have to prove that 100 percent disability which is hard to prove, but if you can prove that and you've worked 15 years or longer in the mines, then you're entitled to a presumption that your disease arose from your coal mine employment.
LOFTON: Another part provides lifetime benefits to certain eligible dependents who survive the death of a miner if the miner had been receiving the benefits before their death. If the ACA is repealed without a replacement, cases that were approved after the ACA went into effect could be reopened, leaving the miner or surviver vulnerable to losing the benefits. And burden of proof may shift again making it difficult for applicants to qualify.
Earlier this month, both the House and the Senate introduced resolutions to preserve the Byrd Amendments from a broader ACA repeal. Republican West Virginia Representative Evan Jenkins, an ACA opponent, introduced the measure in the House.
EVAN JENKINS: I am a firm believer that Obamacare is already in a death spiral and desperately needs to be fixed. So while we are going to work to improve our health care system, I feel strongly about my resolution to make sure that the presumption relating to black lung is contained in whatever is the end product of this year.
LOFTON: But that end product is still a pretty big question at this point. For NPR News, I'm Kara Lofton in Charleston, W.Va.
INSKEEP: This story is part of a reporting partnership with NPR, West Virginia Public Broadcasting and Kaiser Health News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
There are more than 100,000 broadcast and cell towers across this country. You use them every time you make a cellphone call or turn on the radio in your car. They're a problem, though, for migrating birds. Every year, millions of birds slam into those towers at night. Ben Thorp of our member station WCMU reports on a simple way to prevent that.
BEN THORP, BYLINE: Likely the only time you really notice one of your neighborhood towers is at night when they're lit up with conspicuous bright red lights. Those lights help airplane pilots see the huge metal structures that can reach a thousand feet into the air, but can spell disaster for birds.
CALEB PUTNAM: For example, in 1976 in Gun Lake, Mich., one tower in one night killed over 2,300 birds.
THORP: That's Caleb Putnam. He works for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, and says for reasons scientists still can't quite figure out, birds kept flying headlong into towers.
PUTNAM: If that many are dying at one night at one tower, and yet there are thousands of towers across the country and as you go across the world, the numbers are staggering.
THORP: Putnam says in North America alone, it's estimated that 7 million birds smash into towers every year, but until recently scientists didn't know why it was happening. Figuring that out became biologist Joelle Gehring’s mission. She helped conduct a study in 2003 to find out what could be done.
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JOELLE GEHRING: I can't not look at the ground when I'm underneath these towers (laughter).
THORP: It's an unusually warm January morning, and the farm fields surrounding this tower are oozing mud. Gehring is standing at a broadcast tower in rural northeast Michigan that belongs to the local radio station. Gehring says every morning in the spring or fall, the peak migration season, she and others had the unpleasant job of counting dead birds at the base of these towers. What she discovered was surprising.
GEHRING: So we were able to reduce the numbers of bird fatalities on communications towers by simply extinguishing those non-flashing lights, and those fatalities were reduced by as much as 70 percent.
THORP: You heard that right - simply turning off the steady beam lights on towers reduce bird fatalities by 70 percent. Exactly why isn't yet clear, but she has a theory.
GEHRING: Some research has documented that when birds are exposed to long wavelengths of light such as red or white, that it actually interferes with their ability to use magnetic fields for navigation.
THORP: Joelle Gehring says that's especially true on cloudy nights when birds can't navigate by the stars. The tower's steady red lights seem to confuse them, flashing red lights don't. In 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration changed regulations on new towers, requiring they all be built with only flashing lights. Gehring, who now works for the Federal Communications Commission, spends much of her time contacting people who run towers built before 2015, encouraging them to switch to blinking lights.
GEHRING: And when we drive back and forth around those beautiful Great Lakes at night, we see more and more communications towers that are lit with only flashing lights at night. And my son always points out - another bird-friendly tower, mom (laughter).
THORP: There are still tens of thousands of towers, though, that aren't bird-friendly, as birds are drawn to the solid red lights. Gehring and others will continue to try to save those birds by doing one simple thing - changing those tower lights. For NPR News, I'm Ben Thorp.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump signed several executive orders yesterday. One of them was related to abortion. His order restored something called the Mexico City policy, which bars U.S. funding for any international aid group that provides abortion-related services. NPR's Nurith Aizenman has more.
NURITH AIZENMAN, BYLINE: U.S. law has long prohibited American aid dollars from directly paying for abortions overseas. But Trump has taken that a step further by reinstating a policy embraced by Republican presidents. It requires groups supported with U.S. funds to promise they won't even use other non-U.S. funding sources to provide abortions. Anti-abortion advocates say the ban - it's often called the Mexico City policy because it was first announced by President Reagan in that city - is necessary. Arina Grossu is with the Family Research Council.
ARINA GROSSU: There's a fungibility factor. We don't know exactly how that money will be used. And the only way to protect taxpayer money from going for abortions is by reinstating the Mexico City policy.
AIZENMAN: But some of the major aid groups that offer a wide range of health care services to poor women overseas say there's no way they can comply with this policy, particularly since it also prohibits groups from promoting abortion. And that's been interpreted to cover informational activities, like providing a patient with referrals and even basic facts about abortion.
Also, while every Republican president since Reagan has enacted the ban, Trump has expanded it. Now, it will cover not just family planning aid, but the entire $10 billion plus budget for global health assistance. Nurith Aizenman, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President Trump made an eyebrow-raising claim yesterday. As part of an effort to make America more business friendly, the president said he thinks his administration can eliminate 75 percent or more of government regulations. Three out of every four government regulations can be eliminated, he said. Even conservative economists are skeptical of this idea. Though, Republicans do seem serious about some kind of regulatory reform. Here's NPR's Chris Arnold.
CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: It's been said that President Trump likes to have an adversary, and at a meeting with the CEOs of big manufacturing companies, the enemy was government regulations that stifle business. Mr. Trump said, quote, "we're going to be cutting regulation massively."
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The problem with the regulation that we have right now is that you can't do anything. You can't - I have people that tell me they have more people working on regulations than they have doing product.
ARNOLD: Of course, there are all kinds of government regulations. OSHA aims to keep workers safe. The FDA makes sure we have food that's safe to eat. The EPA protects the environment. Mr. Trump said basically there will be no downside.
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TRUMP: We're going to take care of the environment. We're going to take care of safety and all of the other things we have to take care of.
ARNOLD: And then the president said this.
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TRUMP: We think we can cut regulations by 75 percent, maybe more, but by 75 percent.
ARNOLD: Now, it's a bit unclear what that means. Seventy-five percent of all government regulations, 75 percent of the burden on American businesses overall? We called up the Cato Institute. It's a free market think tank. Peter Van Doren edits Cato's quarterly journal which is called Regulation, and we played Trump's claim for him.
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TRUMP: We think we can cut regulations by 75 percent.
ARNOLD: So what's your take? Is that sort of a realistic statement?
PETER VAN DOREN: (Laughter).
ARNOLD: Or does that make any sense or what's your take on it?
VAN DOREN: Well, it's not - I mean, President Trump - he's about signaling.
ARNOLD: That's how Van Doren describes it.
VAN DOREN: We have all these fancy words for what you might call lying. (Laughter) And so this is a game. And Trump is signaling his supporters that he's serious.
ARNOLD: But Van Doren says no president's been able to undo that many regulations ever, so he says it won't be 75 percent or even massive.
VAN DOREN: I think it's going to be probably somewhere in the moderate to small range.
ARNOLD: Still, many Republicans do have serious ambitions about cutting red tape. Philip Wallach is a political scientist at the more liberal-leaning Brookings Institution. He says lawmakers are introducing bills, for example...
PHILIP WALLACH: The Scrub Act which would create a commission specifically designed to find old regulations that are not worth their costs and get them revised or deleted.
ARNOLD: Wallach thinks there could be some meaningful culling of regulations. He says some of that might be a good thing. And he says Republicans do not have 60 votes in the Senate, so he says Democrats in some cases could block the repeal of what they think are really good regulations. Chris Arnold, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Donald Trump is making good on one of his big campaign promises to re-evaluate America's free trade commitments.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
To that end yesterday, he signed an executive order which pulls the United States out of a negotiated but never ratified agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Later in the day, he spoke about the deal after a meeting with union leaders.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I just signed a document, a very powerful document. And we're going to have trade but we're going to have one-on-one. And if somebody misbehaves, we're going to send them a letter of termination - 30 days - and they'll either straighten it out or we're gone.
MARTIN: President Trump also met with the heads of several manufacturing companies yesterday. Afterwards, he defended his economic policies - policies that some critics have called protectionist and anti-trade.
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TRUMP: What we want is fair trade. And we're going to treat countries fairly, but they have to treat us fairly.
INSKEEP: As part of what the president calls fair trade, he plans to announce some action on NAFTA, the free-trade agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada, maybe calling to renegotiate the whole thing.
MARTIN: To hear more about all those plans, we got in touch with Stephen Moore. He was an economic adviser to Donald Trump during the presidential campaign. Mr. Moore, thanks for being with us.
STEPHEN MOORE: Great to be with you.
MARTIN: Now that we've seen President Trump sign this executive order backing away from negotiations related to the TPP, what is your take? Is this a good choice?
MOORE: Well, let's talk first about the real politics here, which is that Donald Trump campaigned for president and he made a big deal out of renegotiating NAFTA and the trade act with Asia. And he is delivering a promise here. And I do think presidents, when they come into office, should follow through with the promises they make to the voters. And he's doing that.
Now, my own personal view on the Asia trade deal is that it is way too complicated. There are way too many special interest provisions in it. And I think it can be renegotiated in ways that will keep the heart of the idea of trade agreements with some of these Asian countries but without the thousands of pages of regulations and special interest provisions.
I think it's important, by the way, because if we have free trade agreements with other Asian countries, that actually increases our power in Asia and reduces the power that China has.
MARTIN: So what happens in the interim? I mean, now that TPP is not going to move forward because there's no American leadership in it, does that create a vacuum that China can swoop in and fill?
MOORE: Hopefully not. That would be a disaster if China swooped in and took our trade routes away from us by negotiating their own deals.
MARTIN: Do you think that's a risk, though?
MOORE: It is a risk - certainly, it is. But I think, look, Donald Trump is most concerned when it comes to trade with China. There's no question about it. And there's an area even as a free trader, as I am, I share many of his concerns about China cheating, stealing technologies and not playing by the rules. And I think a tougher stance with China makes sense.
I think it's in the interest of American companies and American workers. And I think that's coming.
MARTIN: So let's talk more about what could be coming. Administration officials have suggested that President Trump will take some kind of action related to NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. I guess I'm asking you to reveal what you know. I don't know if you can. What do you expect him to do?
MOORE: Well, here is another promise that Donald Trump made, and it was central to his campaign, that he was going to renegotiate NAFTA. And so it will happen. It makes me a little bit uneasy because I think as an economist, NAFTA has been on balance a good thing for all three countries, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. It's benefited Mexico the most, in my opinion.
And given how shaky Mexico's economy is right now with the falling of the peso and the increase in unemployment, I think it's important that we continue to trade very openly with Mexico to keep their economy strong and stable, not just for economic reasons but also for foreign policy and national security reasons. By the way, it's important to remember, this was begun by Ronald Reagan, and it was signed into law by Bill Clinton.
This is a true bipartisan effort that I think on balance has worked well.
MARTIN: So does this decision to renegotiate at least parts of NAFTA - does this run counter to the guidance that you gave then-candidate Trump?
MOORE: No, you know, when I started working for Donald Trump, he and I talked about trade and I said, Donald, you know, I don't agree with you on a lot of your trade decisions. And he said, look, we can agree to disagree on that. I want your help on other issues. If Trump simply tweaks these deals in ways that are in America's interest, I think it's a positive thing.
The worry that many people have, like me who are free trade advocates, is the worry that is Donald Trump going to spark a trade war? And that would be negative not just for the United States but for the whole world economy.
MARTIN: I want to ask you about a meeting that Donald Trump had with CEOs yesterday. In it, he said - he was trying to reassure them saying he wants to axe all kinds of regulations to make it easier for businesses to start new initiatives, to set up new factories. At the same time, he said if corporations still choose to export their labor overseas, he will slap a big so-called border tax on the products they make there.
What do you think of that?
MOORE: I think it's called the carrot and the stick (laughter). So the carrot is that he's offering companies lower taxes, less regulation, a more robust American energy policy, all things that would be very pro-business and make America a very attractive place to invest in. I happen to think that's the heart of the economic plan. And I think if he does those things, it'll have a very positive impact on bringing companies back home.
So I'm in favor of the carrot of lower taxes and less regulation. The stick is something where he's basically got a club and he's saying to these companies, look, if you leave, we're going to hit you over the head with these tariffs when you bring your goods and services back into the United States. And I don't think it's necessary.
I think if he does the tax reductions and the regulatory relief, I do think you're going to see thousands of companies moving back to the United States. I hope that we will see more carrot and less stick.
MARTIN: Although all it takes is a big conglomerate, a big multinational company to call the president's bluff, in some ways, and say, fine, we've done the math. We can take the tariff. It's just in our best interest to produce these products overseas.
MOORE: That's certainly a possibility, no question about it. When you buy a computer, you're buying a computer with parts that are made in Mexico, China, India, United States and so on. That's just the nature of our 21st century economy. And I hope Donald Trump fully understands that. But, look, if you cut me, I bleed red, white, and blue, all other things equal.
I want things produced here in America, in Michigan, in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and my home state of Illinois. I hate it, as Donald Trump does, when I see a company, you know, pack up their bags and leave a town. And you can see how it really negatively affected the lives and the families of people who live there.
MARTIN: Stephen Moore was an economic adviser to Donald Trump during the campaign. He is a senior fellow in economics at The Heritage Foundation. Stephen, thanks so much.
MOORE: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Family and friends gathered today in Houston to remember the astronaut Gene Cernan, who died last week. More than 40 years ago, he became the final person to walk on the moon. NPR's Russell Lewis reports.
RUSSELL LEWIS, BYLINE: Gene Cernan loved leaving the Earth, whether flying his own plane or landing a spaceship on the moon. He was proud of what he did in 1972 during Apollo 17, NASA's last and longest lunar mission. Here he is joking with fellow astronaut Harrison Jack Schmitt on their first moonwalk as Schmidt was exiting the lunar module.
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GENE CERNAN: Hatch is closed.
HARRISON JACK SCHMITT: Barely.
CERNAN: Hey, Jack, don't lock it.
SCHMITT: I'm not going to lock it.
CERNAN: We got to go back there. You lose the key, and we're in trouble.
LEWIS: They spent three days on the surface of the moon. When Cernan got there, it wasn't the barren lunar landscape that surprised him.
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CERNAN: The color of the Earth is so dominant. It's penetrating. And, you know, you can't take your eyes off it.
LEWIS: Cernan said he was lucky to be on that mission. Just before he was named to the crew, he almost died when his helicopter crashed into a river because he was showing off, and some in NASA wanted him grounded because of it. And as he told NPR in 2015, he turned down an earlier chance to land on the moon because he wanted to be the commander, not the pilot.
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CERNAN: I proved to myself - as I said, I sort of felt like I'd been an underdog most of my life. I proved to myself that I was good enough, that I could get the job done. That was a big point in my life.
LEWIS: He went to space three times, including another trip to the moon, Apollo 10, the mission just before the first lunar landing. Before he joined NASA, he flew jets in the Navy and studied engineering in college. Francis French of the San Diego Air and Space Museum says Cernan was special among the Apollo astronauts.
FRANCIS FRENCH: Gene Cernan's probably somebody who should have run for political office because he can win over a room in an instant.
LEWIS: In his years after NASA, Cernan spoke often about the importance of exploration and encouraging young people to dream big and then follow through.
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CERNAN: You know, someone asked me, what would you like to put on your tombstone? You know, that's a tough one. You know, just believe in yourself. The impossible does happen.
LEWIS: For Cernan, the impossible did happen. He was forever called the last man on the moon, but he was troubled by it because for the past 44 years, it was a title he felt he held too long. He just assumed humans would have returned by now. Only 12 people ever walked on the moon, just six are still alive. Russell Lewis, NPR News.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Here's how China is preparing to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. The country's president vowed to get 300 million of his people on the ice, an initiative to encourage winter sports. That is why Beijing has quickly assembled a new professional ice hockey team, which turns out to be a challenge. NPR's Rob Schmitz reports.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: As the Beijing Kunlun Red Stars hit the ice to face off against a team from Moscow, tension is high. A win tonight is crucial to make it to the playoffs in the KHL, Russia's top professional hockey league and second only to the NHL in talent. But hardly anyone in the 15,000-seat Beijing arena understands the stakes. In fact, there's hardly anyone in the arena.
The vast majority of the seats are empty. Sixty-year-old granny Zhang Cuihua takes up three seats with bags of knitting supplies. Someone gave her free tickets, and she figured a hockey game was a good excuse as any to knit a sweater.
ZHANG CUIHUA: (Through interpreter) I haven't seen a hockey game in 20 years. I forget the rules. I can't figure it out. One team is Russian. But who's the other team?
SCHMITZ: That's your Beijing team, I tell her. She looks up from her knitting and squints through oversized spectacles.
ZHANG: (Through interpreter) Oh, but they're all foreigners. China's no good at hockey.
SCHMITZ: Kunlun Red Star is the first Chinese club to join Russia's premier KHL league. The team has 18 players from Russia, Finland, Canada and the U.S. There are a few Chinese nationals, but none of them can compete at this level and they rarely see ice time. In fact, while his teammates are playing below, Chinese player Rudy Ying is in the stands wearing a suit, talking to me about China's 2022 Winter Olympics bid.
RUDY YING: Once we got picked for that, I think a lot of people high up in the government or whatever realized that, like, we had to be competitive, at least, when the time rolls around. So a lot of initiatives were put into place, this being probably the most major one.
SCHMITZ: Team CEO Emma Liao says sponsors, many with close connections to China's government, have already covered the $30 million needed to run the Red Stars. Now comes the hard part - educating the public about the team and about hockey, for that matter.
EMMA LIAO: Nobody knows, like, really knows what is hockey. So our job is we need to educate the audience what is hockey, why it's so attractive and why you should come to watch the hockey game.
SCHMITZ: Few people have done this more than Mark Simon, a Canadian hockey coach who's worked for years to raise awareness about the sport in China. Simon is volunteering as an assistant for the Red Stars. He says he wasn't sure what to think when he first heard about the team.
MARK SIMON: Great idea - KHL, Russia, it's close. China, Russia, you know, the communist brothers and all this stuff, I mean, I get it. But I still thought, you know, it's early to expect that you're going to fill a, you know, NHL-size rink now is insane.
SCHMITZ: Simon says the Red Stars have already broken a KHL record for smallest audience size for a single game - 550 people.
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting) Red Star. Go, go. Red Star.
SCHMITZ: That can make for an awkward game day experience when the team's 12-member cheerleading squad's cheers are swallowed by the void of a sparsely populated arena or when the PA announcer, who Simon complains doesn't know a thing about hockey, begins an exuberant cheer for the Red Stars just two seconds after the other team scores.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Chanting) Red Stars, Red Stars.
SCHMITZ: A group of men from Finland are amused. They say the game would be better if they were drunk, but tight security rules prohibit alcohol inside the arena. They're the only audience members I meet who actually bought tickets. Peter Solonen says he's never seen a hockey game with such good talent attract so few fans.
PETER SOLONEN: They still got something to learn (laughter). You don't see hockey anywhere else but inside the stadium - nowhere else. That is weird.
SCHMITZ: It may be weird, but for Red Stars player Zach Yuen, it's a dream come true. He was the first Chinese Canadian defenseman drafted by the NHL. And he's chosen to come here to play in his homeland.
ZACH YUEN: When I was growing up there, I never had a role model. And, you know, it would have been cool to have a role model to look up to just to, you know, just to know that it's possible.
SCHMITZ: Role models to kids like Yuan Zhongfan, who's practicing with his team in Shanghai. He's 8 years old.
YUAN ZHONGFAN: (Through interpreter) My mom wanted me to learn swimming, but I wasn't tall enough. There was a hockey rink nearby so we picked that.
SCHMITZ: Yuan tells me his dream is to play for the Chicago Blackhawks. I ask him what his parents think about this.
ZHONGFAN: (Through interpreter) They don't think it's possible because no Chinese player has made it to the NHL.
SCHMITZ: Yuan's parents haven't heard about Zach Yuen. And they don't know much about the Red Stars, who, as it happens, lost their big game and have likely lost their chance to make it to the playoffs. But China's government is dreaming big about hockey. And no matter how obscure this sport is today in China, if he works hard, this 8-year-old from Shanghai may someday get a shot at his dream, too.
Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Shanghai.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep. Daniel Frye had an idea. He would propose to Lauren Williams at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. He brought family and friends to watch. They all rode a shuttle bus to the attraction. And when he got off the bus, Frye realized he had lost the ring. Thanks to social media, they did find it. A woman on the bus discovered it in her bag when she returned home to Georgia.
A photo now shows Ms. Williams wearing the ring, so apparently she still said yes. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President Trump faces the challenge of making good on many promises, including this from his inauguration speech.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth.
INSKEEP: NPR's Tom Gjelten is here in our studios to talk us through how the president might approach that goal. Good morning, Tom.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: Irradicate completely from the face of the earth, how do you do that?
GJELTEN: Well, first we need to know what he means by that. You know, Donald Trump speaks with a certain amount of hyperbole and ambiguity, I think we could say. To me, radical Islamic terrorism sounds like an ideology, a particular religious belief system. Now, that doesn't mean it can't be eradicated. But when ideologies are eradicated, it usually is because they eradicate themselves, they become discredited, fall completely out of favor...
INSKEEP: People stop believing them, yeah.
GJELTEN: Exactly. There aren't too many examples in history of people eradicating belief systems by force. So I assume that what he's talking about here involves military operations to some extent.
INSKEEP: Somehow destroying everyone who holds this ideology. Although I'm remembering years ago President George W. Bush was asked when do you win the war on terror? And he actually said you don't ever win. You never eliminate everybody who wants to harm you in the world.
GJELTEN: Well, Donald Trump is not George W. Bush...
INSKEEP: OK.
GJELTEN: ...So we'll see. You know, he could do some things. The Obama administration was constrained by its - in its military operations against the Taliban, against ISIS, al-Qaida by its concern about civilian casualties and getting U.S. troops in harm's way. So Trump could move some on that. But to the extent that he actually is interested in moving against Islam as a religion, it's going to alienate allies in the Middle East.
And reinforcing alliances, which is what he talked about with countries like Jordan, would sure be more difficult.
INSKEEP: OK, so now you're getting at some of the difficulties here. You can make military strikes, you can intensify military strikes, but you're saying it's a war against an idea. You want to make sure you hit the right idea, that you don't alienate people who are your allies...
GJELTEN: Right.
INSKEEP: ...A billion of them, possibly. How do you do that?
GJELTEN: Well, the one thing that we're going to see from Trump, I'm sure, is different rhetoric. He thought the Obama administration was way too reluctant to condemn the treatment of women and gays in some of these countries, should have been more willing to talk about human rights in places where Islam dominates. Beyond that, there are some specific things I think we should be watching for.
One, for example, is whether he is willing or ready to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. He's under some very specific pressure to do that from, among other people, Senator Ted Cruz, who has introduced a bill that would do exactly that.
INSKEEP: Let's remember, very powerful organization. It was a political party, in effect, for a while in Egypt and, in fact, elected a president of Egypt a couple of years ago before the president was removed.
GJELTEN: Exactly - favors a more sort of political interpretation of Islam. Now, here in the United States, it spanned through the years actually more involved in trying to get American Muslims to be devout, to stay active in their faith. Particularly in the early years of Muslim immigration, it was very active in promoting the establishment of mosques and Muslim organizations here.
INSKEEP: One other thing, Tom. Of course one way that this has entered the campaign is the question of whether to ban Muslims from entering the United States. The president proposed that at one point in the campaign. He later revised it somewhat. He's talked about extreme vetting of people from areas affected by terrorism.
What's that - how's that going to affect his immigration policies now that he's actually making them?
GJELTEN: I think that one really important thing to look for is whether there is a move, whether he promotes a move to repeal, to scale back a law that was passed in 1990 that said you can't bar people from the United States on the basis of their past, current or expected beliefs as long as those beliefs would be legal in the U.S. I predict there's going to be a lot of talk about changing that law in order to make it legal to keep out immigrants with particular religious or political beliefs.
This could be the way he gets at this idea of extreme vetting. It would be especially important if those beliefs would suggest some more militant or radical understanding of Islam.
INSKEEP: OK, Tom, thanks very much.
GJELTEN: Of course.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Tom Gjelten.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
United Airlines expects operations to be back to normal today after a computer glitch grounded all domestic flights for a few hours on Sunday night. That delayed thousands of travelers. Many of them missed their connecting flights. NPR's David Schaper reports many airlines seem to be struggling with their technology these days.
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: Dan Micheli arrived at Denver International Airport Sunday evening a little early for his 7:05 flight to Phoenix. He checked his United app and information screens at the terminal, which showed that his flight was on time. But as he walked through the concourse to his gate, he saw it was flooded with people.
DAN MICHELI: Yeah, I noticed quite a bit of crowding and a lot of people at a lot of gates - got to my gate and saw that the earlier flight had not yet left.
SCHAPER: That flight was supposed to take off two hours earlier. The gate agent said it was a computer problem, which for Micheli, who flies every week on business, immediately raises questions.
MICHELI: Where's the redundancy? Where's the resiliency that ensures that a system like that is always up and always ready?
SCHAPER: In a statement, United says an IT issue prevented pilots from getting certain information they needed to take off, like the weight and balance of the aircraft to calculate speed. Experts say the problem likely involved the ACARS system, which transmits data between the aircraft and the airline's operation center.
AHMED ABDELGHANY: ACARS are very important systems for the airline operation.
SCHAPER: Ahmed Abdelghany is a professor of airline operations management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
ABDELGHANY: Typically, systems like that, it should be working 24/7 supporting all the flights. And the problems are not expected to happen.
SCHAPER: United says the problem was resolved within two and a half hours Sunday night. But Abdelghany and others note that there have been several technology problems at United and at other airlines in recent months - one outage bringing down Delta's systems for two days last summer, another forced Southwest to cancel flights for days, too.
Daniel Baker is CEO of the flight tracking service flightaware.com.
DANIEL BAKER: The big problem that airlines face is that a lot of these are legacy systems, meaning they've been around for decades. And the demands on them are getting greater and greater.
SCHAPER: These are huge, complex systems. And every airline's is different, which has created more complications as the airlines have merged.
BAKER: Now they have an even bigger system on top that's relying on the same somewhat antiquated infrastructure.
SCHAPER: Airlines are posting big profits these days. And Baker says they're investing some of that money into IT upgrades. Passengers can only hope that airlines step that up to help prevent the kinds of technology problems that delay and cancel their flights. David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It's a big day for movies and the people who work on them. Nominations for this year's Academy Awards will be announced early this morning in Beverly Hills. NPR arts correspondent Mandalit del Barco has a preview.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: If the other movie industry awards shows are any indication, this is likely a very big day for "La La Land." The film is a love letter to old-fashioned Hollywood musicals. It stars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone dancing and singing their way through Los Angeles.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LA LA LAND")
RYAN GOSLING AND EMMA STONE: (As characters, singing) I don't care if I know just where I will go 'cause all that I need's this crazy feeling. The rat-tat-tat on my heart.
RYAN GOSLING: (As Sebastian, singing) Think I want it to stay.
DEL BARCO: "La La Land's" music, actors and director Damien Chazelle have already made history by winning a record seven Golden Globes. But there are other films expected to be nominated for the Oscars. Among them is the drama "Manchester By The Sea" with Casey Affleck playing a brooding loner who is expected to take care of his teenaged nephew. Another movie likely to be nominated is "Fences" starring Denzel Washington, who directed it, and Viola Davis. They portray husband and wife in the family drama set in 1950s Pittsburgh.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FENCES")
DENZEL WASHINGTON: (As Troy Maxson) It's not easy for me to admit that I've been standing in the same place for 18 years.
VIOLA DAVIS: (As Rose Maxson) Well, I've been standing with you. I've been right here with you, Troy. I got a life, too. I gave 18 years of my life to stand in the same spot as you.
DEL BARCO: These actors have already won Tony Awards for their performances on Broadway. "Fences" is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by August Wilson. Another movie adapted from a play is a coming-of-age drama "Moonlight." Its ensemble cast includes actor Mahershala Ali who plays a big-hearted Miami drug dealer. In this scene, he teaches the young man at the center of the movie how to swim, and he offers advice.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MOONLIGHT")
MAHERSHALA ALI: (As Juan) Let me tell you something, man. There are black people everywhere. Remember that, OK? No place you can go in the world that ain't got no black people. We was the first on this planet.
DEL BARCO: "Moonlight" is already favored to win this year's Best Picture Oscar. It was directed by Barry Jenkins who, like playwright Tarell McCraney, had something in common with the movie's protagonist. They grew up with mothers who were addicted to crack. There are other films that could be nominated. "Lion" is a drama about a 5-year-old boy who has to survive the streets of Calcutta before being adopted. Dev Patel plays him as an adult searching for his original family.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LION")
DEV PATEL: (As Saroo Brierley) Do you have any idea what it's like knowing my real brother and mother spent every day of their lives looking for me? Huh? How every day my brother screams my name?
DEL BARCO: "Arrival" is a science fiction drama starring actress Amy Adams, and "Hell Or High Water" is billed as a neo Western heist crime movie with Jeff Bridges and Chris Pine. Mel Gibson directed another possible Oscar nominee, the World War II drama "Hacksaw Ridge." Another real life story could make the cut. "Hidden Figures" stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae as NASA scientists and mathematicians who help launch astronaut John Glenn into space.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HIDDEN FIGURES")
TARAJI P HENSON: (As Katherine G. Johnson) The goal point for re-entry is 2,990 miles from where we want Colonel Glenn to land.
DEL BARCO: This year's animated movies may face some of the toughest competition. Among the possible nominees, look for "Moana," "Zootopia," "Sing" and "Trolls." I've got a feeling its catchy theme could also be in the running for Best Original Song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I CAN'T STOP THE FEELING")
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE: (Singing) I got that sunshine in my pocket, got that good soul in my feet. I feel that hot blood in my body when it drops. Oh.
DEL BARCO: Jimmy Kimmel will be hosting this year's Academy Award ceremony on February 26. Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
In his first days in office, President Trump is doing some things that any Republican president would do. He's also doing things that only Donald Trump would do. Let's hear some of both from NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith, who's covering the White House and is there this morning. Hi, Tam.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Hi. Good morning.
INSKEEP: What's something that any Republican president would do that he's doing?
KEITH: Well, a - later this morning, expected around 11 a.m., I can confirm from someone at the White House that Donald Trump will sign some executive orders that will fast-track the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline. Those are two controversial projects that the Obama administration essentially blocked, and now they will move ahead. This is - was a cause celebre for many Republicans, also a cause celebre for environmentalists, but moving forward under a Trump administration.
INSKEEP: I want to make sure I understand this. When you say fast-track, that means the Dakota Access pipeline, which many people protested just last December and President Obama finally stopped in one of his last acts in office, that fast-track means - what? It can go ahead or - what happens exactly?
KEITH: Well, the mechanism isn't entirely clear at this point because we don't have the language. But one possibility is that the State Department was reviewing both of these projects because of an executive order that was signed during the Bush administration saying that energy projects that crossed national borders required State Department review and approval. Well, if President Trump undoes that then that sticking point, that area were these projects got held up would go away.
INSKEEP: OK. So those executive orders are expected a little bit later today. What else is the president been doing?
KEITH: He is just wrapping up a meeting with the leaders of the big three automakers - Ford, Chrysler and GM. They were talking about jobs. He says that we're bringing jobs back to the U.S. big league. But he also told them that he wasn't singling them out. But in ways, he is not a traditional Republican because he has...
INSKEEP: He is singling them out in some ways.
KEITH: Yes, because he has been singling out businesses in a way that many Republicans wouldn't. Yesterday, his executive action withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Now, it was widely seen as dead already, but that's something that many Republicans and many in the business world supported. He also yesterday met with union leaders. And that's not seen as something that, like, a GOP president would normally do on his first working day in the office.
INSKEEP: How's this White House dealing with the media?
KEITH: Well, it got off to a very rocky start. And there is still sort of this ongoing battle feud. But yesterday, in his first official White House briefing where he took questions, press secretary Sean Spicer tried to have a bit of a reset. This came after Saturday, where he came out into the briefing room and made this very angry statement that had some clearly false statements in it about the size of the crowd of the inauguration. Then yesterday he came out, was more self-deprecating and said this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SEAN SPICER: I believe that we have to be honest with the American people. I think sometimes we can disagree with the facts. There are certain things that we may - we may not fully understand when we come out. But our intention's never to lie to you.
KEITH: He did re-assert some of the false claims about crowd size, but he did back off some of the others.
INSKEEP: OK, he made new statements, like saying that tens of millions of people had watched worldwide on the internet. And maybe that's what he meant on Saturday. But according to fact checkers, that's also false.
KEITH: That's also false.
INSKEEP: Which also does raise a question, Tam - why is the president so focused on crowd size?
KEITH: He has been focused on crowd size since the very first day of his campaign when he rode that escalator down into Trump Tower, into the lobby and said there were thousands of people there when there were really hundreds. This is something that's very important to him. And there was a feeling that by - you know, by - with news organizations doing side-by-side shots with President Obama's aerial photos from his inauguration and Donald Trump's inauguration that showed big gaps in the crowd, that that was mocking. This is what Spicer said about that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SPICER: It's not about one tweet. It's not about one picture. It's about a constant theme. It's about sitting here every time and being told no. Well, we don't think he can do that. He'll never accomplish that. He can't win that. It won't be the biggest. It's not going to be that good. The crowds aren't that big. He's not that successful. The narrative and the - the default narrative is always negative.
INSKEEP: OK...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SPICER: And it's demoralizing.
INSKEEP: OK, demoralizing. This is a president, Tam, who ran against political correctness, said we should face truths, not worry about people's sensitivities, and a lot of his supporters have mocked what they call liberal snowflakes. Is his spokesman now suggesting that we have to be sensitive about facts if the president dislikes them?
KEITH: He's certainly suggesting that the president is sensitive to what he sees as mocking. Last night, the president met with congressional leaders. And in that meeting, he brought up his electoral win and talked about the popular vote, making a false claim that he's made before, that he would have won the popular vote if not for people who voted illegally. Again, that is false. It has been proven false. And it's just something that the president keeps coming back to, that he just can't quite get over.
INSKEEP: Why do you think that is?
KEITH: It's - I think it might go back to what Spicer was talking about, this feeling that he just can't win even though he won.
INSKEEP: OK, Tam, thanks very much. Really appreciate it.
KEITH: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: That's NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump has a phone call with India's prime minister today - Narendra Modi. India has been going through a political reckoning when it comes to its political parties and how they target voters. Now that country's Supreme Court has weighed in on the issue. Here's NPR's Julie McCarthy.
JULIE MCCARTHY, BYLINE: Here's what the court set down - it banned India's politicians from using religion or caste as a way of appealing to voters. The law has previously disallowed it, but the court expanded the ban. Now, not only is a candidate prohibited from invoking their own religion...
GAUTAM BHATIA: I am a Hindu, and therefore vote for me.
MCCARTHY: ...They are also prohibited from invoking the religion of their intended audience.
BHATIA: I can represent your interests as Hindus, therefore vote for me.
MCCARTHY: That's Gautam Bhatia, a lawyer who writes on free speech. He says the majority reasoned that once you enter public life in a secular state such as India, you consent to participate on terms that leave aside divisive issues such as religion or caste. Bhatia says the court's ideal of the abstract universal citizen who leaves messy personal identity at the door was shared by Mahatma Gandhi, the father of modern India.
BHATIA: The independence movement was fought on the basis of a universal citizen.
MCCARTHY: But the dissent argued there's no such thing, that no one can be separated from their social context. Moreover, the very identities of religion and caste used to discriminate against people are the same identities around which marginalized groups have organized to end their exclusion. Sunil Khilnani of King's College London says Dalits, who were denied their dignity for centuries as so-called untouchables, ultimately mobilized.
SUNIL KHILNANI: To win certain rights, to win - to change policy to improve the conditions of those at the bottom of the social order. Anything that stops that kind of political party mobilization - one, it's not very realistic, and two, it's certainly not something that we want to see happen.
MCCARTHY: The court's edict narrowing political speech has come as India gears up for elections in key states. Already there are politicians who are alleged to have violated the ruling. For example, Parliamentarian Sakshi Maharaj from the ruling BJP party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, recently blamed Muslims for India's population growth by.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SAKSHI MAHARAJ: (Foreign language spoken).
MCCARTHY: Hindus are not responsible for that, he says. Then in a veiled reference to Islam, the BJP politician adds, those people who talk about four wives and 40 children are the ones responsible. Maharaj was booked under a provision that bans language that hurts religious sentiments. Sociologist Dipankar Gupta says such speech is exactly what the court intended to quiet.
DIPANKAR GUPTA: This is the main intention. I mean, the intentions are good, you might say.
MCCARTHY: Gupta says the court was restating a long-held principle against hateful speech that incites. He says different political parties have loose cannons who...
GUPTA: Shoot off their mouth and say awful things about other communities, and the court wants to stop that.
MCCARTHY: Gupta says not everything politicians say has to be completely rational, but it has to be respectful of groups that are not their own. He says the question is, how can Indians function as equals while still maintaining what makes them distinct?
GUPTA: I think that is the crux of democracy and the kernel of citizenship, you might say.
MCCARTHY: Sunil Khilnani says as India grapples with what is and is not allowable political discourse, so too are older democracies. He says recent voting in the United States, Britain as well as India, illustrate the disappearance of a more general language that can appeal across identities.
KHILNANI: The whole notion of citizenship has broken down or is breaking down.
MCCARTHY: And what is increasingly filling that gap, he says, is a kind of nationalistic rhetoric and a more strident nationalistic vision. Julie McCarthy, NPR News, New Delhi.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to spend the next few minutes talking about ambition. We have known for a while now that when women express a lot of ambition in the workplace, they pay a price for that. NPR's Shankar Vedantam is in the studio with me to talk about some new social science that reveals a different aspect to all this. Hi, Shankar.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel. That's exactly right. I was speaking with Leonardo Bursztyn. He's an economist at the University of Chicago along with Thomas Fujiwara at Princeton and Amanda Pallais at Harvard. Bursztyn was wondering whether the disparity between men and women, the fact that men seem to push themselves forward more aggressively, more ambitiously in the workplace might be driven by a dilemma that pits women's professional goals against their personal goals.
LEONARDO BURSZTYN: Men tend to avoid women that actually make more money than they do. Well, if that's the case, then single women might face a trade-off. Many actions that they take that could actually help them in the professional sense could actually hurt them in their personal side on the terms of their dating prospects.
MARTIN: So he's suggesting that a single woman who's really ambitious might not get as many dates. How did they go about trying to test this?
VEDANTAM: So this was their hypothesis. They ran a field experiment among MBA students at a top university. The school requires students to fill out a questionnaire to get placed for a summer internship at the end of the first year of business school. Now, these internships matter a great deal, Rachel. They often end up being places where graduating students find full-time jobs.
Here's the catch. Students were led to think that sometimes only a career counselor could see how they filled out their questionnaires. Others were led to think that classmates could see how they filled out the questionnaires. Compared to men and to married women, unmarried women systematically reported being less driven. And they said they wanted a substantially smaller salary when they thought their classmates could see how they were filling out their questionnaires.
BURSZTYN: When we asked them about their desired compensation, it goes down by $18,000 when they expect their peers to observe their answers. Similarly, when they're asked about the number of days they're willing to travel, for example, every month goes down by seven days, how many hours per week they're willing to work - the number goes down by four. Four fewer hours per week they're willing to work just when they're told that their classmates will observe their answers.
MARTIN: So there's something about being public about your ambition that's making single women second guess themselves.
VEDANTAM: That's right. Now, we don't know whether this is happening consciously. We don't know it's happening unconsciously. This is obviously one study at one university, but it does suggest that these women at least at some level feel they are paying a price if they express ambition. To be too ambitious might harm your prospects in terms of your social life.
MARTIN: Of course, I have to point out there are plenty of single women out there - I was one once - who were really ambitious and weren't afraid to talk about their professional ambitions in a romantic setting.
VEDANTAM: Absolutely right. And I think that's important to say, Rachel. It's also important to say I don't think the study is basically saying the problem is with single women. The problem is that single women are making this bad choice.
What the study is really pointing to is the playing field isn't level. Men do not pay a price when they express ambition in the workplace. What the study is suggesting is that women pay a price and that might reflect the choices that they're making.
MARTIN: So what does that mean? Are there bigger policy implications for this?
VEDANTAM: Well, there are several implications. One is that when schools and teachers are getting feedback from students or when employers are negotiating with job candidates, it's worth keeping in mind that the playing field isn't level. Men are not facing the same penalties as women are facing. The second thing is that attitudes matter. Our beliefs about how men and women ought to behave shapes whether the playing field is level.
MARTIN: NPR's Shankar Vedantam. He joins us regularly to talk about social science research, and he's the host of the podcast Hidden Brain. Thanks, Shankar.
VEDANTAM: Thanks, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Rachel Martin with a story about the benefits of drinking on the job. At least that's what the Belgian parliament concluded. Since the 1990s, legislators in Belgium have been given free beer and wine in the parliament building. Recently, a member of the ethics committee said drinking can lead to bad behavior and suggested that maybe banning it could improve the quality of debate. Parliament said cheers, but no thanks. Apparently before the free booze, MPs were sneaking out of sessions to drink instead. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Ethics lawyers have been decrying Donald Trump's potential conflicts of interest for months, saying as soon as he's in office he'll be in violation of the law. Now that Donald Trump is president, some of those lawyers have filed a lawsuit alleging just that.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
They're arguing that payments made by foreign governments to Trump-owned businesses around the world violate the Constitution. The president's son, Eric, who is executive vice president of the Trump Organization, told The New York Times this suit is, in his opinion, purely harassment for political gain.
MARTIN: Among those filing suit are Norman Eisen and Richard Painter. You've heard them frequently on this program in recent weeks. They were top ethics lawyers in the Obama and George W. Bush White Houses, respectively. They join us now. Gentlemen, welcome back.
NORMAN EISEN: Good morning.
MARTIN: We should say up front the center of your suit is the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which some of our listeners may have gotten themselves familiar with reluctantly. It says, essentially, members of the U.S. government can't receive gifts from foreign states. How is Donald Trump violating that?
EISEN: Rachel, the founders of our country were so worried about the prevalent practice in the days when the United States was established of foreign government sovereigns giving cash and other benefits to leaders - in this case, the worry was that foreigners would give it to the president of the United States and distort his judgment - that they put that limitation in our Constitution. It's the original conflict law of the United States. Donald Trump is violating it because he has an enormous global empire of businesses that is reliant on emoluments, on foreign government cash and benefits. And it poses such a profound threat - the rents he receives, the apartments and condos he sells, the loans, enormous loans that he has.
MARTIN: But he has said that he is putting all his businesses in the trust - in the hands of his sons.
EISEN: He said he's putting operations in the hands of his sons. He's hanging on to the ownership of these businesses. So it's as if he's handing his wallet to his sons to hold. It's still his wallet. And that makes him in violation of the Constitution. And we thought it was important to act.
MARTIN: So, Richard Painter, what's the solution? What would satisfy you?
RICHARD PAINTER: Well, there are a number of things that he can do to resolve this problem. One is that the Constitution provides that he could get consent from Congress to receive some of these payments. He would only have to go to a Republican-controlled Congress and get consent. And he could do that. But he knows that they're going to ask him for information. They're going to ask perhaps to see the tax returns. They're going to ask whether there's Russian money in his business enterprise.
MARTIN: But are they? I mean, if they just gave permission, would that satisfy you, just the act of asking Congress for an OK?
PAINTER: Well, that would satisfy the Constitution. But they aren't going to do that. The Republicans in Congress are only going to do so much for him. And that is what is so tragic here, that he doesn't even trust the Republicans in Congress to sit down and say, OK, let's figure out which of these emoluments I can keep and which ones I can't. I will disclose to you what I have and what I don't. And he won't even do that because...
INSKEEP: Gentlemen, you've said if - I just want to pick up something here. You've said in the past on the program that you wish that the president would put everything in a blind trust, give it to an independent trustee to manage and he could get the money back later. But I want to ask a couple of things about the argument that you're making. First, you're saying that these business transactions amount to a bribe. That's what emoluments basically are. But the president's lawyers have said this isn't a bribe. This is an ordinary business transaction. It's a hotel bill somewhere. It's a loan. Why is an ordinary business transaction a bribe?
EISEN: The...
PAINTER: This is a means of preventing a bribe. I mean, that's the problem. The founders knew that foreign governments were trying to influence our office holders. And they said there are going to be no payments allowed, no benefits from foreign governments allowed whether or not someone can prove there's a bribe. It is unconstitutional unless there's permission from Congress to receive it and Congress has enacted a foreign gift statute that says people can receive gifts from foreign governments up to a certain amount. If Trump wants more, if the president wants more, he could go and ask or, better yet, sell the businesses, turn it over to a blind trustee so we can eliminate this and the other conflicts of interest...
INSKEEP: Norm Eisen, very briefly.
PAINTER: ...And be an effective president.
EISEN: Well, the whole point of the Emoluments Clause is it covers all revenues, all payments. You don't have to show a bribe because of the presumptive bias that these sums create.
INSKEEP: The other question here is isn't this a matter to be addressed by Congress either by voting, as you've said, or voting to impeach the president if he doesn't do anything? Instead, you guys have filed a lawsuit. We should remind people that you have to have standing to file a lawsuit. You have to be able to show that you're suffering some harm. Do your - does your organization have standing to sue the president?
EISEN: The organization does have standing. There's a long line of cases stemming from a Supreme Court decision of - Havens Realty is the name of that case. And in that case you had an organization that had a community mission to help folks in the community. There was some unconstitutional conduct, and the organization had to divert its resources to protect the Constitution. That, of course, is exactly what the organization - nonpartisan - that Richard and I chair, CREW, has had to do here to deal with Mr. Trump's unconstitutional conduct. We hope that Congress will authorize each and every one of these transactions. But there's been no sign of it. There's been no request for it. And we can't just fall into a parallel reality where a president of the United States violates the Constitution day one, hour one, minute one and nobody does anything.
MARTIN: I have two quick questions. How much of this is about creating a mechanism whereby Donald Trump would be forced to release his tax returns?
PAINTER: The - well, that is one of the ways in which the judge could find out what's going on with respect to the emoluments. The focus here, though, is the unconstitutional emoluments that he is receiving without consent of Congress. And I'd much rather have a judge make those decisions now than two years from now or whenever have Congress try to impeach the president.
MARTIN: Real quick, Norm Eisen. Is this a political hit job, as Trump's camp alleges?
EISEN: It's a nonpartisan action. Richard and I have defended some of Trump's nominees on ethics and other grounds - Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Kushner. It is not political.
MARTIN: Former White House ethics lawyers Norman Eisen and Richard Painter. Mr. Eisen served under President Obama, Mr. Painter under George W. Bush.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The nominations for the 89th Academy Awards were announced this morning. NPR arts correspondent Mandalit del Barco joins us now from Park City, Utah. That's where the Sundance Film Festival is taking place. She joins us to talk about all the news with the nominations. Hi, Mandalit.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel.
MARTIN: So I understand that one of the pictures nominated for Best Picture actually premiered at Sundance - right? - last year, "Manchester By The Sea."
DEL BARCO: That's right, Amazon's "Manchester By The Sea." It's the first film from a streaming service to be nominated for best picture. But there are a total of nine nominees for that category this year. "La La Land," the musical love letter to Los Angeles, it got 14 total nominations including Best Picture. And that will compete for the top prize against "Moonlight," the coming-of-age story set in 1980s Miami.
Another movie adapted from a play was nominated for Best Picture, that was "Fences," which was adapted from August Wilson's Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning play. Also the science fiction drama "Arrival" was nominated for Best Picture. So were "Hacksaw Ridge," "Hell Or High Water," "Lion" and "Hidden Figures," the film about three black women who worked for NASA and helped launch John Glenn into orbit.
MARTIN: All right, so those are the films nominated for Best Picture. What about the acting categories?
DEL BARCO: Well, you know, there weren't any really big surprises in this category or in those two categories, I should. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, who star together and sing in "La La Land," they were both nominated for the lead acting categories. Denzel Washington, who directed and starred in "Fences," he also made the list. So did Casey Affleck from "Manchester By The Sea," Andrew Garfield from "Hacksaw Ridge" and Viggo Mortensen for "Captain Fantastic."
And among the actresses nominated were Ruth Negga for her role in "Loving," Natalie Portman, who portrayed Jackie Kennedy, the French actress Isabelle Huppert for "Elle" and Oscars sweetheart Meryl Streep, who made a strong political statement against Donald Trump onstage at the Golden Globes.
MARTIN: I mean, at this point it's now a big deal if Meryl Streep doesn't get nominated for something.
DEL BARCO: (Laughter) That's right. You know, Rachel, it's interesting to note that after criticism last year to the Oscars being so white, there were six black actors nominated in different categories this year.
MARTIN: OK, so let's talk about that. Diversity, as you mentioned, has been a big topic of conversation in Hollywood and beyond. What did we see on that front in the Best Director category?
DEL BARCO: Well, once again, not a single woman was nominated for best director. But one African-American man did make the list. Barry Jenkins, he wrote and directed the screenplay for "Moonlight." And that film actually has a total of eight nominations. But there were other nominees for Best Director - Denis Villeneuve for "Arrival," Mel Gibson for "Hacksaw Ridge," Kenneth Lonergan for "Manchester By The Sea" and Damien Chazelle for "La La Land."
MARTIN: OK, and lastly, what about Best Documentary film?
DEL BARCO: Well "O.J.: Made In America," that did play in theaters, so it could qualify for an Oscar. But it was a multi-part series that also aired on ESPN. And that will compete against a documentary called "I Am Not Your Negro," "Fire At Sea," "Life, Animated" and "13th," that's Ava DuVernay's documentary about the 13th Amendment and the prison industrial complex in America.
MARTIN: NPR arts correspondent Mandalit del Barco. She talked to us from KPCW, our member station in Park City, Utah. Thanks, Mandalit.
DEL BARCO: Thanks, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Populous movements had a good 2016 - first the Brexit vote, then Donald Trump's victory. 2017 could bring more of the same, there will be big elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany. This week on the show, we're going to hear from three leaders of European populist movements. And we begin today with an anti-immigrant politician who is leading the polls in the Netherlands. Lauren Frayer traveled to The Hague to meet the man some call the Dutch Donald Trump.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in Dutch).
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: This was the scene at a political rally nearly three years ago, when Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch Parliament and head of the Freedom Party, asked supporters.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GEERT WILDERS: (Speaking Dutch).
FRAYER: "In the Netherlands, do you want more or fewer Moroccans?"
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in Dutch).
FRAYER: "Fewer," the crowd chants.
LT COL MOSTAFA HILALI: Well, for me, I saw that and it really hit me emotionally.
FRAYER: Mostafa Hilali is a lieutenant colonel in the Dutch army, and happens to be of Moroccan descent. He's one of more than 5,000 people who sued Wilders and won. The politician was convicted late last year of inciting discrimination against Moroccans, but he got no punishment. In fact, Geert Wilders surged in the polls.
HILALI: This reputation, this image that we always have of ourself as a very tolerant and moderate and acceptant country is skin-deep. His rise shows that there are a lot of people out there who actually have very different ideas about how the Netherlands should be.
FRAYER: Over tea at their home, Hilali and his native Dutch wife, Linda Van Noord, recount how they wanted to give their baby a Moroccan name, but worried the boy would face a lifetime of discrimination. Van Noord was also a plaintiff in the Wilders lawsuit, but she says she understands why many other Dutch people support him.
LINDA VAN NOORD: Because the area where my grandparents lived their whole life, it changed radically. You know, suddenly there's this huge mosque now right in front of your home. They're not racist. They're coping with what, to them, is an extreme change.
FRAYER: The Netherlands went from virtually zero to about 10 percent immigrant in just a few decades. Geert Wilders promises to reverse that, and return Netherlands to its white Christian roots. But what makes him different from other far-right politicians is that he's for gay rights, legal drugs, women's lib. What appeals to many voters here is that Wilders says he wants to protect those liberal Dutch values from an enemy that he says is Islam.
WILDERS: A lot of people from Islamic backgrounds don't care a bit about our values, our culture, our identity, our freedom or the rights of women not to be harassed.
FRAYER: Wilders refuses most interviews, he prefers to tweet instead, but I managed to catch him in the hallway of the Dutch Parliament. It was just after the ISIS attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, and Wilders was irate. He just tweeted a photoshopped picture of German Chancellor Angela Merkel with blood on her hands.
WILDERS: We should hold Mrs. Merkel accountable. We should hold the Dutch prime minister accountable. They are all of the same bunch - irresponsible, cowardly, and we have to change our societies and to fight back and defend our values and our people. And that's the only way that we can save our liberty.
FRAYER: He wants to ban the Quran, shut down mosques and pull Holland out of the European Union. He's an isolationist who wants to cut all foreign aid. And just like the Arab Spring a few years ago, Wilders says a wave of populist anger is now sweeping the West, and he's proud to be one of its leaders.
WILDERS: I'm a patriot. I believe there is a patriotic spring going on in the world today in the western world. Donald Trump did the job in America, and I hope that here in Europe we will see a patriotic spring both in Holland, but also in Germany, in France, in many other countries where parties like mine are getting stronger everyday.
FRAYER: His anti-Muslim stance has earned him death threats. When I interviewed him, I had to squeeze my microphone between beefy bodyguards. Such security became common for Dutch critics of Islam 12 years ago after a local filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in the street by a Muslim extremist. Van Gogh had made a movie criticizing Islam. Many Dutch who might not agree with Wilders still vehemently support his freedom of speech, and think the discrimination case against him was ridiculous. One of them is Gijs van de Westelaken, a colleague of the late filmmaker van Gogh.
GIJS VAN DE WESTELAKEN: I think the trial against him was completely wrong, they shouldn't have done this. If anybody has a right of free speech, it's him. On the other hand, yes, well, he's a politician, he exaggerates.
FRAYER: Wilders was nevertheless named politician of the year for 2016. He's poised to win the most votes in the Dutch election in March. The rival parties are not likely to back him to be prime minister. For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer in The Hague.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It used to be the only place to find great television was on the big broadcast networks, then cable was where all the best stuff was airing. More recently, Netflix and Amazon have been racking up the Emmys. And now Apple wants a bite. Hollywood insiders tell NPR that the tech giant has plans to start making original movies and television. Apple will face some challenges, not least of all a very crowded market. But as NPR's Laura Sydell reports, Hollywood is happy to have tech companies enter the game.
LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: When producer Sid Ganis first heard that Apple wanted to make TV and movies...
SID GANIS: I thought to myself - what? - and why?
SYDELL: As a former president at Paramount Pictures, Ganis had a hand in films such as "Top Gun," "Ghost" and "Forrest Gump." He's also someone who uses Apple products and thinks the company is really good at making hardware.
GANIS: It seemed odd that they would take that really big, gigantic leap into creating content. Content is not very easy to figure out.
SYDELL: But Apple's sales fell last year for the first time since 2001, largely due to less demand for its iPhone 7. Apple isn't commenting about its plans for TV and film, but the right content could help Apple boost sales of Apple products.
BRIAN BLAU: Having original content is a strategy that is simply just going to bring people back to Apple.
SYDELL: Brian Blau is an analyst with Gartner who follows Apple.
BLAU: I think this could represent a unique opportunity for them, one that's going to make them more competitive with these other original content providers that, potentially, have been drawing Apple users away from the Apple ecosystem.
SYDELL: These original content providers include Netflix. Netflix has done an especially good job at creating content, like "The Crown," that draws in new subscribers.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE CROWN")
CLAIRE FOY: (As Queen Elizabeth II) My name is Elizabeth.
HARRY HADDEN-PATON: (As Martin Charteris) Then, long live Queen Elizabeth.
SYDELL: Last quarter, Netflix flew past Wall Street expectations and added some 7 million new subscribers in the U.S. and abroad. Analyst Blau thinks even though Netflix is available on Apple devices, the company may want to have some programming that's under its control. In part, as the market for iPhones gets saturated, it will need other sources of income.
BLAU: I think Apple's just trying to find their place and how they can capture some of the revenue. And this sort of TV and video and music content, I think, is just going to be one more pillar that they're going to be able to stand on over time.
SYDELL: And that's just fine with Hollywood producers like Art Linson. Among Linson's executive producing credits are the hit series "Sons Of Anarchy." Linson says Hollywood has become too risk-averse.
ART LINSON: And it opened the door a long time ago for people to say - whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we'll go into that. We're going to do something interesting, and let's see how it goes. And that's why you see Netflix making the surge it made - and Amazon - because they're smart. They went, we're not scared.
SYDELL: And Amazon and Netflix spent serious money. Netflix laid out $100 million with its first foray into original TV, "House Of Cards" with Kevin Spacey. Netflix took it on after it had been turned down by HBO, Showtime and AMC.
But no matter how much money you have, there are challenges, says producer Sid Ganis, especially for a company like Apple, which has never produced TV or film.
GANIS: It doesn't matter that they have $200 billion in the bank. It matters that the writer and the director are in it for the emotional ability to move us as viewers.
SYDELL: And making a hit is hard. It requires the right talent and no small amount of luck. As any number of Hollywood producers will tell you, no one ever starts out planning to make a flop.
Laura Sydell, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
President Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs has not been confirmed yet, but two of the executive orders the president signed this week could have a direct effect on the department and also the veterans it serves, as NPR's Quil Lawrence reports.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: As promised, Donald Trump has moved to dismantle the Affordable Care Act - Obamacare. That's a concern for those who might be left without health insurance and for the Department of Veterans Affairs, which may have to pick up some of the slack.
SENIOR POLICY RESEARCHER CARRIE FARMER: Most veterans have more than one source of health insurance.
LAWRENCE: Carrie Farmer at the RAND Corporation researches health policy. She says 3 million vets who are enrolled in the VA usually get their health care elsewhere, from their employer or maybe from Obamacare exchanges. If those options go away, some of those 3 million veterans will move on to the VA, she says.
FARMER: I would expect that the number of veterans using VA health care will increase, which will only provide a further challenge for VA to provide timely and accessible care.
LAWRENCE: That would be an unwelcome strain on an overtaxed system, she says. Speaking of strain, the president also signed a federal hiring freeze this week. Yesterday, White House spokesman Sean Spicer specifically said that applies to the VA, which he called a broken system.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SEAN SPICER: The VA in particular, if you look at the problems that have plagued people, hiring more people isn't the answer, it's hiring the right people.
LAWRENCE: Just hours later, the acting secretary of the VA seemed to contradict the White House. He said for public safety, the department intends to exempt anyone it deems necessary from the hiring freeze. Trump's nominee to lead the VA, Dr. David Shulkin, has also stressed the urgent need to hire more caregivers. He's been running VA health care since 2015. Last fall, he told NPR...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
DAVID SHULKIN: We have 45,000 job openings, that's too many. I need to fill every one of those openings in order to make sure that we're doing the very best for veterans.
LAWRENCE: Shulkin said the VA performs as well or better than private health care systems, but he said that long before he was asked to join the Trump administration. Quil Lawrence, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOXHOLE SONG, "SPECTACLE")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
There's been a little bit of political wrangling recently in this country as well of course. Red states fought hard against the Obama administration. And now governors of left-leaning states are ready to do battle with the Trump White House. And that is all the talk here in California. Odds are an early flashpoint is going to be climate change. Governor Jerry Brown, in his annual State of the State speech, said California will ramp up its ambitious climate policies. Lauren Sommer from member station KQED reports that the Trump administration could really get in his way.
LAUREN SOMMER, BYLINE: Governor Jerry Brown had one key message about climate change - perseverance.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
JERRY BROWN: We can't fall back and give in to the climate deniers. The science is clear. The danger is real.
SOMMER: Just as President Trump was taking the oath of office on Friday, California released its latest plan tackling climate change, which includes renewable energy and putting millions of electric cars on the road. It's a challenge Brown first made in December, when climate scientists from around the world were meeting in San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SOMMER: The mood at their conference had been dismal.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BROWN: Thank you.
SOMMER: Scientists were worried about losing federal funding for research, even the NASA satellites that collect basic climate data.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BROWN: And if Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite. We're going to collect that data.
SOMMER: Brown has also spearheaded his own international climate agreement with more than 160 cities and states.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BROWN: A lot of people say - what the hell are you doing, Brown? You're not a country.
SOMMER: What California is, Brown says, is the sixth largest economy in the world. So he had a warning for the Trump administration.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BROWN: So we've got the scientists. We've got the lawyers. And we're ready to fight. We're ready to defend.
SOMMER: Playing defense may be in California's future. The state has tough rules limiting carbon pollution from cars. But it can't have those rules without permission from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. That came up last week at the nomination hearing for Scott Pruitt, who could run the EPA. California Senator Kamala Harris wanted to know - would Pruitt uphold California's special permission, its waiver for tougher car rules?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SCOTT PRUITT: Senator, as you know, administrators in the past have not granted the waiver and, in fact, have granted a waiver. That's a review process that will be conducted if confirmed.
KAMALA HARRIS: What is your intention, sir?
PRUITT: I don't know without going through the process to determine that, Senator. And one would not want to presume the outcome.
SOMMER: California has been in this kind of fight before. Back in 2007, the Bush administration denied California's request to have tougher pollution rules for cars, saying it would create a patchwork of regulations. California took the federal government to court. But before the case was decided, Obama was elected, and California got its waiver. Now...
MICHAEL WARA: The first legal disputes are going to be about cars. And I'd be surprised, actually, if we didn't see those disputes.
SOMMER: Michael Wara is a professor at Stanford Law School. He says this isn't just about California. Thirteen other states have adopted the same clean car standards. But the bigger question, he says, is a political one.
WARA: How a Pruitt EPA responds to some of these issues with California is going to really test Scott Pruitt's and the administration's commitment to conservative values.
SOMMER: As attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt sued the EPA, arguing that his state had the right to set its own environmental rules.
WARA: So that logic would seem to imply that California should have the right to set its own agenda. But we'll see how that trades off against the desire to roll back regulations relating to greenhouse gases.
SOMMER: Something California is watching closely, lawyers at the ready.
For NPR News I'm Lauren Sommer in San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE OF TYCHO'S "SLACK")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Let's talk about what to call a fact that is not a fact. President Trump made a string of statements at the CIA over the weekend. Our correspondent Mary Louise Kelly used this language to describe some of them.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: It's provably not true. That's what he said, and that is false. Trump also falsely inflated the size of the crowd at his inauguration.
GREENE: But Mary Louise did not use the word lie. And many listeners asked why. To talk about why, Steve Inskeep sat down with Mary Louise as well as Michael Oreskes. He's the senior vice president who is in charge of news here at NPR.
STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: Good morning to you both.
MICHAEL ORESKES, BYLINE: Good morning.
KELLY: Good morning.
INSKEEP: Mary Louise, what exactly did people ask you?
KELLY: Well, to set the stage a bit further, on day one of his presidency, Donald Trump went to the CIA and delivered a remarkable speech - remarkable in part because he said several things that were not true. So in our reporting on that speech, we described them as you just heard there - as untrue claims, false denials, et cetera, which led to my inbox exploding with people writing to say, why are you pussyfooting around? Why not just say he lied?
INSKEEP: Just to be clear, pussyfooting was a phrase that someone...
KELLY: A direct quote that, I think, a couple of people tweeted at me.
INSKEEP: OK. Why not say he lied?
KELLY: So this has prompted me to go actually look up the word lie in the Oxford English Dictionary. And here's the definition. I'll read it - (reading) a false statement made with intent to deceive. Intent being the key word there - without the ability to peer into Donald Trump's head, I can't tell you what his intent was. I can tell you what he said and how that squares - or doesn't - with fact...
INSKEEP: And leave you...
KELLY: ...With publicly available fact.
INSKEEP: ...Leave the listener to make their own conclusions.
Mike Oreskes, how much discussion has there been about this word, lie?
ORESKES: There's been quite a bit. And of course, it began during the campaign. And we at NPR have decided not to use the word lie in most situations. And there's really two reasons. One of them is the one that Mary Louise cited. But to me, there's a second reason - and maybe more important. Our job as journalists is to report - to find facts, establish their authenticity and share them with everybody. And I think that when you use words like lie, it gets in the way of that.
And there's the really important work we do, the important work that Mary Louise does. And by the way, I want to just interject. I thought she handled this perfectly. And it's really important that people understand that these aren't our opinions. These aren't just thoughts we happen to have. These are things we've established through our journalism, through our reporting. And I don't want to do anything that gets in the way of people seeing that reporting. And I think the minute you start branding things with a word like lie, you push people away from you.
KELLY: I would add, though, that this is something that reporters in our newsroom are wrestling with.
ORESKES: Totally.
KELLY: I will count myself in there - because we are trained as journalists to pick our words carefully. We are also trained to call a spade a spade.
INSKEEP: Correct. And I want to make clear a couple of points here. First, you're not saying the word lie is banned from NPR.
ORESKES: No.
INSKEEP: There's no word that is banned...
ORESKES: No.
INSKEEP: ...From NPR News. We use the words that we use and the best words that we possibly can. The second observation is that some news organizations are clearly making a different choice.
ORESKES: Right.
INSKEEP: We've had Dean Baquet of The New York Times, the editor of The New York Times, on the program. And they used it this very week, also referring to the president. The headline was "Trump Repeats An Election Lie To Top Lawmakers."
What do you think of their choice?
ORESKES: I don't want to edit their newspaper any more than I would want my friend Dean deciding what we should do at NPR. I think one of the beauties of the First Amendment is we can make different choices. I don't think there's any question that Mary Louise and her stories and other NPR stories have clearly communicated the facts in this case. And I have a lot of respect for our audiences. And I think they understand what's happening.
And to the other point Mary Louise made, it's for each of us to make our own judgments about what we think the motives have been here. I think one of the big challenges for us will be in situations where the falsehood is repeated so often that it becomes clear, the intent. And then I think it'll be fair to challenge us on the question of - the intent is so obvious that you could add it up and come to the word lie. We'll see.
INSKEEP: Is this a situation where, as reporters, we need to note when things are false, whoever says them...
KELLY: Of course.
INSKEEP: ...As best we can determine it but do that in a matter-of-fact way and pay attention more to what people actually do?
KELLY: My job, as a beat reporter here, is to be intensely familiar with everything that's been said, every document that's out there that's publicly available so that we can correct the record so that when the president of the United States comes out and says, for example, I never maligned the CIA, I can quickly, on deadline, point to where, in fact, he did malign the CIA. And I can point that out and then try to advance the record by adding more facts the next day, calling sources and trying to advance it bit by bit so that the facts add up.
INSKEEP: NPR national security correspondent Mary Louise Kelly and NPR editorial director Mike Oreskes - thanks to both of you.
ORESKES: Steve, thank you.
KELLY: You're welcome.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Environmental groups say they are ready to fight President Trump's move to revive two controversial oil pipelines. Trump yesterday signed documents to speed up permitting for Keystone XL, which the Obama administration rejected back in 2015, and also for the Dakota Access Pipeline, which the administration had put on hold just last month. Amy Sisk of Prairie Public Broadcasting covered those months of protests around the Dakota Access Pipeline site. She joins us from Bismarck, N.D. on Skype. Amy, good morning.
AMY SISK, BYLINE: Good morning, glad to be here.
GREENE: Well, thanks for coming on. I don't think I realized that those protesters are still set up in those campsites sites around the Dakota Access area. I guess they might have something to start really protesting again here.
SISK: Yeah. So there definitely are still people here. The camp has been relatively calm since December when we saw the Obama administration announced it would launch an environmental review into the pipeline, and that's compared to the frequent and sometimes violent demonstrations that we saw last fall. But Trump had pledged to make a quick decision on this particular pipeline, and people at camp expected him to greenlight the project. Here's what Jean Anneal of Tulsa, Okla. told me at camp.
JEAN ANNEAL: To me it's not surprising. We were kind of - knew that that was going to happen. To me, this is just such a serious issue that I'm not packing up to go home. I'm going to stay.
SISK: And she won't be alone at camp. The camp has really thinned, but there's still a few hundred people who remain there.
GREENE: So that sounds like a mix of resignation, but determination as well at this point.
SISK: Yes, definitely.
GREENE: You mentioned that environmental review. So President Trump signed those documents, he also signed this executive order to streamline those types of reviews for pipelines. He called these reviews horrible and cumbersome, but, you know, you had the Standing Rock Tribe asking for an even more thorough review, which is a difference of opinion here. What were the tribe's concerns, Amy? Just remind us.
SISK: Yeah. So the tribe's number one concern has to do with water. It's concerned about a potential oil spill where the pipeline is slated to cross under the Missouri River next to the reservation. And there's several recent major oil spills in the region that has the tribe concerned. Just last month, we saw a pipeline leak 176,000 gallons of oil in western North Dakota. There was another big oil spill this month in Saskatchewan. We have, you know, data showing that most oil - billions of gallons of it - does make it safely to its destination via pipelines, but of course leaks do happen, and they can be devastating.
GREENE: And we should say, I mean, there are a lot of people who joined this protest from around the country, it wasn't just those protesters at those campsites.
SISK: No, this pipeline fight has really become ground zero for the environmental movement. Big environmental groups like 350.org have gotten involved, they're a climate change activist group, and they hope to essentially disrupt the transportation of fossil fuels. The idea is that if oil can't get to market, it won't be extracted anymore. And several prominent environmentalists are now vowing to fight in the streets. The courts essentially take the level of protest against this pipeline to new heights.
GREENE: But, Amy, there's another side of this debate. I mean, you have the oil industry, labor groups. I mean, they have been saying that these two pipelines could be real job creators, so this must be good news for them.
SISK: Yeah, it definitely is. They're pretty pleased with what Trump is saying now about this pipeline. You know, the oil industry says that pipelines are safe, and that North Dakota's Bakken oil patch needs pipelines to stay competitive. The oil patch out here has long relied on trains and trucks as a method of transporting oil, and the industry says that those are more expensive and more dangerous. I talked to Ron Ness with the North Dakota Petroleum Council about this, and here's what he had to say.
RON NESS: This pipeline should be moving oil today, and we'd have 2,000 or 3,000 less trucks on the road in western North Dakota. We'd be getting our oil to market at - to a better market more safely and more reliably, and we'd be getting a better price for it.
SISK: And he tells me that Trump's action is a significant step, and he hopes to see the final permit needed to complete this pipeline soon.
GREENE: And just briefly, I mean, we talked so much about Dakota Access, it seemed like Keystone XL and that whole debate was long ago, but President Trump is now reviving that pipeline to carry oil from the Canadian tar sands. What's next there?
SISK: Yeah. So TransCanada, which is the company that wants to build the Keystone XL Pipeline, they've already indicated that they will be reapplying for a permit. Now, the economics aren't too good right now for tar sands oil, and environmentalists of course have vowed to fight tooth and nail if the Keystone project is revived. You know, that was their signature victory under the Obama administration, and they believe that tar sands and oil should not be developed or transported.
GREENE: OK, talking to Amy Sisk, who comes to us from Inside Energy, that's a public media collaboration focusing on America's energy issues. Amy, thanks as always.
SISK: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We are in the season of confirmation hearings. The new president's Cabinet picks get vetted, and then they get to sit through sometimes hours and hours of questioning on Capitol Hill as legislators try to decide if they are right for the job. It can be an arduous process any way you cut it, but there have been some complaints from the Trump administration this year that Democrats are slowing the process down. So we've been gathering up your questions about how all this works, and we're going to put those questions to commentator and columnist Cokie Roberts. It is part of our regular segment aptly titled Ask Cokie. Hi, Cokie.
COKIE ROBERTS, BYLINE: (Laughter) Hi, Rachel.
MARTIN: All right, let's play our first question. Here we go.
ROB CANARY: Hey, Cokie, Rob Canary (ph) here from windy Philadelphia. I follow the news carefully while I'm in my cab. Could you give a refresher on when, where and how filibusters get used there, particularly as a method of opposition to Cabinet nominees?
MARTIN: Good question, OK.
ROBERTS: It is a good question. Well, Rob, the Democrats really put themselves in a box on this one because they decided when they were in control of the Senate that they didn't like the fact that Republicans were filibustering nominees, both for the executive branch and for the judicial branch. And so they exercised what was called the nuclear option, where they got rid of the filibuster for appointments to everything but the Supreme Court. They are now in a position where they can't filibuster any of these nominees, so there's really not much of a threat of defeating any of these Cabinet appointees even though some of them have raised serious concerns, both about their policies and about their personal dealings.
MARTIN: OK. So unless there's some huge unexpected defection, these people are going to get through. So what are these hearings for then, Cokie? Is it just theater? Is it just an opportunity for Democrats to kind of get on the record on certain issues?
ROBERTS: Well, the Democrats definitely want to score some points, but it does also put the nominees on the record. And that's especially important when you have a president who doesn't have a record on voting on lots of different issues and been somewhat contradictory in the course of the campaign. So for instance, with the Secretary of State - Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Mattis, they seemingly departed from some of what President Trump had said during the campaign, so that's instructive. It's also a chance to question the records of the nominees themselves, and several of those are very controversial.
MARTIN: All right, let's get to our next question here.
NICOLE BOUDREAU: Hi, my name is Nicole Boudreau. I'm calling from Houston, and I was wondering if hiring undocumented workers has been an issue for disqualifying nominees in the past, if that would be an issue this time around?
MARTIN: What do you think, Cokie?
ROBERTS: Well, there have been people who have withdrawn their nominations because they either haven't paid social security taxes or have had people working for them who were not documented or didn't pay certain taxes. Those were all Democrats, and the Democrats thought that that was a political hazard, and so the nominees withdrew. The Republicans don't seem to have been concerned about a couple of nominees who didn't pay Social Security taxes or had other tax problems. But, look, the Democrats were dealing when the filibuster was still in place, and they knew that Republicans could probably block their nominees.
MARTIN: Like we've been talking about, Cokie, you said these nominees are likely to all get confirmed, but a lot of our listeners wanted to know about those who end up getting turned down by the Senate. Does that happen often?
ROBERTS: Very, very, very seldom. Only nine in all of our history, though one was rejected three times in the same day...
MARTIN: Oh.
ROBERTS: ...John Tyler's pick for Treasury secretary. But the first one rejected...
MARTIN: That's a self-esteem hit (laughter).
ROBERTS: I know, that was a problem. But the first one was Roger B. Taney as secretary of the Treasury in 1834 under Jackson, and he then went on to famously become a Supreme Court chief who wrote the Dred Scott decision. The last was John Tower, and that was quite remarkable because he was a former senator, and the Senate defeated him in 1989. They didn't like him a lot. But the Senate has readily rejected other appointments from George Washington on, but the Cabinet they have pretty much felt that a president gets to pick his Cabinet.
MARTIN: Commentator and columnist Cokie Roberts. She joins us Wednesdays to answer your questions about how Washington works. Tweet us your questions @morningedition with the hashtag #AskCokie, or you can email us - askcokie@npr.org. Thanks, Cokie.
ROBERTS: Good to be with you, Rachel.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. Ashley and Jon Sterkel of Nebraska learned the gender of their first baby and had an idea. Mr. Sterkel had been shooting at exploding targets. They figured - why not use this skill in a Facebook video?
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
JON STERKEL: It's a boy.
GREENE: Smoke was blue for boy. Residents nearby didn't seem to care. They thought a house had blown up. They called police who issued Mr. Sterkel a ticket for using explosives without a permit. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The United Kingdom's path out of the European Union hit a curve in the road yesterday with a ruling from the British Supreme Court. Here's the announcement from the court's president, Lord Neuberger.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DAVID NEUBERGER: Today, by a majority of 8-3, the Supreme Court rules that the government cannot trigger Article 50 without an act of Parliament authorizing it to do so.
MARTIN: Article 50 is the provision that will allow the U.K. to start negotiating its divorce from the EU. The legal challenge was brought by business woman Gina Miller. She joins me now from the studios of the BBC in London.
Ms. Miller, thanks for being with us.
GINA MILLER: Good morning.
MARTIN: The people of the United Kingdom voted in a referendum last year to leave the EU. You pushed to try to make sure it could not happen without a vote from Parliament. Why?
MILLER: Because our constitutional law in Britain says that only Parliament can grant or take away rights. And by invoking Article 50, we would undo the 1972 act that took us into the EU and basically gave us rights and freedoms, and those would inevitably be taken away. So it has to be that we leave the EU - we trigger Article 50 via a new act of Parliament.
MARTIN: What specific rights do you think would be revoked were the U.K. to move forward with Brexit?
MILLER: Well, the four fundamental freedoms that are granted all E.U. citizens when you're a member of the EU - a freedom of movement, goods, services and access to the European Court of Justice - would all be affected.
MARTIN: So you won and now the Parliament will need to sign its approval. But a yes vote is virtually assured in the Parliament. So what's the point of the battle at this point?
MILLER: The battle was about our constitution. Obviously, it has effects on Brexit. But it wasn't about Brexit - it was insuring that there are checks and balances on a prime minister and government and that they can't basically do what they want without parliamentary scrutiny.
MARTIN: You are a private citizen. As I understand it, you're the co-founder...
MILLER: Yes.
MARTIN: ...Of a private investment fund, a successful businesswoman and philanthropist. Why did this issue affect you in this way that you wanted to take action?
MILLER: Well, I couldn't understand why everyone else wasn't jumping up and down and saying this was illegal for the prime minister to think that she was above the law. And my only conclusion is that there's a real fear that has descended in the U.K. after Brexit. people are frightened to ask questions. Anything that isn't seen as the will of the people is somehow being unpatriotic. And I have never been frightened of asking questions. I'm quite happy to take on a battle.
MARTIN: I understand you, yourself, are the target of personal abuse, threats after your challenge on Brexit?
MILLER: Yes. It's very interesting because it's the messenger, not the message, that's been attacked in a variety of media. And it's led to social media and letters and death threats, threats against me as a woman and my ethnicity. I've been called a primate, saying that I'm not even human - threats of beheading, gang raping. You name it, I've had it.
MARTIN: At this point, you have waged your battle. You have been successful. Will you try in whatever capacity you can to make sure that Brexit is successful?
MILLER: Absolutely. As somebody who runs an investment company, then obviously from a point of view of looking at how these negotiations go and what it would mean to the city of London, what it would mean to our economy, then I will obviously be very, very interested and keeping a very close eye on the negotiations.
MARTIN: Gina Miller - she successfully campaigned to require the British Parliament to vote on Brexit.
Thanks so much for your time.
MILLER: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It's a big week for movies. Oscar nominations are out, and one of the industry's most important film festivals is underway. Actors, directors, studio execs - the glamorous folks - they are all at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Hardworking critics are there too, including Kenneth Turan, who joins us now to talk about some of the films. Hi, Ken.
KENNETH TURAN, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel. How you doing?
MARTIN: Good. It's tough work, but someone's got to do it, huh?
TURAN: (Laughter) A lot of snow, one thing - a lot of trudging through the snow.
MARTIN: Lot of snow, funny that in the winter in Utah. All right, so let's get to the movies. Every year at Sundance, there's one film that everybody is just abuzz talking about. What's that movie this year?
TURAN: Well, this year everyone's talking about a documentary called "Icarus" because this film began one way and went in a totally different direction. It started as a personal film by a cycling enthusiast who loves to bicycle and wanted to do a film. He wanted to experiment with performance-enhancing drugs and see what it did to him and see if he'd be detected. He ends up meeting the head of Russia's Anti-Doping Agency, and this man over the course of the film becomes involved in this huge scandal that's front page news on The New York Times. He becomes a key source for this international doping scandal. And to go from this lighthearted personal film to, like, the heart of international intrigue...
MARTIN: Yeah.
TURAN: ...Is a journey that you never expect to go on.
MARTIN: Wow. All right, so that's definitely top of my list for viewing. What other documentaries should we be looking out for?
TURAN: Yes. Well, there is a warm-hearted film, you know, and everyone is looking for a warm-hearted film because of all the snow. It's called "Step." This is the festival where "20 Feet From Stardom" started, and this is a similar vibe. It takes place in a Baltimore leadership school for young women. It's about a step dance team, and how they try and be good at step and also graduate and get into college. It's just a heartening story. It's directed by Amanda Lipitz, a woman. It's her first film, and it's just fun. You know, as I'm talking about it, I'm looking forward to seeing it again.
MARTIN: And lastly, Ken, I have wondered this. I mean, there's so many different film festivals around the country, around the world, really, and Sundance continues to be such a preeminent festival. And I know it takes place in Park City, and it's kind of this party scene, but what is it about the movies that are showcased there or the directors? What is it about the festival that makes it so unique still?
TURAN: You know, one of the things that draws me back every year is really the wide range of dramatic films that they show here. I mean, Sundance has a reputation for kind of showing angsty films about young people confused about their identity, and those are here for sure, but there's really a lot of other subject matter here that's really unusual. I mean, this year there were three films that were so different from each other and so different from what we usually see.
There's a film called "Walking Out," it's a powerful father-son wilderness survival story that's very beautiful to look at and very emotionally moving. There's a film called "Novitiate," which takes place behind the walls of a convent in the 1950s and '60s about the novitiate's relationship to Christ, really something you don't get out of Hollywood. And then there's this little film called "Columbus," which is set in the city of Columbus, Ind., which has a lot of famous modernist architecture, and the architecture becomes a character in the film. It's a personal drama, but really you see these amazing buildings, and they're as interesting as a story, and the story is interesting. So this kind of range is really what makes Sundance Sundance.
MARTIN: All right. Kenneth Turan, he reviews movies for MORNING EDITION and the Los Angeles Times, and we talked to him from Park City where he is watching all the movies for us at Sundance. Thanks so much, Ken.
TURAN: Thank you, Rachel.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
I bet over the next 12 days, we're going to keep hearing what is at stake in Super Bowl 51. Could New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady really be the best quarterback ever? Can the Falcons finally bring a title to Atlanta, a city that's been waiting a really long time? Every Super Bowl has a ton riding on it, right? Well, actually columnist Mike Pesca says maybe this one has more than usual.
MIKE PESCA: Every Super Bowl answers a question. Will this aged veteran be able to finally get a ring? Will that coach overcome a string of disappointment? Can Lady Gaga make amends for Meryl Streep's Golden Globe anti-football calumny? But for this Super Bowl, there's a question that's not been posed before. Can one great game redeem a lousy season? To my eyes, this was the worst season of professional football in memory. Ratings fell by 8 percent across all broadcasts, which might not sound too dire. But for the all-consuming cultural behemoth that is the NFL it's the first significant slippage in many years.
The explanations for why viewership fell were many, and they acted like Rorschach tests. For a certain type of fan, it was said to be the sympathy expressed for the Black Lives Matter movement from Colin Kaepernick, a then-backup quarterback on a team that would go 2-14. For another set of fans, it was said that finally, in 2016, all the horrors of head trauma became too much, though oddly not when the Cowboys were playing. They still set viewership records. It is a natural tendency to hear of a new as of yet fully-vetted development and pour our anxieties into an explanation. Bee colonies die out? Must be cellphones. Pedestrian accidents on the rise? Must be cellphones. By the way, one explanation for the NFL ratings decline - also cellphones.
But I'm here to tell you that it really was just bad football. There have been 10 playoff games so far. One was scintillating, the Packers versus the Cowboys. One was close, but the Steelers won without even scoring a touchdown. And eight were terrible. And the teams to make the playoffs were a horrible lot. They included the Texans, rated by Football Outsiders' advanced statistical model as the fourth worst team in the NFL. They played the Raiders, who would have been good, but because of injuries were forced to start a third string quarterback who looked like he was desperately trying to call an Uber at the Daytona 500.
Last year, the Carolina Panthers and the Arizona Cardinals, two teams who had never won Super Bowls, assembled terrific offenses. And they had the best won-loss records in the league. This year, both those teams have losing records, and the new teams that seemed to come out of nowhere went back to nowhere pretty quickly. Minnesota started 5-1, then four straight losses, missed the playoffs. Detroit Lions, the Cubbiest (ph) of all the teams, put together a series of improbable wins early in the season but regressed, losing their last three and were summarily dismissed in the playoffs. Oh, you could look at the Dolphins' record, 10-6, and tell yourself that ain't nothing. But it kind of was nothing. They beat only one winning team.
Lest this become a Mr. Blackwell inventory of the worst-dressed list where everyone makes the list, let me acknowledge that the Cowboys were compelling. The Patriots were their usual dominant selves. The Falcons have a legitimately impressive offense and, as of late, a defense that can offer occasional resistance. And in the Super Bowl, two of these teams are playing. That is a hopeful prospect for the NFL. On the other hand, the championship could well reflect the desultory parade of horribles that's characterized this season. I guess what I'm saying is, there is a lot riding on one participant - Lady Gaga.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M ON THE EDGE")
LADY GAGA: (Singing) I'm on the edge of glory.
GREENE: Oh my, Lady Gaga and Mike Pesca, could the morning be better? Mike Pesca...
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Nope.
GREENE: Nope. Mike Pesca's the host of the Slate podcast.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Here's a quote. "Big day planned on national security tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall," end quote. That is a tweet from President Trump last night. He has been tweeting again this morning about investigating what he says was voter fraud that cost him the popular vote in November. And let's bring in NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith here.
Good morning, Tam.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Good morning.
GREENE: So let's start with the tweet this morning. I mean, Trump has claimed before - he claimed it again to lawmakers this week saying 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, at least that's what he thinks. No evidence has been offered to that. What is he saying in this latest tweet now?
KEITH: Well, he may be looking for evidence, evidence which seems not to exist. But here's the tweet. He says, I will be asking for a major investigation into - all caps - VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and even those register to vote who are dead - and many for a long time. Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures. We should point out that there is a difference between voter fraud and outdated voter rolls. Those simply are not the same thing.
GREENE: Oh, so people - saying voter - people who voted who are dead, that would not be considered voter fraud. That's a separate - that's a different issue.
KEITH: Well, I mean, I guess if they voted, it would be fraud (laughter). But just being dead and on the voter rolls is not voter fraud.
GREENE: OK.
KEITH: The secretary of state in Ohio - he's a Republican - retweeted and added commentary to Donald Trump's tweet already this morning. He says we conducted a review four years ago in Ohio and already have a statewide review of 2016 underway - easy to vote, hard to cheat.
Essentially, Trump and his team have not been able to offer any evidence of this. And there's quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. Yesterday, our own Mara Liasson asked at the White House press briefing - you know, if the president really believes this thing, then why isn't he doing anything about it? I just want to play a clip of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: If 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, that is a scandal of astronomical proportions. Doesn't he want to restore Americans' faith in their ballot system? Wouldn't he want an investigation of this?
SEAN SPICER: Well, I - you know, this is - but Mara, as I noted several times now, he's believed this for a long time.
LIASSON: I'm not questioning that belief at all.
SPICER: And I think he won fairly overwhelmingly...
LIASSON: I believe that.
SPICER: ...So he's not - and look, we'll work...
LIASSON: I'm asking you - why not investigate something that is a...
SPICER: Well, maybe we will.
LIASSON: The biggest...
KEITH: And so, of course...
GREENE: That was in the briefing room with Sean Spicer, the press secretary, right?
KEITH: Yes. And that clip has been making the rounds on television. And around the time of some of those pieces, Donald Trump then tweeted, well, we are going to investigate.
GREENE: So these are a lot of pieces about Mara's question about whether there should be an investigation. Now we see this tweet this morning. So I guess we'll see...
KEITH: Exactly.
GREENE: ...If it becomes more than a tweet. Well (laughter), let's get back to that other tweet. It's funny - I can't believe we're talking so much about tweets in...
KEITH: Reporting live on tweets.
GREENE: ...Covering the White House. That's right. Donald Trump tweeted about national security, said he was going to begin building that wall. What do you think he has in mind here?
KEITH: He is going to the Department of Homeland Security today and is expected to hold an event there where he will sign executive orders, executive actions. Multiple news outlets are reporting that he will sign something to begin construction of that wall on the border with Mexico that he promised during the campaign, also possibly stuff about border agents or sanctuary cities. But we haven't independently been able to confirm exactly what he plans to sign.
GREENE: Can he simply order up a wall with an executive action?
KEITH: Well, there's already a law that exists that says build a big fence. So what he could do is say, follow that law. The harder part is paying for it and overcoming legal barriers with property owners who don't want a wall running through their property.
GREENE: OK. Speaking this morning with NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith.
Thanks, Tam.
KEITH: You're welcome.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Republicans are in a place they haven't been in a long time - in control of the White House and Congress. So now that the inauguration is over, House and Senate Republicans are heading out on a retreat to try to map out how they plan to move forward. Today marks the first of three days of meetings in Philadelphia. Top of the agenda will be figuring out how to replace the Affordable Care Act. President Trump's point man on health policy is expected to be GOP Congressman Tom Price of Georgia. He's a longtime opponent of the Affordable Care Act, and he is the president's pick for secretary of Health and Human Services.
Tuesday, Price went in front of the Senate Finance Committee and got a lot of tough questions from Democrats in particular about what will come after Obamacare is repealed. The congressman spoke in pretty broad terms, resisting repeated demands by Democrats for details of the Trump plan. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is the ranking member on the committee, and he joins me on the line now.
Senator, welcome to the show.
RON WYDEN: Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: Donald Trump, as you know, campaigned on repealing the Affordable Care Act. Many people who voted for him said that was one of the reasons that they did support him. So Congressman Tom Price is the man who the president wants to lead this effort. Why shouldn't he be confirmed?
WYDEN: I do think - you mentioned that people who voted for Donald Trump - those people thought they were going to get something better. He constantly kept coming back to saying we'll have great care. We'll have something better. What we learned yesterday is the people who have coverage now, working families, could really be worse off.
I asked him repeatedly whether he would commit to making sure people would not be worse off, and he wouldn't do that. And, for example, right at the heart of the Affordable Care Act is the ban on insurance companies discriminating against people with a pre-existing condition. And this part of the Affordable Care Act makes sure that health care is not just for the healthy and wealthy. Tom Price has bills that wouldn't support that ban on discrimination. We asked him about it yesterday. He ducked.
MARTIN: Although he did say that that's been a popular part of the bill and he doesn't want people with pre-existing conditions to be discriminated against in the health care system.
WYDEN: But he wouldn't talk about the fact that he's always given insurance companies loopholes. I mean, for example, he wouldn't protect their coverage if they had been laid off or they had lost their employer-based plan. He basically, again yesterday, gave a green light to insurance companies to discriminate against 1 in 3 Americans just because of a pre-existing condition.
MARTIN: The Republicans will be taking the next three days to kind of rough out their plans for health care moving forward. Was it fair for you to expect Congressman Price to be able to provide any more than the broad strokes he gave you?
WYDEN: Well, we expected something resembling a direction about where the administration was going. For example, we asked about a replacement plan. Again and again during the campaign, we were told that repealing the Affordable Care Act and replacing it would be intertwined. Now you get, again, a little bit of indication from Congressman Price - when he was a member of Congress, he was for repeal and run. He basically wanted to repeal it and then he'd come back sometime and replace it. He was asked yesterday by my colleague Sherrod Brown and others about whether he'd be for a replacement. He ducked that, too.
MARTIN: You and Congressman Price had this extensive back and forth on the matter of a stock purchase he made - his own personal finances, a purchase he made this past August, hundreds of thousands of shares in a pharmaceutical firm. Price says that transaction was ethical, above board. As part of his vetting process, his finances were investigated. Where discrepancies were found, he corrected the error. So why engage with him on this? Do you doubt him?
TOM PRICE: First of all, let's put this in perspective. George W. Bush had a very fine ethics lawyer. He said he has never seen anything like this in decades. That's not a partisan Democrat. That's a conservative Republican. The fact of the matter is the congressman sat on a key health care committee. He was getting inside deals, what are called private placements. He undervalued the stocks in his reporting to the committee for purposes of his nomination all while he sat on the committee.
And it just seems to me - and this is what I asked him - that when independent experts, including conservative Republicans, are saying this was, at a minimum, extremely bad judgment, I think it's just a plain old abuse of position. The congressman, again, was not responsive.
MARTIN: While I've got you, I want to ask about another issue. In a meeting with congressional leaders Monday, President Trump again made the false claim that he lost the popular vote because of massive voter fraud. What do you make of that?
WYDEN: Well, you said it was false. And of course it was. I will tell your listeners that if the president is serious about strengthening the integrity of the way we vote in the country, he ought to support my bill to take Oregon's vote-by-mail system national. We have not had that problem. We have a paper trail for everybody who votes. This is something, in Oregon, Democrats and Republicans have been supportive of because it works. It protects the integrity of the system. So if the president is serious about making sure that we have a smart way to guarantee the integrity of the vote, I hope he'll support my bill to take Oregon's vote by mail national.
MARTIN: I mentioned Republicans are holding a retreat in Philly this week. Democrats are doing the same thing in West Virginia. What's the most urgent matter for you and your colleagues at this moment?
WYDEN: We'll come back to this whole question of how you create opportunity for working families. I'm sure we're going to talk about trade. I think we ought to be tough. We ought to be smart in order to protect good-paying American jobs. We're going to be talking about health care. And again, for me, it comes back to working families.
I'm very troubled by the fact that Congressman Price is talking about privatizing Medicare. That would be very harmful to seniors. Women would lose choice of health care coverage. He wants to shred the Medicaid safety net...
MARTIN: Yeah.
WYDEN: ...With block grants. That's what we'll be talking about.
MARTIN: Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, thank you for your time.
MARTIN: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAVID FRIESEN CIRCLE 3 TRIO'S "BRIGHT LIGHT SKY")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now an update on an unusual story we aired earlier this month. It's a legal fight between the University of Kentucky and its own student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel. The university had sued the paper to try and block records of a Title IX sexual assault investigation from being made public. Now the judge presiding over the case has handed down a ruling. NPR's Ashley Westerman has more.
ASHLEY WESTERMAN, BYLINE: In his decision Tuesday, the county circuit court judge sided with the university, agreeing that there was no way to release documents in the investigation without revealing the identities of the alleged sexual assault victims. He also ruled that the documents fall under the federal privacy law that protects student records. In a video statement, UK president Eli Capilouto says he's grateful.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
ELI CAPILOUTO: This is going to be helpful because I think it'll encourage people to report, give us a greater opportunity through a process that ensures fairness for both the accused and those that are making the allegation that we can adjudicate these cases.
WESTERMAN: The student paper, the Kentucky Kernel, was seeking findings from the investigation of a former professor accused by two graduate students of sexual harassment and assault. The professor left the university before investigators could present their findings. The paper requested the records, but the school only handed over some of them, citing student privacy. Kernel editor-in-chief Marjorie Kirk says despite the ruling, she isn't backing down.
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MARJORIE KIRK: I'm still proud of the work that my staff did to pursue these stories and to help out with this litigation. And so while I was disappointed the judge didn't see that, I think the public is definitely in support of this, so I'm still encouraged to pursue the truth and pursue good journalism.
WESTERMAN: Kirk says they will appeal the decision. Ashley Westerman, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEWARE OF SAFETY SONG, "RISE BY SIN")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin, here to tell you about Sam Snow. He's a D.C. cab driver, and the other day he picked up some passengers. They noticed Snow's jacket covered in Super Bowl patches. They engaged the football fan, asked him, who are your top three quarterbacks? Without hesitation he says John Elway, then they tell Snow to look in the back seat.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Turn around.
GENERAL MANAGER JOHN ELWAY: How you doing, man?
SAM SNOW: Oh, come on, man. You serious?
(LAUGHTER)
SNOW: Come on, man, John Elway.
ELWAY: How you doing?
MARTIN: Yeah, that's pretty cool. It's MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
An interesting episode played out on Twitter yesterday. So the official account for Badlands National Park in North Dakota started tweeting some scientific findings about climate change amongst its normal tweets about bighorn sheep and bison. Now, hours later, the tweets were deleted, and there was an uproar.
The National Park Service told several news agencies that a former employee wrote these tweets - it was not the park itself - and that that's why they were deleted. But many people were not buying that. The Democratic National Committee's press secretary said in a statement, quote, "Vladimir Putin would be proud." NPR's Nathan Rott is here at NPR West in the studio with me. He's been following this. And, Nate, good morning.
NATHAN ROTT, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: So what's the whole fuss here?
ROTT: Well, I think the attention that this is getting is representative of a bigger fight that's starting to take shape between the Trump administration and I'd say career government workers, scientists and outside groups that are worried about the administration's emerging environmental priorities especially when it comes to climate change. This should come as no surprise to listeners or anybody that's been following the Trump administration and his views on climate change. Trump said during the campaign that climate change is a hoax, and he's promised to peel back many environmental regulations in the U.S. But there is a growing concern in the scientific community that climate research is going to be cut or buried during the next four years.
GREENE: All right, that's the whole context. Let's talk about this specific situation. I mean, there were these reports that staff at the EPA were actually put on a temporary media blackout, told not to tweet, not to do anything. I mean, have you looked into that?
ROTT: Yeah, I talked to the new administration's communications director for the EPA's transition team last night, and he said that they have done that. They've instructed EPA staff not to post on social media, to speak to the media, any of that. The reason being that they want to limit outward communication until they get their ducks in a row so to speak. They don't want to say anything that's out of line. They want to get a consistent message across the agency and its 10 regions. The guy that I talked to said that's very consistent with what other transition teams have done, and that's true. Every incoming administration tries to get its agencies on message, but there are some people that think this is different.
I talked to Andrew Light, a senior fellow in the Global Climate Program at the nonpartisan World Resources Institute, he's a former State Department employee, and here's what he said.
SENIOR FELLOW ANDREW LIGHT: In particular it's noteworthy that it seems to be aimed at a cluster of science-driven agencies that primarily work on the environment or climate change, and that seems unique and targeted in this case and unprecedented.
ROTT: He's talking about the EPA, of course, but he's also talking about directives at the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture that limit outward communications as well.
GREENE: And we should remember there was that whole kerfuffle over the transition team asking for the names of people who were involved in climate change research that the Trump team eventually took back and said we weren't actually doing that or shouldn't have done that.
ROTT: And which the agencies said they weren't going to go along with.
GREENE: Going to cooperate with. So what is - I mean, you cover this stuff, Nate, what is the focus of the Trump administration when it comes to the environment? What should we expect?
ROTT: Well, I asked that same question to the guy I talked to last night, the communications director for the EPA transition team because I thought it'd be great to hear from himself. His name is Doug Ericksen, and this is what he had to say.
DOUG ERICKSEN: The focus of the EPA is going to be its core mission, which is to protect the environment and to protect human health.
ROTT: And is - climate change fall anywhere into that?
ERICKSEN: Well, we'll be working on many issues within the EPA, so - but we'll be sticking to the core mission, which is protecting the environment and protecting human health.
GREENE: Little bit of a pause there.
ROTT: Yeah. So I asked him several times, I pushed him on this. Does climate change - is it something you guys are going to be looking at? Is it something you're going to be dealing with? And he'd really didn't address it, you know, and that's fairly consistent with what we've heard at the confirmation hearings from some of the nominees. They're not taking the same line as Trump. They're not saying that climate change is a hoax. They're saying it is a thing and that humans do have some impact on it, but there's really been no talk about what the government should do about that, if anything, and especially in terms of policy.
GREENE: OK. We should say Donald Trump said that, but has said a lot of other different things, trying to figure out exactly what his views are on climate change. That is NPR's Nathan Rott with me here in the studios in NPR West. Nate, thanks.
ROTT: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Top officials from Mexico are in Washington, D.C., today to meet with the Trump administration. They're going to be talking about the future of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. President Trump says it will be renegotiated. But he hasn't given any specifics about what that would look like. As NPR's Carrie Kahn reports, that has left Mexico struggling how to respond to Trump's threats to rip up the trade deal.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: What's a country dwarfed in size and might by its northern neighbor to do? Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto, who's set to meet with Trump next week, says he'll neither fight nor capitulate.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRES ENRIQUE PENA NIETO: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: "Neither confrontation nor submission. Dialogue and negotiation is the solution," Pena Nieto told a group of business and political leaders gathered at his official residence earlier this week. Such a middle-of-the-road stance hasn't won Pena Nieto many friends in Mexico. His popularity tanked last year when he invited Trump to Mexico. It dropped to new lows this year, at 12 percent approval rating, due in part to his perceived weak response to Trump's continuing provocations.
Those have sent the peso into a downward spiral and spooked foreign investment here. But the peso's fast fall and rising inflation now have even some of Pena Nieto's political opponents softening their tone.
GABRIELA CUEVAS: I think we should not be in a hurry for such important issues.
KAHN: Gabriela Cuevas, the head of Mexico's Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a member of the opposition PAN party, says much is at stake in these negotiations.
CUEVAS: It is not like a two-month negotiation. Come on, we are going to have a lot of news for the next two months, even years.
KAHN: She says she was encouraged that Pena Nieto outlined several objectives that must be met in any negotiations between Mexico and the Trump administration, including no wall, respect for Mexican migrants in the U.S. and their money they send back home. Economist Luis de la Calle, who helped negotiate NAFTA back in 1994, says despite Mexico's smaller economy, it does have some cards to play at the negotiation table.
Mexico is the largest market for U.S. wheat, corn, pork and poultry to name a few agricultural products, most of which are grown in Republican states with politicians likely to give President Trump an earful over market losses.
LUIS DE LA CALLE: This idea that it's an unbalanced negotiation because Mexico is the junior partner is not necessarily the case.
KAHN: De la Calle says if Trump rips up NAFTA, tariffs will be placed on both countries' goods, according to rules outlined by the World Trade Organization. In those, he says, Mexico pays far lower duties than the U.S., in some cases by a factor of three. Perhaps testing the water for a tougher tone, Mexico's commerce and foreign ministers both said if negotiations don't go well, perhaps it will be Mexico that walks away from the table and the Free Trade Agreement. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Mexico City.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to take you now to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There's a war court meeting today for the first time under the new Trump administration. It's one more of many attempts to bring the five most high-profile detainees to trial, men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks. But the whole thing's been stuck for years in pretrial motions and legal fights over evidence. NPR's David Welna is outside the courtroom in Guantanamo, and he joins us now on the line. Hi, David.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel.
MARTIN: This has been going on for five years. So what does the new administration mean for this process?
WELNA: Well, you know, Trump hasn't had much to say about this trial. But it really has showcased the perils of trying to put a group of men on trial for mass murder with this so-called military commission, which has been revamped three times since the attacks they're accused of plotting. Mark Martins, he's the brigadier general, who's the chief prosecutor, is now proposing that a jury, which would be made up entirely of military officers, be chosen by March of next year.
And for that to happen, the defense lawyers would have to get a lot more of the evidence that they've been seeking. Here's a bit of what Martins had to say about that this week.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARK MARTINS: We're now going to provide the defense everything we can. We're going to make it as accessible as we can to the accused. But quite frankly, we can't declassify everything that's in government vaults for a trial of this kind. We're making sure it's fair.
WELNA: You know, one of the things that's in government vaults is a still-secret 6,000-page report prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Republican who's now in charge of that panel wants all the copies of it returned, which were sent by Democrats to federal agencies when they controlled the committee. The CIA's already destroyed its copy. But the judge in this case has ordered the Pentagon to hang on to its copies because the lawyers defending these five men say that full report likely has a lot more in it that could help their clients than the 500-page summary of it that was made public a couple of years ago.
MARTIN: So that report is about the CIA's controversial detention and interrogation of these five 9/11 defendants and other people. Do you think the defense team will actually be able to use it?
WELNA: Well, I doubt it. Chief Prosecutor Martin says there's no need, since he'll provide the documents it was based on that he thinks are relevant to the case. The defense lawyers say they simply can't trust him to do that. And if they can't see that full report, they won't know what they don't know. One of those lawyers is Jay Connell.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JAY CONNELL: It's absolutely true that we can't have a complete picture of what information exists. We know that there are something like 6.2 million responsive documents. And we know that the government has turned over to us approximately, including previous substitutions, about 300 pages of information.
WELNA: Connell says with that kind of foot dragging, it's completely unrealistic for the prosecution to aim to put together a jury and get a trial going early next year. He and others think that can't happen for at least another several years.
MARTIN: So what does that mean? Is there anything that can be done to speed the whole thing up?
WELNA: Well, defense lawyers say a big help would be to add another death penalty expert lawyer to each of the five defense teams. They already each have one, as required by law. But one of those experts broke her arm over the weekend and was unable to travel here to attend this court session. And that could cause problems later on if her client claims he was not adequately represented. So having a backup would avoid such problems and possible delays.
The head of the defense team has requested more of these death penalty lawyers, but they cost the government about half a million dollars each a year. And especially with Trump's new hiring freeze, it's not likely they'll get them.
MARTIN: NPR's David Welna, reporting from outside a courtroom in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. David, thanks so much.
WELNA: You're welcome, Rachel.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
All right, Steve, "Jeopardy!" question. This Olympic event is known as the fastest sport on ice.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Well, it isn't me skating, so what is da (ph) luge, the luge?
GREENE: (Laughter) Yes, you're right. Listen to this. It is.
INSKEEP: Oh, good.
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Good morning everyone, and welcome to the 2017 USA Luge Challenge.
GREENE: Very exciting, those sleds that rip down an icy track at 90 miles an hour. Aaron Schachter from member station WGBH says this sport is looking for its next big star.
AARON SCHACHTER, BYLINE: You may be shocked to learn that it isn't easy finding people to do luge. That's largely because there are only three places in the U.S. where you can try the real thing, and that's why USA Luge throws regional events to find new talent. In the summer, they run sleds on wheels racing down hilly pavement. In winter, there are practice tracks and races at ski slopes around the country like this one at the Wachusett Mountain Ski Area.
Luge is one of those sports that you think about for, like, two weeks every four years.
AIDAN KELLY: Oh, yeah, yeah, and nobody - yeah, it's a much bigger sport in Europe.
SCHACHTER: At 22, Aidan Kelly is a veteran slider, as luge racers are called. He started at 13, picked out of a crowd of kids at one of these slider searches.
KELLY: The Germans and Austrians and Italian fans over there probably keep us going a little more than our American fans do unfortunately, but I think everybody is always interested when they see it.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Today, we're using plastic replicas of the actual steel sleds. We have a sled on display right here under the USA Luge tent.
SCHACHTER: And the track is different too. It isn't a sheet of ice, more like a short tubing run with walls carved out of snow about 50 feet long. Real luge tracks can be up to a mile. So there's not a whole lot of space here to judge prospective racers. But a lot of the people go up and down dozens of times, and it becomes easy to pick out the naturals.
WILLIAM WATSON: I like it.
SCHACHTER: William Watson is 10. He sleds straight and fast - no fear.
What do you like about it?
WILLIAM: I like the feeling of going fast when I'm on my back.
SCHACHTER: You look like you knew what you were doing. Have you done this before?
WILLIAM: Nope, never.
SCHACHTER: You're just good at going fast.
WILLIAM: Yeah, pretty much. I skateboard, snowboard and surf indoors sometimes, so pretty much I'm just used to the feeling of going fast.
SCHACHTER: (Laughter) You are the perfect candidate. They're going to try and sign you up.
Now, I know what you're thinking - if a 10-year-old kid can do it, how hard can this luge thing be?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: So we have an open invitation to all you skiers and all you riders to check out the most exciting sport on ice. That is the sport of luge.
SCHACHTER: I feel like I have to try this, but I don't want to.
KELLY: I feel like you do as well.
SCHACHTER: That's Olympian Aidan Kelly egging me on. So I strap on a helmet and goggles and grab a sled.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: So you want to really dig your feet down into the snow, OK?
SCHACHTER: OK.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: All right, have fun.
SCHACHTER: Thank you.
I sit on the edge of the sled, point my feet downhill, hold on for dear life.
Oh, that was great.
That six seconds was pure joy, though nowhere near fast enough to catch the attention of the USA Luge folks. But keep an eye out for William Watson. The 10-year-old came in second in a competition later in the day in the 10 to 17 age group, earning himself a trip to Lake Placid for a real tryout and a shot at the Winter Olympic Games. For NPR News, I'm Aaron Schachter.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
As the Trump administration moves to overhaul America's immigration system, some policymakers are saying just look north. Canadians see immigration as critical to their economic success. That nation has invited in so many immigrants that today one-fifth of the population is foreign born, and yet, broadly speaking, Canadians don't seem to wrestle with the anti-immigrant sentiment that has motivated voters in the United States and in Europe. NPR's John Burnett crossed the northern border for a look.
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: The Caribbean Corner is a sliver of warm, laid-back Jamaica in the frigid precincts of downtown Toronto.
MICHAEL THOMAS: We have different kind of yams - yampee, sweet yam, white yam, yellow yam. We have breadfruit.
BURNETT: Michael Thomas is one of the owners.
THOMAS: If you ask me where I'm from, I said I'm from Canada. And if you ask me what's my nationality, I said Jamaica.
BURNETT: Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities in the world. Just look at the business directory - the Association of Bulgarian Engineers, the Canadian Network of Iranian Architects, the Association of Filipino Canadian Accountants. Half the population, like Mr. Thomas, was born under another flag.
THOMAS: I love it. I see the world in one place. You can celebrate your culture. Yeah, so - and you mix with different cultures and you take part, you know? Yeah, so I like that.
BURNETT: Canada knows what it wants - high-skilled workers and business entrepreneurs like Michael Thomas. As such, Canada assigns points to prospective newcomers for job skills, education and language proficiency. In Canada, they don't even call them immigrants.
MARGARET EATON: In Canada, we do refer to immigrants as new Canadians...
BURNETT: Margaret Eaton is executive director of the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council.
EATON: ...Because there is an expectation that they will come here and that they will stay. And our country, unlike others, actually provides a path to citizenship.
BURNETT: Yet, Canadian immigration is not based purely on maple-leaf hospitality. This northern colossus - the second-largest country on the globe - has only 36 million people. She says a low national birthrate creates Canada's immigration imperative.
EATON: We're not replacing ourselves. So we've always relied upon bringing new immigrants into the country. But it has even more urgency now. If we want to maintain our standard of living, we're going to have to bring in even larger numbers of immigrants.
BURNETT: The United States, which admits more legal immigrants than any other country, has a different approach. It's all about family reunification, bringing in spouses, parents, children and siblings who live abroad. But consecutive Congresses have failed to update the immigration program for 27 years. Foreign nationals can wait a decade for a green card, the lottery system for worker visas is overburdened and 11 million unauthorized immigrants live in the shadows with no hope for legalization.
CHRIS ALEXANDER: The biggest contrast between the U.S. and Canada is that we have reformed our immigration system continuously, intensively, for a decade at a time when the U.S. has been facing gridlock.
BURNETT: Chris Alexander was Canadian minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship from 2013 to 2015. He's currently running to lead the Conservative Party. He sips coffee at a Toronto cafe. He says Parliament continually tweaks the immigration system because it's a national priority.
ALEXANDER: The consensus in Canada that immigration is part of our economic future and part of our identity has never been stronger.
BURNETT: About 300,000 permanent immigrants come into Canada every year. That's equivalent to about 1 percent of its population, one of the highest ratios in the developed world. Ashot Verdanyan and his wife Lora are the kinds of immigrants Canada prizes. We sit down for tea in their cozy apartment in a heavily multicultural Toronto suburb. They came over from Armenia as part of the skilled worker program. He teaches English. She's an industrial engineer. They lived in Iowa for nine years getting advanced degrees.
ASHOT VERDANYAN: We find that the American immigration system hasn't been flexible. Canadian system is much more flexible in terms of immigration. Canada's system is very organized. We wanted to stay in the United States, but even given our credentials, we were unable to do that because we were restricted.
BURNETT: When they arrived in Canada six years ago, Lora says the government had programs in place to help them transition.
LORA VERDANYAN: You don't have any family. You don't have any friends. You don't have anything here in Canada. You can go straight to the newcomers centers, and they will give you support.
BURNETT: This is not to say that every immigrant has a job waiting for them. It's common to find doctors and engineers driving taxis in Canada. Margaret Eaton of the Immigrant Employment Council says the problem is that some employers turn down immigrant job applicants, saying they lack Canadian experience.
EATON: And that can become a bit of a code word for I didn't like your accent. We didn't think you would fit in.
BURNETT: Some parts of Canada are more welcoming to newcomers than others. Drive out of an international metropolis like Toronto to the town of St. Catharines near Niagara Falls.
JOHN DUGGAN: I don't care what people look like. I don't care if they're black, brown or yellow. It doesn't matter. But don't try to change our culture.
BURNETT: John Duggan is an oil field truck driver who's eating an omelet at Angel's Cafe. Though Duggan himself was brought to Canada as a child from Ireland, he's critical of the pro-immigrant policies of the Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau.
DUGGAN: I have no problem with people wanting to come here. But we also have a lot of people here that - I always say charity begins at home. I watched Mr. Trudeau giving brand-new jackets to people coming over. I have no problem with that, but we have people here freezing. And, you know, they need the same stuff, but they have a hard time getting it.
BURNETT: One reason there's not more social tension over immigrants is because Canada doesn't struggle with illegal immigration. Canada has fewer than 150,000 unauthorized immigrants. The United States, with its illegal border crossers and visa overstayers, has millions. Former Immigration Minister Chris Alexander says it's partly an accident of geography.
ALEXANDER: We are lucky to have the United States, and we have only one land border. We have Russia to the north of us. We have the Danes. They're not people swimming in from Greenland.
BURNETT: These days, Canadians are taken aback when they look south at the climate of fear and anger that's broken out in America toward Spanish-speaking and Muslim immigrants.
LAURA DAWSON: Canada has looked at the United States in many ways as an example of a welcoming society.
BURNETT: Laura Dawson is director of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
DAWSON: And it's disheartening for many Canadians to see the United States to be so fearful, to be so xenophobic and not to be more welcoming to other folks in the world.
BURNETT: Some Canadians wonder if that most American motto - E pluribus unum - out of many, one - has moved north. John Burnett, NPR News, Toronto.
(SOUNDBITE OF DO MAKE SAY THINK'S "SAY")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
On Monday, a team of ethics lawyers and legal scholars filed suit claiming that President Trump's many foreign business dealings violate the Constitution.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
They cite the Emoluments Clause, a provision in the Constitution that bars presidents from accepting gifts or money from foreign governments.
GREENE: Of course, one big question courts will have to decide is not actually about the merits of the case here but rather just who has the legal standing to challenge the president in court. Here's NPR's Jim Zarroli.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: It is a fundamental concept in the law. If you want to sue someone successfully, you have to prove first that you've been hurt by them. Michael McConnell is a professor at Stanford Law School.
MICHAEL MCCONNELL: If your neighbor is hit by a car, you may be outraged, you may think he ought to sue, but you can't sue on his behalf. He's the only one who can sue.
ZARROLI: In recent years, the Supreme Court has become a lot stricter about determining whether a plaintiff in a suit has the standing to sue. And so the group now suing Trump, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington - or CREW - has to show how it has been damaged by Trump's conflicts. CREW has done this by arguing that it's had to put extra time and resources into publicizing and opposing Trump's actions. One of the lawyers arguing the case, Deepak Gupta, says CREW needs to be looked at like a business whose product is ethics reports and commentary.
DEEPAK GUPTA: Because of Donald Trump's unprecedented conflicts of interest, the cost to produce that product has gone up. The resources had to shift away from the business that they engage in typically, and that affects them.
ZARROLI: Gupta says there's precedent for this argument. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that a housing advocacy group could sue a real estate firm because it was consuming its resources by discriminating against tenants. Still, Stanford's Michael McConnell thinks CREW's argument is a stretch.
MCCONNELL: This is not even a close case of standing. An organization doesn't have standing because it chooses to throw resources into an issue. If that were true, anyone would have standing to challenge anything.
ZARROLI: If CREW doesn't have the standing to sue the president over his conflicts of interest, then who does? One possibility is Trump's business competitors. A hotel could argue that it's being hurt because its customers are switching to Trump properties to curry favor with the president. And CREW has already heard from some Trump competitors who say that's happening, Gupta says.
GUPTA: And we are considering very carefully the potential claims that those people have.
ZARROLI: Or the courts could decide that nobody really has the standing to sue the president and that it's ultimately up to Congress to decide if the president's conflicts are a problem. Jonathan Adler, professor of law at Case Western Reserve University, says, in that case, the primary mechanism for dealing with the problem is impeachment.
JONATHAN ADLER: It's obviously something that's unlikely when Congress is controlled by the same party, but that is the structure.
ZARROLI: In the meantime, the plaintiffs in this week's lawsuit are hoping to convince the courts they have the standing to challenge the president. Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF MATT JORGENSEN'S "SPACE, PLANE AND LINE")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Americans said goodbye yesterday to Mary Tyler Moore, who died yesterday at the age of 80. She won seven Emmy Awards for her work on TV, but that number doesn't quite describe her place in the culture. She played characters to whom many women especially related and admired. Here's our pop culture correspondent Linda Holmes.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE IS ALL AROUND")
SONNY CURTIS: (Singing) Who can turn the world on with her smile?
LINDA HOLMES, BYLINE: Mary Tyler Moore wasn't just beloved, she was the kind of beloved where they build you a statue. Moore's is in Minneapolis, where her best known character Mary Richards of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" worked for the fictional television station WJM. She'd already won two Emmys playing Laura Petrie on "The Dick Van Dyke Show," but Moore cemented her icon status when Mary Richards walked into that job interview, even if she got off to a rough start with Lou Grant, her soon-to-be boss, who kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW")
EDWARD ASNER: (As Lou Grant) Look, Miss, I was just about to have a drink, and I wouldn't mind some company. Want one?
MARY TYLER MOORE: (As Mary Richards) Oh, no thank you.
ASNER: (As Lou Grant) I said I wouldn't mind some company.
MOORE: (As Mary Richards) Well, all right, I'll have a Brandy Alexander.
(LAUGHTER)
HOLMES: Mary Richards was not TV's first working woman or its first woman on her own. But before Mary, if you saw a woman without a partner at the center of a TV comedy, she was probably a widow like Diahann Carroll's single mom on "Julia" or Lucille Ball on her later show "The Lucy Show." Mary didn't have a living husband, a dead husband, an ex-husband or even a permanent boyfriend like Marlo Thomas did on "That Girl." It wasn't that she didn't want one. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong wrote "Mary And Lou And Rhoda And Ted," a history of the show, and in 2013 she told NPR how Mary stayed single for so long.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
JENNIFER KEISHIN ARMSTRONG: They tried several times. There were dating episodes, and a couple guys lasted more than one episode - very few, but a couple. I mean, it's sort of touching. They were like, no one was good enough for her.
HOLMES: Mary may not have found that exactly right guy, but she did have an apartment, a job, friends and a sex life. In fact, she was on birth control, as the audience learned in November, 1972, when Mary's mother issued a reminder to her father and Mary accidentally answered, too.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, ""THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW"")
NANETTE FABRAY: (As Dottie Richards) Don't forget to take your pill.
BILL QUINN: (As Walter Richards) I won't.
MOORE: (As Mary Richards) I won't.
(LAUGHTER)
HOLMES: Comedies about single women with all kinds of lives would become staples of both broadcast and cable - "Laverne & Shirley," "Murphy Brown," "Living Single," "Sex And The City," and now "Girls" and "Insecure" - but Mary and her best friend Rhoda were there first. Mary had bad dates before Rachel and Monica on "Friends" did. Mary had to get the show on the air before Liz Lemon on "30 Rock" did, and Mary struggled with a gruff but loving boss before Leslie Knope on "Parks And Recreation" did. I talked with Rachel Bloom, the star and co-creator of The CW's "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend." She told me how watching "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in reruns in the '90s really influenced her.
RACHEL BLOOM: The idea of someone being a funny ingenue, and that she was funny as well as the people around her, and that it was a woman cracking jokes, not just, like, a woman being the straight man for dudes cracking jokes.
HOLMES: Women mattered behind the scenes of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" too, they had roles as writers and directors, and Moore and her then-husband Grant Tinker set up MTM Enterprises to produce the show. You might remember the logo with a mewing cat where the MGM lion would have been, that company produced not just "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Rhoda" and "Lou Grant," but "The Bob Newhart Show," "WKRP In Cincinnati," "Hill Street Blues" and "St. Elsewhere." Minneapolis' Mary Tyler Moore statue was moved indoors in 2015 away from its home on the outdoor Nicollet Mall to make way for construction, but later this year it's scheduled to return, and once again, tourists will copy Mary Tyler Moore's pose and throw their hats in the air. Linda Holmes, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK, in early-morning tweets today, President Donald Trump raised the stakes on his plan to get Mexico to pay for a border wall. Trump said that if Mexico was not willing to pay for that wall, Mexico's president should cancel his trip to Washington, D.C. next week. NPR's Carrie Kahn reports from Mexico City.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: President Enrique Pena Nieto's office didn't have an immediate response to the latest provocation by President Trump. Lawmakers here have been urging the president to cancel his meeting in Washington next Tuesday. Late last night, Pena Nieto released a video saying he's waiting to hear how meetings have gone so far this week between his high-level negotiating team and U.S. administration officials. Depending on their report, Pena Nieto said he will decide what to do next. Speaking forcefully into the camera, he says he condemns the U.S.'s decision to build a wall, which divides instead of unites.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
PRESIDENT ENRIQUE PENA NIETO: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: "I have repeatedly said Mexico will not pay for a wall," said Pena Nieto.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He has to say that, but I'm just telling you there will be a payment.
KAHN: In President Trump's first interview on ABC News, he insisted Mexico will pay, maybe in a, quote, "complicated way, but they will pay," said Trump. In one of his executive orders signed yesterday, it was written in a way that may allow the new administration to restrict aid to Mexico. Mexican Senator Armando Rios Piter, of the opposition leftist party PRD, says enough is enough. He wants President Pena Nieto to stand up to these threats and insults and call it what it is.
ARMANDO RIOS PITER: It's a hostile act. It's an unfriendly act. That's the way we are going to start saying it all over the world.
KAHN: Trump did emphasize several times the importance of helping Mexico maintain a strong economy during his border security speech. That appears to have helped the flagging Mexican peso, which has taken a dive following every tweet and announcement from Trump since his election. Yesterday, the peso gained more than 2 percent against the dollar. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Mexico City.
(SOUNDBITE OF RODRIGO Y GABRIELA SONG, "SUNDAY NEUROSIS")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
After the Brexit vote in Britain and President Trump's rise here, some see a populist movement spreading. And this week, we're introducing you to leaders in Europe who are part of it, like Marine Le Pen of France who thinks voter dissatisfaction might carry her to the French presidency this spring. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports from Paris.
MARINE LE PEN: (Speaking French).
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: A confident Marine Le Pen strides into the room greeting reporters in her signature husky voice. In her new campaign headquarters, there's no sign of the party's provocative slogans like this is our country. The candidate takes a seat in front of a calming blue campaign poster that bears no mention of the National Front Party nor the Le Pen name. It says simply, in the name of the people, Marine - president.
LE PEN: (Through interpreter) This isn't just a slogan. It's a profession of my beliefs. I would never betray the people, and it is unbearable to see the people betrayed time and again by politicians who don't keep their promises and by the technocrats at the European Union.
BEARDSLEY: Le Pen says, as president, the first thing she'll do is seek a return of French sovereignty over its borders, currency and laws, if need be, with a referendum to leave the EU, which she calls an undemocratic organization that advances by threats and blackmail. She says Brexit and the election of Donald Trump show that the people are not going to lie back and take it anymore.
LE PEN: (Through interpreter) The people are rejecting so-called free trade and globalization that the elites presented as a positive thing, but it's actually causing massive migration and the collapse of industries.
BEARDSLEY: Since replacing her xenophobic, anti-Semitic father as leader of the National Front six years ago, the 48-year-old former trial lawyer and mother of three has worked to make the party more palatable to mainstream voters. Le Pen's strategy has paid off at the polls. The party has become one of the most successful in France, attracting younger voters and more women.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
BEARDSLEY: In the back streets of the Mediterranean city of Nice, bartender Arnaud Porte says working-class people in this city used to vote left. Now, he says, Nice will probably go with Le Pen but not him.
ARNAUD PORTE: (Through interpreter) I'm very frustrated that people are voting Le Pen. They are not thinking farther than the tip of their noses. Getting out of Europe, closing borders - these things could have disastrous effects down the road. We are not North Korea. It's pure populism.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LE PEN: Merci.
(APPLAUSE)
LE PEN: Merci, mes amis.
BEARDSLEY: Le Pen made a big splash last weekend at a rally for European far-right parties in Koblenz, Germany. She told the crowd, if elected, she would end illegal and legal immigration to France.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LE PEN: (Through interpreter) Immigration has a huge cost on social programs, and it lowers salaries and drives up unemployment. It's also a source of insecurity. We know there are terrorists hiding among the waves of migrants. So how much longer are we going to continue on like this?
(APPLAUSE)
BEARDSLEY: But not everything is going Le Pen's way. She's had to adapt her campaign to some unforeseen events. Unpopular socialist President Francois Hollande is no longer running. And a social conservative, Francois Fillon, is the surprise choice as presidential candidate of the mainstream right. Fillon's support of traditional Catholic values could attract many of the voters Le Pen had been counting on. Jean-Yves Camus, with the French Institute for Strategic and International Affairs, says Le Pen is now adopting Trump's tactics.
JEAN-YVES CAMUS: She's going to the left on the economy and social issues. That is, explaining to the workers that globalization is bad, that the EU is bad.
BEARDSLEY: Because, Le Pen says, they hurt the rights of hardworking people. Camus says except for immigration, the far right and far left have nearly identical platforms. Le Pen says the labels left and right don't mean anything anymore. Today's split is between those who support global organizations and open borders and those who want strong nation states.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LE PEN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "I see the great return of sovereign nations with their borders, protections and patriotism," she says. For Marine Le Pen, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump herald the beginning of a new era. French voters will decide if that's true when they go to the polls in April. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE CINEMATIC ORCHESTRA'S "REEL LIFE")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
That wall that President Trump wants on the U.S.-Mexico border is meant as just a start. The president, yesterday, ordered a series of acts on immigration.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Ends the policy of catch and release at the border, requires other countries to take back their criminals - they will take them back - cracks down on sanctuary cities.
INSKEEP: Let's talk about that last item - so-called sanctuary cities. Now, there is no place in the United States where a fugitive immigrant is entirely safe from arrest. Federal agents can go where they want. But there are cities and counties which have explicitly said it's not their job to actively help with round-ups.
The president's order threatens those cities with a loss of federal funds. It is not clear that he can legally follow through with that, but many cities and states are responding strongly. We reached California's new Democratic Attorney General Xavier Becerra from a state with many sanctuary cities.
XAVIER BECERRA: We're going to do everything we can to protect the citizens and residents of the state of California. We're going to do everything we can to let people who come to our state to build it know that we want to respect them and defend them. And we're going to do everything we can to make sure we abide by all the laws, starting with the U.S. Constitution.
INSKEEP: What are some things that localities in California refuse to do when it comes to immigration law?
BECERRA: Principally, what it is - is that most of the local jurisdictions and law enforcement refuse to do is to violate the U.S. Constitution by holding people that they no longer have a basis to detain simply because the federal immigration authorities say please hold on to those folks. You cannot detain people, under the Fourth Amendment, without justification to do so.
INSKEEP: Attorney General Becerra, the way that you describe a sanctuary city makes this seem like a rather narrow issue. The term sanctuary city sounds far more dramatic than the acts you're describing.
BECERRA: And that's, Steve, the issue is that some people have tried to turn the word sanctuary into something that it's not. Sanctuary doesn't mean that you're protecting violent, dangerous criminals from the hands of law enforcement, whether federal or local. It simply means that we are not going to go out there and engage in activities that go beyond what the U.S. Constitution says we should do with people who are law-abiding, working hard, improving the neighborhoods and communities where they live.
We also don't want to have people who fear talking to police officers simply because the federal immigration authorities would like our local law enforcement authorities to be aggressive beyond what legally they're supposed to do.
INSKEEP: What is the state of California going to do if cities start losing federal funding over this?
BECERRA: That's a question that has to yet be answered in a way that gives us a chance to look at the facts because the state of California, when it receives federal resources, it does so because it's sent over taxpayer dollars from the people of California. So we will do everything we can to defend our local California taxpayers from being denied the resources that they paid for.
If the federal government has a reason to block funding or deny resources to the state of California, we will certainly look at that and challenge it if it doesn't seem right. But we don't believe that we should be losing money for police officers and community policing simply because we're abiding by the U.S. Constitution when it comes to the treatment of immigrants.
INSKEEP: I think you're hinting around at a fact that California is one of the states that, when people calculate these things, tends to pay more in taxes than it receives back. Is that right - federal taxes?
BECERRA: Without a doubt. California is a donor state to the federal Treasury. We always, as taxpayers in the state of California, pay more in taxes than we get back to our state. And so we're going to fight where we need to to make sure that we get the resources that we provided to the federal Treasury. And we'll make sure that we're abiding by every law that we must, starting with the U.S. Constitution.
INSKEEP: Let me ask about another thing, attorney general. California, as some people will know, has stricter auto emission standards than the country as a whole. You had to get, as a state, a waiver from the federal government to impose those standards. President Obama granted the waiver. Now there's a new administration, and the incoming EPA administrator, the nominee, hasn't said definitively whether he would allow that waiver or not. Is that something you would be prepared to go to court to uphold - stricter emission standards for California?
BECERRA: Steve, we're not turning back when it comes to climate change and clean energy. We received a waiver from the federal government. We will do everything we can to defend our position, and we will do more if necessary. We've relied on the representations and the tools that the federal government permitted us to use. And if the federal government wants to, all of a sudden, yank those away, we will do everything we can to prove that, based on the facts and the law, that California has a right to move forward.
INSKEEP: And when you say based on the facts and the law that means that could be another lawsuit if it came to that.
BECERRA: We're going to do what we need to to move forward. We will continue with our policies. We'll continue with our actions that have made California a state where people want to live and work. We'll do whatever we need to do to continue our way of life and our way forward.
INSKEEP: One other thing, attorney general. Of course, there's been a lot of debates about state rights throughout American history. There was a time when more conservative states were asserting state rights against a powerful federal government. Do you find yourself becoming an advocate of state rights?
BECERRA: Steve, what's really interesting in that comparison of the use of states' rights is that in previous generations, some states asserted their rights under the 10th Amendment to challenge other constitutional provisions that protected the rights of individuals.
INSKEEP: Civil rights legislation, for example, right. OK.
BECERRA: Right, or just the 14th Amendment - equal protection under the law. And using the 10th Amendment to try to undermine the 14th Amendment, to me, was not what the founders of this nation meant when they enacted the 10th Amendment.
INSKEEP: We should remind people, the 10th Amendment, if I'm not mistaken, says that all powers that are not explicitly granted to the federal government are reserved to the states. Is that right?
BECERRA: That's correct. When we talk about the rights of states to move forward, whether it's on clean energy or our treatment of immigrants, it's to respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not undermine the Bill of Rights.
INSKEEP: California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, thanks very much.
BECERRA: Steve, thank you.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Now, President Trump has also criticized U.S. automakers for shifting production to Mexico. He's made it clear in tweets, speeches and in a meeting with CEOs of U.S. car companies this week that he wants those jobs back. Now, many of the jobs Trump is talking about involve building small cars. NPR's Sonari Glinton tells us the future of American small cars is pretty bleak no matter where they're built.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Before meeting with executives of the American car companies, President Trump sent this tweet (reading) I want new plants to be built here for cars sold here.
And during the campaign and after, he called for domestic production of small cars like the Chevy Cruze and the Ford Focus.
JON LINKOV: Nobody's building a plant to build small cars in America.
GLINTON: Jon Linkov is with Consumer Reports.
LINKOV: The vehicles that people want more and more are small SUVs, whether they're conventional, mainstream ones or luxury, compact or even subcompact.
GLINTON: Trucks and SUVs began outselling cars about two years ago, and Americans have largely turned their backs on small cars. Low gas prices have helped. But Linkov, with Consumer Reports, says Americans honestly don't really like them.
LINKOV: Buyers just aren't really happy with particularly subcompacts. They give them poor and, you know, worse than average - much worse than average - owner satisfaction.
MICHAEL CALKINS: Americans have always liked their big cars. You know, wide open spaces, you know, bigger is better, the Texas ethos, that's kind of part of the American dream, I guess.
GLINTON: That's Michael Calkins. He's with AAA. He says the United States is fundamentally different than the rest of the world when it comes to cars.
CALKINS: We've been a wealthier country. We have large areas of open space. We've had a tremendous farming industry that has generated a need for vehicles like pickup trucks and SUVs.
GLINTON: It's about practicality, safety and comfort. You know, this is America.
CALKINS: In an SUV or a pickup truck, you sit up high, you have a good view, you feel safe because you're in a big, heavy vehicle. And, quite frankly, Americans tend to weigh a lot more than people in the rest of the world (laughter). We have larger people, and as a result, they like larger vehicles that are more comfortable.
GLINTON: The thing that does get Americans to embrace compact cars - high gas prices. In the late '70s and in the early part of this century, gas prices skyrocketed, and consumers rushed towards smaller cars. But here's the thing, the big American car companies have never been really good at making small cars. So that's why you see so many Toyota Corollas and Honda Civics on the road. Jon Linkov with Consumer Reports says it's tougher for the American car companies to make a profit from small cars.
LINKOV: It was hard for the domestics with wages in the U.S. to invest in a car that - really tight margins. There's huge margins on giant Chevy Suburbans and Ford Expeditions and pickup trucks. That's where the money is. That - they can afford the higher wages in the U.S. because those vehicles sold at such higher prices.
GLINTON: Just to give you an idea, Morgan Stanley estimates that 90 percent of Ford's profits come from its truck line. Now, what could bring the small car back? Linkov says tariffs on cars from Mexico, increased gas prices, maybe millennials could begin buying cars. But he doesn't see a resurgence anytime soon.
LINKOV: It may be like minivans. They'll be there. They're not going to see huge increases in sales. They're not going to see giant decreases in sales in the short term, but SUVs are where it's at.
GLINTON: And if there are new jobs, they'll likely be making SUVs and trucks. Sonari Glinton, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep with congratulations to Joe Vellano, a football lineman without a high profile. Nobody drafted him out of the University of Maryland. He found a place in the NFL as a backup or practice squad player. But in his second season, he played for the New England Patriots, who won the Super Bowl. Now he's with Atlanta, which means journeyman Joe Vellano is in the Super Bowl again. If the Falcons beat his old team, the Patriots, he gets a second ring. It's MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
The organizers of last weekend's big protest marches are asking how to translate them into political action.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Those organizers include the activist Ai-jen Poo. She arrived in Washington among a group of domestic workers, nannies and caregivers.
AI-JEN POO: Many of them are immigrant women and women of color, and they feel like the stakes couldn't be higher in this moment.
GREENE: Now, the number of people on the National Mall far exceeded the number at the previous day's presidential inauguration. Several million other people marched in other cities.
INSKEEP: But none of it changed the reality of last fall's elections, which gave the White House to President Trump and Congress to Republicans. Ai-jen Poo, a Democratic-leaning activist, is now considering what to do next.
POO: The opportunity is enormous, and I think one of the things that we're looking to do now is figure out how we channel energy back home to the communities that everyone comes from. And we saw thousands of small marches locally. And all of those marches can be turned into local organizing efforts. Right now, there are protests and marches being called for every single Tuesday. And what we want to do is build community so that we can translate all this energy into political power in the 2018 election.
INSKEEP: So what do you do with the names that you've gathered?
POO: We're hoping to connect people locally so that they can organize house parties, organize regular community meetings, town halls in communities.
INSKEEP: So people in Oak Park, Ill., where you're from...
POO: Exactly.
INSKEEP: ...Would find out that there are other people in their neighborhood who marched on Saturday who have similar views and they might get together, you would hope.
POO: Exactly, in very much a de-centralized meetup model. Lots of organizations have been using this house party model to organize very effectively.
INSKEEP: What does that mean, a house party model?
POO: It means that somebody who is on that list volunteers to host a gathering in their home for people in the neighborhood. And you have a meeting where you share stories, you share experiences and you talk about what you want to do next.
INSKEEP: You've used the word energy. You've used the word community. Ultimately, though, in a democracy, this is a question of power. How do you translate that energy and community into power?
POO: We want people to start organizing now for the 2018 elections. We want people to run for office. If you've ever thought about running for office, now is the time. With what I saw on Saturday, we have the potential to create a wave where women voters drive victories at every level of elected office in 2018, and that's what we need to make happen.
INSKEEP: To what extent is the tea party, which organized after President Obama's 2008 election and had a lot of successes, to what extent is that your model?
POO: I think we're in a completely different moment. This is a movement moment. Every few generations, we are called upon to take a little bit more risk and to work harder, not just for our own families and our own communities but for the well-being of the whole country.
INSKEEP: But I mean, on a practical level, are you looking at, on a mechanical level, what the tea party did or what other movements have done in the past to organize and learning from them, copying them or adding to them?
POO: Yes. We're learning from every movement, absolutely, and I think the tea party was very successful in leveraging the electoral political system to gain power and influence. And we absolutely want to build political power, absolutely.
INSKEEP: Ai-jen Poo, thanks very much.
POO: Thanks for having me.
INSKEEP: She's the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
For some people, President Trump's tweets are investment opportunities. Since his election, the president has repeatedly named specific companies on Twitter. Within seconds of those mentions, the company's stock price has moved. Investors are now asking how they can protect themselves or profit. Chris Dieterich of The Wall Street Journal has written about this.
CHRIS DIETERICH: The first week of this month, he tweeted in the middle of the day, so markets are open. He critiques Toyota Motors for plans to open a factory in Mexico. A few seconds tick and, lo and behold, orders pour in. The stock falls about 1 percent right in the middle of the day - pretty clear cut uncharted territory for professional investors having one of the most powerful people in the world just publicly name out a single stock in a tweet. The same thing has happened for companies like Lockheed Martin, companies like Boeing, other automakers.
INSKEEP: How many seconds are we talking about that the market moves if it's, say, the Toyota story or another one like it?
DIETERICH: In Toyota, you can see specifically it's one, 1,000, two, 1,000, three, 1,000, four. And then the flood flows from there, so it's almost instantaneous.
INSKEEP: You're saying that someone is at a computer terminal, reads that tweet, absorbs it, instantly hits - or as quickly as they can - hits sell and enough people do that that the stock price moved in four seconds.
DIETERICH: That's absolutely right. So not only professional traders too - there are surveys here from E-Trade. Younger people between the ages of 25 and 30, a recent survey they did found that three-fifths of those people with accounts over a certain size have been trading on these tweets. So it's also ordinary Americans who just watch the markets closely that are absolutely watching the Twitter feed and hitting sell as soon as they can recognize what stock has been named.
INSKEEP: So you could program a computer to watch for the president mentioning Toyota, but then somebody has to think, what did he say about Toyota, is that bad for Toyota, is it relevant to Toyota?
DIETERICH: That's right. The computer is there with the speed, but the interpretation, it still takes several seconds to process. And while that seems like a very short period of time, that still is - it's sort of like years in terms of high-speed trading lingo on Wall Street.
INSKEEP: What does it mean that sometimes what happens is Trump mentions Toyota, the stock plunges, but then it recovers minutes or hours later?
DIETERICH: Yeah, that's - I mean, that's a reaction of truth. What's in the content of these tweets is often vague. It's often incomplete. So that's what you have in markets generally is this instantaneous need to price in some comment and then the ultimate digestion of what's happening. And so often they have come back. And so the more profitable strategy, at least so far, has been essentially to buy the overreaction, and the market has been successful, but often what markets price in is overreaction.
INSKEEP: Does it get even harder because even the people around the president have tried to say again and again and again don't pay so much attention to his tweets. He doesn't mean what he says literally. You really can't take this man at his word.
DIETERICH: It's going to be really interesting to see how the real-time interpretation of the tweets changes over time. So already there have been signs that - of this diminished effect as it becomes a little bit like less novel market-moving updates.
INSKEEP: Would you recommend that amateurs, daytraders, play this game?
DIETERICH: I would absolutely not recommend that amateurs play this game. This is the world of overreaction in split seconds. It's the same as going to Las Vegas. You're well in the realm of speculative trading, and if you consider yourself an investor at all, you would stay as far away from this as you possibly can.
INSKEEP: Chris Dieterich of The Wall Street Journal, thanks very much.
DIETERICH: Thanks, Steve.
(SOUNDBITE OF SYD DALE'S "IT'S NOT UNUSUAL")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
When President Trump spoke to people at the Department of Homeland Security yesterday, Brandon Judd was in the audience. He's president of the union that represents U.S. Border Patrol agents, the National Border Patrol Council, which endorsed Trump during the campaign. He was present to hear the president say he's going ahead with building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, among other immigration measures, and he's in our studio this morning. Mr. Judd, welcome back to the program.
BRANDON JUDD: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: So how different is the border going to be assuming that the president's orders are carried out here?
JUDD: I don't think it's going to be - well, OK, it's going to be a lot more secure. But what we're talking about is we're talking about a wall in strategic locations. We're not talking about a great wall of the United States. We're not talking about a continuous wall from California down to Texas. We're talking about a wall in strategic locations which then helps the Border Patrol agents do their job better.
INSKEEP: Because there are some places that are so sparsely populated and the ground is so fierce or so harsh you really don't need...
JUDD: Correct, correct.
INSKEEP: So you've told us when you were on the program last time that about 10 to 15 percent of the border has serious fences in your view and maybe you'd double that under this proposal.
JUDD: That's what I'm thinking. Again, I don't have the exact specifics of what they're going to do, but I do know that they're looking in specific places like Laredo, Texas, where we have very, very little walls. Yet, the state that Laredo, Texas, borders is extremely violent. And so we're looking in locations like that. They're looking in locations like that, but I think it's going to be very effective.
INSKEEP: What have you made of the really visceral response to this, the negative response to this from many people in the United States as well as from Mexico?
JUDD: Well, I can understand, but you - but, Steve, you have to understand there's a lot of rhetoric out there and a lot of what's being put out there - I mean, I've heard that this is a racist wall. This isn't a racist wall. We're not talking about keeping out legal immigrants. We're talking about keeping out illegal immigrants, and it has nothing to do with race because we get people from all - from everywhere. We get people from Russia who are white that cross the border illegally. And so this isn't a racist wall. This is about the security and safety of the United States.
INSKEEP: Although some people have pointed out nobody is talking about a wall on the Canadian border.
JUDD: No, but we don't have the same problems on the Canadian border. In fact, that's where I work right now. I work on the Canadian border, and we just don't have the same number of people crossing the Canadian border illegally like what we do on the southwest border. It's a lot cheaper to go down to Mexico and cross the southwest border.
INSKEEP: What do you think about the president's effort to compel, if he can, local and state authorities to be more helpful to the Border Patrol and immigration authorities in doing their jobs and rounding up people who are here illegally?
JUDD: Well - so my understanding is that he's not compelling them to help us round them up. But what he is saying is if they come in contact, if a police officer, say, from Phoenix Police Department - if a police officer from the Phoenix, Ariz., police department comes in contact with somebody that he knows is here or suspects that is here illegally, then his responsibility is to contact an immigration enforcement officer to come in and find out. It's the same with me. As a Border Patrol agent, if I make a vehicle stop and I find that illegal activity is taking place outside of the laws that I enforce...
INSKEEP: Drunk driver for example.
JUDD: Exactly - it's my responsibility to call the local law - the local law enforcement so that they can come out and take care of the problem.
INSKEEP: Are we not actually arguing about that much then? Because there are local authorities who are saying, yeah, yeah, if we find somebody who's obviously in violation, we have to turn them over, but we do not want to make that our job. We don't want it to be our job to seek them out or to hold people when otherwise there would not be reason to hold them.
JUDD: And it's not going to be their job. It's not going to be their job to go seek out illegal immigrants in the United States. That is immigrations officers' jobs and it's not theirs. But if they do come in contact with people that are in the country illegally, they should have a responsibility and duty to report people that are breaking the law.
INSKEEP: In a few seconds, how different do you think the country could be in three or four years if these proposals are carried out?
JUDD: Well, I think the country is going to be a lot safer.
INSKEEP: A lot safer.
JUDD: I really do, yes, absolutely. I mean, I was there with what they call the angel families, families that had children that were killed by persons that were in the United States illegally. If these laws are carried out properly - and he's not talking about new laws. By the way, he's not saying that he's going to give us new laws. He's talking about enforcing the laws that are currently on the books.
INSKEEP: Brandon Judd, thanks for coming by. I really appreciate it.
JUDD: Appreciate it, thank you.
INSKEEP: He is the head of the Border Patrol union.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President Trump and the Republican Congress have talked a lot about what they plan to do and undo, namely a lot of the programs and regulations put in place by President Obama and his predecessors. Stacey Vanek Smith of our Planet Money team reports that one of the most intense battles being fought right now is over rules.
STACEY VANEK SMITH, BYLINE: Chuck Nelson was a coal miner in West Virginia for more than 30 years.
CHUCK NELSON: I am a fourth-generation coal miner, so father, grandfather, great-grandfather. We all worked in the mines.
VANEK SMITH: Chuck was used to dirt and coal dust down in the mines, but in the 1980s, a coal processing plant was built right near his house.
NELSON: We started eating a lot of coal dust - I mean, bad, bad. I mean, I'd go to work and come home at night, and there would be a half inch of coal dust on everything in the house.
VANEK SMITH: Whoa, what does coal dust look like?
NELSON: It's just black powder.
VANEK SMITH: Chuck's wife started getting really bad asthma, so he tried talking to the coal company, but they ignored him. So Chuck started talking to environmental groups about the dust and other issues he was seeing in the area, like high cancer rates and contaminated water. They told him there is a law on the books regulating coal mining. It's the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act passed in 1977. But they said the law doesn't go far enough. They were pushing for a modification to that law, something called the Stream Protection Rule.
NEIL KERWIN: Rulemaking, as a process, is the most important source of law in America.
VANEK SMITH: Neil Kerwin is the president of American University and an expert on rules. He says laws are written to be sort of general and sweeping. Rules are written under the umbrella of a law. It's all the details, basically what the law looks like on the ground. The 1977 law said coal companies should not cause, quote, "material damage to the environment." The Stream Protection Rule wanted to be stricter about what material damage meant. Neil says a law can look really different depending on the rules used to enforce it. And presidents have come to love rules but for a totally different reason.
KERWIN: Rulemaking does afford the president the ability to enact public policy without interacting with the Congress.
VANEK SMITH: Rules don't need to be approved by Congress. Congress can comment and so can the public. But basically when it comes to rules, what the White House says goes - not that it's a speedy process. The Stream Protection Rule was in the works for nearly a decade. It's 1,200 pages long, and even still, it barely made it in under the wire. The rule went into effect on the very last day of Obama's presidency. But once a rule is passed, undoing it is really hard, says Neil Kerwin.
KERWIN: You go through the same process to repeal a rule or alter a rule as you do to write one in the first place.
VANEK SMITH: So a lot of work.
KERWIN: A lot of work (laughter).
VANEK SMITH: This was a major point of frustration for mining advocates. Adam Eckman is a lawyer for the National Mining Association. He spent years fighting the Stream Protection Rule. He says, in the end, it was a rush job. The comment period was minimal, and a lot of concerns were just ignored.
ADAM ECKMAN: For the agency to then move forward with the rulemaking, you know, just a couple weeks before the end of the administration. So yeah, I mean, obviously I was very disappointed to put it mildly.
VANEK SMITH: So Adam and his colleagues started pushing for lawmakers to use the Congressional Review Act. It says that Congress can overturn any rule within 60 congressional days of it being finalized as long as the president signs off. It barely ever gets used because most presidents are not going to kill a rule they just issued. But with a new president in the White House, it is suddenly taking center stage. And if a rule gets erased with the Congressional Review Act, that rule can never be reissued. Mining advocate Adam Eckman says this is a democratic process, a lot more democratic than presidents just pushing through rules. But for Chuck Nelson, the coal miner, the prospect of all that work just getting erased seems really unfair.
NELSON: All this work we've done for years, all that's gone, all that work, you know, that's just going to be wiped away with the stroke of a pen.
VANEK SMITH: More than 60 of the rules Obama passed are vulnerable to the Congressional Review Act, including rules to protect funding for Planned Parenthood, ban offshore drilling in parts of Alaska and, of course, the Stream Protection Rule. And behind each rule, there are people like Chuck Nelson nervously watching and waiting to see what Congress will do - or undo. Stacey Vanek Smith, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning, I'm David Greene. This was not New Zealand's first rodeo, but it might have been a first. A rodeo event on the country's North Island has always involved kids chasing sheep around, something that happens elsewhere, including the U.S. Animal rights activists did not like it, so last year organizers replaced the sheep with sacks of wool that were dragged around the arena by clowns. This year's improvement? Kids are again chasing sheep, well, actually men dressed as sheep. You're listening to MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene in Culver City, Calif. And we have a California congressman on the line with us, it is Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. That committee has just announced it will launch an investigation into Russian aggression including cyberattacks against the United States. Congressman, good morning and welcome back to the program.
ADAM SCHIFF: Good morning, good to be with you.
GREENE: So the intelligence agencies have said pretty firmly that Russia hacked, that Russia tried to influence a U.S. election. What more is there to learn? What are you looking for here?
SCHIFF: There's actually a great deal to learn. We have a good basis in the report that the intelligence community put out, but we want to know the details of just what the Russians did, every vector they've used to attack our democracy. They've used media platforms, they've used obviously hacking, the dumping of documents. We want to make sure to investigate whether there were any connections, direct connections or communications with the campaigns, whether any financial transactions - the whole range of what might have taken place, some of which we certainly know. But we want to know the how of it, we want to know more about the why of it. We also want to examine the U.S. government's response and be self-critical about whether we acted the way we should, what improvements we need to make in our defenses.
GREENE: Do you know much more than we do? You said all the way back in September that based on briefings you had gotten, you concluded that Russian intelligence agencies had made a concerted effort to influence the U.S. election. You were out there ahead of the Obama administration. I mean, did you know a lot more? Do you know a lot more?
SCHIFF: Well, I do know some more. Sen. Feinstein and I made that attribution, as you say, in September because...
GREENE: Dianne Feinstein of California, yeah.
SCHIFF: We were convinced that the Russians were behind this, that they were trying to interfere in our election, and we thought the American people really needed to know that. We are part of - or were, Sen. Feinstein has moved on to be ranking on the Judiciary Committee now - but we are a part of the Gang of Eight and so we get the most classified briefings from the intelligence community.
So yes, there's certainly nonpublic things that we're aware of, as well as even classified things that the rest of Congress is not briefed into. But we thought that information was very important that it not be withheld prior to the election, and we were pushing the administration to do attribution. Ultimately they did, but we felt that it was so important that we went out ahead of the intelligence community making that attribution.
GREENE: You talk about the Gang of Eight and people who receive briefings that are heavily classified, the Republican chair of the committee you're on, Devin Nunes. I mean, you're saying that there is a bipartisan group that knows more potentially about President Trump and potential ties between him, his campaign and Russia?
SCHIFF: Well. What I'm saying is that we are certainly privy to classified information that goes into a lot of the details as well as what the sources of information were that made the basis of that public report that was made available just a few weeks ago.
GREENE: You and your Republican colleague Congressman Nunez said in a statement that you'll be looking at the 2016 election including, quote, "any links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns." That is very delicate language there, but are you talking about President Trump?
SCHIFF: Well, yes, and certainly we would explore any links between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. We're not going to leave it there if there were any kind of communications or interactions with the Clinton campaign, we will look at that, too. But you're right, it is enormously fraught politically. After all, we're exploring a potential connection between a foreign adversarial power and one of the major presidential campaigns or both of them. So, yes, it's a very politically delicate task to talk about, but frankly we are committed and the chairman has said he is committed as well to following the evidence wherever it may lead, and so we have to pursue I think any credible allegation.
GREENE: Are you suspicious that there's a tie between Hillary Clinton's campaign and Russia, is what you're suggesting?
SCHIFF: No, not at all. But what we are saying is that we don't want to foreclose any possibilities. We don't want to say that this investigation is solely about the Trump campaign. You know, there were - there have been allegations that the Russians tried to obtain compromising material on both presidential candidates. So we don't want to exclude any possibility, but clearly there have been a number of very public allegations concerning the Trump campaign.
GREENE: OK. That's Congressman Adam Schiff of California. He is the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee joining us via Skype. Congressman, thanks so much.
SCHIFF: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The president's executive actions on immigration drew protesters to the streets last night. Here's NPR's Hansi Lo Wang.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: Here in Queens, N.Y., news about President Donald Trump's executive orders has helped pack the offices of the immigrant advocacy group Make The Road New York. Organizer Natalia Aristizabal is leading a workshop for about 50 people on immigrant rights.
NATALIA ARISTIZABAL: (Speaking Spanish).
WANG: Among other policies, one of Trump's orders calls for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, about a third of which is already blocked by a fence. But Aristizabal says she's more concerned about the threat of withholding federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities, perhaps compelling local police to enforce immigration laws. She warns that could destroy trust between police and immigrant communities.
ARISTIZABAL: Someone who's undocumented may be in great danger. The last thing they're going to think about is calling the police because that's going to mean a detention and deportation for the person making the phone call or perhaps someone in the family.
WANG: Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies welcomes stronger immigration enforcement. His group advocates for more restrictive immigration policies, but he does question how effective targeting sanctuary cities can be.
MARK KRIKORIAN: The question is who's going to blink first, the cities or the federal government, because cutting off their money is just step one. New York and LA and the rest of them are not going to change their policy because of that.
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BILL DE BLASIO: We will not deport law-abiding New Yorkers. We will not tear families apart.
WANG: That's New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has denounced Trump's executive orders, and so have protesters in Queens.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting) Trump, (chanting in Spanish).
WANG: "Trump, listen, we are in the fight," demonstrators chant in Spanish, including 42-year-old Leticia Salazar who walked across the border illegally more than two decades ago.
LETICIA SALAZAR: I'm scared because I have children here, so I don't want to go back to Mexico because it's not easy to work over there.
WANG: Salazar cleans houses and sells water filters door-to-door to help raise her two sons and daughter who are U.S. citizens.
ANTONIO ALARCON: Those people who pick your fruit, who pick the vegetables that you eat every day, he's not talking about those people.
WANG: Antonio Alarcon says it's unfair that Trump's speeches often focus on immigrants who commit crimes. Alarcon was 10 when he and his parents walked across the U.S.-Mexico border without a visa. He registered for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA program a few years ago, and now lives with his aunt and uncle.
ALARCON: Immigration will have my information, and at the end of the day if they decide to come to our houses, those are my big concerns, my aunt and my uncle, putting them at risk of deportation as well.
WANG: That's a concern looming high in Alarcon's mind, even though Trump has indicated he won't go after DACA recipients for now. Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News, New York.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
President Trump is pushing forward with his agenda. He has taken executive actions to order construction of that wall to begin on the Mexico border. He's also taken executive action to start overhauling the nation's health care system, but ultimately, many of his goals do depend on Congress. And the president and vice president are heading to Philadelphia today where congressional Republicans are holding a retreat to map out their agenda for the year. One other person in Philadelphia is NPR's Susan Davis, who covers Congress and who is from Philadelphia. So you're home, Sue.
SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: It's good to be back.
GREENE: Well, there you go. Well, let's - let me ask you one question we've been talking about on the program this morning. It's the wall and who is going to pay for it. Some estimates - over $10 billion. President Trump says Mexico is going to pay. The Mexican government has not given any indication of that. Would Congress pay for it?
DAVIS: They are prepared to pay, and I think $10 billion is a pretty conservative estimate so far. I've talked to congressional aides who say that the estimates they operate off of are at least $15 billion. And that's not including maintenance costs after it's built. Republicans here are talking about looking at a spending bill this spring that will be - the president's expected to ask from Congress that's going to include money for the ongoing war efforts. And in that, it's going to include an additional request for some border money.
It's unclear how much that's going to be, if he's going to ask for a big lump sum or an incremental down payment. But they are prepared to pay for it. There's been one notable exception. Congressman Will Hurd is a Texas Republican. He represents the border district, and he says he thinks it's the most expensive and least effective, in his words, way to do it and that they should use smarter technologies. But he is in the minority here.
GREENE: OK. So otherwise, the party pretty united when it comes to this.
DAVIS: Yeah, and Paul Ryan has said as much.
GREENE: Well, Paul Ryan, the House speaker, says the other thing Republicans are going to be doing at this retreat is sorting out how to replace Obamacare, that there's the whole repeal and then replace thing. They've taken the first steps towards repealing it. What about a replacement? Where do things stand?
DAVIS: The speaker and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, outlined the year ahead yesterday to their colleagues, and they want to have a bill to President Trump's desk by early spring that they say would repeal key parts of the law and include still to be determined some option of replacement plans. One example of the things they're talking about is if in this bill they were to repeal that individual mandate and instead create new tax credits to incentivize people to buy insurance, not tell them they have to have it, they would do that in one bill, and then, throughout the course of the year, do other little fixes.
I'm told they're not talking about doing one big massive health care bill - don't expect a Trumpcare (ph) bill is what one said to me - and that they would do little scattershot bills throughout the year. Another idea they're talking about that would be a separate bill is a bill that would let people buy insurance across state lines. Now, these aren't final. They're not necessarily going to do that, but that's what they're talking about.
GREENE: Do congressional Republicans have their own idea for what they want their agenda to be separate from the new president?
DAVIS: You know, David, this legislative agenda they've outlined I think is the most ambitious I've heard from leaders to do in a single year. They're calling it the first 200 days versus the first 100 days that presidents are often judged by. After overhauling the health care system that they want to be done by spring, they're looking at also overhauling the entire federal tax code for corporations, for small businesses, for individuals and completely revamping the IRS. They also want to do infrastructure spending on those roads and bridges Donald Trump has called for. They also need to raise the debt ceiling, and they want to rework how they spend - rework budget caps that tells them how much money they can spend. And on top of that, David, they're expected to have a Supreme Court nomination, and that could come as early as next week.
GREENE: A lot to talk about. That's going to be a very busy early part of 2017. That is NPR's congressional correspondent Susan Davis in Philadelphia where Republicans are holding their annual retreat, talking about their agenda for the coming year. Sue, thanks as always.
DAVIS: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHRISTIAN SCOTT A TUNDE ADJUAH'S "SUNRISE IN BEIJING")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Just about every American adult has heard the names Roe and Wade. Roe v. Wade was the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the United States. Not so many people know about the real people involved, and now a new play explores their lives. "Roe" was first produced in Oregon and is now at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: When the Oregon Shakespeare Festival asked Lisa Loomer if she'd be interested in writing a play about Roe v. Wade, she was skeptical the court case would make good theater. Then she started reading about key players on both sides of the issue.
LISA LOOMER: And that for me was the story of the divide in American culture. I thought Roe was a great prism for looking at that divide about, why can't we even talk to each other about this issue?
BLAIR: She was also certain her play needed to be evenhanded.
LOOMER: Because I wanted people to feel as they watch the play that their point of view is represented, if nothing else because that helps people be more open and willing to hear another point of view.
BLAIR: The real Jane Roe was a hard living hippie-ish (ph) 22-year-old named Norma McCorvey. In 1969, she was poor and pregnant for a third time. She's played by actress Sarah Bruner. Here, she pleads with her doctor to give her an abortion. She tells him she tried to get it done illegally at a place she'd heard about.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "ROE")
SARAH BRUNER: (As Norma McCorvey) It looked like a ghost town, like somebody had moved out of there real fast. There's blood all over the floors, roaches, sheets like filthy rags, and the smell was...
RICHARD ELMORE: (As Doctor) Yeah. I do understand your predicament, Norma, but maybe you should have thought about consequences before you got pregnant for a third time.
BLAIR: Sarah Weddington was the daughter of a Methodist minister. As it happened, she already knew a lot about abortion. She'd had one in Mexico, something she didn't reveal until years later. She and another attorney challenged the state law on behalf of all Texas women seeking an abortion. Weddington is played by Sarah Jane Agnew.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "ROE")
SARAH JANE AGNEW: (As Sarah Weddington) In the absence of legal, medically safe abortions, women often resort to illegal abortions, which carries risks of death, severe infection and permanent sterility.
BLAIR: The lawyers for the state included Dallas district attorney Henry Wade - the Wade in Roe v. Wade - and attorney Jay Floyd played by Jim Abele.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "ROE")
JIM ABELE: (As Jay Floyd) I think she makes her choice prior to the time she becomes pregnant. That is the time of her choice.
BLAIR: The case was argued before the Supreme Court in 1971. Here, Lisa Loomer uses actual recordings from the appeal. The actors, playing the lawyers, make their arguments facing the audience. From the back of the theater, you hear the voices of the real justices responding. Here's Justice Potter Stewart.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
POTTER STEWART: How should that question be decided? Is it a legal question, a constitutional question, a medical question, a philosophical question, a religious question, or what is it?
BLAIR: In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Jane Roe, too late for Norma McCorvey to get an abortion. But the play doesn't stop there, it goes on to explore the fierce battles that ensued. There's the anti-abortion rights organization Operation Rescue. Actress Amy Newman plays Ronda, an activist who tries to talk a woman out of getting an abortion. Ronda explains that when she got pregnant with her daughter, her fiance wanted her to get one.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "ROE")
AMY NEWMAN: (As Ronda) I was in my doctor's office and I happened to see a picture in one of those pamphlets they give you. I saw the precious little hands and feet. And, no, I may not be a scientist or a medical person, but I have eyes just like you do, and no one - no one - could tell me that this was a fetus and not a human being.
BLAIR: There's not enough time here to explain all of the complexities and nuance in the play "Roe." That, says Lisa Loomer, is what the theater's for.
LOOMER: I think of the theater as a place where we come together, sit together in the dark to contemplate an issue from a very, very human point of view.
BLAIR: Lawyer Sarah Weddington went on to join the Texas House of Representatives and became the first woman to serve as general counsel for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She still speaks out for a woman's right to choose. Norma McCorvey, the Jane Roe in the case, reversed her position and joined the anti-abortion movement. Lisa Loomer says even though "Roe" is a history play, so much of what happens in it is happening right now.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And of course, Donald Trump's rise in this country has been connected by some to a global trend. In Europe, frustrations with the political elite, concerns about immigration have strengthened right-wing, populist leaders. And this week, we're touring around Europe, getting to know some of those leaders. Today, to Germany.
A 4-year-old nationalist party called Alternative for Germany, or AFD, using the German initials, is expected to do well in this fall's parliamentary elections. The party's co-chair is Frauke Petry. Like the current German chancellor, Angela Merkel, she is a scientist who grew up in the former communist East Germany. But that is where the similarities end. Petry recently sat down with NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Frauke Petry likes being in charge. But she doesn't like the spotlight.
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NELSON: At a summit last weekend in the German city of Koblenz, the 41-year-old chemist shifted awkwardly on stage next to Marine Le Pen, her far-right ally from France.
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MARINE LE PEN: (Speaking French).
NELSON: Compared to the fiery oratory of Le Pen, who riled up the crowd with predictions of a populace toppling of the EU...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FRAUKE PETRY: (Speaking German).
NELSON: ...Petry's speech was more of a history lecture on the declining state of Europe. She's more conversational during our interview in Leipzig, arriving with her youngest child, Tobias, in tow.
PETRY: (Speaking German).
NELSON: Petry recently married a fellow party member and is pregnant with their first child, which will be her fifth. You might call it a case of practicing what you preach. Petry says more children - not more immigrants - is the way to address the country's worker shortage.
PETRY: If Germany has an aging population, it is up to Germany to decide a ways out of it.
NELSON: She quotes Machiavelli to explain why taking in so many Muslim asylum-seekers poses a threat.
PETRY: The principles of migration have always been the same. It's a question of period of time, process and numbers. And if migration population, in the long run, numbers out the ethnic population of this country, the country will disappear. It will change dramatically. And that's what we see when we talk about illegal migration today in Germany, in Europe.
NELSON: Petry says she completely rejects Chancellor Angela Merkel's claim that Islam belongs to Germany.
PETRY: If you talk about the religious differences, we do have serious problems with Islam. And it's much easier to integrate someone from France or from Poland, from Spain, from Britain or from wherever in Europe into a European culture like the German culture than someone from a Middle East country. I think that's obvious.
NELSON: The fear of German extinction is something AFD has successfully used in every local election in recent years to win seats in German state legislatures. It's not how the controversial party started out, explains Martin Kroh of the German Economic Research Institute. He says business leaders and academics who opposed German bailouts of the Eurozone founded AFD in 2013. A short while later, Petry and her allies took over.
MARTIN KROH: So the party changed from this moderate, economic euroskepticism to more right-wing, populist statements and also anti-immigrant positions and also being more conservative on family policies.
NELSON: A recent poll on German voters' choices in the parliamentary election this September shows nearly 15 percent plan to cast ballots for Alternative for Germany. Many of those votes are shifting from Merkel's political party. Its approval rating has shrunk to the low 30s. And if the decline continues, Merkel will have a hard time forming a new coalition government. Her political allies are worried enough to have taken stances against migrants in the European Union that sound a lot like what AFD says. Petry smiles when asked about it.
PETRY: These ideas have already been there for quite a while. But they were called racist or xenophobic or something else. In fact, we have a situation right now in Germany where politicians of all the other parties realize that all the so-called solutions up to now haven't worked.
NELSON: Still, Petry is pushing her party to tone it down, especially when it comes to anti-Semitism. Her party is considering ejecting one of its officials, Bjorn Hocke, for recently condemning the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Meanwhile, Le Pen and other populist leaders are calling on Petry to be the next German chancellor. But she isn't prepared to talk about a run.
PETRY: Our party has to enter the German Parliament first of all. And I'm willing and my party's willing to change the political situation in Germany and in Europe. Anything else apart from that is way too early to discuss.
NELSON: In any event, she'll likely need a parliamentary majority to become chancellor because, so far, the mainstream political parties refuse to partner with Petry or her faction.
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Leipzig.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now we report on the big effect that the repeal of the Affordable Care Act would have on hospitals. Exactly what effect depends on whether and how Congress makes good on a promise to replace the law. Here's what is known - the current law helps people pay hospital bills, since many more have insurance, and the law also gives hospitals incentives to give better care to patients. Here's Kristin Gourlay from Rhode Island Public Radio.
KRISTIN GOURLAY, BYLINE: Here's one thing hospitals could lose - patients who can pay. Hospitals like this one take care of anyone who walks or rolls through the emergency room doors. This is the busy ER at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence on a Friday night. Whether you have insurance or not, the ER will take care of you. If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, more people could come through those doors without insurance, people got covered, for example, in states that expanded Medicaid. And those Medicaid funds were a big deal, says Rachel Garfield with the Kaiser Family Foundation.
RACHEL GARFIELD: It is fair to say that if the Medicaid expansion goes away wholesale and things go back to the way they were before this expansion was in place that a lot of those hospitals would see an increase in their uncompensated care costs.
GOURLAY: Or unpaid medical bills. There's still a gap, says Garfield, because Medicaid doesn't always cover the complete cost of care, but it's been better than nothing. Now, if that Medicaid coverage goes away, hospitals could lose more than $160 billion nationwide according to an American Hospital Association estimate. And there's another concern.
TIMOTHY FERRIS: Well, personally I'm worried that the progress we've made over the past five years would be threatened.
GOURLAY: Dr. Timothy Ferris with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston says the ACA encouraged hospitals with financial incentives to experiment with how to take care of patients and save money.
FERRIS: We have now more than 20 different programs - video visits, electronic consultation with specialists, programs for patients with diabetes and heart disease - and I would be worried that a repeal of the ACA would undermine our ability to invest in services for our patients that we are now investing in.
GOURLAY: Ferris' hospital has signed agreements to create accountable care organizations, or ACOs, with physicians and insurers in hopes of saving money. This is how they work - insurers pay doctors for making sure the patient is getting the best and most appropriate care, not for every test and procedure a doctor does like the typical system. Ferris knows most of those experiments haven't paid off yet, but he says they need time to work out the kinks.
FERRIS: One of the things that is difficult for people outside of health care to appreciate, particularly politicians, is how long it takes to make significant improvements in the delivery of care. Because, you know, delivering care to patients, you have to be very careful when you make changes.
GOURLAY: Or risk harming patients. Many other hospitals across the country have invested in these new networks, often overhauling medical records systems, hiring staff, creating new services. Dennis Keefe, head of a large hospital chain called Care New England in Rhode Island, says he worries about the future of his ACO - Integra.
DENNIS KEEFE: I think if there is a real change in direction away from these alternative payment models, we will be assuming risk to care for a population. We have invested enormously to really be successful in this area. We have gone from zero premium dollars flowing through Integra to a billion dollars.
GOURLAY: These are seismic changes in the way hospitals do business, and most want the government to keep supporting these innovations.
For NPR News, I'm Kristin Gourlay in Providence.
(SOUNDBITE OF KONTAKTE SONG, "MOTORIK")
INSKEEP: That story's part of a reporting partnership with NPR News, Rhode Island Public Radio and Kaiser Health News
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep in Washington, where it's the day of an annual event, the day when thousands of people arrive in the city to attend what is called the March for Life. This year, opponents of abortion rights will hear from the new vice president, Mike Pence. NPR's Sarah McCammon is covering the march. She's in our studios.
Sarah, good morning.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: How energized are activists this year?
MCCAMMON: Well, they're feeling good about the Trump administration and especially about Mike Pence, who has a long history as Indiana's governor, of opposing abortion rights. He was sort of picked, in many ways, to shore up the confidence of social conservatives in Trump who, in the past, had described himself as very pro-choice, though he ran, you know, as an anti-abortion candidate. And so Pence is popular with this crowd. And they have a lot of things they're hoping for from this administration.
INSKEEP: Such as what?
MCCAMMON: Quite a few things. A big goal is to cut off federal funding for women's health services provided by Planned Parenthood. Federal funding for abortion is already not allowed. But a lot of these groups want to see Planned Parenthood sort of taken off of the list of groups that can provide services through Medicaid.
INSKEEP: Because it receives federal funding at all for women's health services, even though the money doesn't go for abortions.
MCCAMMON: Right. Other goals include a federal 20-week ban on abortion, something that has been tried in several states and found unconstitutional at the federal level. But that is why, Steve, the Supreme Court is really the big goal. President Trump is expected to announce a nominee next week, and that's something that anti-abortion activists are really watching.
INSKEEP: What are you hearing from specific groups you've spoken with?
MCCAMMON: So ahead of this event, I spoke to Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America, and she talked especially about defunding Planned Parenthood as a goal.
KRISTAN HAWKINS: So they are going to be in the fight of their lives, and they're acting like it. They're doing everything they can to start the discussion to try to save their federal funding. So it's even more important that pro-lifers are there, they show up and they show this administration in Washington that we're paying attention.
INSKEEP: And this is a circumstance where, for the first time in a decade, Republicans control both Congress and the White House, so there's a possibility of doing something in a way that perhaps there wasn't in the past. Now...
MCCAMMON: Right.
INSKEEP: ...Let me ask you, Sarah McCammon, how does this event compare with the last big march in Washington, which was just a week ago on Saturday, the big Women's March, where hundreds of thousands of people showed up?
MCCAMMON: Well, you know, there probably will be comparisons between the two because they're happening so close together at the beginning of the Trump administration. They are very different events, though. The Women's March is, you know, a one-time event. Maybe there will be more, but it was sort of organized spontaneously, in many ways in response to Trump's campaign rhetoric, really focused on women's issues and women's rights but lots of other issues as well - immigration, for instance, and the environment, whereas the March for Life is an annual event. The only issue is opposing abortion - legalized abortion.
Here's what the president of March for Life, Jeannie Mancini told me.
JEANNE MANCINI: I was very sad because I think young women really missed out on a critical voice at the Women's March. And - but that said, I think we're a pretty different march. We're a one-issue march.
INSKEEP: What does she mean by missed out on a critical voice at the Women's March?
MCCAMMON: Yeah. So that brings us to some of the tension between some of the ideas that are being talked about today and were talked about last week at the Women's March. There was a bit of a controversy over whether or not anti-abortion feminists could participate. They weren't allowed to be official partners, but some of them did march last week and will be here today.
INSKEEP: And they'll be marching again today.
Sarah, thanks very much.
MCCAMMON: Thank you.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Sarah McCammon this morning in our studios.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And tomorrow marks the start of the Chinese New Year and also a time when China's big cities feel empty. Hundreds of millions of workers who migrated there for work are returning home for the holiday. NPR's Rob Schmitz is still in Shanghai, where it really does sound quiet.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: Any other time of the year, Shengping Lane bustles with life. But the Lunar New Year holiday is near. Half the city has left for their hometowns, and Shanghai has returned to the Shanghainese. The only vendor left in the alley sells calendars, but soon he'll pack up, too. It's the time of year when Shengping Lane lives up to its name, rising peace.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER RUNNING)
SCHMITZ: It'll soon be the Year of the Rooster and Yuan Shuizhen is preparing chicken feet in her kitchen for the big meal. The 85-year-old retreats outside and plops down on a chair along the side of the alley chatting with friends.
YUAN SHUIZHEN: (Through translator) All of the outsiders have left for home. It's much quieter this time of year, less crazy.
SCHMITZ: Her two friends nod. The three grannies go through a list of food they'll make for their families.
YUAN: (Foreign language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Foreign language spoken).
SCHMITZ: Beef, fish, dumplings, hot pot. After a meal with family, they'll go to the Buddhist temple to pray and burn incense.
YUAN: (Through interpreter) When I was young, we'd go to the cemetery to worship our ancestors, and then we'd cook one pot of rice, serve it in small bowls and we'd eat it for the next five days. Now we cook meals every single day. Life has improved.
SCHMITZ: Yuan's friend Ni Jindi agrees. But the 94-year-old still grumbles about her grandchildren. They're all working professionals, and they rarely have time to visit their grandmother here in the lane. This is the only time of year she gets to spend time with them and her great-grandchildren.
NI JINDI: (Through interpreter) They're leaving on the third day of the holiday to go travel somewhere. I don't know exactly where they're going. I'm too old. I'll stay here.
SCHMITZ: She'll have company. Her two friends are great-grandmothers, too. And their families will also fly somewhere exotic after the first of the year. With their families gone and the holiday setting in, Rising Peace Lane will grow even quieter with just the chatter of three grannies sharing memories of family.
Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Shanghai.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's Friday, which is when we hear from StoryCorps. Back in 2011, this series of conversations featured a talk between two people who could have been enemies but instead became friends.
Mary Johnson met Oshea Israel while he was serving time in prison for murdering her son. After his release, they became close and recorded a conversation together.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
MARY JOHNSON-ROY: My natural son is no longer here. I didn't see him graduate. Now you're going to college. I'll have the opportunity to see you graduate. I didn't see him get married. Hopefully, one day, I'll be able to experience that with you.
OSHEA ISRAEL: And just to hear you say those things and to be in my life in the manner that which you are is my motivation. You still believe in me. And the fact that you can do it despite how much pain I caused you, it's amazing. I love you, lady.
JOHNSON-ROY: I love you, too, son.
INSKEEP: Now, Mary's story doesn't end there. Since that first interview, she's been telling her story in local churches. And she fell in love and married a man named Ed Roy. He'd served time in prison and later also lost a son.
JOHNSON-ROY: How did you and I meet?
ED ROY: We met when my first born and my one and only son was murdered. And a couple of my daughters had asked me to go to the church to hear you speak. I wasn't ready for the forgiveness part, but I was at a loss. Like I shared with you, I thought God took my boy and was punishing me for my own crimes - when I had joined the gangs early and pulled my first armed robbery at 11 years old. But with you be being there, I saw hope. You took me under your wing. That's why I called you my angel.
Then I remember I had that dream that was just before our wedding. And your son was saying - yeah, Mom, all right, you know, right on. And my son was saying - yeah, Dad, 'bout time you got it right.
(LAUGHTER)
JOHNSON-ROY: We also had Oshea in our wedding because he is my spiritual son.
ROY: That was beautiful. As the years and time goes by, you know where I've been. You know where I hurt.
JOHNSON-ROY: And I know you take care of me when I'm not doing well. And I'm grateful to have someone there that has experienced the same thing that I have. The anniversary's coming up of my son's murder, February 12.
ROY: That empty hole's always going to be there in our hearts. But I feel like when we're together and we're able to listen to one another's heartbeats, it says a lot.
JOHNSON-ROY: I'm thankful. I really am. You're a good man.
(SOUNDBITE OF PETER RUDENKO'S "INHALE, PART 2")
INSKEEP: That's Mary Johnson-Roy with her husband Ed Roy for StoryCorps in Minneapolis. Mary and Ed's conversation is archived with all the others at the Library of Congress. And an animated short of Mary's original story can be found at npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF PETER RUDENKO'S "INHALE, PART 2")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
British Prime Minister Theresa May is in the United States to cement what some call the special relationship between the two countries. She is the first foreign leader to visit President Trump. Yesterday, she addressed a retreat in Philadelphia where the president had been meeting with Republican members of Congress. She praised a new era of American renewal.
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PRIME MINISTER THERESA MAY: Because of that great victory, you have won. America can be stronger, greater and more confident in the years ahead.
GREENE: Now, David Rennie has been watching this evolving special relationship closely. He is Washington bureau chief for The Economist. This morning he is in London and joins me on the line.
David, good morning.
DAVID RENNIE: Good morning.
GREENE: So President Trump and Prime Minister May will be meeting at the White House, this speech yesterday seemed to set that up. What did you make of that address? What stood out to you?
RENNIE: Well, she has a really difficult task because after Britain voted to leave the European Union, Britain is more than usually in need of big grown-up friends. And America is the biggest and most grown-up friend Britain traditionally has, but very few people in the British government would have probably chosen Donald Trump as their sort of interlocutor. So the speech she gave yesterday to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders in Philadelphia, that was a much more comfortable audience in a way.
So she was treading this balancing act between trying to make a pitch to conservative Republicans - sort of establishment politicians - before she meets Donald Trump, who poses some other really big problems for her. She tried to present herself as a kind of extreme realist. And that's the headlines here in London where I am this week, very interesting, sort of fixing on the fact that she's repudiating that whole era of sort of Tony Blair-George W. Bush interventionism, the idea of trying to remake the world in our own image was a phrase she used yesterday, and she said that era is over. So that seems an offering to Donald Trump as one realist to another. That seems to be the basis on which she's trying to talk to him.
GREENE: Extreme realist, if you're using that term to refer to both of them it sounds like, what exactly does that mean?
RENNIE: Well, here's the interesting thing. So she offers this kind of peace offering if you like to Donald Trump saying that she shares his views, that it's not up to America or its allies to remake the world in their own image, and they must act in their own interests and that America is, for example, absolutely right to be impatient when allies don't pay enough towards the costs of say NATO. So that was her realist peace offering.
But the flip side of her realism, where she was treading this very difficult balancing act, which she then said but be realist about how much you can get done with someone like Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia. So she said this very interesting thing where she cited the famous Reagan phrase about, you know, when you're dealing with the Soviet Union, you should trust but verify.
GREENE: Right.
RENNIE: And she said, well, so with Vladimir Putin, my advice would be engage but beware. And she...
GREENE: Oh, so you took that as a warning. You took that as not saying that it's a good idea to engage with Putin. I mean, she was warning Trump that this could be very dangerous.
RENNIE: Yeah. I think she's offering, if you like, sort of full spectrum real politic. So she's saying sure, let's be much warier of kind of liberal interventionism. Let's not try and remake the world as kind of perfect democracies. Let's not put boots on the ground. You're right to hear that, you know, the public is sick of that kind of spending of blood and treasure, but I think the flipside is to say then be realistic about who you're dealing with when you pin all your hopes on a kind of brilliant new relationship with Vladimir Putin.
I thought it was incredibly interesting that she talked about Britain sending troops to Estonia as part of NATO's full deployment. She talked about countries that live in tough neighborhoods, so she said we should definitely stand up for the security of Israel. Clearly that goes down well with Donald Trump. But she then mentioned the Baltic states and Eastern Europe as other countries that need to be stood up to. So I think it was a kind of twofer to try to remind him to be realist as well in his dealings with Vladimir Putin.
GREENE: Now wait a minute, David Rennie, because, I mean, you seem to be saying that she's making peace offerings, that she sort of has a calculated message, but, I mean, is this a leader in Donald Trump who Theresa May would have chosen as a partner even if people in her government might not have? Does she feel an alliance here?
RENNIE: Look, there's a big problem with Donald Trump as an ally for the U.K., which is that he has been saying things, for example, about essentially saying it's a good thing that the European Union might break up. He said some very harsh things about Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and the most powerful politician in Europe. And Theresa May does not want to find herself forced to choose between friendship with America and a good relationship with Angela Merkel because although it suits Britain to be friends with America, she definitely is in need of friends, and she's in need of showing, you know, the Europeans that America is an alternative. She could do a great free trade deal with America, you know, Europe doesn't hold all the cards.
But she's also been very, very careful to say that Britain is not rooting for the blowing up of the European Union. She needs Angela Merkel's help for the next several years as she tries to negotiate a good deal for Britain. She doesn't want to be part of a kind of radical nationalist program that some of the people around Donald Trump clearly have an appetite for, which is, you know, blow up everything international and blow up the liberal order. She's not up for that.
GREENE: Yeah. I mean, that's been much of the narrative in this country though, and Donald Trump has certainly added to that, I mean, suggesting that the Brexit vote in Britain and, you know, the vote for him here would suggest kind of a similar trend and would make this alliance really work, but you're saying that Theresa May is in a much more nuanced spot.
RENNIE: She has to be, and partly that's because of British public opinion. And I think what's really interesting - I mean, I basically got on a plane straight off to the inauguration and I went to the Women's March on Saturday, and then I got on a plane and flew here. You come here and you realize that Britain is of course, you know, very fond of America, lots of talk of Winston Churchill's special relationship.
But if you had to grow an American president in a kind of laboratory who's calculated to upset British and European public opinion, you'd create Donald Trump. I mean, the stuff he was saying this week about maybe torture works, maybe, you know, hinting at the possibility of a return to waterboarding even if actually, you know, American law might prevent that, his, you know, his disdain for climate change, his enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin, even just his personal kind of what's seen here as kind of outrageous boorishness and kind of vulgarity. It just touches every button with the British who have a kind of complicated view of America.
GREENE: OK. All right, David Rennie with The Economist magazine. Thanks so much as always, we appreciate it.
RENNIE: Thank you.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And I'm David Greene in Culver City, Calif. Fair or not, this state has been labeled by some as the hub of resistance to a Trump presidency. And California's governor, Jerry Brown, this week seemed to embrace that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JERRY BROWN: California's not turning back - not now, not ever. His truth is marching on.
(APPLAUSE)
GREENE: California does seem ready to push back against Trump's efforts to change course on immigration, the environment and other issues. Yesterday, we spoke with Eric Garcetti. He is the mayor of California's largest city, Los Angeles. And I asked him if he feels the same way as Governor Brown.
So do you share Jerry Brown's worry, anger - I guess you could say - there?
ERIC GARCETTI: Well, I think that we are, of course, concerned with the great economic progress that we've made in this state and in my city - the almost-record low crime levels, the reduction in unemployment and all of the innovation that we share with the world and export as a great American state. We also don't think of ourselves as any different than the heartland. In the past when we lost manufacturing jobs - Los Angeles is the manufacturing capital of America. And we saw car factories shut down here, too.
We have the same concerns and worries about economic success in the future. We've just chosen to take a pathway that is inclusive, that's innovative as a way forward. And we want to make sure we work with this administration to protect those values and, if necessary, defend them.
GREENE: So do you embrace this narrative of being sort of the center of the resistance? Or could it actually become problematic if you want to work with this White House?
GARCETTI: I look forward to working with the White House in areas like infrastructure, where President Trump says he wants to spend a trillion dollars. Great - we'd love to start right here in Los Angeles. He's been very supportive of our Olympic bid. But we're also going to stand up for our families not to be divided. We're going to stand up for our economy, where 61 percent of our main-street businesses are started by immigrants and making sure that we can continue to tell the practical and the human story of why it is so important for America to remember that history, to engage with it and, yes, to work with this administration on fixing what's broken, an immigration system right now that works, really, for nobody.
GREENE: So you're saying immigration is broken, in your mind. Do you feel like you have a partner in President Trump to find a solution? Do you feel like you have his ear?
GARCETTI: Well, time will tell. We spoke - we've had three good and constructive conversations since he was elected president. And I think we have, you know, to a businessman, a great economic case to make. For instance, just under the DACA program, which was - gave legal status to youth who were brought here to this country who are great students - they had, on average, a 40 percent increase in their wages.
And I told the now-president, you know, we don't want to push those people back under the table working for illegal wages, less than minimum wage. That hurts everybody. The native-born American has her or his wages go down when we don't give legal status to folks who want to and are contributing to our country.
GREENE: Los Angeles is a sanctuary city. I mean, this is a place where Donald Trump has said, if your city does not cooperate with rounding up people in the country illegally, Trump has threatened to withhold federal money. I mean, Justice Department, Homeland Security funds - couldn't this be a real problem?
GARCETTI: Well, two points - one, we've never declared ourself a sanctuary city; I'm still not sure what one is. And a study of so-called sanctuary city - counties shows lower unemployment, safer streets in areas that have welcomed immigrants, and we're certainly a welcoming city.
But second, you hurt America when you withdraw funds from Los Angeles. Take the Port of LA. Forty-three percent of all the goods that come into America come through the twin Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Withdrawing federal funds to prevent radiological or biological terrorist attack, that doesn't just hurt Los Angeles - that hurts America.
GREENE: There are many people in California who did not vote for Donald Trump. What would you tell a resident of your city who would say to you - Mayor, please don't try to work with him? We want you to be a hub of resistance. You know, fight on. Fight hard. What do you tell a resident like that?
GARCETTI: Well, I would reassure them that we absolutely will fight on and fight hard for the values every single time anything from Washington under any administration or Congress threatens those. We will never back off of that. But I also have a responsibility as a mayor to make sure we reduce traffic, that we keep our streets safe.
You know, I've worked well - long before this president with people on both sides of the aisle. But it is the responsibility, I think, of anybody in elected office to look for opportunities to help serve their people. And we have to think less about who is the most powerful person in this country and think more about who's the most vulnerable. And where I can find those opportunities with anybody, including our new president, I will do that. But I won't let anybody, even the most powerful person in this country, trample our values or our Constitution. And no matter who's in the White House, I am incredibly vigilant about that and will continue to fight that fight.
GREENE: I do love that you can talk to the mayor of a small town or the mayor of a massive city and the conversation probably won't end without either potholes or traffic coming up. I like that.
(LAUGHTER)
GARCETTI: Exactly, always.
GREENE: All right. Mayor Garcetti, always great to talk to you. Thank you so much.
GARCETTI: Wonderful to chat with you. Thank you.
GREENE: That is Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Leading Republicans met yesterday in a Philadelphia hotel. And protesters were on the streets outside defending the Affordable Care Act. Bobby Allyn of member station WHYY reports.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: Sylvia Metzler carried a sign that said, eliminating the ACA would cause 3,425 Pennsylvania residents to die prematurely every year. The figure comes from a study from the left-leaning Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center. Metzler is a retired Philadelphia nurse.
SYLVIA METZLER: And I had so many patients who didn't have any insurance. And when they got Obamacare, finally, you know, they were able to take care of things.
ALLYN: She and droves of other protesters rallied around the Republican retreat site, insisting that Trump and other leaders not repeal the Affordable Care Act.
METZLER: I already know there's too many people who are sick and dying because they don't have decent insurance. And this is just going to make it even worse, and it's criminal.
ALLYN: Some protesters championed other issues, like Kieran Gusinde-Duffy. He's an activist and Army veteran. He says Trump's critics need to call for Electoral College reforms.
KIERAN GUSINDE-DUFFY: We don't need a system that rewards people for living in the middle of nowhere and gives them more power to control the government because of that.
ALLYN: In other words, he thinks the least populous states have the most voting power.
GUSINDE-DUFFY: That's bogus.
ALLYN: There were no violent incidents with police, something that satisfied Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross.
RICHARD ROSS: I don't think there's been any clashes at all. I mean, a lot of these folks have been great in terms of exercising their constitutional right, and we don't have an issue with that.
ALLYN: Many protesters, meanwhile, vow to keep pressing their cause through demonstrations in the coming weeks.
For NPR News, I'm Bobby Allyn in Philadelphia.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRIOSENCE'S "WALTZ FOR ANDREA")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. Not in any way speaking from personal experience - but you know those moments at the casino when you're at the table, you know you should go home and instead you hit the ATM? Well, Kerry Johnson of Charleston, W.V., did not hit the ATM. He got up from the blackjack table, put a chip down to hold his spot, drove to a bank and robbed it. Took 5,000 bucks back to the casino, and he lost. As luck would have it, he is now facing up to 18 years in prison. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President Trump visits the Pentagon today and gets a briefing on the fight against ISIS. So here are some insights into what military officers are thinking. We called David Barno, who knows many of them. He hears good things about the new defense secretary, James Mattis.
DAVID BARNO: They feel good about having some retired military senior officers in prominent positions. That, at least, is a group that - they know what they think, and they know they're experienced in the rough-and-tumble world out there that the military lives in every day.
INSKEEP: As for the president himself, officers, Barno knows, are waiting to learn more. David Barno once served as the American commander in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida. As we spoke yesterday, a new president was turning attention to the Islamic State.
What the president said during the campaign about ISIS was that he wanted to bomb the stuffing out of them. He used a different word. He said at another point he was going to order his generals to come up with a plan to destroy ISIS in short order. We don't know what that entails. But let's talk through what the elements of a strategy are. What are the tools that are available to the United States in going after ISIS?
BARNO: Well, I think one of the first things that President Trump's going to realize is that we've been fighting ISIS now for several years. We've had a strategy. He may well disagree with the fundamentals of that. And if I were to shorthand what that strategy is, it's essentially, you know, by, with and through others in the region that we're trying to do this indirectly without involving 100,000 or even 150,000 American troops on the ground.
INSKEEP: Work through allies. Groups - groups inside Syria.
BARNO: Right. Absolutely. Build as many partners as we can out there. Give them as much support as we can and use...
INSKEEP: The Iraqis.
BARNO: ...American advisers. And use the - you know, the leverage of the high-end capabilities the United States has, such as our special operations forces, to do very targeted raids against, you know, critical leaders. And we can find them. And the same thing with our airpower, which is unique in the world - allows us to do precision strikes against targets all across the region. So last administration had a strategy. It was more of an indirect approach. And it was certainly a long-term approach. I think President Trump might be looking for something with some quicker results. And that could put some new options on the table.
INSKEEP: When you say long-term approach, we're thinking about, for example, in Iraq, where the army collapsed, and everyone had to recognize it was going to take another year or two or three to reorganize and get them back on the offensive, which they now are.
BARNO: Right. The last administration, the Obama administration, clearly said this is a multi-year campaign when they began it here about two-plus years ago. That's going to continue to be the case. But I do think President Trump has some other tools. He could potentially apply - he can certainly use more military force. He could elect to put American boots on the ground in larger numbers. There's been talk here just in the last few days about establishing safe zones inside of Syria.
INSKEEP: The president said in an interview with ABC wanted safe zones for refugees so they wouldn't have to leave the country.
BARNO: Right. That all entails new uses of military power. And it also entails, inevitably, a deeper commitment of Americans in that region, where they're more visible and perhaps more present on the ground. And that opens the prospect of a deeper involvement with more casualties.
INSKEEP: Does that speed up the war?
BARNO: We don't know. I mean, that's one of the unknowns. This is a group that could go to ground, could become invisible, could end up in - deeply buried in other cities in Syria that are under even the Syrian government's control. So simply by taking Raqqa, which is their sensible capital in Syria - even by taking that - doesn't assure you of an outcome that says there's no ISIS at the end of that war.
INSKEEP: Well, that's what I was wondering here, General. Listening to you, I'm wondering, what are the things you have to do to destroy ISIS?
BARNO: I think you have take apart their leadership. But I think there's been, again, a slow, deliberate campaign to do that. As you identify where these leaders are to strike them with airstrikes and perhaps special operations forces, unlike al-Qaida, ISIS is actually own territory. Taking that territory away from them and denying them all the income and all the influence they have by owning territory - that puts a big hole in their program. And they don't necessarily have a way to recover from that. But we can easily see this campaign, even with a lot of success in taking all their territory back, shift to a campaign fighting an underground ISIS in that region.
INSKEEP: How are people in the military that you know thinking about the idea of restoring the use of torture, which is something the president has not formally done but has certainly talked about doing?
BARNO: I think it's absolutely unacceptable in the minds of anyone serving in the military today that there's any prospect of going back to that. As Senator McCain has said recently, that's not the president's decision anymore.
INSKEEP: It's been outlawed by Congress.
BARNO: It's been outlawed. Last year's National Defense Authorization Act had an amendment in it that specifically prohibited the use of any interrogation techniques beyond the Army's field manual on interrogation. And the president in and of himself does not have the ability to negate that.
INSKEEP: But I was thinking about that. If the law says the Army field manual is the guide, and it prohibits torture, couldn't the president tell the secretary of defense to get in there and change the Army field manual?
BARNO: The law is specific to that particular field manual and the techniques in that field manual.
INSKEEP: So you can't change the field manual.
BARNO: It's not simply saying, change one. We can now add, you know, technique 20, which is torture. And it now complies with the law. The law, as I understand, is written in a way that would preclude any changes to those 19 approved interrogation techniques that are in the field manual now.
INSKEEP: Do the soldiers you talk to feel restrained at all because nobody can be torturing anybody?
BARNO: No. I think quite the reverse. I think there's a profound degree of unease when those techniques were being used. They do not resonate with American values. They're not the way we've behaved in previous wars. And I think the Army is very proud of the fact that the Army's field manual is now the gold standard for how we're going to treat prisoners.
INSKEEP: How do you win the war of ideas?
BARNO: That's one of the big challenges that we face since September 11, 2001. We're fighting, you know, in organizations - first al-Qaida, now the Taliban. The Iraqi insurgency for a long period of time and now ISIS - it's not built on simply armies and battle lines and tanks and airplanes but built on a corrosive set of ideas that attacks some of the primary values that the United States has. That's not something that's, you know, conducive to being wiped out by military force.
We're - and I think this is this whole idea of a long war and a protracted battle that could be, you know, a generation or two generations to really wrest control of the Middle East to find out who's going to actually own the narrative in the Middle East, where much of this ideology is coming from.
INSKEEP: The last administration regarded ISIS and groups like it as a severe problem. The new administration includes some people like the national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who have spoken of it more of an existential threat, one of the gravest threats, perhaps, facing the United States. What is the right way to view the scale of the threat and therefore the amount of resources you would commit against it?
BARNO: Well, I personally disagree with Mike Flynn on his assessment. I think most of the senior general officer corps would say that. When the chairman of Joint Chiefs, Marine four-star General Joe Dunford, testified this year, he identified Russia as the principal threat to the United States. Jim Mattis, the new secretary of defense, in his testimony before he was confirmed, made a lot of the same arguments. ISIS is a serious threat.
But I think serious actors that look at the scope of the global threats out there don't see it as an existential threat that's going to take the United States to its knees. Mike Flynn has actually come out and said that he's worried in some of his earlier writings about ISIS coming here to the United States and, you know, taking over. That is not going to happen. There's no prospect in any serious imagination that that could occur. So I think they are a serious threat. But they're certainly not an existential threat.
INSKEEP: General David Barno, thanks for coming by.
BARNO: Thanks so much, Steve.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
We're learning how hard it is to end a culture of war. In Colombia, a new peace treaty means Marxist rebels are preparing to disarm by the end of May. The group known as the FARC has been at war with the government for more than 50 years. And now 7,000 battle-hardened rebels are supposed to transform into civilians. John Otis reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF BULLDOZERS)
JOHN OTIS, BYLINE: Near the village of Conejo in northern Colombia, bulldozers flatten an area the size of three football fields. Government contractors are building a so-called demobilization zone. In the coming weeks, about 250 FARC guerrillas will gather here as they prepare to hand in their weapons to U.N. inspectors.
NIXON LEGUIZAMON: (Speaking Spanish).
OTIS: Project foreman Nixon Leguizamon says his crew will install bunkhouses, kitchens, bathrooms and a health clinic. They're also building wells.
But this site and about two dozen other demobilization zones were supposed to have been finished weeks ago. There had been delays securing rights to the land. The logistics are also tricky. Many of the zones are being built near traditional guerrilla strongholds in remote mountains and jungles. The integrity of the peace process took another hit on New Year's Eve.
At a party near Conejo, several U.N. inspectors were caught on video dancing cheek to cheek with FARC guerrillas. Critics charged that, instead of serving as neutral monitors, U.N. personnel had grown too close to the rebels. It's not the carousing that concerns Conejo cattle rancher Jose Molina. He's concerned about what lies ahead.
JOSE MOLINA: (Speaking Spanish).
OTIS: "During the war," Molina says, "the guerillas stole my cattle. They kidnapped my father and my father-in-law."
MOLINA: (Speaking Spanish).
OTIS: While pleased that the fighting has ended and that he can now return to his ranch, Molina predicts that newly demobilized guerrillas who lack education and job skills could end up forming criminal gangs. Should that happen, the Colombian armed forces are prepared, says Sergio Jaramillo, the government's peace commissioner.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SERGIO JARAMILLO: (Speaking Spanish).
OTIS: At a news conference, Jaramillo said FARC members will receive benefits like job training and health care. But he added, rebels who do not take part in the peace process will face the full force of the law. But, at least for now in Conejo, peace seems to be taking hold.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAYING VOLLEYBALL)
OTIS: At this FARC camp in the nearby foothills, rebels kill time playing volleyball. They wear civilian clothes. Hardly anyone carries a gun.
ALIRIO CORDOBA: (Speaking Spanish).
OTIS: Despite all of the delays and problems, camp commander Alirio Cordoba insists that the FARC will honor its pledge to hand over all of its weapons by June 1.
(SOUNDBITE OF SHOVELING DIRT)
OTIS: To help move things forward, some of the rebels are working alongside civilians, building the demobilization zone. Just down the road at a military checkpoint, Colombian army troops have also assumed a new role.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Speaking Spanish).
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (Speaking Spanish).
OTIS: Soldiers are now under orders to protect the guerrillas as they prepare to disarm. So says Cpl. Luis Alberto Wilches, who has fought against the FARC for 15 years.
LUIS ALBERTO WILCHES: (Speaking Spanish).
OTIS: "It's been a tremendous change for us," he says. "But we soldiers have the most at stake in bringing the war to an end. This is something that's very good."
For NPR News, I'm John Otis in Conejo, Colombia.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
As early as today, we may find out what President Trump means by extreme vetting. That's the phrase he settled on for the way he would want to screen visitors from certain countries. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith is on the line to talk about this and much more.
Hi, Tamara.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Hi.
INSKEEP: What have you learned?
KEITH: Well, a White House official tells NPR that the executive actions would impose a 120-day moratorium on any new refugees entering the United States. That would be designed to give the government time to come up with a plan that prioritizes Christian refugees who are suffering from religious persecution. It would also indefinitely block Syrian refugees from entering the U.S.
INSKEEP: So Christian refugees ultimately would get in a lot more easily than people of other faiths, Muslims particularly?
KEITH: That is the theory - that they are being persecuted overseas and that they would have priority.
INSKEEP: OK.
KEITH: There would also be a 30-day ban on immigration from seven countries, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Sudan. And President Trump was asked about that in an interview with Sean Hannity that aired last night on Fox News.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "HANNITY")
SEAN HANNITY: Let's talk a little bit about the executive orders on Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen and 120 ban that goes to the promise of extreme vetting.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Totally extreme. And beyond just those countries, we're going to have extreme vetting. We're going to have extreme vetting for people coming in to our country. And if we think there's a problem, it's not going to be so easy for people to come in anymore. You look at what's gone on.
I mean, we could just go one after the other. But then you go to other countries, and you look at Nice, and you look at different places all over Europe. And you look at what's happening with Germany. It's a mess. The crime is incredible. And we're just not going to let that happen here.
INSKEEP: OK. Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen - what's notable about that list of countries?
KEITH: Well, they're all Muslim-majority nations. And all of them are in or around the Middle East. But there's also another bunch of countries that are notably off the list, Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Now, what do they all have in common? They are U.S. allies, and they are all countries where President Trump has done business or tried to make deals. Though, you know, a country like Turkey - it's just - it's had so much trouble with terrorism recently. It's had ISIS recruits spilling over from Syria. But it's not on the list.
INSKEEP: And we're obliged to note that the president has done business in these countries because - recall - he has not fully separated himself from his business. We just don't have a lot of clarity there. We're also obliged to remember that 15 of the 19 hijackers from 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, which is not on the list.
KEITH: That's right. Another criticism that we've heard since these executive actions have been rumored is that these actions send the wrong message about American values and that it could validate the claim that ISIS has been making that America is not just at war with ISIS but with Islam itself.
INSKEEP: So, clearly, the beginning of a debate - not the end here. And we'll be watching that through the day. Let's talk about Mexico. Tam, why is President Trump not meeting the president of Mexico after all?
KEITH: Well, it seems to be a dispute about who's going to pay for the wall.
INSKEEP: OK.
KEITH: And President Enrique Pena Nieto announced yesterday that he will not be coming. President Trump then announced that the feeling is mutual.
INSKEEP: OK. So how is the president intending to get Mexico to pay for the wall, if at all?
KEITH: (Laughter) Well, there was new word yesterday. It seemed like a trial balloon that was floated up and exploded and went away very quickly - but the idea of a tax on imports from Mexico that could be as high as 20 percent. Now, that seems like an interesting idea until you realize that the tax would most likely hit American consumers. It would be on consumer goods consumed by Americans so that, ultimately, Americans would pay for the wall - not Mexicans. That idea was sort of quickly - it went up and went away. The White House has been stepping back from it.
INSKEEP: And we should mention there's also talk among House Republicans of a 20-percent, border-adjustment tax that would affect goods brought in from all countries. So we don't really have a lot of clarity about what the heck we're talking about here.
KEITH: No. And this could be related to that.
INSKEEP: We'll keep on that as best we can. One other thing to ask about, Tamara Keith - a number of top officials - career officials - at the State Department resigned. How unusual is that?
KEITH: There's always going to be a lot of turnover when a new president comes into office. But there was a sense that this happened very quickly and sort of suddenly. Some of these people were nudged out. Others are retiring. Trump doesn't even have a secretary of state yet. Rex Tillerson has not been confirmed yet. That is expected to happen soon.
The American Foreign Service Association, which is the professional association for foreign-service officers, put out a statement saying that there is turnover. It's part of the DNA of the State Department - and that they hope that Tillerson will choose people who come through the ranks of the Foreign Service.
INSKEEP: OK. Tamara, thanks very much as always. Really appreciate it.
KEITH: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: So much to catch up on there. That's NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And it kind of feels like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. President Trump says he is going to build that wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it. Mexico's president has said no way and that he is pretty insulted. NPR's Carrie Kahn is in Mexico City to talk about this.
Carrie, good morning.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Good morning.
GREENE: OK. So Enrique Pena Nieto, Mexican president, was supposed to be in Washington next week. This dispute over the wall - trip is now cancelled. Who cancelled it?
KAHN: It was Pena Nieto. But we have to back up a bit in the Twitter war between the two. I don't know how far you want me to go back.
GREENE: (Laughter) You tell me.
KAHN: I'll start with Wednesday. That's when Trump...
GREENE: (Laughter) OK, OK.
KAHN: He signed the executive order that, among other things, authorized the construction of the border wall, then, in an interview, once again insisted Mexico will pay for it. And he added, one way or another.
So here in Mexico, you have to keep in mind that Pena Nieto is under great pressure to stand up to Trump, to be more forceful. But it's just not Pena Nieto's way. He said time and time again that negotiation is better than confrontation. And he went on Twitter after Trump's executive order and once again said Mexico will not pay for it. That was for domestic consumption. But he didn't cancel the trip. He was saying he was just thinking about it. But that apparently didn't sit well with Trump.
And by Thursday morning, he tweeted, if Mexico isn't going to pay for the wall, then it doesn't make sense to come to Washington. And that really left Pena Nieto with no other option than to cancel. So he sent out a tweet to that effect. But then a few hours later, speaking to Republicans, Trump said that both leaders had decided it was best not to meet...
GREENE: (Laughter).
KAHN: ...And that he will go another way in dealing with Mexico.
GREENE: God, what a back and forth.
KAHN: And then later in the day, Trump's spokesman floated that idea of slapping a 20 percent tax on Mexican goods coming into the U.S. And they've walked back that idea a bit. But, you know, this is a radical change in the relationship between Mexico and the U.S. in a dramatically short period of time.
GREENE: Really, this is more than just a Twitter war.
KAHN: Yes.
GREENE: This goes deeper.
KAHN: In just such a short period of time, too, David - it's incredible.
GREENE: Well, what is the larger picture of that relationship? How big a deal is this?
KAHN: Well, it's really hard to overstate this turn of events. This is Mexico the U.S. is feuding with. This is one of its largest trading partners. Five hundred billion dollars of trade a year and millions of jobs in the U.S. depend on that commerce with Mexico. Let alone, it's its neighbor and its partner in security and law enforcement and immigration. I talked to one historian who was comparing this low point in the relationship to back to Calvin Coolidge days, when he was president in the '20s...
GREENE: That far.
KAHN: ...Or even back to the U.S.-Mexican War of the 1840s.
GREENE: Well, what does Pena Nieto do from here if he wants to negotiate with Trump but seems in a really difficult spot right now?
KAHN: He doesn't have a lot of options. People here are really pushing him to stand up and be more forceful. But, you know, if there's an all-out trade war that happens with the U.S., you know, Mexico is definitely at an economic disadvantage. Eighty percent of Mexico's exports head to the U.S. So it really wouldn't fare well in an all-out trade war. We'll have to see what happens.
But it's just not in his DNA to fight with his opponents. He's really into negotiation. So we'll have to - I don't see him fighting back too hard. But it may - what it's going to do is, you know, bolster his political opponents and especially the leftist populist here, Lopez Obrador. So we'll have to see what happens with the president here.
GREENE: OK. NPR's Carrie Kahn reporting from Mexico City.
Carrie, thanks.
KAHN: You're welcome.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. Kent Yoshimura decided to enjoy his birthday. He traveled from restaurant to restaurant asking for free birthday meals and took video as he received a free breakfast at Denny's. He got a free burger and fries from Red Robin and again from Johnny Rockets then added some wings from Hooters. He got a free latte from Starbucks, a free donut from Krispy Kreme. But not everybody came through. Jack in the Box declined his request for a complimentary cup of water. It's MORNING EDITION.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
For people who are homeless, getting a home can be just a first step towards stability. Over the summer, Anna Scott of member station KCRW profiled a woman on Skid Row nearby here in Los Angeles. Anna picks up that woman's story now.
ANNA SCOTT, BYLINE: Less than a year ago, Dawn Ghan slept in a crowded dorm at a homeless shelter in downtown LA right in the heart of Skid Row.
DAWN GHAN: You've got to train your mind to ignore all the sounds at night 'cause it's just crazy.
SCOTT: Now she has an entire apartment to herself. It's nothing fancy, just a boxy two-bedroom in Covina, a suburb 20 miles east of downtown LA. And technically Dawn only has half the apartment, she could get a roommate any time, but for now it gives her privacy.
GHAN: It felt so good to lay in a bed that was mine that I can call my bed and just lay down. It was so - I cried.
SCOTT: Dawn got this apartment through what's called a rapid rehousing program. Under its terms, when she first moved in her rent was around $200. It goes up a bit each month, and within a year it'll reach the full rate of about $900, but Dawn is already falling behind.
GHAN: It's been real tough. I'm a little minus in my account right now.
SCOTT: Are you worried about becoming homeless again?
GHAN: Very worried. Very, very worried.
SCOTT: Don's been on and off the streets since she was a teenager, decades at this point, mostly because of drug addiction. She's clean now, but she's had trouble finding a decent paying job. She dropped out of high school, has almost no work experience and a criminal record.
SAM TSEMBERIS: Rapid rehousing is for people that need housing only, and I think for some people housing only is not enough, you need supports.
SCOTT: Sam Tsemberis is president of Pathways Housing First, an organization that works around the country to house the chronically homeless. Rapid rehousing is a strategy that's proliferated in recent years, fueled by federal funding. The problem, Tsemberis says, is that at the same time there aren't enough resources for people who need long term or even permanent assistance, the ones who simply can't bootstrap it.
TSEMBERIS: The chronically homeless are people that need a lot of support and ongoing support. I think that there's a discomfort in the idea that people will need help for a long time.
SCOTT: A discomfort because it contradicts the idea that with enough hard work, anyone can succeed.
TSEMBERIS: Emphasis on self-sufficiency is one of the core tenants of the American way, a core belief that you should just by becoming a good person get it together. But homelessness is about poverty, it's about cash, not character.
SCOTT: In the case of Dawn Ghan, it's also about a history of instability and addiction and a lack of education, problems that two rooms in Covina can't fix.
GHAN: Will I be able to be a normal productive citizen? That's my goal. I hope that this works out so I can.
SCOTT: But you don't know yet.
GHAN: Right. It's definitely not something that I can say will never happen again because I could be right back on the street with nowhere to go.
SCOTT: Dawn lives on a very narrow ledge, always on the brink of homelessness. She's an example of why many housing advocates say the country needs to build a wider ledge.
For NPR News, I'm Anna Scott in Los Angeles.
(SOUNDBITE OF ODDISEE'S "STOCKHOLM")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Today was supposed to be the day that a fee reduction was going to go into effect at the Federal Housing Administration. It would have lowered the cost of FHA loans to homeowners. That's not going to happen, at least for now, because in his very first hours in office, President Trump issued an order suspending that fee cut which had many people asking, what's up with that? NPR's Chris Arnold reports.
CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: The Obama administration had authorized the fee reduction for FHA loans. Geoff McIntosh is the president of the California Association of Realtors. He is not happy that President Trump moved to suspend it.
GEOFF MCINTOSH: We were disappointed. It would have made a difference to California homebuyers of about $860 a year.
ARNOLD: So why would the new administration want to keep that money out of Americans' pockets? Well, conservatives had warned that cutting the fees for FHA borrowers, that might leave taxpayers on the hook in another housing crash. Ed Pinto is a director with the American Enterprise Institute's Center on Housing Risk.
ED PINTO: FHA insures over $1 trillion in outstanding mortgage loans.
ARNOLD: So, OK, here's how all this works. The FHA allows Americans to buy homes with as little as a 3 percent down payment. Private lenders actually make the loans and the FHA guarantees them. And the homebuyers, as part of this deal, agree to pay fees into a reserve fund that covers losses on loans that go bad. Those fees went up during the foreclosure crisis, and the Obama administration had been lowering them back down as things got back to normal. The money in that emergency fund, by the way, is also back above its legally required level, but Pinto says...
PINTO: There's been a lot of concern that the level of that fund is insufficient to really cover FHA in the event there were another serious event in terms of foreclosures.
ARNOLD: The FHA did require a bailout after the housing crash, but for the sake of comparison it was less than 1 percent of the money that the government had to use to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which also guarantee home loans. So other experts say that concerns like Pinto's are overblown. Chris Mayer is a housing economist at Columbia University. He says for a long time, some conservatives have been warning that the FHA is a trillion dollar time bomb that we should be really worried about.
CHRIS MAYER: We just went through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the FHA didn't take down taxpayers or the federal government in any way shape or form. You know, at some point you can't keep saying this thing's going to blow up, this thing's going to blow up.
ARNOLD: As far as the Trump administration blocking this fee cut, the optics don't seem terribly good. That is just after his inaugural address where President Trump said he wanted to help working class Americans, one of his first executive orders blocks working class homebuyers all across the country from saving money on their mortgages. Geoff McIntosh with the realtors group says...
MCINTOSH: Yes, I did find it somewhat ironic, but I can also appreciate that they wanted to make sure that it was a sound fiscal decision before they executed it.
ARNOLD: McIntosh says though he's cautiously optimistic that after the Trump administration reviews all the facts and figures that it will allow the fee cut to go through to help make homeownership a bit more affordable for Americans with FHA loans. Chris Arnold, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF WHALE FALL'S "ONSEN")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Our friends at NPR Music check in with radio DJs for their latest favorite songs - that is besides B.J. Leiderman, who writes our theme music. Here's a sample of what they have in heavy rotation.
AMY MILLER: My name is Amy Miller. I'm the program director at KXT in Dallas, Texas. And a song we have in heavy rotation right now is "Shakedown" by Valerie June.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHAKEDOWN")
VALERIE JUNE: (Singing) Somebody, somebody - not any old body, not any old body.
MILLER: And this is the type of song that just makes you want to stomp your feet, clap your hands. I mean this song I love 'cause it sounds like The Big Party Band.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHAKEDOWN")
JUNE: (Singing) Shakedown, breakdown, showdown. That move...
MILLER: She's from a small town in Tennessee, so you hear, you know, the roots influence. You here some backing vocals come in - in and out of the track. And those are actually provided by her family members, as well as Norah Jones, who - I hear Norah's actually going to be making a few appearances on her new album.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHAKEDOWN")
NATE CHINEN: I'm Nate Chinen, director of editorial content at WBGO in Newark. And the track that I brought in is by a British duo called Yussef Kamaal. The track is called "Strings Of Light."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRINGS OF LIGHT")
CHINEN: There's a drummer named Yussef Dayes and a keyboardist named Kamaal Williams. And they have been working together in a very sort of - like, a loose improvisatory fashion, playing these sessions at the Boiler Room in London. This album came out of those sessions. It was, you know, a lot of groove-oriented ideas drawing from vintage jazz fusion and also from London club music.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRINGS OF LIGHT")
CHINEN: There's a great trumpet solo by an expatriate Cuban trumpet player named Yelfris Valdes. He's been living in London for a couple of years now. And I wasn't actually aware of him until I heard him on this album, and he's clearly someone to pay attention to.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRINGS OF LIGHT")
CHINEN: The '70s is definitely a reference point in this music, but I don't think that you would hear this and think that it was any kind of a throwback. You know, they're doing something that feels very grounded in this scene. I think this is a particularly sort of contemporary London-sounding group. And it's always valuable to me to hear a dispatch from the contemporary London jazz scene, which has a lot in common with what we're doing here, but, you know, also has its own vibe and its own sort of temperature.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRINGS OF LIGHT")
ANNE LITT: Hi, my name is Anne Litt, and I'm a deejay at NPR affiliate KCRW in Los Angeles, Calif. And the name of the song I chose is from an artist called Gabriel Garzon-Montano. It's called "The Game."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE GAME")
GABRIEL GARZON-MONTANO: (Singing) Do you worry about everything, afraid you ain't got the tight game?
LITT: That's just for starters, the song has a great vibe. It's sexy. It's cozy. There's a great line in here, and you can't say it without smiling. He says - have a heart like a tangerine. That makes me smile.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE GAME")
GARZON-MONTANO: (Singing) Have a heart like a tangerine. Have a heart like a tangerine. Find love in a special way.
LITT: He's an interesting guy. His mother is French. His father is Colombian. They were both immigrants to the United States, but he was born in Brooklyn and has been raised in Brooklyn. His mom was actually part of Philip Glass' ensemble in the '90s. And from her, he learned all about classical music and that attention to detail. And then he sort of combined that with his heritage and, you know, his love of '70s soul and funk. You can totally hear it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE GAME")
GARZON-MONTANO: (Singing) Find love in a special way.
LITT: One of the things I love about this song is that there's an optimism to it. It's sort of, to my ear, a life-is-beautiful-approach to looking at the world.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE GAME")
GARZON-MONTANO: (Singing) You don't have to lose the game. Have a heart like a tangerine.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Patricia Bosworth, who's authored acclaimed biographies of Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and the great photographer Diane Arbus, has now written about a chapter in her own remarkable life that is also at times sad, harrowing and not for children. "The Men In My Life: A Memoir Of Love And Art In 1950s Manhattan" recounts her time in Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, learning and working alongside Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Penn, Elaine Stritch, Tennessee Williams and starring alongside Audrey Hepburn in "The Nun's Story" before making the turn in her life to literature.
Patricia Bosworth joins us now from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
PATRICIA BOSWORTH: Oh, I'm very glad to be here.
SIMON: I guess we have to begin with - you have such a distinguished, and yet in many ways tragic, family background, don't you?
BOSWORTH: Yes, I guess you could say that.
SIMON: Your father, Bartley Crum, a great lawyer who defended many targets of the House Un-American Activities Committee then became a target himself, didn't he?
BOSWORTH: Yes, he was blacklisted after he handled the Hollywood Ten. He lost all of his corporate clients, and it was very difficult for him.
SIMON: And he met a sad end, a sad tailspin, didn't he?
BOSWORTH: Well, he committed suicide. That's part of what my book is about. He's one of the men in my life, you see, one of the most important men. And my other was, course, my brother, Bart Jr., who also killed himself. So I had a double whammy there, and it was very difficult. But that's what part of the book is about, me being a suicide survivor and surviving and going on.
And this particular 10-year period which I write about is absolutely incredible in terms of all the things that I was - I managed to do like, you know, getting married and divorced, finishing college, becoming an actress. All this happened in this 10-year period. And I just - I wanted to write about that.
SIMON: Yeah. I wish I could think of a clever way to ask this, but here goes. What was it like to ride on the back of Steve McQueen's motorcycle?
BOSWORTH: (Laughter) It was incredible. It was very sexy. We were at the Actors Studio together, and he was a new member. And he was just gorgeous and not at all interested in me. And I boldly kept staring at him in class until he just said, you want me to take you out, don't you? And so I said, yes. So we - I hopped on his motorcycle and we went off to Central Park. And we actually had a wonderful afternoon. He talked a lot about his life and...
SIMON: He was a real gentleman, too, wasn't he?
BOSWORTH: He was a real gentleman. And at the very end he said, look, I can't take you out because I'm in love with somebody else and I don't want to, you know, fool around with anybody right now, and I hope you understand. And I just thought it was so great. But I did have that one afternoon with him on the motorcycle (laughter).
SIMON: (Laughter) Yeah. There's this trio of handsome Italian-American actors - Harry Guardino, Tony Franciosa and Ben Gazzara. And they - by today's standards, they would greet you in the most appalling way, wouldn't they?
BOSWORTH: Well, you know, the Actors Studio was an amazing place. It was just - as Kazan called it, Elia Kazan who founded the studio, he called it a zoo. It was open 24 hours a day. Projects were always going on. And there was a very kind of sexy atmosphere about the place. There were lots of affairs going on and also a lot of arguments. But it was also very male chauvinist piggish in those days.
These guys, all of them, they really thought they were terrific and that women should be sort of kept in their place, and also we should go out with them whenever they wanted us to go out with them. I would come in and I'd be grabbed and I'd have to fight my way out of their embraces. This is the way things were there. But it was also sort of fun.
SIMON: I have to ask you about a sad period you recount toward the end of your book. You were cast in "The Nun's Story" alongside Audrey Hepburn. And on the same day you got that good news, you got some other news.
BOSWORTH: Yes, I found out I was pregnant.
SIMON: And there's no role for a pregnant nun in that film.
BOSWORTH: No, no, not - certainly not in those days, not in the 1950s.
SIMON: And it - well, you didn't want to be a mother then anyway.
BOSWORTH: No, I realized I didn't want to have a child at that point. I knew that having an abortion would be a difficult experience. I didn't realize how difficult, both physiologically and psychologically. And I did go through with it. But as you know, I mean, I could tell the story if you want and what happened to me.
SIMON: Yeah, please, yeah.
BOSWORTH: Well, when I - what happened was I did have the abortion. And the doctor had given me some pills because I was about to go to Rome on a plane. And we stopped off in Paris, and I had these pills I was supposed to take in case I might hemorrhage on the plane because of the altitude. And I left the pills in the ladies room. Don't ask me why.
And so we're flying on to Rome, and I suddenly started to hemorrhage. I didn't know what to do. Got a pad - you know, one of those sanitary pads from the stewardess and managed to stem the blood, etc. Got to Rome. I met Fred Zinnemann, the director, and it was all very exciting. And meanwhile I am feeling very, very sick. I don't feel well. I know that I'm still bleeding.
And the next morning, Fred Zinnemann had agreed that we should go and meet with nuns and stay in convents. And I was, for some reason, sent to a hospital convent, and I was supposed to talk to this nun about what it's like to be a nun. So I got there, and luckily she spoke English. And the minute she saw me she said, oh, Ms. Bosworth, you're - you don't look well at all. And I said, oh, I'm fine. I'm fine. She said, no, I really don't think you are well. I think you should go back to the hotel and rest. So she said, but you know what? If you continue to feel badly, here's my phone number and you can phone me.
So I got back to the hotel, and I was just bleeding so badly all over the rug. It was just horrific. And I called her and I told her I had had an abortion and I thought I was dying, and she rushed me back to the hospital. And I got to the operating room and the doctor sewed me up. And he was very angry at me. He said, I've - you know, I've been working with actresses for too many years, sewing them up, and you're a fool and why didn't you take precautions and, you know, really chewed me out.
So I went back to my hospital room, and I never told Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers didn't know. The hospital didn't tell them. The nuns didn't - the nurses didn't tell them what had happened. They said I had a stomach ailment. The picture was delayed. So everything was fine, and I recovered and went on with the movie. But, of course, that - it was a traumatic, traumatic experience, and I had really almost lost my life. And so that's the story, really.
SIMON: Sister Rose, not judgmental?
BOSWORTH: Not at all.
SIMON: Didn't shake a finger at you about Vatican teachings and - yeah.
BOSWORTH: Not at all. No, no. She said to me - I said to her, Sister, I could have died. And she said, well, you didn't die because God has plans for you. You're going to stay around a little longer. She never made a judgment.
SIMON: Looking back on it now, what do you find yourself most grateful for about this period in your life in the '50s?
BOSWORTH: I'm grateful for all the amazing experiences that I've had with all these people. And I think I've been very, very lucky. I think luck has a lot to do with - in anybody's life, and I think I've been incredibly lucky.
SIMON: Patricia Bosworth, her book, "The Men In My Life: A Memoir Of Love And Art In 1950s Manhattan." Thanks so much for being with us.
BOSWORTH: Oh, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
John Egerton, the Southern historian, once said for as long as there's been a South, food has been central to its image. These days, a rising star of the Deep South food scene is a man born and raised in India. It's part of our series on people who found the American dream through food. NPR's Maria Godoy has this story of the changing South and a chef named Vish.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARIA GODOY, BYLINE: Oxford, Miss. - it's a town steeped in Southern identity.
JOHN T EDGE: In many ways, this is an archetypal Southern town.
GODOY: John T. Edge is with the Southern Foodways Alliance, which is based here in town.
EDGE: Courthouse square at the center, there are beautiful homes with rolling lawns framing it. You know, there's a university adjacent.
GODOY: That university is Ole Miss, a place once rocked by deadly riots over racial integration. To some, Oxford might seem an unlikely place for an Indian chef to achieve star status.
VISHWESH BHATT: We need the chili sauce.
GODOY: But Vishwesh Bhatt, or Vish, as everyone calls him, isn't exactly cooking Indian food. He's the chef at Snackbar, an upscale restaurant that serves Southern and French food with a twist. He uses traditional Southern ingredients, like catfish, grits or mac and cheese, but Vish prepares them using the flavors and techniques of his native India. Think garam masala home fries, daal hushpuppies and his signature dish, okra chaat.
Vish throws thin slices of okra into a deep-fry basket for about a minute. Then he tosses them with a bunch of flavors and textures.
BHATT: So you've got tomatoes, cilantro, chiles, chopped peanuts, lime juice, salt, pepper and chaat masala.
GODOY: Chaat masala is a zesty spice mix used in Indian street food. The result is savory, crunchy, tangy. It's Southern and it's Indian.
Oh, my God. That's so good.
For Vish, food has been a bridge between the two Souths he's called home, the American South and the Global South. Vish was born and raised in Gujarat, India. When he was 17, his family moved to France briefly before coming to America.
BHATT: First place we showed up in the U.S. actually was Texas.
GODOY: He was 9,000 miles from home. Everything was different, but then he went to the supermarket.
BHATT: And there were beans and tortillas, and I was like, wait, I know what all those things are. I didn't know a tortilla was a tortilla. To me, it was a flatbread. And I was like, I recognize this.
GODOY: Chiles, cumin, cilantro - Tex-Mex cooking shares many of the same ingredients as the Indian food he grew up with.
BHATT: I loved it. You know, that was where I made the first connection between how similar things were between India and the U.S.
GODOY: Food became a way for Vish to make himself at home in his new country. When he went to college, he studied political science, but he also learned to cook.
BHATT: My mom had sent me with, like, a thing of spices, a tin of spices, and, you know, mustard seeds, turmeric, some garam masala.
GODOY: As he experimented in the kitchen, Vish drew on childhood memories of helping his mom prepare large family feasts back in India. Soon he was hosting his own dinner parties for friends. But it took Vish more than a decade to realize cooking was his true calling.
In the meantime, he moved on to graduate school at Ole Miss in Oxford, and that's where he met John Currence, a celebrated Southern chef who eventually became Vish's mentor and boss. John remembers Vish as always hanging out at his restaurant.
JOHN CURRENCE: He was curious, and he just really liked to eat.
GODOY: John says Vish had a natural talent. He cooks in a way that's intensely personal.
CURRENCE: You know, Vish is so beautifully influenced by, you know, the food of his family and particularly his mother.
GODOY: But Vish wanted to explore other cuisines, too, so he ended up going to culinary school. After that, he cooked French food and Southern food and Caribbean food, even a little English food. For years, the one thing Vish didn't want to cook professionally was Indian food. John says Vish didn't want to be pigeonholed.
CURRENCE: And Vish's sort of stock reply was, but I don't ever want to be the cliche Indian guy in a small Southern town in a little bitty Indian restaurant.
GODOY: Still, when John and Vish opened Snackbar in 2009, those Indian influences finally started creeping into Vish's menus. John remembers one particular dish, a Keralan fish curry served with a southern staple - collard greens.
CURRENCE: I mean, I was literally moved to tears. Here I was, experiencing that moment where, you know, an individual becomes a chef.
(CROSSTALK)
GODOY: Oxford loved Vish's cooking. So did the food world. Now, at age 51, Vish Bhatt is a three-time finalist for the best chef of the South from the James Beard Awards. Basically, it's the Oscars of the food world. For Vish, the recognition is still surprising.
BHATT: It's insane. I mean, it's - I still have trouble believing it.
GODOY: And Snackbar has become a favorite hangout for the Oxford community, a sort of clubhouse for locals like Julia Jimenez.
JULIA JIMENEZ: I come for happy hour maybe once every other week, more if I can talk my husband into it.
(LAUGHTER)
GODOY: John T. Edge of the Southern Foodways Alliance says Vish's food tells a larger story about the South.
EDGE: Just the hint of okra and the knowledge that okra is beloved in West Africa, beloved in India and beloved in the American South, those connections, in a way, spin out a story of Southern culture. It both confirms what you think about the South and subverts it at the same time. That's what's great about his food.
GODOY: It's food rooted in the Southern past while also pointing to where the South is going, as a strong economy attracts immigrants from all over.
EDGE: We live in a place that is changing rapidly and, I think, for the better. The South is not losing anything in those changes. It's gaining much. It's gaining okra chaat.
GODOY: And that's a taste of the American melting pot and an American dream. Maria Godoy, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: Okra chaat sounds great. You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
People see a lot of Rufus Sewell these days. He's starring in the play "Art" at the Old Vic in London. On PBS, he plays Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's first prime minister - and perhaps prime minister indeed, if you catch my drift. And Rufus Sewell is receiving raves for his role as John Smith, the Nazi leader of America in Amazon's alternative universe in "The Man In The High Castle."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) John, I don't know what it is you think I've done.
RUFUS SEWELL: (As Obergruppenfuhrer John Smith) What I know you've done is withhold information from me, despite the fact that I welcomed you into the Reich, into my home, into the life of my family.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) I would never do anything to harm your family.
SEWELL: (As Obergruppenfuhrer John Smith) If you keep secrets from me, you place my family in danger.
SIMON: The series is increasingly loosely based on Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel in which the Nazis win, America is occupied and many Americans seem happily so. Rufus Sewell joins us from the Old Vic in London. Thanks so much for being with us.
SEWELL: My pleasure.
SIMON: I understand, Mr. Sewell, that when some people see you now, meaning only to tell you that they love your work, they give you a sign.
SEWELL: Well, it's only happened the once actually. Yeah, someone tried to Sieg Heil me through a coffee shop window relatively recently, which came as something of a shock. And strangely enough, when I turned away - because I was holding my 3-year-old girl at the time - he thought the problem was I hadn't - he hadn't Sieg Heiled with sufficient clarity. So he came out to tap me on the shoulder and do it again. And this was not, you know, the usual suspects, kind of alt-right-looking fellow. He was a kind of beardy Hollywood hipster who happened to be a fan of the show. It didn't occur to him that it might be a slightly inappropriate thing to do.
SIMON: How do you - how do you put life into such a loathsome character?
SEWELL: Well, I don't know. I mean, for a start, I would object to even what you just said. I mean, there are certain things that are loathsome, I would say. The Nazi ideology is loathsome, but people essentially are not. I think he's a kind of mixture. And what drew me to him - I would describe him as a person with an alternate history inside him. You know, a person who's turned out one way who had history on a different way would seemingly be a different person entirely, someone with good and bad in him like everyone to greater or lesser extent, someone to who the worst parts of him have been eked out because of a morally corrupt system that he's having to exist in.
And I think the way you do it, or the way I've tried to do it, is try to get as familiar as I can with what happens to people and how they create a narrative for themselves in which they're the good guy, which is what people tend to be. So I read as much as I could about how Nazism took hold of ostensibly normal people in Germany. I mean, certainly particular historic circumstances that made it possible, but the idea that all of the most evil people in the world existed in a particular period in a particular country only might be a very comforting to us as humans. But it's dangerously misleading to think that because the potential is there for us to accept any kind of monstrosity. It can be turned into normality if we can be sufficiently distracted with our own nonsense. I mean, we see evidence of that all the time.
SIMON: To clue some of our audience in who perhaps haven't seen it and not to give away too much at the same time, this year John Smith faces a personal crisis. He truly loves his family. Then he gets terrible news from the family doctor that his son has muscular dystrophy. Here's that clip.
SEWELL: That's right.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE")
KEVIN MCNULTY: (As Doctor Adler) I sat on this not just because of who you are but because Helen and Alice are friends.
SEWELL: (As Obergruppenfuhrer John Smith) I appreciate that.
MCNULTY: (As Doctor Adler) I understand. It's hard, the hardest thing a father could ever do. My heart aches for you. It really does. But the boy is defective.
SIMON: And how do they see defects in the Reich?
SEWELL: Well, there's a hideous phrase that was actually used at the time, which comes up in the series, which is used to describe someone who is taking up valuable resources to no great end because they are - they have a limited lifespan. And they're called useless eaters. And it's one of the most chilling phrases, but it's part of their language. And he discovers that effectively his son is what the Nazis would describe as a useless eater. It comes from his family because his - it turns out he has a brother who died who suffered from the same thing. So the terrible irony of it is that someone who was originally an American soldier who - when it turned into a civil war between the people who wanted to capitulate to the Nazis and the people who wanted to keep on fighting, he picked the right side because he wanted to protect his family.
SIMON: Yeah.
SEWELL: And that machine that he's hitched his wagon to now wants to devour one of his own sons. I was aware of this potential story point when I accepted the job, and it was that - it's that conflict, and it chimes in with what I call the alternate history that he keeps a dialogue with inside him. That's, for me, the attraction of the part, and it's the horror of it.
SIMON: I have read in interviews, Mr. Sewell, that - I have read that you say you were a difficult teenager and...
SEWELL: No, it's not really...
SIMON: Yeah.
SEWELL: I would - I'd say that actually - this is why I try to actually avoid doing printed interviews these days, especially in England, because normally the things that I've said would be a reaction against some preposterous question. But of course they didn't print the preposterous question, so it seems like I've waltzed into the room and made all these outlandish statements. I think when I first said that, it's because of a - I think I was talking to someone who had an assumption about the kind of teenager I was, and that's because I was playing relatively upstanding romantic leads in period dramas. So I felt the need somehow to push against a stereotype I was being placed into. So my childhood, my teenage childhood, was a perfectly normal tearaway '80s British childhood that involved alcohol and smoking and shoplifting and all the natural, healthy things the people I knew did (laughter). And I'm not entirely ashamed of it. You know, I came out the other end.
SIMON: Yeah. How - what led you to the theater, do you think?
SEWELL: I failed all my auditions for films for a very long time. I say that half jokingly, but I do have a resistance to people assuming, as they like to with British actors, that theater is my first love. I've had that statement made on my behalf by strangers many, many times. People will say, well, of course, theater is your first love, and something in me wants to rebel against that. Well, actually, no, it was - it was watching Anthony Hopkins on TV when I was young that made me want to be an actor. And then I discovered a love for theater through doing it at college and stuff.
But it was always really - it was films I wanted to do, and I've kind of changed my mind because I ended up doing a lot of theater because those are the jobs that I got when I left drama school and developing a real love for it. And also, to be perfectly honest still, not so much with television, but I prefer theater now to film certainly because I get much better roles. If I got the kind of roles in films that I got in theater, then it might - there might be a bit more competition, but at the moment, there's none.
SIMON: Do you ever want to play in a mindless comedy?
SEWELL: Oh, absolutely. You know, when I was at drama school, my fear was that I would be trapped in the only thing that I was really comfortable in, which was comedy. I mean, I'm doing comedy now. I wouldn't say it's mindless.
SIMON: Oh, "Art" - yeah, "Art's" a very smart show, yeah.
SEWELL: Yeah, but it's very funny. Yes, I would say, for me, if I had one thing I was good at, it would be comedy. I mean, beware of what actors say they like doing, obviously. I mean, it's not always a pleasure to watch people in their dream roles, but for me, it's the one thing that I like doing the most and I'm probably the best at. And the successes I've had in England at least have normally been more comedic. So yes, actually, it's my bag completely. I just don't get to do it very often, possibly because of my bone structure and my, you know, hair coloring and previous casting I guess.
SIMON: Well, I got to tell you, before the interview began, we had a bunch of producers staring at your picture saying, brooding.
SEWELL: (Laughter) Yeah. Well, I don't know. That's more to do about self-consciousness, self-consciousness about your smile in the early years that kind of sets into habit and the influence of kind of '80s album covers. I would call it my kind of mid-'80s Depeche Mode face, which just happens on instinct (laughter). But in reality, I'm possibly one of the least brooding people you will meet. You can see people's disappointment sometimes that I don't come out the stage door brooding and silent. I'm a bit of a chatterer if anything.
SIMON: (Laughter).
SEWELL: As this interview will attest.
SIMON: Rufus Sewell, who seems to be starring in just about everything these days - "Art" in London, "Victoria" on PBS and Amazon's "The Man In The High Castle." Well, a delight, Mr. Sewell, thanks so much.
SEWELL: (Laughter) Lovely to speak to you, too.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Congressional Republicans are trying to figure out when to repeal and how to replace the Affordable Care Act. Whatever happens, there's a lot at stake for older Americans. NPR's Ina Jaffe covers aging. She joins us for our regular conversation we call 1 in 5, which refers to the 1 in 5 Americans who, by the year 2030, will be 65 years of age or older. Ina, thanks so much for being back with us.
INA JAFFE, BYLINE: It's good to be back with you, Scott.
SIMON: Now, don't Americans over 65 have Medicare?
JAFFE: Well, they do. But what people don't always realize about the Affordable Care Act is it's not just a discrete program in and of itself. It changed other government programs, too, and that includes Medicare.
SIMON: What was the biggest change for Medicare?
JAFFE: Well, the one that's gotten the most attention is the change to prescription drug coverage. You may have heard about something called the doughnut hole. That's where Medicare would get you a discount on prescriptions but only up to a point. After that, you had to pay full price for drugs until you shelled out around 1,300 bucks. Then Medicaid would help you out again.
Now, some people never really reached that point because when they had to pay full price, they just started skipping some of their prescription meds. So the Affordable Care Act has been phasing out this gap. It saved people on Medicare more than $23 billion. But this program could go away with the repeal of the law.
SIMON: That could go away, and we should say, once again, that we don't know yet what any replacement will look like. What have you heard among the ideas being proposed that might affect older Americans?
JAFFE: Well, a few members of Congress, Republicans, have circulated their own proposals for replacing the Affordable Care Act. And one thing that comes up in some of them, including in House Speaker Paul Ryan's plan, is a major change to Medicaid. Now, that's known as the program that provides health care for the poor. But it's also the program that pays for long-term care for a lot of older people. In fact, Medicaid pays the bills for most nursing home residents.
SIMON: That could be jeopardized?
JAFFE: Well, certainly the people putting forth these plans don't think it would be. What they want to do is change Medicaid from a guaranteed benefit to a block grant to states. So a state would get a fixed amount of money from the federal government and decide for itself how to spend it. The idea is that states know their needs better than the feds, and this would give them flexibility.
What critics of this idea worry about is, what happens in an economic downturn when demand on Medicaid goes up? They say states could be left with a sort of Sophie's choice. Do you cut back on services for poor children or for the frail elderly?
SIMON: I know we've talked about Medicare and Medicaid. Are there proposed changes that would affect older Americans who might buy their own health care coverage?
JAFFE: Yeah. In fact, there's a little-known feature of the law that helps people in their 50s and early 60s, people who aren't yet eligible for Medicare. Insurance companies used to be able to charge them many times more than they charge a younger person for the same policy. The Affordable Care Act put a limit on that.
Now insurance companies can only charge them three times as much. But the various replacement proposals that are out there either set the limits higher at five or six times more or they don't have any limit. And researchers say that could result in around 400,000 older adults being unable to afford to buy health insurance anymore.
SIMON: NPR's Ina Jaffe, thanks so much.
JAFFE: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF JULIAN LAGE AND CHRIS ELDRIDGE'S "BUTTER AND EGGS")
SIMON: This is NPR News.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
President Trump has phone calls scheduled today with several world leaders, including Vladimir Putin. In just the last 24 hours, Trump has suspended all refugees from entering the United States and suspended immigration for the next three months from seven countries that have Muslim-majority populations. He's talked about negotiating a new trade agreement with the United Kingdom and blowing up an old trade deal with Mexico, all in one week. NPR's Scott Horsley joins us. Scott, thanks for being with us.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: The president signed a couple of papers at the Pentagon last night, including this executive order that puts into practice his campaign promise of extreme vetting. What does that propose to do?
HORSLEY: Well, remember, Scott, Trump's original call on the campaign trail was for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States, and that morphed over time into extreme vetting. The order the president signed at the Pentagon is somewhere in between. He described this as a way to keep would-be terrorists from getting into the country.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We want to ensure that we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas. We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love deeply our people.
HORSLEY: This order bars entry of all refugees for 120 days. It bars entry of Syrian refugees indefinitely. It cuts by more than half the total number of refugees the United States is expected to take in this year and gives priority to Christians from the Middle East. And it closes the door for 90 days to all visitors from seven countries with largely Muslim populations - Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Sudan.
SIMON: It's getting quite a reaction. What's the range of reaction, as you've been able to tell?
HORSLEY: Congressional Republicans applauded the move. The GOP chairman of the House Judiciary Committee called it a sensible pause on the entry of refugees. But the order was roundly criticized by human rights groups and Democrats on Capitol Hill. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley said it's contrary to our founding values and a smokescreen for religious discrimination. Others said it would make the country less safe, not more.
A number of critics noted this order was signed on Holocaust Remembrance Day, when the White House itself honored the victims of Nazi Germany. It bears noting, Scott, some of those Jewish victims sought refuge in the United States and were turned away, a chapter in our history that we now view with considerable shame.
SIMON: Trump held his first face-to-face meeting with a foreign leader yesterday, Prime Minister May of the United Kingdom. Always talk about the special relationship between our two countries. Now, there are some similarities in their political rise, but a lot of differences, too, aren't there?
HORSLEY: Yeah, the similarities are sort of superficial. You know, both countries are asserting their sovereignty - the U.S. after the November election, the U.K. after Brexit. They're both pulling back a bit from international cooperation. But while Trump was the architect of his America First campaign, Theresa May was sort of the reluctant inheritor of the Brexit vote, and she's trying to make it work.
But she's far more committed to the preservation of the European Union and cooperative groups like NATO than Trump appears to be. May is also more suspicious of Russia and insisted yesterday that sanctions against Russia over its meddling in Ukraine should be preserved. Trump, however, said it's too early to say what should happen to those sanctions.
SIMON: President Trump also spoke by telephone yesterday with the president of Mexico. They've kind of been barking at each other earlier in the week over Twitter. Phone call make a difference?
HORSLEY: At least they sort of papered over their differences for the moment and maybe turned down the temperature on what, you're right, was threatening to become an all-out Twitter war. Both sides said yesterday the call was constructive. But, you know, Donald Trump and Enrique Pena Nieto are still on opposite sides when it comes to that wall. They scrapped a planned meeting here in Washington next week. So this is a low point in relations with our next-door neighbor. And remember, Mexico is one of the United States' biggest trading partners, even if Trump insists the U.S. is getting played.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: We have a trade deficit of $60 billion with Mexico. On top of that, the border is soft and weak, drugs are pouring in, and I'm not going to let that happen.
HORSLEY: The administration did admit this week it's looking for other ways to pay for the border wall, including a possible tax on imports that would hit U.S. consumers, never mind the president's promise that Mexico would foot the bill.
SIMON: NPR's Scott Horsley. Thanks so much.
HORSLEY: You're welcome.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The president's executive order on refugee resettlement leaves many refugees already in the U.S. in a state of limbo. NPR's Joel Rose has this story.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: It's been just over a month since Mohammed Shagleel (ph) arrived in the U.S.. Shagleel is a Syrian refugee. His family left its home in Damascus more than four years ago and fled to Jordan.
MOHAMMED SHAGLEEL: My mother now in Amman, Jordan. She lived with me with my brother's family there.
ROSE: Today, Shagleel is in New Haven, Conn. He was expecting his mother to join him there once the security vetting process was finished, but that now seems unlikely. Shagleel doesn't know exactly what President Trump's executive action means for his family, but he does know this.
SHAGLEEL: It's bad. It's very bad. I don't know what is coming in the next days. Is it just the beginning now this laws - this new laws is just beginning. I don't know.
ROSE: The president's action blocks all refugee resettlement from Syria - at least for now - and it includes a 120-day moratorium on all refugees entering the U.S. Resettlement agencies say there will be many families like Shagleel's split in half by the sudden change. Jennifer Sime is with the International Rescue Committee in New York.
JENNIFER SIME: There are people sitting in refugee camps or in cities living in not great circumstances who may even have been fully vetted by now and literally are just waiting for their departure dates or their medical exams.
ROSE: It's not clear what will happen to those people. President Trump says he wants to be sure that refugees undergo what he's called extreme vetting.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: To keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America. We don't want them here.
ROSE: Trump's action also slashes the total number of refugees the U.S. will accept this year by more than half, from 110,000 to 50,000. It was hailed by some as a much needed correction.
DAVID RAY: Refugee admissions have been way out of line with public sentiment.
ROSE: David Ray is with FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. It's a nonprofit in Washington, which some human rights groups say is anti-Muslim. Ray says governors across the country signed a letter after the 2015 terror attacks in Paris calling for a halt to immigration from Syria.
RAY: The country is in real need of a temporary time out in refugee admissions. This is a prudent national security move that will save American lives.
ROSE: But resettlement agencies say the vetting process for all refugees is already intensive, and it's especially rigorous for Syrians. Chris George is the director of Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services in Connecticut.
CHRIS GEORGE: It's a very tough process. It is the toughest screening process for any refugee in the world, and it's also the hardest way for anyone to get into this country. And it seems to be working well.
ROSE: Georgia's group helped resettle Mohammed Shagleel in New Haven. When we talked on Friday, I asked Shagleel how often he talks to his mother.
Did you talk to her today?
SHAGLEEL: Every morning I talk with her.
ROSE: And what was that like?
SHAGLEEL: I didn't tell her about the new laws. I think she will be sad.
ROSE: When they talk today, Shagleel plans to tell his mother that he'll keep trying to bring her here no matter what. Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
I am surrounded by Mary Tyler Moores - smart, strong, independent women who have enriched the news business and, for that matter, our world. When Mary Tyler Moore died this week at the age of 80, a lot of women in the news business, and women who are lawyers, teachers, accountants and software engineers, cited Mary Richards, the role she played on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" from 1970 to 1977, as an inspiration. But I think a lot of young men in the news business, myself included, were also motivated by Mary Tyler Moore. Her show made news look like a nice way to spend your life - interesting and rewarding work in the company of kind, funny people who share jokes, sorrows, worries and celebrations.
The show was created by James L. Brooks and Allan Burns. By 1973, 25 of the show's 75 writers were women. Looking back, I think the balance of women and men in the writers room helped make women characters more compelling and complete. Mary and her friends, Rhoda, Phyllis and Sue Ann, all made their own way in life. But I think it deepened the portrayal of men, too. Gruff Lou Grant got heartsick to tears when his wife walked out of their long marriage. You could see in Ted Baxter's silver-haired bluster the bombast of a man who was scared he couldn't measure up to his own 8-by-10 glossy image. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was a sitcom that showed women who were on their own and happy and men who could tell them how being on your own didn't always make you as happy as you'd hoped.
Mary Tyler Moore's famous sunniness could mask a lot of steel. She said without telling too many stories about it that she'd had a childhood that made her sing and dance for approval. She struggled to live with diabetes. She had a son who died in his 20s, lost a sister to drugs and a brother to cancer. Mary Tyler Moore suffered from a drinking problem for 10 or more years, worked hard to overcome it and was strong enough to talk about it.
In later years, she was drawn to serious, often searing roles - the mother who's lost a child in the 1980 film "Ordinary People" and the paralyzed sculptor in the Broadway production of "Whose Life Is It Anyway?" And she was outstanding. But a lot of us will always think of Mary Tyler Moore with that smile that could melt a Minnesota winter, captured in freeze-frame on a snowy street as she flung her knit cap into the air. I like to think Mary's cap will never come down.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE IS ALL AROUND")
JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS: (Singing) Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile? Well, it's you girl and you should know it with each glance and every little movement you show it. Love is all around, no need to fake it. You can have the town, why don't you take it? You're gonna make it after all. How will you make it on your own?
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
People in Great Britain were closely watching the meeting between their prime minister and President Trump. NPR's Frank Langfitt followed events from London and joins us. Frank, thanks for being with us.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Good morning, Scott.
SIMON: And were the headlines in the U.K. different than what they were here, do you think?
LANGFITT: Well, I think what people here were focusing on - the first thing was what Prime Minister May had to say about NATO, and what she said is that President Trump fully supports NATO. And of course, this is a military alliance that's kept peace in Europe for decades. And here's what May had to say.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRIME MINISTER THERESA MAY: On defense and security cooperation, we're united in our recognition of NATO as the bulwark of our collective defense. And today, we've reaffirmed our unshakeable commitment to this alliance. Mr. President, I think you said you confirmed that you're 100 percent behind NATO.
LANGFITT: Now, Scott, this is really important and should be a big relief to people in Europe. You know, during much of the presidential campaign in the states, Mr. Trump was highly critical of NATO. He said it was obsolete, Cold War relic and that a lot of European countries were just freeloading on the U.S. military. This scared people in Europe because Europe relies on the U.S. military. And what they're kind of worried about is if the U.S. doesn't show a lot of resolve, that could be a green light to Vladimir Putin to get even more aggressive with other states sort of near his borders with Russia. So what we're seeing here, I think perhaps, is Trump's thinking evolving. He's been relying a lot on the new defense secretary, James Mattis, who earlier this week used the exact same language Prime Minister May used - unshakable commitment to NATO. So it now looks like Theresa May and Secretary Mattis are both kind of working with the president to kind of bring him around.
SIMON: Frank, did you notice any kind of small notes in these exchanges that might give us some insight into really both of these relatively new leaders?
LANGFITT: Well, yeah, you know, one thing that was interesting is getting a sense of Trump's thinking on European institutions. You know, recently he said he didn't care about the European Union and what happened there. That's a giant trading block. That's another thing that alarmed people here. The European Union's very controversial, but again, it has done a lot to keep the peace. And what happened was if you were listening to this press conference, he said one reason he didn't like the EU - he never named it, but he said was that this organization he was talking about had given him headaches as a businessman.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And I had a very bad experience. I have - I had something when I was in my other world. I have something in another country and getting the approvals from Europe was very, very tough. Getting the approval...
LANGFITT: And so what he's actually talking about - seems to be talking about here - is this battle he had over a seawall for a golf course in Ireland. The EU was actually protecting some snails, and the snails won. So Trump wasn't able to build his big wall; had to build two - I think he's going to build two smaller ones. But this tells you a lot about how his experience as an overseas businessman is shaping his thinking as president. And that could have a big influence here in Europe.
SIMON: This would not seem to be a match, an obvious political match, because Theresa May is a vicar's daughter and a longtime figure in British politics. Donald Trump, of course, is new - almost brand new - to U.S. politics. Did they seem to get on?
LANGFITT: Not that badly considering how incredibly different they are. There was one awkward moment where May chose a BBC reporter who ended up asking a really tough question that Trump hated. And he said, well, there goes that relationship (laughter) kind of, you know, criticizing May. On the other hand, you know, when they were walking at the White House, there was this moment where he actually held May's hand as they walked down some stairs. And it was - it wasn't the kind of thing we always think about when we think about Mr. Trump and women. It was sort of a very gracious note. And so I think that maybe was reflective of the beginning of what hopefully will be a pretty good relationship.
SIMON: NPR's Frank Langfitt, thanks so much.
LANGFITT: Happy to do it, Scott.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Steve Bannon, President Trump's chief strategist, told The New York Times this week that the media should keep its mouth shut. Mr. Bannon called the media, quote, "the opposition party." Investigative journalism organizations have responded. ProPublica put out instructions on its website for how to leak information to the press. They've expanded the areas of coverage to include conflicts of interest, voting rights and the realities of health care. Eric Umansky is the deputy managing editor of ProPublica and joins us from our studios in New York. Thanks very much for being with us.
ERIC UMANSKY: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: What do you hope happens?
UMANSKY: I hope that we get important information that we can share with the public, and that most broadly the public be informed about whatever the realities are that's happening in Washington and elsewhere.
SIMON: So you're hoping for leaks from government employees, from contractors, from - fill in the blanks.
UMANSKY: We're hoping from - information from anybody who has specific information about what is happening in any of the offices where they think something is amiss and something deserves public attention.
SIMON: Any concern that at least some of this information, let's say, from internal revenue or the military or the security establishment might be confidential for very good reasons?
UMANSKY: Yes. We are quite cognizant of that. And most fundamentally, we are not inducing anybody to commit a crime. We're not asking for somebody to take something that was top secret. People need to make their own choices about what they think inside the government deserves public attention. That's not a decision for us to make. It's a decision for them to make.
SIMON: The Obama administration was accused of invoking the Espionage Act to crackdown on leakers and pursuing whistleblowers more aggressively than any other administration in history. So why didn't you make this call under that administration?
UMANSKY: Well, first of all actually, we have had a page for a long time on our site encouraging people to send us documents and information, including in secure ways. So the answer to that is we have been asking people. Why have we pushed it even farther now? Well, one of the reasons that we've pushed it farther now is because we have been hearing about ways in which federal employees are being told to keep quiet. And if people are being told to keep quiet, well, that means that there's a good chance that relevant information is not coming out that should be.
SIMON: Haven't there been gag orders during the transition of previous administrations too?
UMANSKY: Certainly, every administration tries to control information. That's something, as you said in particular, that the Obama administration was quite aggressive on. And we had put out over many years plenty of not just critical information about the Obama administration but critical information based on inside sources that we cultivated. I will say one of the things that you're seeing with this administration is instances in which various bureaucracies have simply been cut off or shut down. The National Park Service stopped tweeting for a couple of days after they had done a tweet about climate change. And their first tweet after that was an apology for that tweet. That is quite unusual.
SIMON: But do you have some concern that by making this public call under the Trump administration, at least to more notice than under the Obama administration, you're encouraging the view that the press has a liberal bias?
UMANSKY: No, no. Again, what we are encouraging is for people to send information. Now, you can judge us on our stories, if our story may be unfair, if our story may not have enough context. Our job is simply to put important information out there, and we're going to keep doing it. If somebody wants to accuse us of being biased as a part of that, well, there's nothing we can do.
SIMON: Any success yet?
UMANSKY: We have been getting a lot of interesting information from people, and we're going to keep digging.
SIMON: Eric Umansky is deputy managing editor of ProPublica. Thanks so much for being with us.
UMANSKY: Thanks for having me.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The 97-year-old woman who helped revolutionize what Americans think Chinese food is celebrates the Lunar New Year in San Francisco. Cecilia Chiang opened her influential restaurant, The Mandarin, in 1961 - a time when most U.S. Chinese restaurants served chop suey. The Mandarin attracted celebrities and food enthusiasts with dishes like tea-smoked duck and twice-cooked pork. Chiang told NPR's Neda Ulaby how she's ringing in the year of the rooster.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: First, though, I asked Cecilia Chiang what it's like to be 97 years old.
CECILIA CHIANG: Right now, I'm so busy.
ULABY: It's true. Scheduling our interview was hard because at this lunch or that dinner or plans with friends or great-grandkids. Still, this almost-centurian had 16 people over last night to celebrate her Chinese New Year.
CHIANG: People don't believe me. You're 97. You're going to cook a dinner for that many people. You're crazy. But I enjoy it. I do this for fun.
ULABY: Chiang's is a legend in the food world. Her DNA is all over Chinese food in this country. She taught Julia Child about Chinese cuisine. One of the first chefs she hired started Panda Express. Her son founded the chain P.F. Chang's. Even at age 97, she was excited to cook for her friends.
CHIANG: I just finished the menu. I show you. I have five-sliced beef. I have asparagus with ginkgo nuts.
ULABY: Roast pigeon, fish, red-cooked pork.
CHIANG: All different kind of mushroom in a oyster sauce.
ULABY: But as much as Chiang loves the Lunar New Year, she misses being in countries where everyone is celebrating it.
CHIANG: Here is really no fun.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
ULABY: This 97-year-old is showing me on her phone a video from the other side of her world - crowds of people, fireworks shooting out of skyscrapers.
CHIANG: Taipei - New Year's Eve.
ULABY: Last year was the year of the monkey. Chiang says like the animal, it was crazy and chaotic. She thinks this year will be better.
CHIANG: Could not be worse than monkey.
ULABY: This is the year of the rooster, she says, and filled with portent, starting with the sound she remembers as a little girl back in 1920s Beijing.
CHIANG: (Imitating rooster) Wake up. Wake up. I hope this will wake up some people. That would be good, right?
ULABY: Cecilia Chiang then excused herself. She had to see her great-grandkids, advise some chefs she mentors, and she had plans with some old San Francisco friends - members of the band Jefferson Airplane.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COME UP THE YEARS")
JEFFERSON AIRPLANE: (Singing) I ought to get going. I shouldn't stay here and love you.
ULABY: Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COME UP THE YEARS")
JEFFERSON AIRPLANE: (Singing) 'Cause you're so much younger than I am. Come up the years. Come up the years and love me. Love me.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In this interview, it’s said that a chef once employed by Cecilia Chang went on to found the Panda Express restaurant chain. In fact, it was a son of that chef who founded the chain.]
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Some congressional Republicans are openly worried - at least behind closed doors - about how fast their party's moving to repeal the Affordable Care Act. At a meeting this week, lawmakers warned each other about potential political consequences. The Washington Post quoted Representative Tom McClintock as saying, quote, "that's going to be called Trumpcare. Republicans will own that lock, stock and barrel, and we'll be judged in the election less than two years away." Another congressman who expressed concern was Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, who joins us. Mr. Sessions, thanks so much for being with us.
PETE SESSIONS: Good morning.
SIMON: You voted for a budget resolution to allow quick repeal of large parts of the Affordable Care Act. Now you want to slow things down.
SESSIONS: No, I don't think that's what the vote was. The vote was a - was really an order that I had presumptively given from the Rules Committee earlier that authorized committees to begin looking at what this might look at. That was what the vote was.
SIMON: You have concerns about a refundable tax credit to potentially replace parts of the ACA.
SESSIONS: In fact, the discussion about health care has been a healthy one but has not come to a conclusion. As some of your listeners may know, I have a bill with Senator Bill Cassidy that's called The World's Greatest Healthcare Plan. And in that plan it gives every single American that does not today receive the tax benefit that companies - large companies and corporations - allow their people to have, it gives every single American that tax advantage. This tax advantage is some $8,000 for a family of four allowing them on a pretax basis or on a advanceable basis to be able to go to the marketplace and apply $8,000 to a non-government-provided insurance.
This would level the playing field as opposed to others who have suggested it would be a high-standard deduction that all Americans would have, thus allowing them the next April to be able to write that off their taxes. I believe that we must give all Americans an advanceable pretax opportunity to give a tax credit in January of the year that they would want to buy their health care.
SIMON: Do you think it's wise for some members of your party to try to tie repeal of parts of the ACA to defunding Planned Parenthood?
SESSIONS: Let me say this - it is against the law for - and it has been against the law - for the federal government to pay for abortions. This would be a debate that mostly would take place with the executive. As you know, President Obama and any president has a chance to go - we do not specify Planned Parenthood in anything we do. We simply say health care providers. So while I am for not allowing the funding of Planned Parenthood, I don't know it would take shape in this form. I think it would be a law that would need to be debated in the House, passed the House and in the Senate. And that's the issue right there. So would I want this to stop the health care reform? No.
SIMON: I - you know, I have to ask, Congressman, I noticed something in The New York Times edition and The Washington Post. Is there - was there some concern of members of your party about President Trump? Mark Sanford, the congressman from South Carolina, says - was quoted as saying, I think you can move from real to bizarre if you don't watch out and some of what he's done and in tweet world certainly fits that mold. And then he said they were talking about what the president said about counting the popular vote, and Mr. Sanford said a fellow member turned to me and pointed to it and said that's what Third World dictators do.
SESSIONS: Well, let me go to really the issue at hand, which is why I came on, and I'm so delighted to have this opportunity to ask and receive tough questions and to give them back. President Trump and Vice President Pence are personally involved in this issue of health care, and I believe that President Trump believes that every single American, as he said, stands a shot at getting health care. And that is the purpose of this - really this discussion that I want to have with you and the American people. We want to struggle - and that includes with the vice president and the president who I'll meet with this week personally on this matter for all Americans, including disabled people and the American public that need an opportunity to have the tax advantage. And, Scott, as you know, that was what I wanted to talk about today and what you asked me to talk about. The other ideas that President Trump have, we can agree or disagree.
SIMON: Pete Sessions of Texas, thanks very much for being with us, sir.
SESSIONS: Yes, yes, sir.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Well, let's just say that President Trump and the president of Mexico have agreed to disagree. Yesterday, they held what was called a constructive and productive hour-long phone call after spending much of the week spatting over President Trump's proposed border wall and his insistence that Mexico pay for it. NPR's Carrie Kahn reports that the Mexican president's popularity took a hit over his handling of the crisis, but he got a boost from Mexico's richest man.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Both presidents issued a joint statement shortly after yesterday's call. They both acknowledge their clear and very public differences about paying for a border wall, and both agreed to resolve those differences as part of a comprehensive discussion. Pena Nieto's statement also included this sentence (reading) for now, both presidents agree not to publicly talk about this controversial issue.
That line was missing from Trump's statement.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I have been very strong on Mexico. I have great respect for Mexico. I love the Mexican people. I work with the Mexican people all the time - great relationships.
KAHN: Later in the day, Trump softened his tone regarding Mexico but vowed to renegotiate trade deals to the U.S.' favor.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: But the United States cannot continue to lose vast amounts of business, vast amounts of companies and millions and millions of people losing their jobs. That won't happen with me. We're no longer going to be the country that doesn't know what it's doing
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CARLOS SLIM: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: "It's good they spoke by phone," said Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. In a rare press conference at his Mexico City headquarters, Slim said it is clear that the two presidents weren't going to negotiate anything over Twitter. Trump and Pena Nieto had been tweeting their disagreement over payment of the border wall during most of the week. Thursday, Pena Nieto canceled his visit, which was scheduled for next week in Washington. In his more than hour-long press conference, Slim urged Mexicans to unite around Pena Nieto, whose popularity has tanked greatly in part due to his dealings with Trump.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SLIM: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: "Those proposals are absurd," says Slim, referring to Trump's insistence that Mexico pay for the wall and his proposal to tax Mexican exports to the U.S. by as much as 20 percent. Slim said the best wall the U.S. could build to keep immigrants out would be by investing and creating jobs in Mexico. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Mexico City.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Some past Republican presidents have phoned in their support for an annual anti-abortion protest in Washington, D.C. This year, President Trump sent his vice president, Mike Pence.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: On behalf of President Donald Trump...
(CHEERING)
PENCE: ...My wife, Karen, our daughter, Charlotte, I'd like to welcome you all to Washington, D.C., for the 44th annual March for Life.
SIMON: The vice president is the highest-ranking official to ever appear at the rally in person. As NPR's Sarah McCammon reports, abortion opponents at yesterday's gathering feel energized by a new administration.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: The annual rally known as the March for Life is definitely Vice President Mike Pence's kind of crowd.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PENCE: President Trump actually asked me to be here with you today.
(CHEERING)
PENCE: He asked me to thank you for your support.
MCCAMMON: As the former governor of Indiana, Pence gained popularity among social conservatives for his plainspoken style and hard-line stances against abortion and same-sex marriage. He helped Trump shore up his support with the Republican base, many of whom were worried about Trump's temperament and history of describing himself as very pro-choice. In the end, Trump and Pence won more than 80 percent of white evangelical voters. Pence promised the crowd that Trump's victory will prove to be a victory for them.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PENCE: That's why this administration will work with the Congress to end taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion providers.
(CHEERING)
PENCE: And we will devote those resources to health care services for women across America.
MCCAMMON: Under current law, federal funding for abortions is already illegal in most cases, but Planned Parenthood does receive about half a billion dollars in federal funds each year to provide services like health exams and contraceptives to low-income women. Iowa Senator Joni Ernst told the marchers she's preparing to introduce a pair of bills aimed at diverting family planning funds away from the organization.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JONI ERNST: Folks, we're going to stop it.
(CHEERING)
MCCAMMON: Abortion-rights opponents are hoping that Trump and the Republican Congress will move their agenda forward.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Unintelligible) Together, OK?
MCCAMMON: At the march, participants filled a section of the National Mall near the Washington Monument and poured onto nearby streets. Among them was Rose Romero, an attorney from Fort Worth, Texas, who saw Pence's appearance as a positive sign.
ROSE ROMERO: It took 44 years - right? - for someone in his position in government, the vice president of the United States, to come and celebrate life and appreciate life. That is amazing to me.
MCCAMMON: Attending the march for roughly the 10th time was Richard MacDonald from New Jersey. For him, Pence was a reassuring presence.
RICHARD MACDONALD: To be honest, Trump was not my No. 1 choice. I do like Pence's pro-life stance and, you know, he seems a more kind of levelheaded kind of guy. But with Trump, I mean, he's got the right idea. We've got to put our country first, not just on the pro-life issue but with everything. We've got to put - get jobs back into the country, and I think it's the right approach.
MCCAMMON: Already Trump has signed a presidential memorandum blocking U.S. funding to groups that provide or, quote, "promote" abortion abroad. He's promised to announce a Supreme Court nominee next week - a move activists on both sides of the abortion debate will be watching closely. Sarah McCammon, NPR News, Washington.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Two hundred sixty-eight people have been shot in Chicago so far this year; 4,368 people were shot last year. And there have been almost as many ideas offered as to how to end the violence - Crackdown on guns, invest in destitute neighborhoods, put more money into inner-city schools. President Trump tweeted this week, if Chicago doesn't fix the horrible carnage, I will send in the feds. And there's this suggestion - hire a supervillain. That's the premise of this week's issue of the comic book "Deathstroke." Mothers of the victims of gun violence pool their money to bring in a practiced assassin to avenge their children's deaths. It was written by Christopher Priest and drawn by Denys Cowan, two pioneering African-American artists who've been in the comic business for 40 years. Christopher Priest is in Colorado; Denys Cowan in Los Angeles. Thanks very much for being with us.
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST: Thank you.
DENYS COWAN: Thank you. It's good to be with you.
SIMON: And what moved you to bring "Deathstroke" to Chicago, Christopher?
PRIEST: Writing "Deathstroke" presents a number of challenges to me. As a Christian, as a minister, it's difficult for me to write a comic book that all but glorifies violence. So my take on "Deathstroke" has been to not so much celebrate violence but to deal with the consequences of violence. So in order to do a credible anti-violence story, I thought, you know, let's do it in the place, you know, probably the most violent comic book that DC publishes. And as I started working on a story, there were news reports of just tragic numbers coming out of Chicago in terms of gun violence. And I thought that Chicago would make an appropriate platform for this story.
SIMON: Denys Cowan, for - we just heard the author of the storyline say it's an anti-violence comic book, but as the artist, you had to draw a lot of violence in there, didn't you?
COWAN: (Laughter) Yes, yes. You know, I've often said that a lot of times in the comics that I draw, we're dealing with action, not necessarily violence. So you have characters flying around and shooting, you know, ray beams out of their eyes or using feats super strength. You know, it's over the top. It's not real. It's action. In this case, with "Deathstroke" we were dealing with violence. That required a different approach and that necessitated in me drawing a lot of stuff that I don't normally draw in comics.
SIMON: Christopher Priest, there's a point in the story when a character says there would be outrage if Chicago police were killing as many people as Deathstroke does.
PRIEST: Yeah. You know, it seems to me that the outrage associated with violence, it really changes depending on what your perspective is, which side of the spectrum you're on. So yeah, there was a line there where, referring to Deathstroke - this is presumably a white man running around killing young black men - and the mother replies, my daughter was black. The kid who shot her was black. If a white cop shot and killed my daughter's killer, I'd bake him a pie. It's a line I really didn't invent. It's something that I've heard from people before. You know, I think personally nothing comes from violence other than more violence. But that's the point we're trying to make here. We're not even dealing with the, you know, police right now. We're dealing with just sort of this intramural tribal culture that is fueling a lot of the violence going on in Chicago.
SIMON: Denys Cowan, in these days of social media, I wonder what kind of reaction you're getting.
COWAN: Most the reviews are really good, and people seem to get it. There are a few criticisms that I've seen come down. Like, you know, one was Priest and Cowan - what are they, spokesmen for, like, the Black Lives Matter movement and then they're anti-white?
SIMON: They didn't read it very closely, did they?
COWAN: They didn't read it very closely at all. It was just a knee-jerk reaction, and we don't offer any solutions in "Deathstroke #11." We do ask a lot of questions, and...
PRIEST: Well, in addition to that, we're also saying that we're all to blame, the police, the gangsters, the parents, the education system, the economic system there, the politicians, the mayor. We've all got skin in the game.
SIMON: As you noted, Christopher Priest, you're also a minister.
PRIEST: Yes.
SIMON: I was struck by the priest who's the minister.
PRIEST: (Laughter) Yeah, yeah, you know, Reverend Priest. You know, I've got all the bases covered.
SIMON: Of all things, is "Deathstroke" - does that fit into your ministry in a way?
PRIEST: Not directly, and it's something that is difficult to get people to understand that number one that art is art. There is no such thing as Christian art or secular art - writing, painting, drawing, whatever it is. As far as, you know, finding a moral basis for writing a hardened killer, this is a guy with a lot of problems, and he pays a heavy emotional toll for the lifestyle that he's chosen. We don't couch him in theological terms, but this is in fact a book about morality and is actually preaching a pretty strong sermon against violence and against this behavior and against this lifestyle.
SIMON: Christopher Priest and Denys Cowan, they are author and illustrator of "Deathstroke." Thanks very much for being with us.
PRIEST: Well, thank you for having us. I very much appreciate it.
COWAN: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A battle over sanctuary cities is playing out in the liberal enclave of Austin, Texas. The county sheriff there will no longer give federal immigration agents access to her jail. She thus defies a governor and a president who are determined to deport more immigrants who are in the country illegally. NPR's John Burnett reports.
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: Starting next week, the new Democratic Sheriff Sally Hernandez says the ten-story Travis County Jail in downtown Austin will limit its cooperation with ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If federal agents want to inquire about an unauthorized immigrant in her custody, she'll only cooperate if the detainee is arrested for murder, sexual assault or human trafficking, or if federal agents have an arrest warrant. Hernandez announced the new policy on YouTube the day Trump was sworn in.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
SALLY HERNANDEZ: The public must be confident that local law enforcement is focused on local, public safety, not on federal immigration enforcement. Our jail cannot be perceived as a holding tank for ICE or that Travis County deputies are ICE officers.
BURNETT: With this action, Travis County joins 300 other jurisdictions around the country, such as New York City, Chicago and the state of California, that reject ICE detainers. These are requests by ICE to local law enforcement to hold unauthorized immigrants in jail so federal agents can decide whether to pick them up for possible deportation. In deep-red, law-and-order Texas, the sheriff's announcement, which she campaigned on, was akin to kicking a fire ant mound. Republican Governor Greg Abbott's response was swift. He spoke to FOX News.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GREG ABBOTT: She would give sanctuary to people who are in the United States illegally, who've been convicted of crimes in the past, of heinous crimes like armed robbery. They could have been operating in conjunction with drug cartels, and she would not cooperate with ICE whatsoever.
BURNETT: Donald Trump has also taken aim at sanctuary cities. Earlier this week, he announced the federal government would cut off millions of dollars in funding to local jurisdictions that he says shelter criminal aliens. Are they right? Are immigrants in the Travis County Jail dangerous criminals? NPR took a quick survey of the 51 detainers that ICE sent to Travis County since the first of the year. Some immigrants had been arrested for lower level offenses, such as driving while intoxicated and marijuana possession, but most face multiple charges, including serious crimes like murder and sexual assault of a child. Our snapshot reflects a recent trend that ICE has been refining its requests to mainly ask for custody of immigrants with repeat arrests or felony charges. Bob Libal is director of an immigrant human rights group in Austin called Grassroots Leadership. He points to studies that show noncitizens commit crimes and go to jail at about the same or lesser rate as citizens do. He sees the president's and the governor's offensive against sanctuary cities as scapegoating immigrants.
BOB LIBAL: It's simply playing on a cheap kind of anti-immigrant bigotry.
BURNETT: Here's why the Trump administration is fighting with Austin and all the other sanctuary cities - under his new rules, Trump wants to deport any unauthorized immigrant arrested for any crime no matter how minor. The detainer is the primary tool that ICE uses to pick up immigrants charged with crimes, so friendly jailers are essential. Christopher Lasch is a University of Denver law professor who studies immigration detainers.
CHRISTOPHER LASCH: It is impossible in any sense of imagination for President Trump to attain the deportation numbers that he wants without harnessing local criminal justice systems.
BURNETT: Late this week, Sheriff Sally Hernandez double-downed, saying she will not let, quote, "fear and misinformation" change her new jail policy. With the governor and the president threatening to cut off state and federal grant dollars to the county, a showdown appears inevitable. John Burnett, NPR News, Austin.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This year's Oscar nominees look different. Four African-American actors have been nominated, along with one British actor of Caribbean descent and one of Ethiopian and Irish descent. And four films with diverse casts are up for best picture - "Moonlight," "Fences," "Lion" and "Hidden Figures." Last year around this time, we spoke with longtime film critic and actor Bobby Rivers about Hollywood and racial diversity. He joins us again from the studios of Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul. Bobby, thanks for being with us.
BOBBY RIVERS: Scott, it's wonderful to be with you again.
SIMON: What do you think brought about this change?
RIVERS: I think it was Cheryl Boone Isaacs, determined to bring inclusion and diversity into the academy. And also it was a very popular hashtag, #OscarsSoWhite - really hit a nerve. And it hit an accurate nerve because it was just so obvious that people of color did good work that was overlooked. And this year, there were a number of landmarks that were made.
The first black person to be nominated for an Oscar and the first black person to win was Hattie McDaniel, best supporting actress for the 1939's is "Gone With The Wind." In all that time, no black actress has had more than two Oscar nominations to her credit. And this week, Viola Davis is now the most Oscar-nominated black actress in Hollywood history with just three nominations. I say just because Jennifer Lawrence is a good actress. She's in her 20s. She's got four. Amy Adams has five. So this is not - it's not about who's more talented. It's about the opportunities that come to actresses of color.
SIMON: But all of that being noted, are the Oscar nominations, in a sense, window dressing for an industry that is not necessarily very diverse?
RIVERS: To a degree, probably so. To a degree, it is maybe Hollywood patting itself on the back, but it gets the attention of people all over the world. And when all of these people all over the world notice that - wait a minute - there is something of gravity in this discussion about diversity and inclusion, then I think it helps.
SIMON: I want to give you a chance to talk about "La La Land."
RIVERS: OK, OK.
SIMON: I just saw it. As you know, my wife and I don't get out a lot with two young kids.
RIVERS: (Laughter).
SIMON: So I liked so...
RIVERS: Did you like it?
SIMON: I liked so many things about it, but...
RIVERS: I hear you.
SIMON: Yeah?
RIVERS: Here's how I feel? You know, around the Christmas holidays, you pass a department store window, and you see a big, beautiful Christmas gift box in the window. And then if you open it up, it's full of beautiful, brightly colored tissue paper, and that's all.
SIMON: (Laughter) Yeah.
RIVERS: That's how I felt about "La La Land." Visually? Beautiful. The acting was good. I felt that the screenplay was a C-plus.
SIMON: Yeah.
RIVERS: Now, considering that "La La Land" has now made Oscar history because it got the same amount of nominations as in "All About Eve," do this. Go see "La La Land" and then watch "All About Eve." And which one do you think is a better screenplay?
SIMON: I mean, "All About Eve" - my gosh, that screenplay, the direction, the acting - there's no comparison.
RIVERS: Brilliant, brilliant - all of it.
SIMON: Yeah, exactly. While we have you, couple of films you liked most this year?
RIVERS: Oh, have you seen "Hidden Figures?"
SIMON: No, not yet.
RIVERS: I wish that Taraji P. Henson was in the running for best actress for "Hidden Figures." I saw that movie twice. It's inspiring. It's well-written. It's well acted. I highly recommend that. I just love that. As far as the people I wish had been at the Oscars, you know, I loved what Tom Hanks did as Sully. I thought maybe he'd get in the best actor race. He didn't.
SIMON: Yeah.
RIVERS: Somebody I really loved - Ben Foster in "Hell Or High Water." He has done some good acting for years. I think he's overdue for an Oscar nomination.
SIMON: Bobby Rivers, film critic, interviewer and bon vivant, thanks very much for being with us.
RIVERS: It was wonderful to be with you again, Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "OUTLAW STATE OF MIND")
CHRIS STAPLETON: (Singing) Cut my teeth on Daddy's old LGO, and I lost my mind somewhere in New Mexico. And T.W...
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
And finally time for sports.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: Serena Williams won her seventh Australian Open, her 23rd Grand Slam singles title, in Melbourne today - 6-4 6-4. She defeated Venus Williams, who is pretty great in her own right. We're joined now by Howard Bryant of ESPN.com. Howard, thanks for being with us.
HOWARD BRYANT: How are you, Scott?
SIMON: I'm fine. How did the match play out?
BRYANT: Well, the match played out relatively routinely, simply because Serena is just that good. It was so powerful. It's so difficult watching those two play each other. Anyone who watches Serena knows the fire that she brings to a match. But she's going up against her older sister, and everyone who watches Venus knows what fire Venus brings to the match. So they don't want to show each other up. You can see the sort of angst and the anxiety when they're going up against each other because they really don't want to do this, but, of course, when there's a trophy in the line, they're both competitors, as well. Serena is just too good. And that was pretty much the bottom line, as it is with her against pretty much everybody. And Venus battled, and they fought, and they really showed how much they have revolutionized the sport. But at the end, when it was time to cross the finish line, it was Serena.
SIMON: The Deen, Uloom (ph), Manning or Ryszard (ph) brothers, Reggie and Cheryl Miller, Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko - there are no other siblings in the history of sports that come close to the Williams sisters, are there?
BRYANT: No, they're the greatest. They are - they are the greatest athletic pair, I think, in in modern sports history. I would defy anybody to try and top that. And how can you? Whether it's numerically in terms of the number of championships - but it's also in terms of legacy. It's a word that we use very poorly, I think, in our business. When I watched that match today, I saw the legacy of Serena and Venus in players like Maria Sharapova and Dominique Cibulkova and Petra Kvitova and Madison Keys and all of these power-hitting players.
And if you go back and you look at Chris Evert and Martina Hingis and some of the other players, they revolutionized the game. You can't hit the way - the way Chris Everett and Martina and those guys hit anymore because Serena and Venus have turned the game into a power game. And when you watch them play today - that was what I really saw. You saw the legacy of having to be a power player in order to compete at the top levels. And it was it was really stunning to watch. And it's also something to think about - something else. They turned pro 22 and 23 years ago, and they're still playing at the top levels of the game.
SIMON: Thirty seconds or so left. I understand that there are men playing to this year, right?
BRYANT: Yeah, it's - this is a - this is the cocoon Grand Slam. You had the 30-somethings - Venus and Serena. And now you've got 35-year-old Roger Federer going up against 30-year-old Rafael Nadal - classic, classic matchup - the two - probably the two greatest tennis players on the men's side. And I cannot wait. I will be up to see it at 3 a.m. And Nadal is up 23-11 on Roger. He wants his 15th major, and Roger want his 18th. Something's going to give. And believe me - this is the matchup that everybody didn't think we were ever going to see again, and we're going to get it tonight.
SIMON: Yeah, yeah. It is like coming out of a dream - isn't it? - both of these finals.
BRYANT: Fantastic.
SIMON: Howard Bryant of ESPN.com, thanks so much for being with us.
BRYANT: Thank you.
SIMON: And tomorrow on Weekend Edition Sunday, we're going to talk more about Serena Williams and her impact on sports.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Asghar Farhadi, who is one of Iran's best-known filmmakers, won an Oscar for his film "A Separation." He's been nominated this year for his latest movie, "The Salesman." Howie Movshovitz of member station KUNC has this report on that new film, which was inspired by Arthur Miller's "Death Of A Salesman."
HOWIE MOVSHOVITZ, BYLINE: Rana and Emad are a wife and husband who play the Lomans in a Tehran production of Miller's play. As the film opens, they wake up to discover their apartment building is starting to collapse.
(SOUNDBITE OF "THE SALESMAN" FILM)
MOVSHOVITZ: Writer and director Asghar Farhadi says the fractures in the apartment house are a metaphor.
ASGHAR FARHADI: (Through interpreter) One of the themes in the film is about these cracks that happens around everything, both physically and mentally. The cracks on the windows and on the walls and then between the relationships of the people.
MOVSHOVITZ: The faulty construction is revealed by the stress of new construction next door.
(SOUNDBITE OF "THE SALESMAN" FILM)
MOVSHOVITZ: The cracks in the marriage are exposed by a single incident, just as they are in Miller's play. In the film, the couple moves to a new apartment. And Rana leaves the door open. Gradually, we learn that an old man looking for the prostitute who used to live there enters. No one can agree on what happens after that, and the film doesn't show it.
FARHADI: (Through interpreter) It's like in real life. Everybody sees the truth from their point of view. It's like a puzzle that no one has the complete - the whole thing. And it's like a mirror that is broken on the ground, and everybody just see different parts of that mirror, just sees himself or herself in that broken mirror.
MOVSHOVITZ: And that gives rise to speculation among the neighbors and suspicion in the husband. Was his wife sexually assaulted or only spied upon? She says she can't remember and nobody wants to go to the police because that will just create more problems.
JAMSHEED AKRAMI: Farhadi is an insightful social commentator. He cares deeply about what's going on in his country, and his movies can be really probing and poignant commentaries on Iranian realities.
MOVSHOVITZ: Jamsheed Akrami teaches film at William Paterson University in New Jersey. He also directed "The Cinema Of Discontent," a documentary about censorship in Iran.
AKRAMI: The Iranian system is a theocracy, and in a theocracy it's always the government that prescribes the right behavior for the people. So people have to pretend all the time that they're behaving the right way. So the Iranian people live a double life, a life in public, which is to the liking of the government, and a life in private, which is the one they choose to live.
MOVSHOVITZ: The intimacies of private life are taboo on screen in Iran. "The Salesman" shows the couple's bedroom but never with the couple on the bed. The filmmaker was forced to cut one scene in which a woman is heard singing because that, too, is banned. Akrami says Iranians use foreign art, like Miller's "Death Of A Salesman," to look at their own situation.
AKRAMI: "Death Of A Salesman" was a popular play before the revolution. And I remember the movie "A Place In The Sun," the movie that George Stevens made based on Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy," was also quite popular because they're all about the American dream and how it turns into a nightmare. And you can see a parallel in this movie between how an American dream turned into nightmare is played on the stage and at the same time, you see this real-life couple and the dissolution and disintegration of their dream as a married couple.
MOVSHOVITZ: Filmmaker Asghar Farhadi says that movies can show us the things we share, personal things the news does not.
FARHADI: (Through interpreter) I really believe that in this new age, the media tries to show that we are very different from each other and separate us from each other. But our similarities, I believe, are way more than our differences. But the media works more on the differences.
MOVSHOVITZ: Yet he uses one of the media's tools to tell his story - a handheld camera.
FARHADI: (Through interpreter) I really want to show the audience that this is a real life and usually we note news reports from the handheld. That's what their audience believe that when something is handheld it's a real, real life. And I want to show the audience that - don't think this is a film. This is a real life.
MOVSHOVITZ: For Farhadi, the play he uses to spin his story has both specific and general significance. Just as Willy Loman jumps back and forth between a reality he can't accept and his fantasies and memories of an imagined past, the scenes in "The Salesman" shift back and forth between the actors on stage and their lives outside the theater. Farhadi says he wants to capture the uncertainty he sees in Iranian society.
FARHADI: (Through interpreter) The last scene, when the family of that old guy come to their house, it looks like a theater scene. Even the lighting of the lamps that are hanging from the walls make it feel like it's a theater. And they turn it off and turn it on, and you will ask yourself for a second, are we watching a theater or is it a real life?
MOVSHOVITZ: Asghar Farhadi has a tremendous international reputation, which invites criticism at home that he panders to the outside world. Yet "The Salesman" has been his most successful film in Iran so far. For NPR News, I'm Howie Movshovitz.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The great British actor John Hurt has died. He got his start early, said he appeared in front of an audience for the first time when he was just 9 years old.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHN HURT: I felt, you know, body and soul, as it were. But, of course, I mean, I - at that age, I didn't think in terms of being professional. I didn't know anything about it. That happened later.
SIMON: He went on to a career that spanned more than five decades and multiple genres. He gave Harry Potter his wand.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCEROR'S STONE")
HURT: (As Mr. Ollivander) I wondered when I'd be seeing you, Mr. Potter.
SIMON: He ran a dictatorship in a futuristic England in "V For Vendetta."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "V FOR VENDETTA")
HURT: (As Adam Sutler) Tonight, any protestor, any instigator or agitator will be made example of.
SIMON: And memorably, he was a victim in "Alien."
(SOUNDBITE OF "ALIEN" FILM)
SIMON: Ouch. But it was his role as the disfigured John Merrick in the 1980 film "The Elephant Man" that won John Hurt an Oscar nomination and the praise of the director David Lynch, who called him simply the greatest actor in the world.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HURT: I haven't planned it at all to be this way. I just - I do what interests me when I'm invited and do it as well as I know how and try to get better. That's all.
SIMON: John Hurt died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 77.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
An executive order signed by President Donald Trump went into effect last night. It suspends the refugee admissions program for the next 120 days. It bars immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries for the next three months. It went into place as many people were in the process of coming to the United States, including Hameed Khalid Darweesh, an Iraqi who served as a translator for the U.S. government there. He was detained at JFK Airport last night. He has just been shown live on CNN outside of the airport - apparently released a short time ago. We have Brandon Friedman on the line with us. He's a veteran and former Obama administration official who worked with Mr. Darweesh while they were both in Iraq. Thank you for being with us, Mr. Friedman.
BRANDON FRIEDMAN: Thanks for having me on, Scott.
SIMON: And how long was he held? Do we know - was he charged? Did anybody ask him a question that we can draw any inference from?
FRIEDMAN: No. I don't know anything about what happened while he was inside. I know he arrived on a flight at about 6:30 last night, and he was apparently just released in the last half hour.
SIMON: And all of his paperwork was in order. He had the proper visa, every - everything looked fine as far as you know.
FRIEDMAN: Yeah, absolutely. He had a special immigrant visa given to him because of his time serving with the U.S. government and the U.S. military while he was in Iraq - while were in Iraq.
SIMON: And are there more people in detention right now?
FRIEDMAN: I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm hearing news reports that there are, so we'll just have to see.
SIMON: What's Mr. Darweesh like? What kind of work did you get to - did you do while you got to know each other?
FRIEDMAN: So Hameed is - I mean, he's committed to the mission. He's committed to protecting the U.S. troops who are over there, and he's absolutely fearless. We would go out and all the American soldiers would be wearing body armor. He would go out with - when we first started, he would go out wearing absolutely nothing but his clothes, and he would do the same missions. He didn't have an ounce of fear in him, and it was really unfortunate that they decided to detain him. This executive orders is quite un-American because he's exactly the type of - exactly the type of person we need to be letting in. We really owe it to him.
SIMON: Do you know if he - there are reports that lawsuits are being filed. Do you know - is that something that interests him? Is he one of the people we're getting reports about?
FRIEDMAN: I don't know. I have actually not spoken to him since he's gotten out, so I'm not sure.
SIMON: Yeah. We don't know a lot of the circumstances of what's happened, Mr. Friedman, but I wonder what your concerns are right now.
FRIEDMAN: Well, I'm concerned that other people are going to be stopped and detained the same way. And my overriding concern is that the others that are going to be stopped and detained aren't going to be released as he has been. My fear is that other people are going to be stopped and they're going to be turned around and sent back. And that's very un-American.
SIMON: In part because of you and people like you Mr. Darweesh was able to get some attention to his case.
FRIEDMAN: Hopefully. I mean, hopefully we can help out and hopefully we can sort of raise our voices and shine some light on this situation so this doesn't happen again because this executive order really should be rescinded. It's not helping anybody. It's actually going to endanger U.S. troops because now people who work for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria are not going to have any incentive to do it if they think that we're not going to back them up, which is what this executive order says.
SIMON: Brandon Friedman is a veteran and CEO of The McPherson Square Group. Thanks so much for being with us.
FRIEDMAN: Thanks for having me.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Was it the maid, the lover or the lover's partner who killed glamorous socialite Emily French with a candlestick? If this sounds like an Agatha Christie plot, it is. "The Witness For The Prosecution," set in 1920s London, has been adapted into a new TV show and stars the award-winning Kim Cattrall as the murder victim. The show airs on the streaming service Acorn TV.
Now, you probably best know Kim Cattrall for her role as the fabulous Samantha Jones in "Sex And The City." Kim Cattrall joins me now from our studios in New York City.
Welcome.
KIM CATTRALL: Hi, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I love Agatha Christie. But for those who might not know her or her work, give us a brief synopsis of this show.
CATTRALL: First of all, "Witness For The Prosecution" is one of her, I would think, lesser-known novellas. And then it was a play in London in the '30s or early '40s. It's a whodunit as - and Agatha does whodunits like nobody else.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right.
CATTRALL: It's really - she leads you through the story of this woman who's a socialite, who is very lonely. And then, she met this young man who was very charming. And they started to have a relationship of sorts. She was older than him. She gives all of her money to him. Through all of these different events, they become closer and closer, and she doesn't trust anyone else around her. So she makes him part of the will, actually. He has everything, not just part of it. He has everything.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: He gets everything.
CATTRALL: And then, mysteriously, Emily French is found dead.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why don't we listen to Emily French, your character, in action. Here she is talking to her young lover, Leonard Vole.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE WITNESS TO THE PROSECUTION ")
CATTRALL: (As Emily French) When one is a woman of a certain age, one becomes subject to all manner of tedious lectures about what one should and shouldn't be. I'm supposed to no longer have any particular needs, wants or appetites. My fires are supposed to be out. But they rage unchecked.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Now that is not the Agatha Christie I knew.
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let me just say that I was reading it when I was about 10 or 11.
CATTRALL: Right.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Clearly, the dialogue has been updated, shall we say.
CATTRALL: Yes. A wonderful writer called Sarah Phelps has her fingers all over this. I think what Sarah Phelps has really done here is she's changed the timeline to 1923, which was after the first world war, which is a very dark, scary time. She's really, I think, made my character, in a lot of ways - and I, of course, happily added to that - a feminist. She was a suffragette. She had a mind of her own. She came from wealth. She married a very wealthy man who died. And she got to be one of the first women who could vote because she had property and she had money.
So I sort of found her this kind of anomaly in 1923. She had all of these advantages, certainly, but she was very alone. And she had this kind of free spirit. What I wanted to try and do with Emily French - not just make her a stock character that's killed, the victim - I wanted to sort of open up and understand her a little more and also maybe really kind of get into the vulnerability of a woman at that point in our history and the choices that she had and didn't have.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You have been drawn to characters like this.
CATTRALL: I have, in a sense...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I mean, you portray sexually complicated women. I mean, definitely "Sex And The City," this is another...
CATTRALL: Yes.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why is that important, to show women having complicated sex lives, especially older women?
CATTRALL: Well, I think women and the complexities of being a woman, especially in today's society, are not explored enough. I've really - in the last 14, 15, 16 years now - since the end of "Sex And The City," spent a lot of time in Europe working and really been very fortunate to play characters that are multifaceted and multidimensional. I'm very fortunate to have this stage of my career where I can look at these questions and challenges that I'm having in the world as a woman, now 60, and looking at them and saying well - how can I through what I do, through my work, explore that?
So these kind of characters, these kind of sort of challenges of what middle age brings - it brings a lot of wisdom - you lose, you gain, as in every stage of your life. But I think that I'm very attracted to that. More than just the sexual energy, I think that the wonderful thing about "Sex And The City" is that it was explicitly revealing and sharing with an audience four different points of view on any half-hour show. And I think, collectively, those points of view made up one complete woman. I got to have more fun then maybe the other (laughter) characters...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Just a little.
CATTRALL: ...But I found also with that kind of voracious appetite of someone like a Samantha Jones - I don't see Emily French - she's more lonely and desperate of some kind of connection. Samantha - it was a totally different ballgame. That was just her appetite. But the other side of that was she was covering up a lot of her fear of intimacy, which I find, as we get older, is - can be prevalent.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I guess it must be asked. We must do it. It is, I think, contractually obligated for me to ask you, and you know what's coming here. When is the band from "Sex And The City" getting back together (laughter)?
CATTRALL: You know, I take that as such a great complement, Lulu, because wherever I go, invariably, people say that they're interested or they want to know if there's going to be more. and...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I would watch it in warzones. It kept me sane.
CATTRALL: (Laughter).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It made me happy.
CATTRALL: No, it - I guess, you know, being at this juncture of my life, I'm thinking - how do I want to spend my time? What would be the reason behind it? What is there to say that has been left unsaid? Is - that's my question. And who would write it? And what would it be about? And that, to me, would be the reason to go back and do a film.
I look back on that experience, and the only thing I say is - oh, God, I wish I would've enjoyed it even more than I did. And what I always loved about Samantha was her - she had no judgment. You know, there was an acceptance there of her girlfriends. She was always, always talking from the mount because she'd been there and done that. She was older, and she had that daring side of her. But there was this love, this bedrock respect and love, that I just loved in playing her. And I loved it because it was so an integral part of those storylines and the experience.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You seem to have always played these sort of older and wiser roles, even when you weren't necessarily that old (laughter).
CATTRALL: Acting, acting...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Acting.
CATTRALL: Yes, my - I had a teacher who'd say, acting acting. But the jobs that I'm being offered now and the opportunities and to work with such amazing people, it's just joyous. I was with a fellow actress about four or five years ago. I was visiting her up in Scotland. And...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You got to name drop. I'm sorry. You have to do it.
CATTRALL: It was Tilda Swinton.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK.
CATTRALL: Oh, gosh, I hate doing that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, once you said Scotland, I kind of knew.
(LAUGHTER)
CATTRALL: And - I just think she's fantastic. And she sort of turned to me and - we're walking this, like, wooden landing - and she says, you know what's great? And I said, what? And she said, we got nothing to prove (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF BOBBY MORGANSTEIN'S "SEX IN THE CITY")
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Kim Cattrall - you can see her in Agatha Christie's "The Witness For The Prosecution." It airs tomorrow night on Acorn TV. You can access it by going to acorntv.tv.
Thank you so much.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thanks, Lulu.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOBBY MORGANSTEIN'S "SEX IN THE CITY")
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "KISS AN ANGEL GOOD MORNING")
CHARLEY PRIDE: (Singing) You've got to kiss an angel good morning and let her know you think about her when you're gone.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Ah, the signature tune of country singer Charley Pride, just one of dozens of No. 1 hits he's had. In total, he's sold some 70 million records. Pride was also the first African-American singer to perform at the Grand Ole Opry - that was in 1967.
And in two weeks, Charley Pride will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys - pretty extraordinary for a man who grew up in Mississippi the son of a sharecropper.
Charley Pride spoke to us from the studios of KERA in Dallas, and he told us about his early baseball career and how he discovered country music.
PRIDE: We had an old Philco radio my dad bought. And of course he was the only one that'd mess with the knobs. And whatever we heard is what he heard. So Nashville was about 275 miles from where I was born down in Mississippi. And it was 50,000 watts, and that's what we got every Saturday. And I just got kind of hooked on it. And I bought me a Sears Roebuck guitar and started emulating the singers, and that's - and one thing led to another from baseball to segueing into this.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, you originally wanted to be a Major League Baseball player.
PRIDE: Right. See, when I saw Jackie Robinson go to the Major Leagues, I'm picking cotton beside my dad. And I said, uh-oh, here's my way out of the cotton field. So when I saw him go to the majors, I said, boy, I tell you, if I'd like to go to the Major Leagues and break all the records, then set new ones by the time I'm 35, 36, then I would sing. That's kind of the way I had it kind of planned.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you're playing baseball - tell me about how you made the transition into being a full-time musician.
PRIDE: Well, I went in the Army in '56, got out in '58. I still was signed to the Memphis Red Sox. And I - but when I went in the Army, I was single. But when I came out, I had married and had a kid. I had a chance to try to get my release from Memphis, and I read an article in The Sporting News - baseball players capable of playing A-ball, write this number. I got a reply from Missoula, Mont. And when I got to Montana, Red Foley and Red Sovine came up there to do a show. I went out backstage. They let me sing on the show. They said, you ought to go to Nashville. I went to Nashville.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter).
PRIDE: I went to Nashville, and the guy that was doing public relation for the publishing company they had told me to go to, he come in and heard me. I sang for him. He said, where you from? I said, I'm from - born and raised in Mississippi, but I live in Montana. Well, how do they take you up there? I said, about the way you doing right now - when they see me because, you know, with the pigmentation I have - I mean, I say (yodeling). Oh, you look like them and sound like us.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SNAKES CRAWL AT NIGHT")
PRIDE: (Singing) Oh, the snakes crawl at night. That's what they say. When the sun goes down, then the snakes will play.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So when you went and auditioned, they said, you sound like us - I guess white and country - but you're black.
PRIDE: No, they didn't say - let me explain that, too. You see, Chet Atkins took the dub. I did a dub for Jack Clement. Chet Atkins took it out to Monterey, Calif., and played it for all the bigwigs there. And he said, how do you like this voice? So they all said, he sounds good.
So when he showed the picture and said he was colored, everybody looked at one another. But unanimously, they said - well, we're still going to sign him. We ain't going to say nothing about it, and that's the way they did it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JUST BETWEEN YOU AND ME")
PRIDE: (Singing) But just between you and me, you're too much to forget.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm going to ask you a little bit, since you brought it up, about the fact that you are African-American in a genre that is still seen as, sort of, music for white America in many ways. Do you see it as that way, country music?
PRIDE: No, that's why I am where I am. I never see nothing but the staunch American, Charley Pride. But see, like, when I got into it, about the minute I told you a while ago about the you look like them and sound like us - say, for instance, like I'm talking to you - they use different description. They'll say, well, Charley, how does it feel to be the Jackie Robinson of country music? Or Charley, how does it feel to be the first colored country singer? Or how does it feel to be the first negro country singer? Or how does it feel to be the first black country singer?
Or - so it don't bother me other than I'm have to explain it to you how I maneuvered around all these obstacles to get to where I am today. So I'd like to clear that up because - like, I've got a great-grandson and daughter. And they going to be asking them that, too, if we don't get out of this crutch we've all been in all these years of trying to get free of all of that, you see - y'all, them and us.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I've read that your sister used to say to you - why are you singing their music?
PRIDE: Right, right. She passed on, just passed on about six, eight months ago. She was the oldest of 11 of us. She said to me - she said, why you singing their music? And I said, well, it's my music, too. She said, well, it ain't going to get you nothing.
Now, before she passed away, I bought her about two or three SUVs. And she tells people she said, I laughed at him and all that and told him it was - why is he playing their music? And she said, but who's laughing now?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IS ANYBODY GOING TO SAN ANTONE?")
PRIDE: (Singing) Is anybody going to San Antone or Phoenix, Ariz.? Any place is all right as long as I can forget I've ever known her.
As far as being in the country music field, my greatest feeling was when I was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. But it's so many other - you know, I got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame between Gladys Knight and Leonard Bernstein. I've got three Grammys. I'm second only to Elvis to have sold the most records on RCA before they sold it all to, I guess, to Sony.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Did you meet Elvis?
PRIDE: Oh yes, yes. We used to play the Houston Livestock Show. But yes, I met him. In fact, I went to two of his openings. The third opening I went to with him was 1971. That year, I won male vocalist and entertainer of the year. I was out in the audience.
He said, ladies and gentleman, out in the audience is a - (singing) the easy part's over now. That's the line in one of my singles - and he says, Charley Pride. So I waved and everything, and he invited us all up to the suites. Then I got up there, Lulu, and I walked all the way around all those 15 suites up there. I said, boy, this is a long way from picking cotton beside my dad trying to get here, you see? So you just think about those kind of things, too.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Charley Pride, he'll receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys on February 12. He joined us from the studios of KERA in Dallas.
Thank you so much, sir, for taking the time to talk to us today.
PRIDE: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "KISS AN ANGEL GOOD MORNING")
PRIDE: (Singing) Kiss an angel good morning, and love her like the devil when you get back home.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
You never know what roadside attraction you might find along America's byways. Our colleague Melissa Block is on a reporting road trip around the country, and she just had to check out a behemoth in Kansas.
MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: When I told folks in Kansas that I was going to be in the southeastern corner of the state, everybody said you've got to go see Big Brutus. Big Brutus - what's Big Brutus? It is the world's largest electric shovel. And that's where we're going right now. We just saw a sign. Big Brutus in West Mineral, Kan.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Come with us as we guide you through the past, present and future of this mammoth mining machine.
BLOCK: Mammoth is right. You can see it on the horizon from miles away.
BETTY BECKER: At the very top, it's 160 feet, or like a 16-story building.
BLOCK: Our guide is Betty Becker. She's manager of Big Brutus and the mining museum.
BECKER: Weighs 11 million pounds.
BLOCK: 11 million pounds?
BECKER: Yes.
BLOCK: Put another way, 5,500 tons. Big Brutus is painted bright orange. Its job was to scoop rock and dirt off the coal seam in a strip mine. Each bucket load could fill three railroad cars.
BECKER: It took 52 men about 11 months to assemble big Brutus.
BLOCK: The cost, back in 1962, $6.5 million. Big Brutus worked 24 hours a day for 11 years. When the PNM coal mine shut down in 1974, Big Brutus dug his last pit right here. They backed Brutus out and parked the giant in the fields. It would have cost too much to dismantle so...
BECKER: They just left it here.
BLOCK: Should we go up?
BECKER: Let's go.
BLOCK: All right.
BECKER: Watch your step, and watch your head.
BLOCK: We climb up a metal staircase till we're five stories off the ground. The boom goes up another 100 feet or so. You used to be able to climb all the way up there, too. Some people even got married up there but not anymore.
BECKER: There's the stairway to the boom, which has been locked and closed and no one...
BLOCK: I see.
BECKER: ...Goes there.
BLOCK: Boom is closed by notice from insurance company.
BECKER: Yes, ma'am. Yes.
BLOCK: It's tempting though, isn't it?
BECKER: No, not really.
(LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: The shovel operator would sit in a glass-enclosed compartment. You get a nice view of Kansas farmland from up high here. It took huge amounts of power to run this electric shovel.
BECKER: And they plugged it in just like you plug in an electric lamp or something.
BLOCK: Betty Becker's father drove a coal truck at the mine, hauling coal from the pit to the cleaning plant.
BECKER: He passed away on the job. So he was at work, and we got a call to come to the hospital, and he was gone. So anyway, but that was...
BLOCK: Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry.
BECKER: ...That was in 1966. That was a long time ago. So...
BLOCK: Betty tells me when the mine shut down in the '70s, it was devastating for this community.
BECKER: West Mineral got quite a bit smaller because people had to go other places for, you know, work. And then we lost our school, and just how little towns are gone - they're not as popular anymore. But Big Brutus will be here forever. So...
(LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: And after all this time, she's grown awfully fond of the monster machine.
BECKER: Yeah, it's like part of my family (laughter) - a big part.
BLOCK: A very big part.
BECKER: A very big part (laughter), yes.
BLOCK: Betty Becker, thanks so much for showing us around Big Brutus - 16 stories tall, the world's largest electric shovel in West Mineral, Kan.
BECKER: Thank you very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAETANO VELOSO SONG, "POR QUEM?")
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's our colleague Melissa Block. She's on a reporting road trip we're calling Our Land.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
President Donald Trump's executive order barring many foreigners, including all refugees, from entering the U.S. caused confusion at airports around the world. Travelers have been detained and turned back. And then, late last night, a federal judge in Brooklyn issued a temporary stay on part of the executive order, saying federal agents could not deport anyone who arrived in the U.S. with a valid visa. This is a rapidly developing story with lots of threads to follow. And we begin this morning with John Burnett, who covers immigration for NPR. Hi, John.
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: Hey, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what is the situation? As we know it right now, it is changing all the time. But what are you hearing about what's happening at airports across the country?
BURNETT: Well, we just got some new information. I was on a call with some of the lawyers who filed the big lawsuit to stop the executive order in New York, including the ACLU and some others. And so these are lawyers that have their eyes and ears in the airports. They have their representatives there trying to meet some of these travelers. So this is the latest we've heard.
They say that we continue to face Border Patrol non-compliance at all of these airports. And despite the fact that they feel like there are now four federal judges who have ordered stays against this - Trump's order, that there's non-compliance on sort of a massive scale. They said...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Non-compliance meaning that they're keeping those people still.
BURNETT: Meaning that immigration agents continue to detain and deport and try to get the green cards from some of these who fall under Trump's order. And they're hearing it from across the country now, from the airports in Los Angeles, at JFK in New York, Dulles here in Washington, DFW in Dallas. And, again, they're saying in some cases, if you'll give us your green card, your lawful residency card, we'll let you get on the flight. And we won't bother you anymore.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's what immigrations officials are telling people with green cards when they're coming into...
BURNETT: Yeah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...The country from these countries.
BURNETT: And so they're saying this is a checkerboard. They're saying that the government - the White House is not giving good guidance to all of its immigration enforcers around the nation.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK. What recourse do these advocates and travelers have? What can they try to do to get the government to comply?
BURNETT: Well, again, these lawyers, they're complaining that they're not able to see these clients, that every time they talk to Customs and Border Protection, that they're told that you just have to wait, or you can call President Trump. What's actually happening on these airplanes is that if the travelers have cell phones, that are being detained, they can call family members, who then call lawyers.
But there's no way for the lawyers to meet them. And so what they're doing is they're in these - in the airports with signs in Farsi and Arabic saying, if you have a relative who can't exit this flight, please call us. And there's, you know, like, a thousand or more of these volunteer lawyers now kind of fanning out in these international airports across the country. It's kind of extraordinary.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Just to remind people, part of President Trump's order is meant to cover travelers from seven countries. I'm going to name them now - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia. Have you heard any specific stories of how this is playing out at airports?
BURNETT: Well, he said there's one case in which there was a young Iranian Fulbright scholar who was put on a flight. Customs and Border Protection put her on a flight that was ready to take off. The lawyers were able to prevail on the officials at the last minute. They turned the plane around on the tarmac, came back to the gate, and turned her loose. So this really is chaotic.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I think we should listen to, now, the administration's response. This is White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on "Face The Nation" this morning.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FACE THE NATION")
REINCE PRIEBUS: I think - so here's what the correct statement is. The executive order itself is not placing further burdens on people that hold green cards. But what is reality - and this is the part that people get confused with - is that a Customs and Border Patrol agent does have pretty wide discretion in asking questions and making sure that the person coming in is not dangerous to Americans.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So Priebus there is talking specifically about green card holders. There's been a lot of confusion about this. You know, are they actually subject to this, or are they not? What do you think he's saying here?
BURNETT: Well, I think - I mean, even under that, Lulu, is that the individual port directors of these ports of entry have enormous latitude of how they want their agents to enforce this. And so it literally depends. If you fly into Atlanta, they - Atlanta and Chicago - they have released some of these detainees. If you end up in San Francisco or New York, they're still detaining them. So they do have a lot of interpretive powers of how they want to respond to this order.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK. John Burnett, thank you so much for being with us.
BURNETT: It's been a pleasure.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
And now we go to Dulles International Airport in Virginia where at least 63 people were detained. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang has been there this morning. And he joins us now on the line.
Hi.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: Good morning, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What's the status of the detained travelers? Do you know?
WANG: We're still trying to figure out those details. There's a lot of unanswered questions now, the night after a number of federal judges issued orders, including, of course, the New York federal judge that issued a stay blocking the deportation of refugees and other foreigners that were subject to President Donald Trump's executive order. So we're still trying to figure that out.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You're there. Describe the scene to us. What are you seeing?
WANG: Well, I'm here at the arrivals gate for international arrivals and lots of families here and also a group of attorneys and volunteers, some of them holding signs saying, welcome to the USA in English and in Arabic saying, free help and having balloons. Lawyers also brought a printer here. They're all at the ready, ready to help any refugee families, any other international travelers that may be detained at customs because of this executive order.
But so far, you know, we saw one Afghan family come, a mother and her son. The son worked for the U.S. military as a translator in Afghanistan. They were able to get through customs. And they are in the car on their way back home to their relatives in Virginia right now so no issue so far. But the lawyers are here at the ready, ready to advocate on their behalf.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We are seeing protests in various airports around the country. They started yesterday. They seem to be continuing today. What are the lawyers you're talking to saying about the stay from the district court in New York?
WANG: Well, today, they - a lot of them are saying, you know, we're going to see kind of the wait-and-see approach to see how exactly will that be applied. Again, we saw that one Afghan family pass by no problem. But they are still waiting to see if they - anyone else runs into any issues and to test out to see if, actually, this order will be applied nationwide as the judge ordered in New York. And so the lawyers are ready to help them - you know, if they get detained, to provide legal assistance.
They also have, you know, the small water bottles and other care packages ready to help relatives who are waiting here in the waiting area to receive their loved ones. And so it - so far, it's kind of a wait-and-see approach. There's a long wait for the folks after they get off the plane sometimes to go through customs. And so we'll see what happens.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Just briefly, have you been able to speak to any of the family members who are waiting for their detained loved ones?
WANG: I spoke with that Afghan family, some of the relatives. They live in Virginia, and they were a little anxious to see what would happen. They were very thankful that no issues, it seems, to take home their mother and their brother.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: NPR's Hansi Lo Wang at Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
Thanks so much.
WANG: You're welcome, Lulu.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
And now we're going to talk specifically about refugees. Under the new rules, Syrian refugees are barred indefinitely. And those from other countries have to wait 120 days before trying to enter the United States. David Miliband is the president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee and a former foreign secretary of the United Kingdom. And he joins us on the line. Thank you so much for being with us.
DAVID MILIBAND: Good morning.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So first, sir, your reaction.
MILIBAND: I think that America has long been a haven for refugees as well as immigrants. And it's a very sad day when, within shouting distance of the Statue of Liberty, a court has to prevent the deportation of people who have served with the American military because a presidential court order is trying to keep them out of the country. I think there are two other very important points for your listeners.
The first is that there are 60,000 refugees around the world who've been through the vetting process, the quite severe security-vetting process that already exists to screen out people before they're admitted as refugees. And they are put in limbo by the presidential order. Of course, that's a very small proportion of the total 25 million refugees around the world.
The second point is that there was a propaganda gift in the executive order for those who would do damage to the United States. ISIS want nothing more than to be able to say to Muslims around the world that America doesn't want them. And I'm afraid that this executive order plays into their hands.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I want to ask specifically about your organization. There's been a lot of confusion since this order was signed. How is your organization reassessing its priorities?
MILIBAND: So we are an international humanitarian-aid organization working in 30 countries. We helped about 23 million people last year with water and sanitation, with health care, with education. But we're also a resettlement agency, a refugee resettlement agency in 29 U.S. cities. We honor the history of the U.S. We were founded by Albert Einstein just before the second world war to help rescue Jews from Europe and allow them to find safe haven in the U.S. We're New York-based.
We are obviously working on two fronts. First of all, we want to maintain the services that we provide internationally because most refugees are stuck around the world in countries, either bordering conflict or on transit routes from there on. But we're also determined to make the case that refugee resettlement has been an American success story.
Sixty thousand Cubans we've resettled - just the IRC - since 1960. The founder of Intel, Andy Grove, was resettled by the IRC in 1956. And right up to this Friday, when I was in Silver Spring, Md., I met new refugees from Syria, from Iran - actually a Christian from Iran who we'd resettled.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is this going to change your attitude, though?
MILIBAND: Well, we are, at the moment, determined to make the case that the review period that is underway involving, we hope, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the Department of Defense, recognizes that the security-vetting system that the United States has is already a serious one and a severe one.
We argue that the executive order is founded on a myth, which is that there is no security vetting. There is security vetting. It's an average of 12 to 18 months. It involves biometric testing. And so, of course, we have to work with whatever the U.S. State Department, who are ultimately the funders of these programs, desired. But we also want to use the next 120 days or 90 days to make the case that this is an American success story.
I'd make one other point to you. It's not a tenable situation for people to be detained in their dozens at airports, never mind to be stopped in their thousands around the world at airports and at embassies. This policy needs to be addressed urgently because it's in grave danger of spiraling out of control.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: David Miliband, president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee - he joined us via Skype - thanks so much for being with us.
MILIBAND: Thank you so much.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
We turn now to Nigeria. You'll recall in 2014, almost 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram in Chibok. It sparked a global outcry. But according to new reporting, that number may barely scratch the surface of the problem. In a piece called "Child, Bride, Mother: Nigeria" in today's New York Times, photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair reveals that there could be nearly 25,000 girls who've been taken. And a warning to our listeners - some of the details of this conversation include graphic descriptions. She joins us from our studios in New York. Thanks for being with us.
STEPHANIE SINCLAIR: Thank you for having me, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: How many girls are missing? What is the number that you discovered?
SINCLAIR: Well, there are no exact figures. But the latest figures that I had from the head of the Borno State Emergency Management Agency was that they have at least some whereabouts of about 9,000 girls who were abducted. But they think that there are an additional 13,000 girls who are unaccounted for in the areas they've been able to assess. And that's not counting the areas that are too dangerous to do more investigation.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You managed to speak to some of them that had returned. What did they tell you? Who are these girls?
SINCLAIR: These are girls who saw no chance of being rescued after being held for - some of them - four years and decided to just make a run for it, you know, when the opportunity was there.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And so what did they tell you about their ordeal? How old were they when they were taken? What happened to them while they were being held by Boko Haram?
SINCLAIR: I mean in all honesty, in 25 years of my doing this profession, I have never heard stories as horrific as these girls described. They told me stories from them kind of being pregnant and trying to escape and getting captured by the insurgents and then being lashed a hundred times while pregnant so bad that they had to go to the hospital because they weren't going to live - that they were taken there.
Other girls say that they intimidated them from trying to escape by killing other girls in front of them, setting them on fire, starving them so they were so weak that they didn't have the energy to try to escape. Many of the girls left either pregnant or carrying children. Some of the girls' children died along the route home. Some of them died as soon as they arrived (unintelligible). Just they didn't have enough milk to give the kids. And they were so malnourished themselves that they just - you know, they just couldn't keep them alive.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: How old were these young women?
SINCLAIR: I met girls who were abducted as young as 10 years old. Many of them - 'cause some of them had been held, you know, two to four years, most of the girls I spoke with were between the ages of 14 and 17.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And many of them had children?
SINCLAIR: Almost all of them had children.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why do you think we haven't heard about these women - these young girls - before?
SINCLAIR: Well, you know, I asked that question when I was there. And what I was told is that the focus has been on the Chibok girls - that, you know, there was an international outcry over these 276 girls - and rightly so. I mean, it's horrific to think of, you know, over 200 girls going to school and being abducted at one time.
That said, you know, there was so much effort put on that that there wasn't really any effort kind of put on all the other girls that were taken simultaneously or actually not long after. One of the reports that I read was that, you know, Boko Haram was actually emboldened by the success in their minds of abducting the Chibok girls and just how easy it was. And so it's starting to be documented that they're using child marriage as a weapon of war.
Having girls for fighters to marry is one of the things that they can recruit fighters with. You know, if you join us, we'll get you a beautiful wife. And so many of the girls reported this. And, also, when they have children, they're going to be raising these children to then reinforce their fighting ranks because they've been fighting for so long.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: As you mentioned, you've worked on issues related to child brides for a long time. You founded an organization called Too Young To Wed. You know this issue. I should also tell our audience we know each other. And when you told me about this story, you said it was the most important story that you've ever worked on. Why?
SINCLAIR: I definitely think the child marriage issue is - it's my life's work, and it's something that I think is extremely important. I mean, just statistically, girls are married every two seconds around the world. But rarely have I heard this kind of abuse. The abuse is so extreme. And that's just what I find so unacceptable.
I mean, I can't even imagine what the public response would be if this happened in another, more developed country. This isn't just a development issue. This is an emergency issue where these girls are in desperate need of help - not just the ones who are still abducted but also the ones who have escaped by themselves and don't have the support that they need.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What's been the Nigerian government's reaction to this? Have they been getting involved?
SINCLAIR: The story just came out last night, so I haven't heard from them since the story came out. I will say that when I spoke to them, at least the members of SEMA, which is the emergency management - the State Emergency Management Association - I mean Agency - they were supportive of us getting the word about this - out about this. They need more support. President Buhari has definitely stepped up efforts against Boko Haram - but not enough compared to the scale of what's happened to the people out there and to the girls in specific. So their need - they need more support.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Stephanie Sinclair - her story is in today's New York Times. You can see photos there and online. There's also a 10-minute film. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for having me.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Kinan Azmeh is a Syrian musician and a green-card holder who has lived in the U.S. for the past 16 years. He's a member of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, which tours all around the world. And because he was born in Syria, one of the seven countries whose citizens are currently barred from entering the United States, he's unsure if he will be able to re-enter the country as planned next month.
KINAN AZMEH: I have a concert in Beirut on the 1. So the plan was to leave, go back home right after.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Have you been in touch with a lawyer? How are you getting your information? You mentioned you're reading articles.
AZMEH: Yes. I mean, the lawyer, actually, who filed for my case when I applied for my green card three years back - she told me that - you know, she wrote back one line, saying it's not looking very good. But, again, also, she mentioned that, you know, things are changing by the minute. So I guess I'm just keeping myself updated as much as I can.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You've been in the U.S. for 16 years. That's a long time to put down roots. How are you processing this, the idea that, possibly, you may not be allowed to return?
AZMEH: You know, I've been trying to claim both Damascus and New York as homes. I used to travel back and forth as much as I can, except in the last five years, of course. It's quite a contrast. And processing all of this while preparing to play a Mozart clarinet concerto in a few days - I don't know. Maybe it gives meaning to what I'm doing. But, also, in the meantime, I'm not thinking of the materialistic things.
I think, actually, mostly of the friends and loved ones that I have in New York and in the U.S. in general. And I know that this also shall pass. I try to be optimistic as much as I can. But I'm not allowing my emotional reactions to get in the way. I'm just trying to think, you know, little by little, what I can do.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you think a moment like that - you mention that it increases your focus on the music. Do you think this will inform your performance?
AZMEH: You know, it just - I continue to believe that making music is an act of freedom. You know, and when I play - even when I'm practicing on my own, I really think this way. But it's quite - today, I had, actually, this flashback. There's a piece that I've written about 12 years ago in 2005 while I was detained at JFK Airport, waiting to be questioned. And I wrote this piece called "Airports."
And back then, I was thinking, you know, all these people are unified only for having a "different passport," quote, unquote. And I thought maybe a - kind of a protest song can unite all of these people. And now it's sad to see that this piece is still relevant today, 12 years later.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thank you so much. Kinan Azmeh - he's a Syrian-born musician and a U.S. green card holder. I appreciate your time, sir.
AZMEH: Thank you very much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF HEWAR'S, "AIRPORTS")
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
The news this morning is, of course, fallout from President Trump's executive order on immigration. That includes a freeze on all refugee resettlements for up to four months and a review of the vetting process for refugees coming from predominantly Muslim countries. We're going to hear from one Somali family that entered the U.S. before the ban went into effect. They arrived in Lowell, Mass., on Wednesday. WBUR's Shannon Dooling has their story.
SHANNON DOOLING, BYLINE: Hawo Ahmed said landing in the U.S. earlier this week felt like a dream. She and her family from Somalia could hardly believe they'd made it after beginning their refugee application six years ago. They bought new winter boots and jackets when they got word they were headed for a new home in Massachusetts. Hawo said as soon as she got off the plane, she saw an airport television with news anchors talking about President Trump's plans to stop accepting refugees.
HAWO AHMED: Even tears were filled up in my eyes 'cause I felt very bad for others. They have more expectation. Some have been told where they are going, which state they are going. And if they stop all these things, it's going to be very painful.
DOOLING: The 24-year-old arrived in Lowell with her sisters and their mother. The family fled Somalia amid the Civil War in 1993 and headed for Kenya, where the girls grew up and learned English. Hawo was a baby when the family left and only knows what her mother has told her about that time.
AHMED: She said that it was, like, conflict all over the country. People were killing each other like tribes. Different tribes were killing each other. And they even used to come in the houses to rape the girls and kill them. So they had to move.
DOOLING: Many other members of the family fled Somalia, as well. Hawo says her aunt and cousin live in a refugee camp in Kampala, Uganda. They only had one more interview in the vetting process before they were hoping to meet Hawo and her family in Massachusetts. Now Hawo's not sure what will happen to them.
AHMED: I couldn't sleep last night. I just think about them. And she has been in the process for so long. And we want - if you can help her.
DOOLING: Resettlement agencies are accustomed to hearing these worries from refugees distraught about family members left behind. Jeff Thielman is president of the International Institute, the agency that brought the Ahmed family to Lowell. Thielman says there are countless stories like theirs, families going through the proper procedures, trying for years to reunite. And now, with Trump's executive action, he's not sure just how long that wait will be.
JEFF THIELMAN: We know how heartbreaking it is for this whole process to happen. And they're doing everything right to come to the United States. They're doing everything they're supposed to do to come here. But there's this obstacle to getting here.
DOOLING: Of course, proponents of Trump's restrictions argue there may not be enough obstacles to being resettled in the U.S. Jessica Vaughan is director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports limiting immigration. Vaughan says it's about time the refugee resettlement system got an overhaul.
JESSICA VAUGHAN: The point is to make sure that we are not unnecessarily putting ourselves at risk or assisting ISIS, which has promised to infiltrate the refugee flow by being reckless and going forward with a program that needs a review.
DOOLING: And while the Trump administration pushes forward with that review, Hawo and her family are grateful to be in the U.S. She says she's eager to start college, to get a degree in business and to help her family still living in the refugee camp. For NPR News, I'm Shannon Dooling in Massachusetts.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
What a week - lots of change. But there's always one thing you can count on staying the same. It's time for The Puzzle.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Will Shortz is the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle master. Good morning.
WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Good morning, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So I'm new to this. And so I have a few questions. I'm curious. How do you put The Puzzle together? How do you think of them?
SHORTZ: Well, I just play around with words in my head. I find the best time to do that is in bed. I don't know.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In bed (laughter)?
SHORTZ: Do you get new ideas in my bed? Yeah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sometimes.
SHORTZ: Get some of my best ideas then. And, sometimes, I wonder, after 30 years, am I ever going to run out of ideas? But so far, so good.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So far, so good. And listeners send you puzzles, as well, right?
SHORTZ: Yeah. There's a form online on the NPR website where people can submit ideas. One important thing is it has to be something good for radio 'cause...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right.
SHORTZ: This is the medium. Something that's too complicated that you need to read - that doesn't work. Something that's changed over the years - there's a lot of tools online now for solving puzzles.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Ah.
SHORTZ: And I try to use challenge puzzles that are - can't be too easily solved online.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Last week's puzzle came from one of our listeners, right?
SHORTZ: Yeah. It came from Dan Pitt of Palo Alto, Calif. And I said the numbers 5,000, 8,000 and 9,000 share a property that only five integers altogether have. And I said, identify the property and the two other integers that have it. Well, when written in words, these integers have the five vowels A, E, I, O, U exactly once and no Y. And the only other two integers with this property are 6,010 and 10,006.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We received more than 500 responses. And the winner is Sam Levitin him from Worcester, Mass. Nice job, Sam.
SAM LEVITIN: Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Are you ready to play The Puzzle?
LEVITIN: Yes.
SHORTZ: All right. Every answer today is a made-up, two-word phrase in which the first word has six letters. The last three letters spell the second word that will complete the phrase. For example, if I said a scurrying insect whose appearance has been affected by radiation, you would say mutant ant. Here you go - number one.
LEVITIN: OK.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter).
SHORTZ: A heavy weight in Massachusetts' capital.
LEVITIN: A Boston ton.
SHORTZ: That's right. Number two - a hero pilot who lives in a royal home.
LEVITIN: Something castle.
SHORTZ: No. Where else do...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Palace? Something palace?
SHORTZ: There you go. You have it. Palace ace. Just take the last three letters - palace ace.
LEVITIN: Oh, ace.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Oh, OK.
SHORTZ: OK, good. Here's your next one, a young lady who is very careful about spending money.
LEVITIN: A frugal gal.
SHORTZ: There you go.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Nice.
SHORTZ: A container from Mr. Spock's home planet.
LEVITIN: A Vulcan can.
SHORTZ: A bear's home that is concealed.
LEVITIN: A hidden den.
SHORTZ: Uh-huh. Prohibition on headwear for Sikhs.
LEVITIN: A turban ban.
SHORTZ: That's it. A collection of things in the room where you store clothes.
LEVITIN: A closet set.
SHORTZ: Uh-huh. A thin line of seats in a theater.
LEVITIN: A narrow row.
SHORTZ: Uh-huh. Boston basketball players' peculiar mannerism.
LEVITIN: Celtic tic.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You're on a roll (laughter).
SHORTZ: That's it. I tell you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: This is awesome.
SHORTZ: What an Italian tourist city has when its canals are frozen.
LEVITIN: Venice ice.
SHORTZ: Uh-huh. Now here's a quote. My name is Lassie, and I'm a German shepherd, for example.
LEVITIN: A collie lie.
SHORTZ: That's a collie lie. Meat sold in Batman's hometown.
LEVITIN: Gotham ham.
SHORTZ: Uh-huh. Mafia chief in England's capital.
LEVITIN: London don.
SHORTZ: That's it. And your last one is how things are done in Oslo.
LEVITIN: Norway way.
SHORTZ: That's the Norway way. Good job, Sam.
LEVITIN: Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was really, really good. You were fast, too. For playing our puzzle today, you'll get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin as well as puzzle books and games. You can read all about it at npr.org/puzzle. Sam, what member station do you listen to?
LEVITIN: WBUR in Boston.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: One of the best. Sam Levitin of Worcester, Mass., thanks for playing The Puzzle.
LEVITIN: Thank you both.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right, Will. What's the challenge for next week?
SHORTZ: It's an odd one. It's an original. Take six different letters. Repeat them in the same order. And then repeat them again, making 18 letters altogether. Finally, add T-E-B-A-S-K-E-T at the end. And if you have the right letters, and you space them appropriately, you'll complete a sensible sentence. What is it? So again - six different letters. Repeat them twice so you get 18 letters altogether. Add T-E-B-A-S-K-E-T at the end. And if you have the right letters, and you space them right, you'll complete a sensible sentence. What sentence is it?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you have the answer, go to our website, npr.org/puzzle, and click the submit-your-answer link. Just one entry per person, please. And our deadline for entries is Thursday, February 2 at 3 p.m. Eastern. So include a phone number where we can reach you at about that time. 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 WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle master, Will Shortz. Thanks so much, Will.
SHORTZ: Thanks a lot, Lulu.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Japan has a new sumo champion. And the big news is, he's Japanese. Last week, a 30-year-old sumo wrestler named Kisenosato, who weighs in at 385 pounds, was promoted to the rank of yokozuna, or grand champion. For years, one of the country's most famous national sports has been dominated by non-Japanese. We spoke to veteran sumo commentator Doreen Simmons who explained why that's been the case for nearly two decades.
DOREEN SIMMONS: Basically, it was the Mongolians mostly. There have been a few really good people from the old countries of the USSR. But it's really the Mongolians who have mastered it.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sumo lost its allure for young Japanese boys, she says, because the financial reward wasn't guaranteed.
SIMMONS: For the poorer Japanese sumo was a less good option. There were other things that they could do that would bring in a safer income.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Kisenosato is the first Japanese-born winner since 1998. His victory proved especially sweet coming after a history of crushing defeats in key fights. And he wept after he beat the long dominant, Mongolian-born Hakuho.
Doreen Simmons herself is a bit of a sensation. The British-born announcer has made Japan her home for over 40 years. And at 84, she still calls sumo matches on television.
SIMMONS: It's one of these crazy things. I mean, sometimes I'm talking and a total stranger on the train will say - oh, you're Doreen Simmons, aren't you? (Laughter) Yep. I keep my mouth shut more often.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Refugees and other foreigners were held at airports across the country yesterday as President Trump's executive order went into effect. By the evening, a federal judge in Brooklyn had issued an emergency stay on a part of the president's actions. That stay prevents the deportation of anyone with a valid visa after they have landed in the U.S.
That's a lot to keep track of, so I'm going to recap. President Trump's orders prevent all refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days, bars Syrian refugees indefinitely and prevents people from seven Muslim-majority countries from coming here for three months - on that list Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
Here to talk about some of the foreign policy implications is Richard Haass. He's head of the Council on Foreign Relations. And his new book is, "A World In Disarray."
Thanks for being with us.
RICHARD HAASS: Good morning.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Good morning. President Trump's executive actions on immigrants and refugees, it feels like a fundamental reset of how this nation views its borders. When you saw the news, what were your thoughts?
HAASS: Well, I was both surprised and unhappy - surprised because I don't always assume that everything said on a campaign becomes policy. And often, for good reason, it does not. But disappointed - beyond the humanitarian costs that you've been talking about this morning, this is - you know, it's bad for American universities. It's bad for the American economy. A lot of these people, you know, who are here already or who would come here would fill our schools, would work for our major technology and other firms.
But the foreign policy side of this is what worries me as much of anything. You're really letting down those people, say, in Iraq, who risked their lives to work to help Americans. This seems to me as not just personally unfair to them but sends a terrible message that those who work with us will not necessarily be protected. I think, also, if you're ISIS, this is a good day. This is a recruiting boon for you. It basically sends the message, the Americans are at war with Islam, just as we, ISIS, have been saying all along.
And lastly, I worry about the implications for America's 3 million Muslims. By essentially dealing with people not as people but as members of religious groups or people who come from certain countries, I'm worried this will alienate this community. We need them to be fully integrated in this society. We need their leaders, basically, to work with law enforcement to identify, in particular, those young people who do get radicalized. And what I fear this will do is actually increase the alienation and radicalization of this community. So the homegrown terrorist threat, which I worry far more about than anyone coming in from across our borders, that threat could actually get worse.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's important to say at this point that the Trump administration says this is not a religious ban. This is not a ban on Muslims. This is to protect the country from terrorism. When we look at our foreign policy, we've already seen reaction from around the Middle East. What do you think the effect is going to be in places like Iran and Iraq?
HAASS: Well, it won't - none of this will change the dynamics of what is going on in places like Iran and Iraq. Iraq is, you know, fighting ISIS. The government there is what it is. But Iran - and again, none of this will affect the Iranian nuclear program or Iran's push for regional primacy. Those are some of the reasons the Middle East is as turbulent as it is. But I think, again, it's a powerful propaganda tool for a country like Iran. What it says - the United States is implacably hostile to Muslims. I think it makes it more difficult, in some ways, for us to get Iraqis to work with us. The bottom line is I don't see how it helps us to stabilize this part of the world.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: This is part of what President Trump has called America first and America-first position in the world. What are the risks of this kind of isolationist, it seems, position?
HAASS: It's not just isolationist, America first - it sends the signal that the United States is going to narrow and calculate its self-interest. And we're simply not going to care about what it might mean for other people or other countries. So here, we're seeing the humanitarian crisis, but we're also going to see other countries taking matters into their own hands.
And they're going to stop deferring to American interests. They're either going to defer to the most powerful regional state, or they're going to increasingly arm themselves and do what they narrowly think they need to do. This is a world with much less American influence. This leads to a world with much less order. Yeah, I've written about a world in disarray. We could go from a world in disarray to something even worse all too quickly.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Richard Haass, head of the Council on Foreign Relations, his new book is "A World In Disarray," as he just mentioned. Thank you so much for being with us.
HAASS: Thank you for having me.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Members of the Trump administration are making the rounds on the Sunday talk shows in an attempt to clarify details of their executive order. But as the morning goes on, many of the details of the rule are becoming less clear. NPR's Mara Liasson joins us now.
Welcome.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let's just note that we are learning about major pieces of policy affecting many people on Sunday talk shows. Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, seemed to say this morning on NBC's "Meet The Press" that this executive order does not now affect green card holders. Let's hear what he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MEET THE PRESS")
REINCE PRIEBUS: As far as green card holders, moving forward, it doesn't affect them. But here's the deal, if you're coming in and out of one of those seven countries, then you're going to be subjected, temporarily, with more questioning until a better program is put in place over the next several months.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Walk us through what the president's team is saying this morning.
LIASSON: Well, what they're saying is, over time green card holders will not be affected, but in the short-term they might be subject to more screening. U.S. citizens might also be subject to more screening if they come back and forth from these countries.
The White House feels comfortable that most Americans will think this sounds perfectly reasonable. Donald Trump is just trying to keep them safe. Reince Priebus was also asked why other Muslim countries that have been the country of origin for terrorists who have attacked the U.S. but also are countries where Trump has business interests or hotels - why weren't they on the list. He said, well, maybe other countries will be added in the future.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Other countries added in the future. Mara, President Trump is just starting his second week, and he's already made a number of dramatic moves. Should this surprise anyone?
LIASSON: No, I think that he's moved very quickly to make good on promises that he made during the campaign. He has heartened his supporters by that, and he has horrified some of his critics. Yes, he's caused a lot of confusion and even chaos, as you saw at the airports this weekend. He's gotten pushback from the federal judiciary. Sometimes he stepped on his own story. He's embraced conspiracy theories. He's shown that he really cares about his box office, crowd size, etc.
But the bottom line is that the White House thinks he's been very successful. Kellyanne Conway tweeted this recently. She said (reading) get used to it. POTUS is a man of action and impact - promises made, promises kept, shock to the system. And he's just getting started. So I think when we heard during the campaign that supporters took him seriously but not literally and his critics took him literally but not seriously. Now we're learning it's a good idea to take him seriously and literally.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Indeed. How much of a shock to the system has it been, as Kellyanne Conway put it?
LIASSON: Well, I think it has been a shock to the system. There's also been questions raised about who's calling the shots at the White House. The executive order process seems driven by a very small group led by Steve Bannon who is Donald Trump's chief strategist and keeper of his nationalist, populist ideology. He has been accused of not coordinating enough with other agencies, which resulted in some of the chaos this weekend. But just to give you an idea of how important he is, Donald Trump has elevated him, by executive order, to a seat on the Principals Committee of the National Security Council at the same time that he downgraded the director of National Intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This is something that's unusual. David Axelrod, for instance, who had the same position in the Obama White House, said that he never sat on a principals committee meeting. He only was in the Situation Room as an observer. So the big question is - did Bannon create chaos on purpose or, did the chaos ensue because he and other White House aides are inexperienced or maybe even a little paranoid? I'm told one of the reasons that they didn't reach out and coordinate with other agencies was not just because they were in a rush, but because they feared that career bureaucrats would sabotage their policy.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Bannon has indeed been quite a controversial figure. Remind us a bit who he is now that he is so powerful.
LIASSON: He is a former investment banker, worked at Goldman Sachs, also was the chairman of Breitbart, the website which traffics in conspiracy theories and has become a haven for white nationalists. Bannon told a Daily Beast reporter in 2014 - he described himself as a Leninist. He said (reading) Lenin wanted to destroy the state. That's my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today's establishment.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: How is the rest of President Trump's party responding to this very eventful week?
LIASSON: I think there's been some pushback from Republican members of Congress on the refugee ban, but mostly silence from the leadership. I think Republicans are a little confused and cowed by Donald Trump. They have changed their positions - to get closer to him - on immigration, trade, governing by executive order, deficit spending, crony capitalism, conflicts of interest. Republicans used to be against all of those things, not anymore. Although at the bottom line, they're very, very happy that Donald Trump is going to be signing their agenda into law.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: NPR's Mara Liasson, thanks so much for being with us.
LIASSON: Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
On Saturday, two Syrian families arrived at Philadelphia International Airport only to be turned away and sent back to the Middle East. Those families, two brothers accompanied by their wives and children, had visas. They also had relatives who are U.S. citizens waiting for them in nearby Allentown, Pa. Sarah Assali is one of those relatives. She told WHYY's Bobby Allyn yesterday that her family submitted the paperwork to immigrate before the Syrian war started but that the conflict has made their departure more urgent.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SARAH ASSALI: We brought them here for a better future. But we're also now taking them away from, you know, a war zone where they don't have food and they don't have water. And you don't even know when you're going to have electricity next.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Congressman Charlie Dent is a Republican who represents Pennsylvania's 15th District where the Assali family lives. He's also home - it's also home to a large Syrian community. And Congressman Dent joins us on the line now. Thank you for being with us, sir, this morning.
CHARLIE DENT: Thank you, Lulu, for having me on the program.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Congressman, the relative of these two families is a constituent of yours. I understand you spoke with them about what happened yesterday. What did they say?
DENT: Yeah. Oh, I spoke them at length. My son and I visited their home last night. Well, here's what happened. Their family members had arrived from Syria via Beirut via Oman - Amman, Jordan via Doha, Qatar and then into Philadelphia. They arrived in Philly at about 7:45 a.m. I became aware of the situation around 10 o'clock from my son who happened to know the family well. He went to high school with one of them. He - my son contacted me. And I got a hold of the family. And bottom line is, we tried to find out the status of the family. And what occurred was the family was turned around and sent back to Qatar within three hours of touching down in Philadelphia, not giving us proper time to assist them.
The bottom line, I guess, is that these folks are - they're six Christians. They are not refugees. They were coming here on immigrant visas. They were - and again, they are not refugees. They have their paperwork in order for a green card. They were to be greeted and then taken up here to Allentown where the family purchased a home for them and furnished it and, you know, waiting for them. This family has been in process since about 2003, you know, long before the Syrian civil war. And so I guess what concerned me about this order is that apparently this executive order was not properly processed. You know, the Departments of - defense, state, homeland security and justice I don't believe were consulted in a meaningful way because, you know, we would've never - I can't imagine anybody from the Department of Defense and Department of State wanting to hold up a translator from Iraq who was coming into New York yesterday and being sent back. I mean, that to me...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you think it should be revoked, sir? Do you think that - is your advice to President Trump that it should be revoked?
DENT: Well, my advice yesterday was simply too - that this is unacceptable. I urged the administration to halt enforcement of the order until a more thoughtful and deliberate policy could be instated. And then, now, apparently, some federal judges have already more or less halted enforcement of the order, which I think is appropriate. So - and I guess that's what has me somewhat bewildered why, you know, this has gone into effect the way it did. Because the family that I'm dealing with, again, it's a Christian family. They were, you know, the family members were in flight when this order was announced and apparently then enforced. So I just think there was no - it just struck me as very unfair.
And we all want, by the way, we all want - I think every one of us has a goal to enact policy to keep America safe both at home and abroad. And I certainly think it's fair to consider ways to enhance vetting of refugees. That's fair. But, you know, but it has to be done thoughtfully and carefully. And, you know, this is not a - some people call this a Muslim ban. I don't think that's actually accurate. I mean, it's a country ban because...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But sir...
DENT: ...It's virtually anybody, yeah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...Just briefly we have - just in a few sentences - you keep on mentioning that these refugees in your district were Christian. Would you champion them if they were Muslim - just in a few sentences?
DENT: Well, of course. Look, my view is this - I do not support Muslim bans. I do not, you know, support Muslim registries. The point is that these people were coming here, not as refugees, but as immigrants. They were immigrants, you know, that had gone through the proper channels. Everything was done legally, lawfully, they spent thousands of dollars. People who are in that situation are being prevented from coming in.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thank you Congressman Charlie Dent...
DENT: Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...Republican from Pennsylvania.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Hundreds of travelers around the world were set to fly to the United States, some already buckled into their plane seats, when the travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries was implemented Friday night. At the Cairo airport, Iraqi travelers were told they wouldn't be flying to New York. Instead, they would be headed back to Iraq. NPR's Jane Arraf joins us now from Cairo. She spoke to one of those families.
Jane, tell us what happened.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: So Fouad Suleiman, with his wife and their three kids, had received approval in December for resettlement to the States. So they had gone through Cairo, and it had taken them, Lulu, two years to go through the screening process. As you know, it takes others a lot longer, so that's not bad.
They sold the house. He quit his job. They pulled the kids out of school. And they thought everything was fine until they landed in Cairo. And then there was that email from, they say, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad saying, don't let them on the plane. So they were, essentially, deported. They spent the night on the floor in the transit lounge, and they were sent back to Erbil on the first flight this morning instead of landing in Nashville for their new lives.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That must have been an incredible shock for the whole family. What did Mr. Suleiman tell you about that experience?
ARRAF: Well, we talked to them just after they landed back in Erbil. And Mr. Suleiman said he felt like he had been treated like a drug dealer.
FOUAD SULEIMAN: They treated me as a criminal because they deported me. An officer escorted me to - inside the plane. And he was sitting just in the same row of seats with my family. What did I do to deport me like a criminal, like a drug dealer, yeah?
ARRAF: So this is a man with three university degrees, including an MBA. He's from the Kurdistan region, which is one of the closest allies in the fight against ISIS. He says the whole thing was deeply humiliating.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And that's just one story. I imagine there must be so many others. What other stories are you hearing from people being affected by the ban?
ARRAF: Absolutely. There are a huge range of people. So in Jordan, we spoke with two Syrian refugee families. And they've actually been given their travel dates. One of the families was due to leave in two days. So again, after you wait years and you've been through all the screenings and you've been declared safe and cleared to travel, you sell all of your stuff and you cut your ties and you packed your suitcase. And now they're told that none of that is going to happen for the foreseeable future, so they're absolutely scrambling.
But it isn't just affecting Muslims. A Yazidi friend of mine, from the religious minority that the United States actually launched airstrikes to protect from ISIS, he's now separated from his wife because he's in the U.S. And she was given a U.S. visa to join him, but she was also prevented from boarding when she reached the airport in Iraqi Kurdistan. So this whole thing has left a lot of people scrambling.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I imagine that U.S. consulates and embassies have also told Iraqis and others on the list, you know, not to show up for their visa appointments. Just briefly - we have a few seconds left - what has been the reaction from the governments in the region? You're based in Cairo. What are you hearing? We have about 30 seconds.
ARRAF: Well, Cairo is really hoping that it will forge a better relationship with the United States. It hasn't really said very much about this. The Iraqis have said a lot. There's a move within Parliament now to basically ban Americans from entering Iraq. But it's not Parliament that decides. And that's probably unlikely to happen.
There's a lot of anger. And as you know, Lulu, in this region to begin with, there's a real feeling of betrayal among, particularly, people who help the United States. So this just cements that, both on the government level and on the level of ordinary people.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Stories from around the region from NPR's Jane Arraf. Thank you so much for joining us.
ARRAF: Thank you, Lulu.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
President Trump made several calls to world leaders on Saturday, including the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, French President Francois Hollande and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. But perhaps at the top of his phone list were German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin. We'll hear about the call to Merkel in a moment. But first, NPR's Lucian Kim has the reaction from Moscow.
LUCIAN KIM, BYLINE: The Kremlin is giving a very positive readout of Saturday's phone call between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although there was widespread speculation that Trump might propose lifting sanctions on Russia, Putin's spokesman told a local news agency that the subject had not been discussed. According to statements made by the White House and the Kremlin, the main subject of the call was how to defeat ISIS. Russian state television is welcoming the change in tone between Washington and Moscow.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Speaking Russian).
KIM: "Uniting forces in the fight against international terrorism," the host said, "is the main priority." While the White House didn't go into detail, except that the call lasted about an hour, the Kremlin's statement was much more specific. The conflict in Ukraine, which is the reason for sanctions, was only mentioned in passing after other issues, such as peace in the Middle East and nuclear nonproliferation. Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, cautions that previous U.S. administrations also tried to use the fight against terrorism as a way to jumpstart relations with Russia.
FYODOR LUKYANOV: It didn't work under Bush. It didn't work under Obama. There's a big question mark whether it will work now with Trump because the general atmosphere is totally poisoned by deepest mistrust since maybe the Cold War time.
KIM: As for lifting sanctions, Lukyanov said Putin is unlikely to bring up the subject on his own and that it would probably only be part of some bigger deal in the future. In their conversation, Putin reminded Trump that Russia was an ally in the two world wars and said Russia considers the U.S. the most important partner in fighting international terrorism.
But even if Putin can win over Trump, the new U.S. president faces staunch opposition to a rapprochement with Russia within his own party. Some Republicans in Congress want to write existing sanctions against Russia into law and impose new ones because of alleged Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election.
Lucian Kim, NPR News, Moscow.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: I'm Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in Berlin. According to her spokesman, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Trump talked for 45 minutes yesterday. The spokesman says the leaders discussed the importance of NATO and the need for each member state to pay its fair share, the turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa, relations with Russia and the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Merkel and Trump also said they will work to deepen ties between their countries. But recent polls here show most Germans are very suspicious of Trump and expect their country's relations with the U.S. will sour. Political and business leaders, unnerved by his pronouncements, have also lashed out. One is Matthias Wissmann, the head of the German Automobile Industry Association. He bristled at Trump's threats to slap a 35 percent import tariffs on German cars not made in the U.S.
MATTHIAS WISSMANN: (Speaking German).
NELSON: In a recent interview with German n-TV, Wissmann said the U.S. should remember it sells cars here, too. He warned that whoever starts with protectionist measures will end up, quote, "kicking the ball into his own goal."
Many here say they are glad Merkel challenged the president about his ban on all refugees and the restrictions on citizens from seven largely Muslim countries.
SIGMAR GABRIEL: (Speaking German).
NELSON: German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel at a news conference in Paris questioned how such orders could be imposed by a country that embraces Christian values like the U.S.
At the Kollwitz weekly market in central Berlin, people I spoke to expressed fear about what Trump might do next.
PETER ZEC: (Speaking German).
NELSON: Design consultant and author Peter Zec said he doesn't share in the, quote, "hysteria" about Trump. but he is concerned the president will pressure Merkel and other European leaders to end sanctions against Russia. He predicts lifting the sanctions might embolden Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, to seize more of Eastern Europe.
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Berlin.
(SOUNDBITE OF DUSTIN O'HALLORAN'S "RUNNER")
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Each year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists updates the doomsday clock. The nonprofit panel of scientists and scholars uses the clock to symbolize just how close we are to the apocalypse, which is set at midnight. And last Friday, they moved the clock forward and set the time at two and a half minutes to midnight, the most dire assessment since 1953.
But there's always a silver lining for some. Bad news for humanity could be good news for Larry Hall, or at least his bottom line. He's the CEO of the Survival Condo Project. To tell us more, he joins me now from Kansas. I think you are, sir, about a hundred feet underground.
LARRY HALL: I am. And the wonders of technology have us talking.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: First of all, what is a survival condo?
HALL: Well, a survival condo, in our context, is a converted Atlas F missile silo that was a mainstay in the Cold War era that once housed an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile. And the silo itself was designed to withstand a direct nuclear shock wave and still be able to launch the missile that was protected inside of it. So we have converted that structure into a modern-day, luxury survival bunker.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I understand it's about 15 stories.
HALL: It is. If you went from the floor on the bottom, which we call level 15 - from that bottom floor to the top of the elevator shaft is about 201 feet.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I think people are quite familiar with survivalist bunkers of different descriptions. But this is built as a luxury bunker. Describe some of the amenities that you have there.
HALL: Well, it's kind of like a miniature cruise ship. We have everything from a bar and a lounge to a movie theater. We've got a library. We have continuing education classrooms for the children. All the apartments in here have 9-foot ceilings, and they range from just over 900 square feet to just over 3,600 square feet.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Who are the types of people who are looking for something like this? What are their motivations?
HALL: People's fears and the people that have the financial resources to purchase these, you know, run the spectrum. There is no preponderance of one group over another. We've got Republicans and Democrats. And we've got people that are very much fearful of global climate change. And the big difference there is they argue about what causes it. You know, some people, you know, believe that it's a man-made event and other people believe that it's a natural phenomenon. But neither group disagrees that it's happening.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm curious - what are they asking for? What are the special things that they want to decorate their bunker with?
HALL: They ask for high-end appliances. They ask for extra electronic windows.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What are they? For someone who wouldn't know - I'm sort of trying to visualize it.
HALL: Picture a 55-inch LED TV. Instead of being in what we would call horizontal mode, you tip it so that it's in portrait-mode and hook it up to a high-definition camera that's on the surface. And you can change the scenes. And so right now, I'm sitting 100 feet under, and I'm looking at my wind turbine on the surface. And I can tell that it's daylight. And for all practical purposes, I can't tell that I'm a 100 feet underground.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: How long can someone survive down there?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, we have food for every person for at least five years. But we also have organic hydroponics and aquaculture, which is the raising fish. And with the wind turbine, the green energy, technically the requirement is that, you know, given the wind and everything else and raising our own food, we could be off grid indefinitely.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Larry Hall, CEO of the Survival Condo Project, thank you so much.
HALL: Thank you very much for having me.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
There's a rule in journalism that you never want to become the news. But with the new Trump administration, it seems that the quote, unquote, "media" is very often at the heart of the story. I would remind our listeners that freedom of the press is protected by the First Amendment along with speech and religion, fundamental U.S. freedoms. So we're going to be checking in regularly with different people who are observing this relationship between the president and the press.
We're joined this week by David Harsanyi. He's a senior editor at The Federalist, a conservative web publication. And he wrote a piece this past week which caught our eye. It's titled "Let's Hold All Politicians Accountable For Lying. Not Just The Ones We Dislike."
David Harsanyi, welcome.
DAVID HARSANYI: Thank you for having me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So tell us your basic argument.
HARSANYI: Well, I guess my basic argument is that a lie is a lie, no matter how complex it is or how simple it is or how crass it's told or how good it sounds to the ear. And simply because Donald Trump is not very good at lying or that he lies about very weird or stupid things that are very obvious, like voter fraud, doesn't mean that his lies are any worse than other politicians who have more nuanced and complex ways of misleading the American people. In fact, I would argue that people who know or are good at lying are probably more dangerous than people who aren't and are easily called out.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You're basically saying, perhaps the press reaction to President Donald Trump's misstatements, falsehoods is overblown?
HARSANYI: It depends which one. I mean, I do think that - for instance, I'll give you an example - the argument over the crowd size, whether Barack Obama or Donald Trump had a larger crowd for their inauguration in Washington. Clearly, Barack Obama in 2009 had a far larger audience. That's a lie. I'm not sure how important it is. Is it more important than a lie about policy? Is it more important than Barack Obama's lie about being able to keep your plan if you wanted to?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You're talking about health care there.
HARSANYI: I am. Even at the time, people were saying that's impossible. But yet, no one would ever have called it a lie because it is - conceptually, it's the sort of thing that we understand in politics. It's misleading, but it's not sort of a just a blatant lie like the one Donald Trump told about the crowd size.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is this, though, about untruths being told? Or is there some fundamental shift in the way this administration is talking to and about the media? Donald Trump doesn't just say we are bad professionals. He says we are bad people. His senior strategist Steve Bannon doesn't say we are irresponsible. He says we are the opposition.
HARSANYI: Right. I mean, I think the press should be the opposition in a way. It should always be the opposition to power. Now, will the Trump administration move against freedom of speech in any way through either legislation or some kind of executive order or regulations or in any way? I think that's a completely different discussion that we need to have. But I don't see that happening. I mean, if Steve Bannon tells the press to shut up and listen, that's wrong to say because we want a free press and we want them to say what they want. But he has no power over the press. So I'm not that concerned about his bluster.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, as someone who has covered authoritarian regimes - I've been in Egypt and Turkey and Venezuela - you know, I think what some people are worried about is that it always starts by undermining the press. The rhetoric shifts pretty quickly from the opposition press to the traitor press. Is that a concern to you, the fact that they're focusing so heavily on attacking the mainstream media?
HARSANYI: Yeah. Listen, I am definitely concerned by the sort of obsession that this administration has with fighting the media. But I'm also concerned that the media takes the bait all the time. Every time he tweets on a - you know, you can turn to CNN or Fox and there's, you know, a breaking news alert that Donald Trump has tweeted something.
I just don't think that that's going to be helpful for people who actually want to, you know, keep this administration accountable. It's not the way that news should probably be covered. We can't, you know, overreact to every little thing that the guy does. Obviously, he's not a traditional president. He wasn't a traditional candidate. He says a lot of goofy things. But there are also a lot of people in that administration moving forward with real policies. And that, I think, gets overlooked too often.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: David Harsanyi of The Federalist, thank you for being with us.
HARSANYI: Thank you.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
It was a match for the ages.
(SOUNDBITE OF 2017 WOMEN'S SINGLES AUSTRALIAN OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP)
SERENA WILLIAMS: (Grunting).
VENUS WILLIAMS: (Grunting).
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: Game, Serena Williams.
(SOUNDBITE OF 2017 WOMEN'S SINGLES AUSTRALIAN OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP)
V. WILLIAMS: That's my little sister, guys.
(LAUGHTER)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: Ladies and gentlemen, our champion, the legendary Serena Williams.
(APPLAUSE)
S. WILLIAMS: She's the only reason I'm standing here today and the only reason that the Williams sisters exist. So thank you, Venus, for inspiring me.
(APPLAUSE)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Serena Williams beat her big sister, Venus, on Saturday to win the Australian Open. It's her 23rd Grand Slam singles title, a new record. In this week's edition of Out Of Bounds, our ongoing conversation about sports and culture, we talk with Clinton Yates. He's a writer for the ESPN website The Undefeated and penned an intensely personal essay about how he came to admit that Serena is his favorite athlete of all time.
Thanks for coming here.
CLINTON YATES: Anytime.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I want to talk about this article which caught our eye. You wrote that it took you years to be able to say this out loud. Say it. What is it?
YATES: Serena Williams is my favorite athlete of all time.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK (laughter), tell us, why was it so hard for you, as a man, to admire a woman athlete?
YATES: I think there's two reasons. No. 1, is that as somebody that grew up - you know, I played three sports in high school. I played soccer. I played basketball. I played baseball. So my entire, sort of, psychological link to what I cared about in sports was very much toward, No. 1, those sports and No. 2, people who I saw who I felt were better at team games.
But I also think that too many athletes are so caught up, from an identity standpoint, in one thing or another thing - whether it's being a woman, whether it's being black or whether it's being someone who's not American. In this case, Serena obviously is American. But you know how sometimes there's something that you like and you keep returning to it and you don't really have a reason why? And then something happens and you're like - wow, I know a lot more about that than I cared to realize.
And it was when she last won Wimbledon, and I just looked at myself, and I said - I don't know that there's another person I'd rather watch play sports. And that's all I do for a living, you know what I mean? And...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was the moment for you?
YATES: That was the moment for me. It was the last Wimbledon where I said - wow, not only is she my favorite athlete from a standpoint of playing the game, but I am here for the fashion. I am here for what she does off the court. I am here for her eloquence and intelligence and personal standards. The situation that happened at Indian Wells - she didn't play there for years because she felt it was a racist location, and she was not going to deal with that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I want to come back to this idea of you - obviously - as a man, making this admission about a woman athlete. What has been the reaction when you talked about this on Twitter, when you've talked about this publicly? What has been the reaction among other men?
YATES: The first reaction I got to that was some guy said, I'm having a hard time imagining you wearing a tennis skirt, which instantly indicated to me where most people are at, from a guy's standpoint, when it comes to what they think about women. They are ultimately just objects of desire or of their gaze. So a lot of guys, for me, reacted - oh, come on, how could you say something like that? And it's like well, you know, sorry, dude - I don't look at all women as sex objects, No. 1. And No. 2, I don't view all things that women do in athletic context as lesser than.
And that - those two things right there are more than most men are not only willing to do but need to do. That's the problem. You know, this is what toxic masculinity and patriarchy bring to you in society - is that if you don't have to do that, you will not do that. And so once I, you know, made that personal growth point, which was 10, 15 odd years ago, you know, it's not hard for me to say that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what did you think of the match?
YATES: The grace that they showed toward each other, the actual competitiveness that they show on the court, it's really, really something to see. And if you haven't gotten a chance to watch it, it's worth watching the fullness of the match from entrance to exit, not just the part where they're hitting the tennis balls because their relationship is so special like that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Clinton Yates is a writer for The Undefeated. Thanks.
YATES: Pas de quoi.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
The action has now moved to the courts. Hours after President Donald Trump signed his executive order, a federal judge in Brooklyn granted temporary reprieve to dozens of refugees and other travelers stuck at airports. Other judges in Virginia and Massachusetts have chimed in too. The White House said it was motivated by a desire to protect U.S. borders. But lawyers are preparing a series of broad constitutional challenges. With us now to talk about the legal controversy is NPR's justice correspondent Carrie Johnson.
Hello.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Happy to be here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Carrie, the judge in New York - let's start with that - granted a temporary stay for some people. Who does that cover?
JOHNSON: It appears to cover what could be as many as 200 people who traveled to the U.S. before that Trump executive order was put in place, not just people in New York but people trapped in airports across the country. The court rulings from Saturday and early Sunday do not mean these folks are in the clear and can stay in the U.S. It just means they can't be deported right away.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We saw images of volunteer lawyers flocking to airports, setting up legal offices in McDonald's and airport restaurants. What happened? What are they trying to achieve?
JOHNSON: Sure. Lawyers for the ACLU and a few other immigrant rights groups jumped on the case immediately. They raced to court Saturday night, drummed up a lot of support on social media. So the crowd in Brooklyn and elsewhere was huge. And in that New York courtroom, Judge Ann Donnelly found sending these travelers home could cause them irreparable harm and would cause no harm to the U.S. government to keep them in the country for the time being.
The judge didn't make a broad ruling about the constitutional claims in the case, but she did say, based on her early read, it was likely that their due process rights had been violated. And Lulu, another judge made clear this stay applies to people with green cards, lawful permanent residents of the U.S., who were getting detained at airports as well yesterday.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what is the Trump administration saying about all this?
JOHNSON: Well, the Department of Homeland Security put out a statement last night. They said less than 1 percent of the 325,000 people who came to the U.S. yesterday were, in its words, inconvenienced. And DHS says it's going to keep enforcing the border, and it retains the right to revoke visas. So they are holding pretty firm.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You know, the president, yesterday, told reporters this is not a Muslim ban. But there are bigger questions about whether his order discriminates on the basis of religion.
JOHNSON: Yeah. The president's power when it comes to immigration is pretty sweeping. The president by precedent is able to bar refugees and in some cases to pick and choose among countries where the U.S. wants to admit people. But some constitutional lawyers and immigrant rights groups say Trump's order favors Christians over other religions. And in fact, Rudy Giuliani, a close adviser to President Trump, told Fox overnight that, in fact, the president had, at least on one occasion, used the word Muslim ban to him.
Meanwhile, Lulu, a prominent advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says it's planning a lawsuit on that and other grounds soon. So this legal action is only beginning right now.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Only beginning.
NPR's justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, thanks so much.
JOHNSON: You're welcome.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Now we're going to turn to Louisiana. It's on low ground, and residents there have long built flood barriers to stay safe. But that's no longer enough. Now state officials have mapped out areas that will have to be let go. The problem is that more than 2,000 families live on that land that can no longer be protected. As Ryan Kailath of member station WWNO reports, authorities have made a striking recommendation to deal with this.
RYAN KAILATH, BYLINE: Al Yates and Anthony Caronia live just north of New Orleans in St. Tammany Parish. They've been neighbors for 30 years. Last week, the two friends stood outside marveling at a huge flock of purple martins.
AL YATES: I don't know why they came here so early. They're supposed to come in May.
ANTHONY CARONIA: And then you've got the alligators already showing up, and then you see the fish striking.
KAILATH: Yeah.
CARONIA: We go by the birds and the trees and the...
KAILATH: Right.
CARONIA: ...Flowers out here.
KAILATH: These guys love the warm weather, but it makes them nervous that nature feels out of whack. To them, a mild winter signals a hot, stormy summer. And in this neighborhood...
CARONIA: Anytime you hear a storm's even getting anywhere close to Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, you get ready.
KAILATH: Caronia says he evacuates his family about four times a year - shuts down his towing company, pulls his son out of school.
CARONIA: The hardest part is getting your family a place to stay. You might have to go five hours out till this passes.
KAILATH: Caronia didn't set out to live in one of the most disaster-prone parts of the state. When his parents first got here, the area was pretty well-protected. But decades of storms, rising seas and sinking land have changed all that. The state is now recommending his area for voluntary home buyouts. The plan is to move people out of harm's way, knock the houses down and turn the land itself into a natural storm barrier. There's no cash offer on the table yet, but if there were...
CARONIA: Gone. I'm gone. I'm leaving. Mr. Alvin, too - he's selling. Anybody you talk back here, they're afraid now. It's scary, sir.
BREN HAASE: This is the most aggressive step that Louisiana has taken to implement these sort of programs and to take a sort of an alternative look at how we might reduce risk.
KAILATH: Bren Haase is chief of planning for the state's coastal authority. Reduced risk, he says, that's what levees and floodgates do. But move to higher ground and you can leave a lot of that risk behind. Public policy types have a name for this. They call it retreat.
Has that word come up before?
PAT BRISTER: I don't use it (laughter).
KAILATH: Pat Brister is president of the St. Tammany Parish where more than a third of these buyouts are recommended, more than anywhere else. The idea of retreat does not sit well with her.
BRISTER: These are not just homes. I know the people that live in these homes, and I know they've lived there for some generations. So it's not as simple as just buy the home out. It's lives that we're talking about. So it's not easy.
KAILATH: Retreating would hurt the local economy, too. If people leave, their property taxes go with them. Brister would rather keep people in their homes by building new flood barriers. The state's new plan does call for that, but there's not enough money budgeted yet. And even if there were, it would take 30 years to finish building something strong enough to keep Caronia and his neighbors dry. He says he doesn't have that kind of time.
CARONIA: It's time to let us go. We're in our 50s and 60s and 70s back here. We're tired.
KAILATH: Tired of storms, tired of flooding, tired of waiting. To him, retreat doesn't sound like such a bad plan.
For NPR News, I'm Ryan Kailath.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARTURO STALTERI'S "SELIKA SUITE, V MOVIMENTO")
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Trump administration officials have been circulating on the Sunday talk shows this morning. Let's hear a bit of what they had to say about the executive order on immigration and refugees. Here's White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on ABC's "This Week." He says the executive order is integral to securing our country.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THIS WEEK")
SEAN SPICER: We took the first step in ensuring that a terrorist attack won't continue to occur on this country. And so what do we say to the family or to the individual who gets hurt or the family of someone who gets killed because we didn't take the steps? Protecting this nation and our people is the No. 1 priority of this president and our government.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: On NBC's "Meet The Press," White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus downplayed reports of chaos.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MEET THE PRESS")
REINCE PRIEBUS: The fact of the matter is 325,000 people from foreign countries came into the United States yesterday. And 109 people were detained for further questioning. Most of those people were moved out. We've got a couple of dozen more that remain.
And I would suspect, as long as they're not awful people, that they will move through before another half a day today. And perhaps some of these people should be detained further. And if they're folks that shouldn't be in this country, they're going to be detained. And so - apologize for nothing here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And President Trump's senior adviser Kellyanne Conway echoed Priebus on "Fox News Sunday" and said the ban is a small price to pay.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FOX NEWS SUNDAY")
KELLYANNE CONWAY: I was stopped many times - weren't you? - after 9/11. I didn't resemble or share a name with or be part of any kind of terrorist conspiracy. But this is what we do to keep a nation safe. I mean, there are - this whole idea that they're being separated and ripped from their families - it's temporary. And it's just circumstantial in terms of whether you're one of those 300 and some who was already on an aircraft or trying to get an aircraft, as opposed to the over 3,000 children who will be forevermore separated from the parents who perished on 9/11.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and senior adviser to the president Kellyanne Conway.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Refugees and other foreigners were held at airports across the country yesterday as President Trump's executive order limiting entry into the United States went into effect. By evening, a federal judge in Brooklyn had issued an emergency stay on a part of the president's actions. And today, two additional district courts issued restraining orders.
We're still learning about the details of the ruling. Administration officials have provided mixed messages on the Sunday talk shows about what this means specifically for U.S. green card holders. There's no confusion, though, about the purpose of executive order itself. President Trump said it clearly in a tweet this morning (reading) our country needs strong borders and extreme vetting.
Mark Krikorian is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He has praised the action. Thank you for being with us, sir.
MARK KRIKORIAN: Well, thanks for having me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So in this order, Mr. Trump wrote that Christians and others from minority religions should be given priority. How do you respond to critics who say that sounds dangerously close to a religious test?
KRIKORIAN: Well, it's not a religious test. It's a persecution test. In other words, what we're now seeing in the refugee flow - what we've seen, for instance, from the Syrian refugee flow over the past couple of years - is that almost every single person we have admitted from Syria is a Muslim, even though the population is 10 to 12 percent Christian. And they're, frankly, everybody's target. So there's a - our refugee selection system has been skewed, actually, against Christians and Yazidis and frankly (unintelligible)...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But Christians are a minority in Syria. I mean, Christians are a minority in Syria, so it...
KRIKORIAN: Yeah, they're a minority, and they're sort of everybody's target, quite frankly. So I mean, that's why they're a minority and have been for a long time. So in other words, Christian refugees - and there's a lot of them in Turkey and Lebanon and Jordan - are - do not get resettlement offers. They just - it just doesn't work that way.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But what Mister - President Trump has done has banned all refugees from Syria indefinitely. How do you respond to that? Do you think Christians should be given, you know, allowed to come in and not Muslims?
KRIKORIAN: Well, I mean, this actually addresses the broader issue of why are we doing refugee resettlement at all because the fact is that it's dramatically more expensive to bring a refugee here than it is to take care of people there. Our research shows that the cost of resettling a refugee from the Middle East is 12 times greater than taking care of one in the Middle East. We take refugees in order to make ourselves feel better. That's all it is. Because each person we take represent 11 other people that we're not helping but could have with that same money. I think it's selfish, and it's morally wrong to undertake large-scale refugee resettlement. The people we're taking are not emergency cases who literally cannot stay where they are any longer. We are doing this literally to make ourselves feel better, and it's just - it's not right.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Many of these people, of course, are fleeing terrible situations.
KRIKORIAN: They already fled them. They're in Turkey or Jordan. They're not in - they're not being persecuted any longer.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sure, countries that are completely overwhelmed. These are developing...
KRIKORIAN: And we should help them.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And these are developing nations that feel completely overwhelmed. Doesn't the United States - briefly sir - have a moral responsibility to help some of these, you know, refugees resettle in the United States?
KRIKORIAN: I think that you can make a case for that, and if you make a case for that, that's a case against refugee resettlement because if we have a responsibility for helping protect refugees, we can - we are doing it in the most inefficient way conceivable by bringing them to the United States instead of improving the conditions in Turkey or in Jordan or in Lebanon. That has to be our goal, not to pick a lucky few as lottery winners to move them, you know, to Sioux City, Iowa. That doesn't help the other 11 people who are not going to be able to be helped with the money that we have to devote to that one person we're resettling here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Mark Krikorian is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Thanks for being with us.
KRIKORIAN: Thanks.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Protesters have organized in several cities around the country and at airports to express opposition to President Trump's executive order. At Dulles International Airport in Virginia, at least 63 people have been detained. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang spoke to one of the protesters who is demanding their release. This is Beverly Harrison (ph).
BEVERLY HARRISON: I'm angry that our country is being taken over by Trump and that the world is going to think this is who we are. And this is not my America, and I want to protect it and I want people to know that they're welcome here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And in Boston, hundreds of demonstrators are gathering now. We have WBUR's Jack Lepiarz on the line. Hi.
JACK LEPIARZ, BYLINE: Hello there.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So describe the scene for us. What are you seeing there?
LEPIARZ: Well, the Copley Square, which is in downtown Boston, is absolutely packed right now. You said hundreds. There may be thousands now. It's about the size of a football field, and it is completely packed there. Up at the front, there are a couple of people holding up a big sign that says no Muslim ban; other people holding up signs saying immigrants make America great. Another person said - has a sign that says, quote, "at first they came for the Muslims and this Jew says never again."
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tell us about some of the people you've spoken to. Why did they show up for this?
LEPIARZ: Well, a lot of people say they just had a sort of visceral reaction to when they heard the news either Friday or Saturday. They say, you know, this is something where they sort of draw the line as far as their American values, what they see as, you know - one of the values of America is diversity. And they want to come out and say that they do not support this, that they believe that people who are green card holders, people who are students in the school, people who are trying to bring skills to the U.S., they don't want them to be kept out. And at the same time, they believe that, you know, if it's a refugee coming from Iraq or Syria, they should have that opportunity to come to the U.S. And they said there shouldn't be a blanket ban on immigrants entering this country.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Practically speaking, what are they asking for? What do they think - what effect do they think they can have?
LEPIARZ: That's a murkier question. I've asked a couple of them, and the response right now is, you know, they want this policy scrapped. But as far as what to do next, a lot of them say it may just be any time there is this kind of policy or a policy they don't agree with, they say there needs to be more protests like this, demonstrations like this, where there's almost a show of force, as one woman said, where you can get the bodies out there and tell people who are in office that this is not OK.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: WBUR's Jack Lepiarz in Boston, thank you so much.
LEPIARZ: You're welcome.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Writer Laurie Frankel has written a novel about a family with five boys - yep, five boys. The youngest, though, feels he is something entirely different, a girl. This is a story that could not be closer to Laurie Frankel's heart. She is living it with her own child, born a boy, who now identifies as a girl. Laurie Frenkel joins us now to talk about the book, which is called "This Is How It Always Is." Laurie, thanks for being with us.
LAURIE FRANKEL: Thank you so much for having me, Rachel.
MARTIN: And I guess we should underscore, you have taken novelist's liberties here because you do not actually have five children. (Laughter).
FRANKEL: That is correct. I only have one child.
MARTIN: You would have no time to write a novel.
FRANKEL: That's - that's exactly true.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: So how closely did your own family's experience reflect the story that you're telling here?
FRANKEL: The nice thing about my life is that it's pretty boring, which is really how you want your life to be but not how you want your novel to be.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
FRANKEL: So in fact, this - this really is very fiction. It's very, very made up.
MARTIN: The child at the center of your novel is born a boy, named Claude. And there's this passage early on, when he's talking to his parents about how he's thinking about his future, even as a very young kid - I mean, only 3 years old, I think, at this point in the story. Would you mind reading a little bit of that?
FRANKEL: (Reading) When he grew up, he said, he wanted to be a chef, a cat, a vet, a dinosaur, a train, a farmer, a recorder player, a scientist, an ice cream cone, a first baseman, or maybe the inventor of a new kind of food that tasted like chocolate ice cream but nourished like something his mother would say yes to for breakfast. When he grew up, he said, he wanted to be a girl.
MARTIN: So kids go through phases, as any parent knows. And they say things and use their imaginations, as - as you just illustrated in that passage. And you try not to ascribe too much significance to anything because who knows what's going to happen. So when your son, now daughter, first came to you, did you dismiss it as a phase of some kind or just a kid thing?
FRANKEL: Yeah, not so much dismissed it as a phase of some kind as embraced it as a phase of some kind. I thought, OK, she wanted to wear a dress. And she was a he at the time. And we said, OK. It didn't inspire panic. It didn't seem to be anything to be worried about or alarmed about. It seemed like it - pretend. And it seemed like...
MARTIN: How old was she at the time?
FRANKEL: She was 6. She had just turned 6. And it seemed like she was just playing and having fun. And she was just playing and having fun and trying things on. It's just that - that it stuck.
MARTIN: Rosie is the mom in this story. And at one point, she asks, why would we ask him what he wants? He wants to sleep in the crate with the dog.
FRANKEL: Right (laughter).
MARTIN: He thinks high heels are comfortable. This is clearly not a human being whose judgment should be used to make major life decisions. Did you go through that?
FRANKEL: We did go through that. And we still go through that. I think that putting all of your - your faith in the decision-making powers of your small children is probably not the best way forward for anyone. In the book, they - what happens is that they feel their way through. And I think that that's what all of us do in parenting in general.
You make a judgment call. And you take your best guess. And you take a shot. And you hope for the best. And if it works, that's wonderful. And if it doesn't, then you modify. That's what parenting is, is figuring out that balance between letting your kids be who they are and protecting them from the world they have to live in.
MARTIN: And releasing them into that world, which is hard enough if your kid is just, hey, doing fine and is, like, accepted by the mainstream. It's still really difficult to let your kid go to school and not be there to fight his or her bottles.
FRANKEL: Yes. Yeah, sometimes I feel like letting my kid out of the house every morning is the hardest thing I do all day. And again, I think that's - that's the hallmark of parenting. No one out there in the world is ever going to love my kid or get my kid as much as I will. And yet, I've got to let her go every day anyway.
MARTIN: Did you want this to be a how-to book when it comes to parenting a transgender child?
FRANKEL: No. No, I wanted it to be the opposite (laughter).
MARTIN: Is it an annoying question?
(LAUGHTER)
FRANKEL: No, no, it's a wonderful question. But I didn't - I don't want it to be a how-to book. In fact, I want it to be the opposite. I want it to say, whatever - whatever you think you know, whatever your gut reaction is to what you would do if you were in this situation, probably it isn't. And I want to say, yeah, but. I feel like that's the thesis of this book - yeah, but. You know, like, people's gut reactions are often, as they are to so many things, very black and white. And in fact, this is a complicated issue that's getting more and more complicated. And that complication is wonderful. And I want more of it.
MARTIN: So to that end, do you think of this novel as an opportunity to open up dialogue with someone - a parent, maybe - who has a very different perspective about what it means to be transgender?
FRANKEL: I hope so. Yeah, I hope so.
MARTIN: I mean, we're living through this moment with the debate about transgender bathroom use. And it is a complicated time. And this is something that a lot of people are struggling with.
FRANKEL: It is a complicated time. And it is something that a lot of people are struggling with. And I think it is a topic that scares people. And I think that, in part, that's because they haven't met anyone, or they don't know that they've met anyone, who is impacted by these issues. There are a lot of transgender people. And there are even more people who are gender nonconforming. And these little kids are just kids. They're the least scary people you can imagine.
So one of the things that I hope is that people who read this book will read it and forget about the transgender issues and just be in the embrace of this family and realize that this family is like all families. They love, and they keep secrets for one another. And they protect one another. And they struggle with how to do that. And they have these challenges. And it's hard, but it isn't scary. And it isn't abnormal at all.
MARTIN: If I can ask you about your daughter.
FRANKEL: Yeah.
MARTIN: She's 8 years old now?
FRANKEL: She's 8 years old now, yeah.
MARTIN: What does she think about you having written this book that was inspired, at least in part, by her?
FRANKEL: Well, she loves it. She thinks that all books should be written about her.
(LAUGHTER)
FRANKEL: She cannot actually imagine why I would ever consider writing a book about anything else. And she's a big reader. But it's a - it is a book for adults. It is not appropriate for her. But I'm certainly mindful of the fact, and was while I was writing it, that she will read it some day. And I hope that she will love it, of course. But I also know that she will see that it really is not about her. It's really very - very fictionalized. And I hope very much that the plot that - and heartbreak that - and drama and near misses that happen in this novel, I hope that they will never happen to her.
MARTIN: Laurie Frankel's new novel is called "This Is How It Always Is." Thanks so much for talking with us.
FRANKEL: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We are in the midst of an epic few days of the American story. President Donald Trump delivered an order on Friday stopping all refugees and visitors from some countries from entering the United States.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
That led to a weekend of confusion around the world - detentions, releases and protests at airports across the United States. Here in Washington, in fact, you could have spent most of your day going from one protest to another around the city. Overseas, a man named Fuad Sharif tried to fly from Iraq, which is one of the affected countries, to get his Ph.D. in Nashville, Tenn.
FUAD SHARIF: I read about it on the internet. I (unintelligible) about it's a growing city. It's a nice city. It's called Music City.
INSKEEP: Mr. Sharif, his wife and their three children had visas to come to the United States and even got their boarding passes for a flight and made it all the way to the gate for a connecting flight in Cairo, Egypt, when they learned they could not get on the plane.
SHARIF: I was looking at the faces of my wife and kids. They turned pale yellow, and they were about to faint and fell down to the ground. All dreams collapsed in one second.
INSKEEP: All dreams collapsed in one second, Mr. Sharif said. They're now back in Erbil, Iraq, which is where they started. The White House says the confusion here is a small price to pay for an act that keeps Americans safe. And we're going to talk about that throughout the program. NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson is on the line now.
Carrie, good morning.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: Would you clarify for us who exactly is covered by this order?
JOHNSON: President Trump's order suspended new refugee admissions for 120 days, and it singled out travelers from seven countries - Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia. They're barred for 90 days. Now, Steve, one huge point of confusion all weekend long is how the order covered green card holders.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
JOHNSON: Those are people who are permanent residents of the U.S. And some of them were detained at airports this past weekend. Homeland Security leaders now say those folks are allowed in so long as there's no evidence they've been up to no good overseas.
INSKEEP: OK. So they actually adjusted the order, according to the reporting, at the last moment to include green card holders. And now they've decided, after some of the blowback, to exclude, more or less, green card holders. Is that right?
JOHNSON: It seems as if they've landed at the position that green card holders are going to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, Steve.
INSKEEP: Oh, which is actually what the language said originally. But they're just talking about it differently.
There were legal challenges over the weekend, and judges sided with the the opponents, at least in some cases. Where do things stand?
JOHNSON: Yeah. Steve, in at least four cases, federal judges sided with migrants or travelers. The ACLU sued in Brooklyn over the detention of two clients who were held at JFK Airport. Judge Ann Donnelly issued a temporary restraining order barring not just the deportation of them but as many as 200 other people or more. The judge cited irreparable harm those folks would face if they were sent back. And she's demanded the Trump administration provide a list of all affected refugees and travelers, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK. But that's just people who were in transit or already in the United States, right? The president has the right to keep out other people if he chooses to do that.
JOHNSON: He does. The president has broad legal authority in this regard. Two other judges, though, did something slightly different. A judge in Virginia ordered travelers a green card holders be allowed to consult with attorneys. Another in Massachusetts ruled that folks were not only free from deportation who had been stuck in the airport but they need to be released.
Steve, there are reports from pro-bono lawyers all weekend that border agents may not be complying with some of those directives from federal judges, which is a problem.
INSKEEP: Is that clear that they are or aren't? And is the administration openly defying the courts?
JOHNSON: We don't know for sure. We've heard from ACLU lawyers, other advocates for immigrants that there's evidence. They're being kept from talking with attorneys about the situation. It is mysterious at this point, and some Democrats in Congress are demanding a meeting with DHS.
INSKEEP: OK. So we'll keep looking for answers as we can get them.
What is the president saying about all this, Carrie?
JOHNSON: Well, after a torrent of criticism all weekend, President Trump finally weighed in with a statement. He says it's all about protecting American borders and keeping the country safe. Homeland Security says only a small percentage of the average number of people who journeyed to the U.S. this weekend were - in its words - inconvenienced. And the DHS says no matter what these judges' rulings say, the president's order remains in place and the U.S. government can revoke visas at any time.
INSKEEP: What happens to all the legal challenges now, given that the order, broadly - with some exceptions - is in place?
JOHNSON: Well, Steve, the White House says the president has sweeping authority on immigration and at the border. There is a federal law that allows the president to suspend people if he determined their entry is detrimental to the nation. But there are also laws that conflict a little bit. There's a 1965 law on the books that says people should not experience preferences or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, nationality when it comes to immigration. And Trump's order appears to grant some religious preference to Christians, which could be a target of lawsuits moving forward, including one, I'm hearing, by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which could be coming very soon.
INSKEEP: Are you referring to the provision that says persecuted religious minorities can still get in? And the president said in an interview the other day - yeah, I meant Christians by that - maybe not exclusively, but that's what he was talking about.
JOHNSON: Yeah. And, you know, opponents of this order seem to suggest that this is a disguised way, a clever way by the administration to impose what they call a Muslim ban. Now, Donald Trump says this is not a Muslim ban. But Trump's close associate Rudy Giuliani told Fox News over the weekend that Donald Trump reached out to him and others about how to make such a ban legal and give it legal cover.
Steve, those statements could be used by refugee advocates to demonstrate some discriminatory intent by the administration in lawsuits going forward.
INSKEEP: Carrie, thanks very much as always.
JOHNSON: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: That's NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to turn now to a couple other big national security stories we're thinking through this morning.
First, the U.S. raid against al-Qaida operatives in Yemen - it left one American service member dead. President Donald Trump also issued an order asking for a new plan to defeat ISIS. And he wants to change the way the administration makes major decisions on national security - more specifically, who gets to make them. So we're going to bring in NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman to help us unpack all this.
Hi, Tom.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Hello, Rachel.
MARTIN: Let's start with Yemen. What can you tell us about the operation?
BOWMAN: Well, Rachel, there was a special operations raid into a village being used by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. I'm told the raid had been planned for a while with Yemeni forces before Trump took office, but he authorized it. The American troops were after what they call a target of opportunity, and the forces came under attack. Now, another aircraft came in to help after they took casualties. It was a V-22 Osprey, which crash landed. The troops got away but destroyed their aircraft to keep it from being seized.
Now, local Yemenis say dozens of civilians were killed in this raid, including eight children. The Pentagon says they're investigating. And now our colleague Alice Fordham talked with the father of the al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. He said his granddaughter died in this raid. And of course, his son was killed in a U.S. drone strike back in 2011.
MARTIN: So let's stay with that for a moment. We're used to hearing from the U.S., the Obama administration in particular - they were saying all the time we work really hard to protect civilians who might get caught in these military operations. Are you hearing any indication that that might be changing?
BOWMAN: Well, we don't have enough information about what happened in this case. But that is what Obama tried to do, prevent civilian casualties. And he placed restrictions on airstrikes. But Trump does want to relax some of those restrictions in places like Yemen and also Libya as well as Iraq and Syria. And the president has asked for plans to accelerate the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The Pentagon is looking at that - more weapons for example, more trainers and also, perhaps, placing U.S. troops closer to front-line combat. And as part of all of this, it's more likely you'll see additional airstrikes as well. And consequently, you could see more U.S. and civilian casualties.
MARTIN: Let's get to the shake-up at the NSC - this is the National Security Council. This is the group of national security advisers the president relies on to make really top decisions. President Trump has made an unusual choice. He's decided that he wants his senior adviser Steve Bannon to have a seat at that table.
Why is that significant?
BOWMAN: Well, first of all, the National Security Council has been around for some 70 years. And it includes a president, vice president, secretary of state and defense, the most senior people approved by the Senate. Trump's order says that his personal strategist, Steve Bannon, is going to be on this NSC. He's a retired naval officer. But most of his career, he's run a media company. In the past, presidents have tried to keep the national security decision-making separate from politics. You remember Karl Rove who was George W. Bush's top aide in politics - he was not part of the NSC.
MARTIN: Yeah.
BOWMAN: The same with Barack Obama's David Axelrod. So this is highly unusual.
MARTIN: And it's not just Steve Bannon gets a seat at the table permanently but also the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America's top military adviser and the director of National Intelligence are no longer guaranteed a spot.
BOWMAN: That's right. And the headlines over the weekend said they'd been kicked off the NSC. That's not exactly right. You're right, the director of National Intelligence, the chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff - what the White House has done is said they'll attend meetings dealing with issues, quote, "pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise."
Now that's unusual because one would think anything that the National Security discusses...
MARTIN: That's their thing.
BOWMAN: Exactly.
MARTIN: That's what they know about.
BOWMAN: You would have that director of National Intelligence and the top military adviser. So this is very unusual - a lot of people scratching their heads over this and a lot of complaints from the likes of Senator John McCain and former Defense Secretary Bob Gates.
MARTIN: NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman walking us through the changes at the National Security Council.
Hey, Tom, thank you so much.
BOWMAN: You're welcome.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
In Your Health on this Monday morning, cancer researchers are testing whether a cheap, safe drug that's been used for more than 40 years to treat parasitic infections might also help to fight cancer. The research is part of a growing movement to take a fresh look at old medicines to see if they have new uses. And NPR's Allison Aubrey has more.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: I happened to come across this drug called mebendazole several years back. My son came home from summer camp with this gross infection - pinworms. These are tiny, staple-sized worms that infect the intestines. They make kids feel itchy and uncomfortable. My pediatrician prescribed mebendazole, a cheap, generic drug. Two weeks later, the infection was gone.
Now flash forward a couple of years, and I was stunned to find on a research website, clinicaltrials.gov, that the same medicine, mebendazole, was being investigated as a cancer drug. Curious, I reached out to Greg Riggins at Johns Hopkins University. He's a cancer researcher there. He's testing the mebendazole in brain cancer patients, and he invited me to Baltimore to talk about it.
GREG RIGGINS: Here is the laboratory.
AUBREY: Tell me where we're standing, what we have in front of us.
RIGGINS: So we have cages of mice. These are our cancer research mice.
AUBREY: A few years back, something extraordinary happened here. Some of the lab animals got pinworm, the same thing my son had, and the veterinarian at Hopkins treated the whole colony of mice with the animal version of mebendazole. The drug staved off the parasite, but it also did something else. Now remember, these are lab mice that are used for experiments. Researchers had implanted cancer cells from a tumor called medulloblastoma into the animals' brains. But after they got the pinworm drug, the cancers never developed.
RIGGINS: Our medulloblastoma stops growing.
AUBREY: This was completely unexpected.
RIGGINS: We were surprised.
AUBREY: But after doing some research, Riggins realized he was not the first to see the anti-cancer properties of mebendazole. There were already researchers who were doing animal studies to see if the drug worked against lung cancer and melanoma. So Riggins decided to take his research to the next level - in people. He got funding to do a study to see of mebendazole might help people with glioblastoma, one of the most common and aggressive brain cancers. Phase one of the trial has wrapped up, and he has some initial results.
RIGGINS: The data, to me, looks as good as it could get for a phase-1 trial.
AUBREY: Now, mebendazole is not a miracle cure. But Riggins says the drug seems to interfere with cancer cells in a variety of ways. For example, it disrupts the development of blood vessels, which can starve tumors of the blood supply they need to thrive. So he says the next phase of this trial will be to find out if the drug can actually buy very sick patients more time.
RIGGINS: The odds would favor that it is increasing survival.
AUBREY: He stresses the initial data are preliminary. But Riggins says what he has learned about mebendazole has made him think it might have another role to play in fighting cancer. For example, it's possible it could help prevent the development of certain tumors. He is studying a hereditary form of colon cancer. He's already published a study showing mebendazole has a preventive effect in lab animals. Now he's planning a study to test this in people at high risk.
RIGGINS: If you can prevent a cancer, you don't have to worry about, you know, the heroic efforts to try to cure it. I mean, a cancer that never happens is the best kind of cancer.
AUBREY: In addition to the trials in Baltimore, other labs around the country and in Mexico are studying the potential of mebendazole to prevent or treat other cancers. And Bruce Bloom, who is the president and chief science officer of a group called Cures within Reach, which helps to fund the research, says he has proposals for more studies sitting on his desk.
BRUCE BLOOM: We're very optimistic that mebendazole has a potent anti-cancer mechanism.
AUBREY: And it certainly isn't the only existing drug that could be repurposed to fight cancer and other diseases.
BLOOM: It's amazing how many inexpensive drugs that have been around for 25 years or more, like mebendazole, have so many other opportunities to help unsolved disease patients.
AUBREY: Bloom points to research on the diabetes drug metformin and the heart medication propranolol as well as mebendazole.
BLOOM: It's not likely that mebendazole or any other single repurposed drug is ever going to cure cancer. But each one of them combined with other repurposed drugs can create a cocktail that helps the body to manage cancer.
AUBREY: In other words, the idea is to help buy people more time. He says considering it can cost a billion dollars to develop a new drug, repurposing existing drugs may help bring therapies to patients more quickly and affordably - at least that's the hope.
INSKEEP: And we've been listening to NPR's Allison Aubrey who's in our studios to continue the discussion about Your Health.
And Allison, wow. This makes me want to go rummage around in the medicine chest to see if there's some old prescription bottle we can repurpose for something new.
AUBREY: Right. There's a lot of optimism here, Steve. But I have to say there's a big concern with mebendazole, too. You heard Dr. Riggins say it's this affordable drug around the globe.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
AUBREY: And it is. You can walk into a pharmacy in Mexico or in Brazil. You can buy it over the counter for a few bucks. And that used to be true here. When my son had pinworms, the cost of mebendazole in the U.S. was $3 a pill. Now - $369 a pill.
INSKEEP: The very same drug is more than 100 times more. Why is that fair?
AUBREY: The very same drug. So remember, the cancer research is very preliminary. This drug is intended for use as a pinworm drug, right? Now back in 2011, the company that made this drug, Teva, decided to pull it from the market. They decided not to sell it anymore. It actually went off the market for a few years, then the drug changed hands a couple of times.
So I reached out to this company called Impax Laboratories. They're the company that acquired mebendazole. And I said - what is going on here? You know, this drug is $3 around the globe. How can you be charging $369 for it? And they basically said to me - look, we spent millions of dollars acquiring the drug from Teva. We had to go through an approval process, so that's what the price is.
INSKEEP: Three sixty-nine.
Allison, thanks very much.
AUBREY: Thanks very much, Steve.
INSKEEP: That's Your Health - NPR's Allison Aubrey.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. There was an athletic contest this weekend that measures physical strength, steely will and the chance for national glory. All you had to do was throw a piece of haggis more than 270 feet and, thus, set a new world record. This annual haggis throwing tradition happens in Scotland, of course, where the dish of spiced sheep's organs is considered a delicacy. The prize for beating the world record was a lifetime supply of haggis. No one was able to do it, which makes me wonder if they were really trying. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In Europe, many leaders have rejected Donald Trump's ban on refugees and restrictions on citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries. The measures added to growing frustration and concern with the new American president. We turn now to NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, who is with us from Berlin. Good morning, Soraya.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: What are leaders in Europe saying about Trump's ban and immigration restrictions?
NELSON: Well, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, she said through her spokesman that she, quote, "regretted" the policy, that she rejects the idea that fighting terrorism justifies discriminating against people of a specific background or faith and that she told Trump so on the phone.
In the U.K., meanwhile, Prime Minister Theresa May at first would only say the ban was an American affair. But under pressure, her spokesman later said that the British government didn't agree with this kind of approach and wouldn't be following suit.
MARTIN: Trump also called Vladimir Putin on Saturday. Any idea if they discussed the ban?
NELSON: Well, if they did, it wasn't talked about by either side. But both did say that they were making fighting international terrorism their top priority.
MARTIN: Any idea of how many people in Europe will be affected by this?
NELSON: Well, we've heard many reports about travelers being stranded in European airports - scores of them, you know, unable to board their U.S.-bound flights. And most of them were sent back - and dual citizens, those who have nationalities, perhaps were born in one of the affected countries but hold a passport from one of the European countries.
In Germany, that accounts for about 100,000 people.
MARTIN: OK. So that's the view from Europe. We're going to shift now to another U.S. ally, this one in the Middle East. NPR's Alice Fordham says that Iraqis are still grappling with the consequences of Trump's ban. Let's take a listen.
MARTIN: Can you tell us about the next steps? What are European countries doing about this now?
NELSON: Well, the European governments all say they need to get clarification from the White House. The U.K. Foreign Office says that it's already heard back and that only people who are actually dual nationals who are traveling from one of the seven countries are likely to be affected by the ban.
MARTIN: NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in Berlin. Thanks so much, Soraya.
NELSON: You're welcome, Rachel.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And here in the United States, our colleague Kirk Siegler is following a weekend of protest against the executive order.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) No hate. No fear. Refugees are welcomed here. No hate. No fear.
KIRK SIEGLER: For a second straight weekend, throngs of protesters march through downtown Washington to the White House, holding signs like, we are better than this and all are welcome.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: Houston, make some noise.
(CHEERING)
SIEGLER: Houston is known for its large immigrant and refugee population. Rabbi Josh Lobel (ph) came out with his family to a protest downtown to show support for refugees fleeing war zones and to protest the temporary travel ban.
JOSH LOBEL: You know, people who are just looking to escape, that, to me, is a terrifying sign.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting, unintelligible).
SIEGLER: At LAX in Los Angeles, thousands of protesters blocked traffic and chanted and marched in and outside the Tom Bradley International Terminal.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Let them in. Let them in. Let them in.
SIEGLER: Among those chanting let them in was Nada Jezree (ph). She's Syrian-American. And she says she has family currently trapped in war-torn Syria. And she worries it could be impossible for them to reunite now.
NADA JEZREE: I'm very concerned. And I really don't want them to get hurt. So, like, I really want them to be safe. So I'm protesting.
SIEGLER: Volunteer attorneys also floated throughout this crowd trying to help distraught family members who hadn't heard from loved ones on inbound flights. Judy London, a local immigrant law attorney, said the scene is one of confusion, and federal authorities are giving them no information.
JUDY LONDON: The American people and the world has a right to know how many people are in the basement of this airport.
SIEGLER: Inside the arrivals hall, jet-lagged passengers getting off international flights from the Middle East were greeted by a barrage of people waving signs and cheering.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Immigrants are welcome here.
SIEGLER: Arriving passengers held up their phones and videoed the dramatic scene as they tried to push their way toward the exit. The crowd erupted in cheers when they saw women in headscarves walking through. Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Los Angeles.
(SOUNDBITE OF ATMOSPHERE'S "TO ALL MY FRIENDS")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Leaders of major technology companies here in the U.S. are criticizing President Trump's executive order that bans immigrants from some Muslim countries. As NPR's Laura Sydell reports, there are growing concerns that the order is going to hurt business.
LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: Silicon Valley prides itself on its openness to immigrants. And it's not just talk. A study by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan think tank, found that 51 percent of U.S. startup companies worth more than a billion dollars were founded by immigrants. Yesterday, at the San Francisco International Airport, hundreds of people showed up for the second day in a row to protest the Trump administration's executive order. Joel Parish is an engineer at Apple. He is not an immigrant, but he says many of his colleagues are.
JOEL PARISH: It is a big concern. And some of my best co-workers - the best engineers - are on immigrant visas or have spouses that are on immigrant visas. And so I know they're extremely concerned about this. And it's impacting our ability to travel and do business internationally. We have a global presence.
SYDELL: In an email sent to Apple staff, CEO Tim Cook said the company had employees directly affected by the executive order, and it was offering help. Cook said Apple would not exist without immigration. In fact, its co-founder, Steve Jobs, was the son of a Syrian immigrant.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin is an immigrant who was born in the Soviet Union and fled to the U.S. with his family as a child. He showed up to yesterday's protest at the San Francisco airport. And today, there were others here from his company. Mani Varadarajan, a software engineer at Google, came to the U.S. from India when he was a year old. He says the Trump administration order was felt immediately at Google.
MANI VARADARAJAN: I did have a friend call me rather frantically - and not a very political friend, but he called me on Friday - who is a Google employee. He manages people. And two employees in his team were told that they shouldn't travel because there's a doubt as to whether they could come back if they did travel.
SYDELL: Until now, many tech leaders were keeping a low profile as to their thoughts on the Trump administration. In December, leaders of the largest tech companies met with Trump, and it appeared friendly. But Friday's executive order definitely changed that. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, is an immigrant and is critical of the Trump administration order. In a memo to staff, he said it was painful to see the personal cost of it on colleagues.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, we need to keep this country safe, but we should do that by focusing on people who actually pose a threat. The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, also an immigrant, said his company is committed to helping the 76 employees impacted by the ban. The founders of the ride-hailing service Lyft, which has many immigrant drivers, will donate $1 million to the ACLU. Even immigrant workers not directly covered by the ban say they feel afraid. John Hanna is from Egypt, which isn't on the list.
JOHN HANNA: For me and my wife, I'm concerned, too, if we had to travel at any time. Would it be possible to come back? Would it be a problem with expanding the ban to include Egypt, as well?
SYDELL: Hanna says he knows people who were out of the country when the ban came down, and now they can't get back into the U.S. For its part, the Trump administration says implementation of the travel ban has been a massive success story. Laura Sydell, NPR News, San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE OF MAKANA'S "NA PO'O KA LA")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President Trump said over the weekend that his order stopping visitors from seven countries, and all refugees, was working well. At American airports over the weekend, there was confusion, court battles and protests. The status of green card holders, among others, is unclear this morning. They were included in the order, but some are now getting in.
Pegah Ebrahimi is among the many who feels a personal stake here. She's a lawyer who works for the attorney general of Virginia. She's a green card holder, originally from Iran. Her family moved to Canada about a decade ago. And she has dual Canadian and Iranian citizenship.
PEGAH EBRAHIMI: I have felt like a prisoner since Friday, even though I live in the same city that I have lived in for the past six years. I had no plans of traveling. But to know that you can't leave the country is an absolute horrifying feeling to have.
INSKEEP: It's a dramatic human story, a dramatic security story, a dramatic political story, a dramatic American story. And NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson is on the line.
Hi, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: So why was there so much confusion over the weekend?
LIASSON: Well, there was a lot of confusion, as you said, mostly because it wasn't clear what to do with people who were in transit and because customs and border officials seemed to be enforcing the executive order differently at different airports. And then there was the question of what to do with people with green cards. The Department of Homeland Security originally wanted to exempt green card holders. The White House overruled that. But now, as you said, they seem to have backed off to say that green card holders will not be affected.
The initial court challenges went against the president. But the executive order has not been adjudicated - the order itself. And the courts will have to decide whether this is a religious test or not. And the White House is pretty confident about this because the president has a lot of authority over refugee policy, a lot of authority over immigration policy. And in the end, the courts might go his way.
INSKEEP: And let's remember, when you talk about being a religious test, that's what the president originally called for, was a ban on Muslims.
LIASSON: Right.
INSKEEP: What he ended up with was a geographic test.
LIASSON: Right.
INSKEEP: And so the question is whether this counts as religious or not among...
LIASSON: Yes, even though he said that the order says that religious minorities, meaning Christians, can be prioritized.
INSKEEP: Although there are religious minorities who are Muslims in many of these countries.
LIASSON: That's right.
INSKEEP: So we'll find out about that. He's also said it's a temporary order. But the president said during the campaign, we're going to continue this until we have perfect security. It's not clear what that means. Now, what have lawmakers said about all this, Mara?
LIASSON: There have been different reactions from - obviously, from Democrats and Republicans. This has really galvanized the opposition to Trump. There were protests at airports that were spontaneous, unlike the Women's March, which was planned. You have Democratic senators with 2020 ambitions showing up at these airport protests. There's going to be a demonstration tonight at the Supreme Court with Democratic members of Congress.
Republican support has been mixed - a lot of support in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, you had criticism from senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who've criticized the policy as being counterproductive. They agree with national security experts who say this could backfire on the United States' national security because it could give ISIS a recruiting tool and send the message that America is at war with Muslims. Other Republican senators, like Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, have basically criticized the way the order was designed - that it caused a lot of confusion.
INSKEEP: Well, how has the White House responded?
LIASSON: The White House is very confident that this is going to be popular with the broader public and not just with Donald Trump's hard-core base. You know, he ran on this ban. He said he'd keep the country safe. The White House believes he's just doing what he said he would do.
We don't have polling yet. But earlier this month, Quinnipiac did take a poll that asked the question, do you support suspending immigration from terror-prone nations? And 48 percent agreed with that. Forty-two percent disagreed.
INSKEEP: So it may depend on how you phrase the question, I suppose.
LIASSON: Yes.
INSKEEP: Now there's...
LIASSON: As polling always does.
INSKEEP: There you go. Well, now there's the question, there's so many other issues to deal with, and this is one more issue that has become very polarizing. Jonathan Martin of The New York Times writes over the weekend that Democratic lawmakers are under ever more pressure from their base voters to provide total opposition to this president.
LIASSON: Yes, and you saw that Republican voters had the same thing happen to them during the Obama administration. I think one of the places where this is going to play out - we'll find the answer to this - is when Donald Trump nominates his Supreme Court justice. He has said that it could come on Thursday, possibly earlier.
Right now, that would need 60 votes in the Senate for confirmation, unless the rules are changed - the way Democrats did for other presidential nominations. And the big pressure is going to be on exactly those Democratic senators from red states who are up for re-election in 2018. Republicans are going to be spending many, many millions of dollars to pressure those Democrats to vote for Trump's nomination. And then you've got the base, as you said, pulling back in the other direction.
INSKEEP: Mara, can you help us get started on another area of discussion here? The president has reshaped the National Security Council, which considers major national security issues. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, top military adviser to the president, director of National Intelligence, top intelligence official - they're still around. But they take a half-step back. Steve Bannon, the strategist and media publisher, takes a step in. And he's on the council. What does that say about Bannon's role?
LIASSON: Well, it says that Bannon's role is extremely important and central. He's now a member of the principals committee of the NSC. And as you said, the DNI director and Joint Chiefs - the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is not. He has been the architect of Trump's nationalist, populist ideology, wrote the inaugural address, has been organizing these executive orders. And this is unusual because other top strategists, like Karl Rove or David Axelrod, were not members of the principals committee and didn't sit in on NSC meetings.
INSKEEP: Mara, thanks very much, as always.
LIASSON: Thank you.
INSKEEP: NPR's Mara Liasson.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
More now on that shake-up at the National Security Council. We are going to turn to General Michael Hayden. He served Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama in top intelligence posts as director of the National Security Agency and CIA and deputy director of national intelligence. General Hayden, welcome back to the program.
MICHAEL HAYDEN: Good morning.
MARTIN: Steve Bannon, senior adviser to President Donald Trump, a former news executive - no high-level military experience, no high-level national security experience - has now been guaranteed a spot at top National Security Council meetings. How significant is that?
HAYDEN: That's very significant, and as Mara just pointed out, very different from what has gone on for the past 16 years. Rachel, I cannot remember a meeting whose results I cared about where Karl Rove was present. And although David Axelrod occasionally attended NSC meetings, he was not what Bannon has now become, a charter member. It seems to me that it puts ideology at the center over the professional kinds of information that the DNI and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs bring to the party.
MARTIN: So you mentioned Karl Rove and - and David Axelrod. These were senior political advisers. So there's a concern here that Bannon is going to inject some kind of politics into national security issues.
HAYDEN: He will inject politics and his ideological brand of policy. And that will come in the face of what I call the - the fact guys, the guys coming in with data, the world-as-it-is people as opposed to Bannon, whom I would categorize as the-world-as-we-want-it-to-be, or he believes it to be. I - I was always worried because the president-elect - or the president, rather - has actually made some very powerful choices for heads of departments and agencies. I was quite pleased with the pool of talent that he had.
I was always concerned, though. How will the administration make decisions? How much of the center of gravity will be in the White House or out there in the departments and agencies? The executive order on the National Security Council - and frankly, Rachel, the executive order on refugees this past weekend - seems to suggest that the real power center is going to be in that 18 acres in downtown Washington, and not out there with those talented people in the departments and agencies.
MARTIN: So as you mentioned, this is a diminishment of the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top U.S. military adviser, and the director of national intelligence. They will be invited on a case-by-case basis, which is - is rather exceptional. Does it mean an overall diminishment for them in general?
HAYDEN: Well, I think what we know so far, what we've said so far, what the order says so far, gives a certain sense of diminishment. Now, they can come to the meetings. But their attendance is at the discretion of Mike Flynn, which is another way of saying that the people who are really controlling events here are in the White House. And by the way, if they're...
MARTIN: Mike Flynn, national security adviser. Yeah.
HAYDEN: Right, yeah. And by the way, Rachel, these guys are statutory advisers. Bannon is there by presidential directive. But the DNI and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs are, by law, the senior advisers to the NSC. So this is quite a remarkable setup.
MARTIN: Before I let you go, you mentioned the - the ban, the travel ban, that President Trump and the administration has put out there. Could I just get your take on that? Do you think, as someone who has studied America's national security threats for so long, that this is the right move at this moment?
HAYDEN: It's a horrible move. It is a political, ideological move driven by the language of the campaign and, frankly, campaign promises - promises in the campaign that were hyped (ph) by an exaggeration of the threat. And in fact, what we're doing now has probably made us less safe today than we were Friday morning before this happened because we are now living the worst jihadist narrative possible, that there is undying enmity between Islam and the West.
Muslims out there who were not part of the jihadist movement are now being shown that the story they're being told by the jihadists - they hate us; they're our enemy - that's being acted out by the American government. And frankly, Rachel, at a humanitarian level, it's an abomination.
MARTIN: General Michael Hayden. He served in top intelligence posts under three presidents. General Hayden, thank you so much for your time. This is NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's hear a supporter of President Trump's executive order on refugees and some visitors to the United States. He's Congressman Bill Johnson. He served many years in the U.S. Air Force and is now a Republican representing southeastern Ohio, the hilly country along the Ohio River. He's praised the executive order as temporary and precautionary. And he's on the line from southeast Ohio. Congressman, good morning.
BILL JOHNSON: Good morning, Steve. How are you?
INSKEEP: I'm doing fine. Thank you very much, sir. Everybody agrees that it's a dangerous world, that there are terrorists out there. So there's no need to discuss that part of it. What we need to get at here, though, is what is it that makes this specific order, worded as it was - targeting refugees and people from seven countries - what makes that an effective response to the problem?
JOHNSON: Well, the American people certainly don't want to wind up in the same situation, Steve, that we see some of our friends in Europe. You've seen what's happened in Paris with people that have come in under the banner of refugee status. When the president is trying to put caution and restraint in place, he has to comply with the law.
And if you look at Section 11 of the executive order, it's very, very clear that he has every intent of complying with the law. And those seven countries were listed by President Obama and identified by Congress in the past. So President Trump is not doing anything outside the law.
INSKEEP: Well, that's an interesting point because there have been many questions about what the intent of this was. It's been described as a Muslim ban. The president has said that's false. But we also heard on Fox News, over the weekend, from Rudolph Giuliani - big supporter the president - who said that Trump asked him for a Muslim ban. And Giuliani said, let me figure out a way to do this legally. Doesn't that leave it pretty clear what the motivation of this was?
JOHNSON: Well, I think you have to look at the facts. You know, we can use hyperbole, and we can use he said, she said. But you have to look at the facts. You know, there are some 40 predominantly Muslim countries. This deals with seven of them. And if you look at countries like Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Nigeria - just to name a few - these are the largest Muslim populations in the world. And they are not listed.
So the overwhelming majority of the Muslim world is not affected by this executive order. So to call it a Muslim ban - and I appreciate, Steve, that NPR wants to get to the bottom of this because there are good people on both sides of the debate. But to call it a Muslim ban is just adding to the hysteria because that's not what it is at all.
INSKEEP: Well, that raises another question for me, Congressman, because you mentioned there are many countries not covered. There are also American Muslims who are not covered. There have been people from other countries linked to attacks. There have been U.S. citizens linked to attacks. The next time there's an attack, if it's from somebody other than not these seven countries, would you favor the president extending these kinds of targeting to cover more people?
JOHNSON: Look, I don't think we can - I don't think we can throw a blanket over this thing and say every time there's an incident that we're going to - that we're going to put up travel bans and stop certain people from coming into the country. But clearly, there's a precedent for this. You know, President Obama stopped Iraqis from coming in in 2011 for six months - not 120 days, Steve, but six months. And if you go back to the Iranian hostage situation in the '70s, President Carter stopped travel from Iran...
INSKEEP: Well, you raise...
JOHNSON: ...During that time.
INSKEEP: ...You raise a good point there about 2011. I do need to underline a couple of facts here. The Washington Post looked into that and noted that in 2011, it appears the Obama administration slowed visa applications from Iraq in response to a specific incident. And then, when they felt that procedures had been improved, they sped things up again. I want to ask about...
JOHNSON: But Steve, isn't this a slowing? I mean, this is a...
INSKEEP: Well, it's a stopping, actually.
JOHNSON: It's temporary, Steve. It's not a stopping. It's not permanent. It's a temporary thing for 90 days. And here's the point, Steve. If President Trump and those who think that this executive order is irresponsible and over the top - if - those of us who think that it's the right thing to do, then some people may be inconvenienced. But if those who are sensationalizing and exaggerating the executive order and opposition are wrong, then Americans could die, Steve.
INSKEEP: Well, Congressman, let me ask...
JOHNSON: The president has a responsibility to protect and defend the people of the United States.
INSKEEP: Agree about that responsibility, but let me just ask about something you mentioned. You said it's temporary. And that is how the president has described it.
JOHNSON: Right.
INSKEEP: There are time limits. But the president also said, in a speech during the campaign, we're going to continue this until we can, quote, "perfectly screen people." Will there ever be a moment that you can perfectly screen everyone?
JOHNSON: One thing I've learned in this job is never to say never because you don't know what you're going to do, Steve, when bills come to the floor and political issues come up. And I also understand that there is no perfect solution.
INSKEEP: Doesn't that mean that temporary is going to mean forever then? Forgive me. Doesn't that mean temporary's going to be forever?
JOHNSON: No, it does not mean temporary's going to be forever. I don't think that means that at all. If that were the case, then we would still be slowing Iraqi entrance since 2011. And I don't think that's the case.
INSKEEP: Forgive me, Congressman, just a few seconds. One other thing I want to ask about, the president has said he would welcome religious minorities, including Christians from Syria. There are other religious minorities who are Muslims - for example, Sunni Muslims in Iran. In about 20 seconds, would you personally welcome Sunni Muslim refugees from Iran because they're a persecuted religious minority?
JOHNSON: Well, when the ban is lifted and we can properly vet people, absolutely, Steve, because people will - you know, the bad guys - the bad guys aren't going to comply with the law...
INSKEEP: Remember, there's an exception now. You wouldn't welcome them now?
JOHNSON: What exception are you talking about?
INSKEEP: Exception for persecuted religious minorities.
JOHNSON: Well, certainly there are. Certainly there are.
INSKEEP: OK.
JOHNSON: And when that time comes, I think that's a situation - that's a circumstance that the president has to consider.
INSKEEP: Congressman Bill Johnson of Ohio, thanks very much for taking our questions. I really appreciate it.
JOHNSON: You bet, bye-bye.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. The Atlanta Falcons are ready for the Super Bowl - of Ping-Pong. Coach Dan Quinn says the team put three Ping-Pong tables in the locker room, which helped players to bond. Since they're heading for the championship, it apparently worked. One player says it improves hand-eye coordination.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Oh, man - but I hope he doesn't miss the game with a Ping-Pong injury. Oh, come on, Rachel. They're going to be ready to play the New England Patriots. Yeah, as long as the Ping-Pong balls aren't mysteriously deflated.
INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Donald Trump defended his executive order on immigration on Sunday, saying, "this is not about religion. This is about terror and keeping our country safe." That's a quote. Here's his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, on NBC's "Meet The Press" yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MEET THE PRESS")
REINCE PRIEBUS: Here's the deal. If you're coming in and out of one of those seven countries - by the way, identified by the Obama administration as the seven most dangerous countries in the world in regard to harboring terrorists and affirmed by Congress multiple times - then you're going to be subjected, temporarily, with more questioning until a better program is put in place over the next several months.
MARTIN: Priebus said at one point in that interview that the executive order would not apply to green card holders going forward. The Department of Homeland Security later confirmed that. Congressional Democrats are strongly condemning the executive order. Former vice presidential candidate Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia is one of them. He is on the line now with us from Roanoke, Va.
Senator, welcome back to the program.
TIM KAINE: Hey. So good to be with you guys this morning.
MARTIN: You wrote in a statement yesterday that you're, quote, "appalled by the cruelty the Trump administration has demonstrated over the past 24 hours." Trump administration officials say they recognize the order is inconveniencing people, but this is about protecting America's national security. You don't see it that way?
KAINE: No, I don't. If you want to protect security, you vet everybody in a significant way. You don't single people out from certain countries. You don't make the order apply to green card holders, people who are lawful permanent residents of the United States, as was originally the case.
MARTIN: Which has now been clarified, yeah.
KAINE: After the firestorm and after lawsuits, they finally have said, OK, maybe we were wrong on that. It won't apply to green card holders. Let me just give you an example. I actually live in Richmond, but I'm in Roanoke, Va., today. Last night, I visited with a family in Blacksburg. This is a family that, together with Commonwealth Catholic Charities, helped to resettle a Syrian family in Blacksburg about a year ago - mom and dad and four kids. Seventy-three percent of the refugees are women and children under the age of 14.
The husband in the family was helped with his English, and he got a job in a local construction firm. The guy who runs the firm told me, you know, I have some kind of conservative folks working for me. But we absolutely love this guy. He's a great worker. His family is great. And the group of families in Blacksburg was waiting for another family to arrive this week, on the 4, that they were prepping for because they're a welcoming community and they want to be able to help these children.
These are children that we're trying to help come away from the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. And Donald Trump has taken a Statue-of-Liberty nation and turned it into a hard-hearted place with his order. There's the right way to do this, and there's the wrong way to do it. And what the administration's done has been the wrong way.
MARTIN: So I want to ask you about the right way. But first, you can argue America has a humanitarian responsibility to provide safe harbor to refugees. And yes, it's on the Statue of Liberty, but it is not required by law. And U.S. constitutional rights do not apply to people who are not U.S. citizens.
KAINE: Well, that's not completely true. The 14th Amendment says every person - every citizen is entitled to the privileges and immunities, but every person is entitled to equal protection of the laws. And there have been a number of constitutional cases that have applied rights even to non-citizens.
But let's talk about what's right for our national security. I'm on the Armed Services Committee in the Senate. When you send out a message that this sends out - that, you know, we're going to target folks from these Muslim countries no matter what their circumstance, no matter how well they are able to be vetted - we're going to target them and not let them to be allowed in, you're basically playing right into the hands of a narrative of terrorist groups in the Mideast that say what the U.S. is trying to do is conduct a war against Islam. Other members of Congress have pointed out the same thing.
MARTIN: So do we just absorb that risk then? Do I hear you saying, a terrorist might get into the country this way, but...
KAINE: No, no. I'm not saying that at all.
MARTIN: ...It's not worth changing our system or values?
KAINE: No, I'm saying we should have a vetting process. If what this order was was, we're going to increase vetting processes for anybody, refugee or travelers - we're going to do the following - that's one thing. But that's not what it did at all. It just said, if you're from these particular Muslim-majority countries - and many of the countries that have had instances of folks coming in with terrorist background are not on the list - but if you're from these countries, we're going to block you.
And as you know, this order applies to people coming to the United States under a protected status that we call the special immigrant visa, people who have worked with our troops in the field, who have been interpreters for them and assistants for them. And because of helping the United States, they've put their lives at risk. We give them a special protected status because of their help to Americans so they can be safe. People with special immigrant visas are caught up in this and turned away. This is something that Senators McCain, Shaheen and I have worked on a lot.
It was just so poorly done. And it really does amount to a religious ban because the president himself said, look, we're going to apply it to folks from these countries. But if you're from a persecuted religious minority, especially Christian, you know, there will be an exception for you. We should not have a religious test. That is contrary to everything this country stands for.
MARTIN: So how do you do it better? Because you are saying that there is a way to vet people better, that there is a way to tighten our security.
KAINE: Absolutely. You know, if he had said, look, we're going to look at every aspect of our immigration system and try to tighten it up, you wouldn't have had these protests. We made, for example, a year ago, significant changes to make it harder for people to get tourist visas to come into the United States because we realized there were some weaknesses there.
The family - just using the example of this family that's supposed to arrive in Roanoke through the help of Catholic Charities this week - they fled Syria. And they have been in a refugee camp being vetted through the U.N. to try to come to the United States for four years. They've been through a four-year vetting process. But if you want to make the vetting process harder for refugees generally - make it harder to claim political asylum in the United States, take a look at whether there are gaps in tourists or travelers - all of that we could have a productive discussion about.
But when you make it about people from particular nations, even those who have helped U.S. troops on the battlefield... Who would ever help us again if they help us on the battlefield and then we abandon them to danger because they've, you know, been brave enough to help the United States? So this thing - I mean, clearly, it was done by the political folks at the White House without getting advice from immigration officials...
MARTIN: Yeah.
KAINE: ...And others. And that's why it has backfired so badly.
MARTIN: U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia talking about the executive order on immigration from the Trump administration.
Senator, thank you so much for your time.
KAINE: Thanks.
(SOUNDBITE OF LITTLE PEOPLE'S "OFFAL WAFFLE")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This past weekend was supposed to be a special one for an Iraqi family in Michigan, after a long immigration process a woman and her husband planned a reunion. NPR's Jeff Brady reports on what really happened.
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: Until last year, Shahad Khairuldeen says she worked for a U.S. contractor in Iraq performing HR and IT tasks. Because of that work, she says it wasn't safe to stay in her country. Like many others who helped the U.S. in Iraq, she applied for a special visa.
SHAHAD KHAIRULDEEN: And it's taken me four years to get the visa because it go under seven level of security check.
BRADY: Khairuldeen came to the U.S. last fall with their 3-year-old son. She says her husband had to wait for a renewed passport. He traveled from Iraq to Philadelphia on Saturday, and then was supposed to catch a connecting flight to Detroit.
KHAIRULDEEN: And I didn't know why he's not showing, I start to worry about him. I thought something happened to him. I wait three hours and then somebody called me and told me they have my husband.
BRADY: Khairuldeen says authorities offered few details except that her husband, Ahmed Al Janabi, was still in Philadelphia. On Saturday night, a judge blocked Trump administration plans to deport immigrants affected by the travel ban. Khairuldeen's husband was released Sunday morning. A few hours later, he arrived in Detroit, that's when Khairuldeen learned he was put in handcuffs and prison clothes and locked up overnight.
KHAIRULDEEN: That is horrible. He didn't do anything wrong. He's not a criminal. He come here on a legal paper. They shouldn't treat him like that.
BRADY: U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to questions about this particular case. In a statement the agency said less than 1 percent of international travelers at airports were affected, and the statement said the agency treats the people it encounters humanely and with professionalism. Khairuldeen disagrees, but at this point she's happy to have her family back together again. Jeff Brady, NPR News, Philadelphia.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called last night's attack on a mosque in Quebec a, quote, "terrorist attack on Muslims." At least six people were killed after gunmen opened fire during evening prayers. For the latest on this, we are joined now by Kelly Greig from the Canadian TV channel Global News. She joins us now from Quebec City.
Kelly, thanks for being with us.
KELLY GREIG: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much.
MARTIN: Walk us through what you can tell us about the details of the attack last night.
GREIG: It happened right in the middle of evening prayer. So there were about, police say, about 50 people inside the mosque at the time. Now there are six people who were killed. And you did mention there were eight wounded. But of those, six were critically wounded. So those numbers could change this morning.
From the information the police provided us, there were two arrests that were made. One was the suspect who was actually at the mosque on the scene. Another one was fleeing the scene and was arrested about 20 kilometers away, a few miles away. And so those are - those two suspects are both in custody.
Now there are people showing up to the scene this morning and getting as close as they can get just to get a look of where it happened. But mostly, the city is just completely in shock.
MARTIN: Do you know anything else about the two people who've been arrested?
GREIG: There are rumors flying around this morning. So far, police have not confirmed anything. What we do know is that they are two men. That is the only details we have. But we are expecting a...
MARTIN: They're two men, did you say, Kelly? I'm sorry. The line was...
GREIG: Yes, two men. Yes.
MARTIN: OK.
GREIG: But we are expecting a police update a little later this morning. So we're hoping to get more information on the suspects themselves.
MARTIN: This isn't the first time this particular mosque has been targeted either, right?
GREIG: It hasn't, no. It's actually been a recent target, too. Last year in June, a pig's head was left on the doorstep, (inaudible). Of course, this is something horrible and more of an affront to the, you know, practice of Islam. And there was also a threatening message left just weeks later in connection with that pig's head saying = what is worse, having a pig's head or having genocide? Now, at the time, everyone at the mosque was shaken, but they persevered. And they thought they had gotten through the worst. But of course, yesterday's acts just can't compare with the threat.
MARTIN: What's the reaction just within the community? I mean, is Quebec - is there a large Muslim community in Quebec?
GREIG: There are about three mosques in Quebec - I think there are four, actually - and Quebec is not even the largest city in the province. This is really a government town, a very quiet town. There's a very low crime rate. So for something like this to happen has, really, the residents shocked. And especially where the mosque is - it's right in the middle of a residential neighborhood. There are literally houses right next door to this mosque. So people coming out and, obviously, they saw what had happened last night. And they're just in complete disbelief. And there are many vigils and memorials that are planned across the province held tonight and later this week.
MARTIN: And just briefly, Kelly, are these isolated incidents? Or what can you tell us about larger anti-Muslim sentiment around Canada - and in Quebec in particular?
GREIG: Well, it's an interesting time for Canadians. It's just a...
MARTIN: And I think we've lost that line. That was Kelly Greig from Global News in Canada. She was talking about an attack that took place on a mosque in Quebec City yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE OF BONOBO'S "BLACK SANDS REMINIMIXED")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's ask an immigration lawyer about President Trump's executive order on all refugees as well as visitors from seven Middle Eastern nations. They have been temporarily, the order says, banned from entering the United States. William Stock is the president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association whose members have been very busy at airports across the United States. He's on the line from Virginia. Welcome to the program, sir.
WILLIAM STOCK: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: Do you understand as this has evolved who is getting to come in, people from the seven countries and refugees, who actually gets to enter in spite of the order?
STOCK: We've certainly seen that on a case-by-case basis people with humanitarian issues were able to come in. Many green card holders, people who've lived in the United States for a long time who have permanent resident status, were not allowed to board airplanes over the weekend. Eventually many of those were allowed to come into the United States. CBP unfortunately was really caught completely by surprise by this order, and really the biggest problems were that they didn't know how to implement it in the first two days.
INSKEEP: CBP, that's the Customs and Border Protection, the guys who have to actually do this.
STOCK: Exactly, the people at the airports.
INSKEEP: And you said green card holders on a case-by-case basis, does that mean that green card holders are still broadly banned from returning to the United States but they can ask and may be granted permission?
STOCK: Exactly. That's the way the order was originally interpreted. Secretary Kelly, head of the DHS, came out late last night and said that the possession of a green card should be considered a dispositive factor in a case-by-case basis, so ironically the government had to announce that on a case-by-case basis a broad category of people was subject to being admitted.
INSKEEP: OK, so I think what you're telling me then, Mr. Stock, is that the executive order has now been changed but in a way that they can say - the White House can say they didn't actually change the executive order.
STOCK: Certainly there is at least some guidance that's now being given to CBP officers around the country about exactly who their superiors say should be covered by the order.
INSKEEP: OK. I've heard a number of claims from people who feel that Customs and Border Protection is not following court orders to allow people in if they'd already reached the United States. Do you feel the government is obeying the various court orders on this at the moment?
STOCK: They are not. Our members have reported being asked to give access to people who were being detained for secondary inspection. I think people in America need to understand that they have no rights when it comes to CBP. CBP can search their phone, their luggage when they come in. And in spite of court orders, CBP said they were not going to let lawyers have access to these folks.
INSKEEP: There are court orders saying that you should be able to provide them with legal representation?
STOCK: Yes, there are two court orders, one in Boston, one in Dulles. The one in Dulles specifically requires allowing people to have access to lawyers so that they could understand what the rules were and how they might be able to claim one of these case by-case exceptions or asylum if they were afraid of being returned back home to wherever they had been coming from.
INSKEEP: One other question here about who gets in and who doesn't, it involves refugees. The refugees have been stopped, but we're told in the executive order there is an exception for persecuted religious minorities. The president has said he meant Christians in Syria, but there are religious minorities who are members of Muslim sects in all seven of these countries, and a great many of them can describe themselves as persecuted. Are they being allowed in so far as you know?
STOCK: My - the intelligence I have so far from our folks on the ground is that folks who arrive with refugee visas, people who'd already been approved by the U.N. and the U.S. authorities, were turned away, their visas were canceled. Many of them were told that they could come back, you know, within 90 days. They're going to have to go through new processing because CBP canceled their visa here in Philadelphia. We're actually going to be bringing a lawsuit on behalf of a Syrian family who had just that experience and has now been returned to Jordan.
INSKEEP: Just one other thing, Mr. Stock, about the constitutionality here. I know that immigration lawyers, the ACLU and others have said that this order is unconstitutional - a religious test which would be unconstitutional. Dan McLaughlin writes in The National Review over the weekend that whatever you think of a religious ban, whether you think this is a religious ban or not, quote, "foreigners have no right under our Constitution to demand entry to the United States or to challenge any reason we might have to refuse them entry, even blatant religious discrimination." Does the Constitution really apply to everyone here?
STOCK: Well, this is going to be a collision of two big constitutional principles. The first one is that generally speaking Congress is allowed to make the rules and the executive is allowed to execute it, but the other one is that the U.S. government cannot establish an official religion by saying that Muslims are out and Christians are in.
INSKEEP: OK. Well, Mr. Stock, thanks very much, really appreciate that.
STOCK: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: William Stock, a busy man who leads a busy organization. He's president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The images that often come from breaking news can be dramatic or brutal or upsetting. And that has provided inspiration for art. In Los Angeles, an exhibit at the Getty Center looks at artists' reactions to mass media, what they saw day after day in decades past. NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg reports.
SUSAN STAMBERG, BYLINE: It's a big show - more than 200 photos and videos, 17 artists. They're not photo journalists. They take the actual work of photo journalists and turn it into something else. They use news images of terrorism, Hurricane Katrina, the death of a pope. The war in Vietnam is a major theme for two of the artists horrified by that war assaulting them through the mass media of the day. They lifted pictures from magazines, newspapers, TV screens and collaged or manipulated them to reflect their horror.
The original news images are deeply disturbing. The artists' use of them amplifies the disturbance. Martha Rosler took a Life magazine picture of a handsome 1960s living room and on the living room stairs pasted a clipping of a devastated Vietnamese man carrying his blood spattered child. A sobering juxtaposition, the war in our living room.
ARPAD KOVACS: Often these images from Vietnam were appearing in the exact same issue as these interior scenes.
STAMBERG: A reader could easily flip through the magazine and miss one or the other, but the artist intervenes.
KOVACS: What it does is it makes America confront two different realities.
STAMBERG: Arpad Kovacs curated the Getty show.
This is not very subtle, though, is it? It's really political and quite focused.
KOVACS: It's very political, it's very aggressive. But it's meant to be. You know, a lot of these pictures actually initially circulated in underground magazines. These are pictures that are not on the fence. They really stake a claim and stand for something.
STAMBERG: Martha Rosler was a student of John Baldessari. The 85-year-old artist is an iconic figure in the LA art world with works in major American museums. He too manipulates photographs, adding text and lettering. He once had students in his conceptual art class react to undated, uncaptioned news photos he pinned to a bulletin board. Baldessari pauses at one of them in the Getty show.
Look, there's a man bending down and it looks like he's kissing - I can't tell. Is he kissing the ground or...
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, you don't know that. You're just making that up.
STAMBERG: Which is exactly Baldessari's point, just what he wanted his students to do.
BALDESSARI: That's the way you're reading it.
STAMBERG: He could simply be bending to smell the ground, the artist says, or the grass.
BALDESSARI: You don't know that.
STAMBERG: But I like that I can wonder about it. And I can make up some story around it. I like that.
BALDESSARI: Sure, sure.
STAMBERG: Meaning is slippery, Baldessari says, although there is clear meaning in the newspaper photographs Donald Blumberg works with. In the Vietnam years, he had a photo show at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Police occupied the campus during an anti-war student protest. A flying wedge of cops ran by chasing the students.
DONALD BLUMBERG: They were trapped in the stairwell of the campus and beaten with clubs. That was the last draw in thinking I was going to be a decorative fine art photographer doing beautiful photographs for people to look at.
STAMBERG: He started clipping news photographs that captured the disaster in Vietnam. He enlarged and then photographed page one of the New York Daily News, a photo of the massacre in the town of My Lai with the big headline, "GI Shot Child, Walked Away." Another headline, "Grenade Is Cut From Prisoner's Face" with the X-ray of that face and the lieutenant who dug out the live grenade with his pocket knife. Around each story, Blumberg shows a thick, dark black frame. The black is in memoriam, like the black ribbon worn after a death in the family.
BLUMBERG: I'd like to be as political as I can. And one of the ways of being political is through my photography.
STAMBERG: We are bombarded with photographs. They come at us from everywhere, so many images - more than we can absorb. For Donald Blumberg and other photographers in this Getty exhibition, "Breaking News: Turning The Lens On Mass Media," the magic of still photography is that it stops time, gives viewers the chance to really look and think about what's happening in our world, our lives.
I must say, as a lover of art, I look at art to get away from the news and to get away from realities and tragedies and war and all of that. Here, they're saying, in your face.
KOVACS: I think good art is always about something difficult.
STAMBERG: Again, curator Arpad Kovacs.
KOVACS: Art is more than a pretty picture. Good art is about sort of challenging the status quo and making a statement.
STAMBERG: Through their photographs, these artists are bearing witness for future generations, those who weren't around when the news actually broke. In Culver City, I'm Susan Stamberg, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
An effort to help American veterans get medical care faster is not working. NPR and some of its member stations have investigated a multi-billion dollar U.S. government program for veterans. It is supposed to add more doctors, nurses and other medical staff at VA medical centers. The idea was that more staff would cut wait times, which sounds pretty simple, but it hasn't worked that way. So let's talk about this first with Steve Walsh, who's a reporter with our member station KPBS in San Diego. Hi, Steve.
STEVE WALSH, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: What's gone wrong?
WALSH: Well, so the VA got about $2.5 billion to hire new medical staff. One of our findings is that there was no real pattern to where those doctors and nurses and other staff were sent. So for example, wait times for mental health were really bad two years ago in San Diego. I think San Diego's VA would have gotten more help since, after all, the stakes were really high when you talk about mental health care.
INSKEEP: But they didn't get more help is what you're saying? That particular facility didn't get any more staff?
WALSH: Well, not as much as they thought they should get. And so think back to 2014 to patients like Charlie Grijalva. That's when the wait time scandal first hit. Grijalva was diagnosed with PTSD when he was still in the Army. He lived in Imperial Valley, a desert community about two hours from the VA hospital in San Diego.
INSKEEP: OK.
WALSH: I went out there, actually, to talk to his widow, Gloria.
GLORIA GRIJALVA: It's a small town, so everybody knows each other. His and my parents - his mom went to school with my mom. His dad lived, like, two blocks away from my dad. So everybody knows each other here.
WALSH: Grijalva had a history of suicidal thoughts after spending 18 months in Afghanistan and a year in Iraq. The VA tried to reach out. In early 2014, his wife says they seemed to have gotten his prescription right. Then his VA psychiatrist left that summer, he missed an appointment with a nurse practitioner in September. The VA renewed his medications over the phone and because San Diego's wait times were so long, they offered to let him see a doctor outside the VA system under the new Choice Program.
But in December 2014, his medication ran out again and then it was the holidays. Grijalva had a young family and a new baby on the way. He insisted on giving his kids a magical Christmas.
GRIJALVA: He was like, you know what? I want to do what we used to do as a kid and play some Christmas music and have the kids decorate the tree, drink hot chocolate. And even though he was still feeling the way he was, he wanted to have that kind of Christmas for his kids.
WALSH: A few days before Christmas, his wife found him. He'd hung himself a few hours after he texted her I love you.
GRIJALVA: He had told me when he was at his lowest, I don't want my kids to see this. I don't want to put my kids through any of this.
WALSH: Now, you can't say whether the VA could have actually saved his life, but everyone agrees with long wait times like this, the system needed to be fixed.
INSKEEP: Painful story unfolding over years and wait times were one factor, one part of that story. Let's bring in another voice now. NPR's Quil Lawrence covers veterans issues and has for years. And, Quil, what was it that Congress tried to do about this problem?
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: They came up with basically two approaches. They spent about $10 billion to give some vets the choice to get care outside the VA.
INSKEEP: OK.
LAWRENCE: That's what they were talking about with Charlie Grijalva. They gave him a chance to see an outside mental health care provider. And then the part we're focusing on today is the about $2.5 billion they spent to hire new staff inside the VA to sort of beef up their ability to see more patients. Now, Dr. David Shulkin joined the VA after that law passed, but he's been overseeing the program since 2015. And we spoke to him several times last year about the Choice Program.
DAVID SHULKIN: Our goal is to get them the health care professionals that they need. So that the choice money, we wanted everybody to go out and execute on it and to use that money as quickly as possible 'cause we have a sense of crisis.
INSKEEP: Really interesting to hear this voice, Dr. David Shulkin, Quil Lawrence, because we're listening to a guy at the VA who's now been promoted. President Trump wants him to be promoted to run the VA. And he's saying this was the goal, to get more health professionals on the frontlines.
LAWRENCE: Right, and the $2.5 billion was supposed to give them a big bump in staffing. But when we looked at their data, we just didn't see it. We saw that they basically ended up hiring the same number of people with this $2.5 billion of VA Choice money, the same number you would have expected them to hire the following year without that money. We found that the new VA staff didn't really go to the medical centers that appeared to need it most, according to the data.
And the locations that got the staff weren't really more likely to improve than the locations that didn't get part of these $2.5 billion worth of new hires.
INSKEEP: Wow, OK, so this leads to some bottom line, questions. First for you, Steve Walsh, of KPBS, what's it look like at a Veterans Center that needed extra staff, lots of extra staff, and didn't get it?
WALSH: So we remember San Diego. It had one of the longest wait times in the country if you needed to see a mental health specialist. That was the problem with Charlie Grijalva, the vet who committed suicide back in 2014. San Diego asked for about 40 mental health providers to tackle its wait times. It was allowed to hire 24 people that first year. And then when they came back in 2016, they found out that all of the money had already been spent. So the pattern seems to be kind of all over the place.
What I did is I actually took a car ride around Southern California to look at some of the larger VAs. I first stopped in West Los Angeles, one of the largest and busiest VAs in the country. They were prioritized by the VA, though they received the least money of any of the VAs in Southern California. I actually went a half an hour away to Long Beach. They received more people, though both in Long Beach and LA, overall wait times have not come down over the last couple years.
INSKEEP: Wait a minute, that's the next bottom line question. Why wouldn't things at least improve in the places that did get a lot more staff?
LAWRENCE: So, Steve, the VA says that they got really a huge uptick in patients in the last year or two, which swamped some of the gains they made. But when we looked at their data, the VAs that they prioritized didn't seem to be the ones that did better. We saw VAs that they'd prioritized get fewer hires. For example, Dallas wasn't prioritized, LA was, and Dallas got almost three times more hires. If there was a data-driven method to how these choice hires went out, we just couldn't find it.
INSKEEP: And one more bottom line question, how could it be, as you say, that an extra $2.5 billion didn't actually lead to hiring that many more people?
LAWRENCE: There are a lot of factors that contribute to that. One might just be that there's a limited number of doctors and nurses. They're scarce around the country, so it doesn't matter how much money you pour into it. But we're going to talk about that at length this afternoon on All Things Considered.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Quil Lawrence along with Steve Walsh of KPBS. Gentlemen, thanks very much.
LAWRENCE: Thank you, Steve.
WALSH: Thanks, Steve.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now, today is the last day - for this year anyway - to sign up for the health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act, which may seem a bit strange since most of the talk in Washington has been about getting rid of Obamacare. But NPR's Alison Kodjak reports that amid all this confusion, people keep signing up for coverage.
ALISON KODJAK, BYLINE: At Whitman-Walker Health in downtown Washington, D.C., yesterday, there was a steady stream of people looking for help enrolling in Obamacare. Katie Nicol is a senior manager who oversees five people whose sole job is to help people sign up for insurance coverage.
KATIE NICOL: We've been busy, you know, consumer after consumer all day.
KODJAK: Which may be surprising given all the uncertainty surrounding the Affordable Care Act. Not far from Whitman-Walker, Republicans in Congress and President Donald Trump are working to dismantle the health care law. Members of the House and Senate have taken the first steps to repeal the ACA, and Trump issued an executive order to roll it back. Still, as today's deadline to get coverage approaches, Nicol says demand for insurance hasn't waned.
NICOL: Our volume has been the same as it has in past years.
KODJAK: That tracks with the latest numbers released by the Department of Health and Human Services. As of January 14, 8.8 million people had signed up for coverage, slightly more than last year. Those numbers haven't been updated since Trump moved into the White House. Nicol says even as their clients pick insurance for this year, they worry about what happens next.
NICOL: We definitely have people coming in with a lot of anxiety surrounding the ACA and whether it's still going to be here for - just through the end of the year.
KODJAK: That's because Republicans have spent the last few months talking about repealing and replacing Obamacare. But the details of a new plan have been sparse.
The concern Nicol sees in D.C. is showing up across the country, says Jennifer Sullivan, a vice president of Enroll America, which works to get people affordable health insurance.
JENNIFER SULLIVAN: Between actions in Congress and actions from the new administration, consumers are confused. We are hearing that consumers are concerned and need clarification about what's available.
KODJAK: In recent weeks, several polls have shown that now that Obamacare is threatened, more people view it favorably. And that's likely at the top of mind of many congressional Republicans who are grappling with how to replace the ACA with a program that will ensure at least as many people have coverage.
Alison Kodjak, NPR News, Washington.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
One more development in this dramatic newsweek - a surprise announcement late Monday. The Boy Scouts of America say that they will begin accepting transgender boys who want to join its scouting programs. NPR's Richard Gonzales reports.
RICHARD GONZALES, BYLINE: The news of the Scouts' policy change came in a written and video statement released by the chief scout executive Michael Surbaugh. He says that for more than 100 years, the Scouts used information on an individual's birth certificate to determine a boy's eligibility to join in its single-gender programs. But now, he says, communities and states are interpreting gender identity differently. And the old policy no longer works because the laws vary from state to state.
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MICHAEL SURBAUGH: Starting today, we will accept registration in our Scouting programs based on the gender identity provided on an individual's application.
GONZALES: But Surbaugh seemed to anticipate that the policy change will be met with more than a little skepticism, if not outright opposition in some areas of the country.
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SURBAUGH: We will also continue to work with families to find Scouting units that are the best fit for their children.
GONZALES: The policy change comes after the scout leadership was confronted by the case of 8-year-old Joe Maldonado of New Jersey. He had joined a scout troop last fall, but was then forced out after parents and local leaders discovered that he had been born a girl. That publicity wasn't good. Justin Wilson is the executive director of Scouts for Equality, a group of Eagle Scouts, former scouts, parents and volunteers who oppose discrimination within the group.
JUSTIN WILSON: They saw the public reaction, they saw the harm that this caused for this child, for this family, and they thought that it was a distraction from doing what they do best which is serving the Scouting programs. In response to that relatively short discussion, they made this historic change.
GONZALES: Wilson says the speed of the Boy Scouts' decision stands in sharp contrast to the 37-year battle for the inclusion of lesbian, gay and bisexual Scouts, employees and troop leaders. As for Joe Maldonado, his mother Christie told the Associated Press that she would like for her son to rejoin the Scouts, but only if the leader who kicked him out leaves. Richard Gonzales, NPR News.
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When Sally Yates faced a confirmation hearing to serve as deputy attorney general in 2015, a senator asked her a question.
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JEFF SESSIONS: If the views the president wants to execute are unlawful, should the attorney general or the deputy attorney general say no?
SALLY YATES: Senator, I believe that the attorney general or the deputy attorney general has an obligation to follow the law and the Constitution and to give their independent legal advice to the president.
INSKEEP: Senator Jeff Sessions wanted to know if Yates would defy President Obama. As it turns out, Yates stayed on after Obama left and defied President Trump. She rejected the president's ban on refugees and visitors from seven majority-Muslim countries. She said she wasn't sure it's lawful.
The president said it is, and fired the acting attorney general. Democrats resisting the president's order include a Democratic congressman from Indianapolis. Andre Carson is one of two Muslims in Congress.
ANDRE CARSON: For me, being African-American and being a Muslim, I think, my reference point is quite different. I mean, having had to deal with deep suspicions and animosities growing up as an African-American and as a Muslim - so you have double the assumptions, double the suspicions - I'm deeply concerned. You know, I applaud the injunction against President Trump's executive order. And I call on the Democratic Party, the Republican Party to speak boldly against these things. To me, it's unpatriotic and un-American.
INSKEEP: Well, help me understand this, congressman, because you say that as a Muslim you're particularly concerned about this order. But I could hear someone from the administration shooting right back and saying this is not targeting all Muslims. It's not targeting all foreign Muslims. It's targeting visitors from seven specific countries. It's not a Muslim ban. Why do you feel that it is aimed at you or people of your faith in particular?
CARSON: Well, it's obviously a Muslim ban. President Trump himself has made anti-Muslim rhetoric a pillar of his campaign, so it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that he is now implementing these policies. Now, whether he says it or not, these restrictions are clearly aimed at directly affecting Muslims around the world.
INSKEEP: Congressman, how many refugees are in Indianapolis these days?
CARSON: We have thousands of refugees. Many are from Asia. We have a growing - one of the largest - Burmese communities, Syrian refugees. I welcomed a family several months ago.
INSKEEP: Well, let me put on the table, very frankly, some concerns that some Americans have about refugees. And let me just ask about the ones there in Indianapolis. As a former law enforcement officer, do you find them to be a security threat?
CARSON: Well, I think we have a very thorough vetting process. It takes 18 to 24 months, multiple agencies - including the State Department, Department of Homeland Security and others who are a part of this system. That's encouraging for me. I think what we have found and what the data suggests is that the larger threat comes from racial supremacist organizations in rural parts of society, in places like Indiana, other parts of the Midwest. But as it relates to the religious threat, I think we have to monitor more closely lone wolves.
INSKEEP: Lone wolves - a lot of security experts say that is the profile of a person to worry about. But you said something else there, congressman. You said you were concerned about a security threat from rural Americans. What did you mean by that?
CARSON: Well, not rural Americans specifically. I worked in rural America as a law enforcement officer. I said that these extremist groups who have a presence in these parts of our country...
INSKEEP: You're thinking of racist groups - is that right? - like white nationalist organizations.
CARSON: Oh, without question, without question - and so these groups are preying on disillusionment. They're preying on growing pockets of poverty throughout our country. And they're telling them these Muslims are the reason why you're not successful. African-Americans are the reason why. Latinos are taking your jobs.
INSKEEP: Let me ask one other thing along those lines, congressman. Setting aside extremists of any stripe and just talking about ordinary people, ordinary voters, some of the millions of people who voted in November, do you think that people in your city - Indianapolis - have a good understanding of Hoosiers just 20, 30 miles outside of town, in the farmland? And do you think people in rural areas have a good understanding of what's happening in your city?
CARSON: I think, you know - look, some of the best people you'll ever find in this country live in rural America, and I can attest to that being from Indiana. But my greater point is that the face of terrorism in this country has a Muslim face. It has an Islamic face. The greater truth is, even from data from our esteemed FBI, can attest that the larger threat comes from racial, supremacist organizations.
INSKEEP: Congressman Andre Carson of Indianapolis, ind., thanks very much.
CARSON: What an honor. Thank you.
INSKEEP: Now, after we spoke with Carson, we did a little fact-checking. PolitiFact's takes issue with his assertion that racial supremacist groups, specifically, are a larger threat than Muslim terrorists - depends on how you count. And PolitiFact says they can find no data to support his assertion.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Here's another of today's main stories. Canadian officials arrested a suspect in the massacre at a mosque. He's 27, a university student and an online critic of immigration. North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann is in Quebec City.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: Police here say Alexandre Bissonnette, a French-Canadian, walked into the mosque in this quiet neighborhood of Quebec's provincial capital during prayer service and started shooting. Six men were killed, including a grocer and a college professor. Two others remain in critical condition. No one's sure why he did it. But Bissonnette's Facebook posts suggested he was drawn to right-wing politicians and opposed immigration.
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PRIME MINISTER JUSTIN TRUDEAU: Canadians will not be broken by this violence.
MANN: Prime minister Justin Trudeau spoke yesterday before Canada's parliament. He promised to stand with the country's fast-growing Muslim community.
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TRUDEAU: The people who commit these acts mean to test our resolve and weaken our values. They aim to divide us, to sow discord and plant hatred. We will not close our minds. We will open our hearts.
MANN: Police at first thought there might be two gunmen. They now say Bissonnette allegedly acted alone, and later turned himself in.
Exactly 24 hours after the shooting, thousands of people marched in silence Monday through the snowy streets near the mosque, which was still cordoned off as a crime scene.
EMANUEL TROTTIER: Some people left candles. Some people are just here as a sign of solidarity and walking, just together, peacefully.
MANN: Emanuel Trottier lives in the neighborhood. She said she wanted to send a message to her Muslim neighbors.
TROTTIER: We want to show them our respect and affection.
MANN: But many of the people who gathered here were clearly shaken. Vicky Bonsaint said the attack had left her feeling confused and disillusioned.
VICKY BONSAINT: I'm here because I'm really sad about what happened here in Quebec. This should never happen. I thought we were a place of peace.
MANN: She said she's baffled that anyone could hate so much to kill during a prayer service. But while Quebec and all of Canada have welcomed growing numbers of refugees and immigrants in recent years, there have been tensions.
This mosque was vandalized last year during Islam's holy month of Ramadan. A pig's head - considered unclean by Muslims - was left on the front step. Daniel Fradette who marched last night said this community faces the same backlash that threatens Muslims and immigrants across Europe and North America.
DANIEL FRADETTE: You find scapegoats in the minorities and the people which is the other, which you can pin your fear, I would say.
MANN: But Canadians turned out by the thousands in vigils all across the country yesterday to show that they do welcome Muslims, that they do consider newcomers to be fully Canadian. That was also the message sent by Quebec's provincial premier Philippe Couillard who spoke directly to Muslim citizens.
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PHILIPPE COUILLARD: (Speaking French).
MANN: "We are with you," Couillard said. "You are home, and you are welcome in this home. We are all the people of Quebec." For NPR News, I'm Brian Mann in Quebec City.
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A few years ago, the Brazilian entrepreneur Eike Batista was one of the 10 richest people in the world. Last night, he was in prison. Here's NPR's Philip Reeves.
PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: Batista's flight from New York no sooner touched down than he was arrested, taken by police for a medical checkup and driven here to the Bangu Prison complex in Rio. Eunice Gomes is by the gates in the visitor's waiting area. Gomes says her son-in-law Paulo is doing time for not paying child maintenance in the same wing as the former billionaire Batista. She knows what awaits him.
EUNICE GOMES: (Speaking Portuguese).
REEVES: "The living conditions are awful," says Gomes. Brazilians remember Batista as the shining star of their nation's boom years as a commodities tycoon with a fortune of some $34 billion and a white Lamborghini on display in his front room. He lost most of his business empire when the economy crashed several years ago. Prosecutors accuse Batista of money laundering and bribery. His case is a spinoff from Brazil's massive and widening contracts for kickbacks scandal involving the state-run oil giant Petrobras and lots of politicians and executives.
Batista returned home after a warrant was issued for his arrest. He says he's come back voluntarily to clear matters up. As Brazil's corruption scandal grows, so, it seems, does the contempt Brazilians feel for their leaders. Sitting by the prison gates, Eunice Gomes saw Batista being driven inside. The former multibillionaire's lustrous hair had been shaved off like any normal prisoner. Gomes says she feels not a glimmer of pity. She sees this as a lesson for Batista...
GOMES: (Speaking Portuguese).
REEVES: ...In what it feels like in Brazil to be poor. Philip Reeves, NPR News, Rio de Janeiro
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Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. If you want to bet on the Super Bowl, bookmakers are taking bets on things far beyond the score. You can bet on the opening coin toss - heads and tails or even odds. Smart money says the national anthem will clock at two minutes nine seconds, and you can wager on how many times Tom Brady's wife Gisele Bundchen appears on the TV broadcast. You can even bet on the color of Gatorade dumped on the winning coach. Purple is a 12-1 longshot. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
David Frum is sipping coffee in our studios this morning. He's a conservative writer, once an aide to President George W. Bush and a consistent critic of the new Republican president. He's joining us on this morning after President Trump fired the acting attorney general of the United States.
Mr. Frum, welcome to the program.
DAVID FRUM: Hey. Thank you so much.
INSKEEP: OK. Sally Yates, Democratic hold over at the Justice Department said she wasn't sure the order was lawful, and she wasn't going to defend it in court. The president said it is lawful and fired her. Is the president within his authority here?
FRUM: The president is certainly within his authority. But let us study carefully what this incident reveals which is that the administration took no legal advice at all before admitting this executive order.
INSKEEP: They held it very closely.
FRUM: Yeah. Well, normally you don't do such a close hold that you don't check with the Office of Legal Counsel. It doesn't seem like they got anyone to sign off on it to point out some obvious difficulties. And that's one reason that this order - a lot of elements of which are defensible by the way - the order is such a chaos.
INSKEEP: And we should mention the president has asserted that he did get the sign-off of the Office of Legal Counsel which is part of the Justice Department, but clearly not the acting attorney general. And it's not entirely clear from the Justice Department what happened there and other Cabinet members. There is a legal scholar who writes in The Washington Post that if Sally Yates found the order wrong, she just should have resigned, rather than make the president fire her. Should she have?
FRUM: If you feel strongly about it, you can't blame her for making the statement while she felt she could. But as I said, this is not so much on her as it is on an - this is a new administration. They haven't staffed up yet. Check with the lawyers and avoid legal problems. And they would ask basic questions like does this law apply or order apply to green card holders or not which is something that left tens of thousands of travelers around the planet in limbo - permanent residents of the United States - in limbo while the administration made its - made up its mind. By the way, among those excluded by this order - Canadian Cabinet minister, the head of the German-American Friendship Group in the German Bundestag - I mean, this had impact that nobody could have attended and maybe a little care would have prevented.
INSKEEP: Pretty dramatic several days. We're talking with David Frum. He writes for The Atlantic, and he has a cover story coming out which paints a very dark vision of a possible near future. The headline is "How To Build An Autocracy" which sounds pretty creepy. What are you talking about?
FRUM: We live in an age of de-democratization. The number of democracies in the world has been going backwards since 2005, and even many existing democracies including in Europe have been becoming less democratic...
INSKEEP: They have the form of a democracy...
FRUM: They have elections, but they don't have the rule of law. Hungary is an example of this. Poland is becoming another. And there would be real reason to fear that it could happen in France if the wrong people win the election that is expected in 2017. The United States, I argue, is not immune, and I based on these examples from other developed or near developed countries - I show how the United States could go wrong.
When we talk about authoritarianism, we conjure up out-of-date visions from the 1930s. But we are no more likely to do authoritarian government the way they did in the 1930s then we're likely to address or talk or do any of our other business in the way they did it in the 1930s. What I describe here is a process of corruption that needs to change the rules for its own self-protection and that gradually one by one working with a Congress that is held hostage by the agenda it wants to pass gradually undercuts American legal norms.
INSKEEP: You describe ways that the president not in some violent overthrow, but gradually over time could undermine the media, undermine the rule of law. And you just said Congress would go along with it. Why would Congress go along with something like that?
FRUM: Normally what happens in a new presidency is the president has a big agenda, and Congress is full of people with human weaknesses. And so the president indulges the human weaknesses of members of Congress in order to pass his agenda. This time it's the other way around. Donald Trump does not have much of an agenda. Congress burns with this intense Republican agenda and so does Congress that has to put up with the human weaknesses of the president in order to get a signature on the things it desperately wants to pass.
INSKEEP: You end up painting a vision of, you know, 2021 or so that there's still the form of democracy but not really democracy at all, not really free elections, a lot fewer people voting, a lot less free media. I just want you to address here, though, before you go, David Frum, there are many people listening now who voted for Donald Trump. I heard from a Trump voter not very long ago who said I just don't think he's the monster people keep saying, these people who trust the new president. What do you say to them when you express fears like this?
FRUM: I don't think that disasters have to be spectacular. They can be a slow corrosion, and we go step by step through the article showing how you would do it, how you would use the anti-trust laws, for example, to pressure companies like Washington Post which was owned by Amazon which faces an anti-trust investigation. Let me give you one concrete example before I go.
Before the election, Twitter suspended a lot of ultra right-wing racialist accounts. Immediately after Donald Trump's election, those accounts were all reinstated, and that was the result. It's pretty obvious if you are listening closely to people in that group of fear of what Donald Trump would do to Twitter through anti-trust and other actions. They were nervous, and they restored those accounts. And so they are back, and you will see in area after area, media under pressure, businesses under pressure not to criticize the president lest he reduce their stock value with an angry tweet.
INSKEEP: David Frum's new article coming out soon is called "How To Build An Autocracy." David, thanks very much for coming by, really appreciate it.
FRUM: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now let's hear some American companies that are responding to Friday's temporary ban on immigrants from seven mostly Muslim nations. Here's NPR's Yuki Noguchi.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: As the ban took effect Friday evening, U.S. employers rushed to recall workers back to the U.S. Many tech executives with large foreign workforces rebuke the ban. The Cleveland Clinic, whose CEO sits on one of Trump's business advisory panels, said one of its medical interns was diverted to Saudi Arabia after trying to re-enter the U.S. Kim Thompson is an Atlanta employment attorney advising Fortune 500 companies.
KIM THOMPSON: Definitely if you're from one of these seven countries on the list in the executive order, we're recommending no travel at all.
NOGUCHI: Thompson says even foreign nationals of countries unaffected by the ban are emailing her with their concerns over whether it's safe for them to travel. She also worries about retaliation.
THOMPSON: I do feel that we might end up with other countries reacting to this, not just the seven countries that we're dealing with, but other countries too that start taking actions so that American citizens couldn't travel to those countries as freely as we have in the past.
NOGUCHI: Lynn Shotwell, executive director for the Council for Global Immigration, says federal discrimination laws prohibit employers from asking about religion or national origin, making it hard to identify affected workers, but some have a big immigrant workforce.
LYNN SHOTWELL: Universities are probably one of the groups that I've heard the most from so, you know, universities have traditionally been open to people from around the world.
NOGUCHI: Shotwell says companies are also taking the opportunity to communicate to all employees.
SHOTWELL: They are trying to reassure their employees that they support them, and that this order hasn't changed their support for a diverse global workforce.
NOGUCHI: Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Decades of war and extremism in Afghanistan have ravaged that country's ancient culture including its music. A school in Kabul started by an Afghan musicologist is trying to change that, and this month introduced the first ever all-female Afghan orchestra which played at the World Economic Forum in Davos. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson caught up with them during a recent concert in Berlin and files this report.
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SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: There's a brief hiccup as the young Afghan women in brightly colored headscarves and dresses rehearse before their concert is to begin here at a landmark church in the German capitol.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Speaking Dari).
AHMAD SARMAST: (Speaking Dari).
NELSON: One performer complains to orchestra founder Ahmad Sarmast that there isn't enough room to play. He waves at the others to scoot over and give her more space.
SARMAST: (Speaking Dari).
NELSON: "From the top, girls," he says, and they oblige.
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NELSON: The conductor for this piece is 18-year-old Zarifa Adiba. She moves her arms as gracefully as a ballerina.
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NELSON: The girls and young women, ages 14 to 20, play traditional Afghan instruments like the rubab, similar to a lute, and the drum-like tabla as well as Western instruments like the piano and oboe. Adiba, for example, is not only a conductor but a violist. She was born in the Taliban-rife Ghazni province where girls are often forced to marry when they are still children, but Adiba had bigger ambitions.
ZARIFA ADIBA: The thing that I loved was music from my childhood. And my mother is a great supporter of me, and she told me that what you love, go ahead and find out. I had a kind of view about pop singing, rock singing, and I wanted to be a pop singer actually.
NELSON: But then she enrolled at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul and discovered girls could play instruments. The school was started by Sarmast, who had moved back to his native Afghanistan from Australia after the Taliban were driven from power. His goal, which almost cost him his life in a suicide attack two years ago, is to create a new generation of Afghan musicians to bring back their country's musical tradition and infuse it with Western ones. On this night, for example, the female orchestra performs Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
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NELSON: Sarmast says his quest for diversity is not only musical, but of gender. That isn't always popular in Afghanistan's ultra-conservative society that is strictly segregated by sex.
SARMAST: But that situation cannot continue forever, and Afghanistan should move in the same path that every other nation goes. And the girls and the women of Afghanistan should also enjoy the freedom that other girls and women are enjoying outside Afghanistan.
NELSON: All of which appeals to Adiba, who managed to get into the school even though she was a ninth-grader and the cut-off is usually fourth grade. She says she loved playing in Europe this month, but is eager to go home, especially after learning that an uncle who disapproved of her playing recently told her mother how proud he is of his niece.
ADIBA: I'm happy that at least I changed my family, and these all girls who are in the orchestra, they are going to change their family. And their family - when their family is going to change, you can have a society which is changed.
(SOUNDBITE OF ZOHRA ORCHESTRA PERFORMANCE)
NELSON: The group's last European and performance is tonight in the eastern German city of Weimar. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Berlin.
(SOUNDBITE OF ZOHRA ORCHESTRA PERFORMANCE)
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Democrats in Congress are vowing to fight President Trump's executive order on immigration and refugees with everything they have. But what do they have? They don't have control of either the House or the Senate, which means they cannot do too much when it comes to legislation. NPR's Scott Detrow reports that is frustrating many members of the party base.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) No hate. No fear. Refugees are welcome here. No hate...
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Over the weekend, Democratic lawmakers rushed to join protests. Monday evening, they organized their own on the steps of the Supreme Court.
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CHUCK SCHUMER: The order will make us less of America.
DETROW: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats are vowing to try and repeal it. That doesn't seem to be enough, even for the people who came to this rally.
TOM JOHNSON: We need real resistance, not just pep rallies and talk.
DETROW: That's Tom Johnson on the bullhorn.
JOHNSON: Right now tonight, I want them to come out and say Donald Trump needs to be impeached, and we're going to fight to impeach Donald Trump.
DETROW: Dawn Southard's request for Congress - no appeasement.
DAWN SOUTHARD: I'd like to see them stop all the nominations - all the nominations until they revoke this executive order.
DETROW: The thing is, Democrats just don't have the votes to do either. But under Senate rules, Democrats can block the Supreme Court pick that President Trump will name today. Whether or not they do that will be the first big test of whether Democratic leaders are listening to an increasingly angry base. Scott Detrow, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Today the Justice Department is still defending President Trump's executive order on immigration in court. That's the same as yesterday morning, but not without a dramatic turn in the hours in between. The acting attorney general yesterday told the department not to defend an order that temporarily bans visitors from seven majority-Muslim nations and refugees from everywhere. Sally Yates said she was not persuaded that the order is lawful, so President Trump replaced her. With us to talk about this is NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson who's on the line. Hi, Carrie.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Hey, Steve.
INSKEEP: Who's Sally Yates? This is surely a name that most Americans had not heard before yesterday.
JOHNSON: Well, she's a holdover from the Obama Justice Department. She'd expected to be on the job just a few more days really until the Senate confirms her successor in Donald Trump's pick. But Sally Yates is not unfamiliar to people inside the Justice Department, she's been a prosecutor there for 27 years, sending to prison a former mayor in her home state of Georgia and also the Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph.
INSKEEP: OK, so a professional prosecutor and a professional at the Justice Department, a career person at the Justice Department who was promoted to this political position under President Obama.
JOHNSON: That's exactly right.
INSKEEP: OK, and what did she say?
JOHNSON: Well, she said she was concerned that Trump's executive order was unlawful, and she cited in a letter to lawyers working on these cases yesterday afternoon some statements made by the administration and surrogates. She wasn't clear, but it seems clear from reading around the lines that she was talking about comments Trump made to Christian broadcasters about giving preference to Christian refugees, and also statements by Rudy Giuliani, a Trump adviser, in which he told Fox News that Trump called him and said he wanted a Muslim ban but wanted to do it legally. Both of those things raised big concerns in Sally Yates' mind about maybe unlawful intent behind this executive order.
INSKEEP: And let's just remind people it has been widely argued by people across the political spectrum that a religious test for getting into the country would be unconstitutional, that would be setting up a state religion. The president has contended this is not that, and she's saying I am not persuaded because of these other statements. And then the president fired her, right?
JOHNSON: Yeah, this all took place in the span of about four hours yesterday, four very dramatic hours. Sally Yates was informed of her firing by the White House via hand-delivered letter to the Justice Department, and almost immediately the president came out with a statement from the White House saying she had betrayed the Department of Justice and was weak on immigration and weak on borders. Very tough talk from the White House.
INSKEEP: Well, let's try to put this in some historical context here. Sally Yates was confirmed in 2015, and there was a senator at the confirmation hearing - amazingly enough, Jeff Sessions, the guy who is in line to be attorney general - who said, are you willing to defy the president if he asks you to do something improper? And she gave an answer that sounded very much like yes, I can do that, I'm sworn to uphold the Constitution. And then Sessions went on to talk about a little bit of history from the Bush administration and an earlier one. Let's give a listen to that.
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JEFF SESSIONS: I remember John Ashcroft as attorney general for Bush, and he's been celebrated for being in - when he was in the hospital they tried to get him to sign a document that dealt with terrorism that he thought went too far, he refused to do so. So I hope that you feel free to say no in the character of John Ashcroft and others who said no to President Nixon on certain issues.
INSKEEP: There was actually an attorney general and an acting attorney general who resigned rather than follow President Nixon. So where does Sally Yates fit into that history if at all, Carrie?
JOHNSON: Well, a lot of comparisons being made overnight to the Saturday Night Massacre, that 1973 firing and mass resignations inside Nixon's Justice Department. That's not entirely apt because Sally Yates was a political holdover on the way out the door already, but certainly she has taken a very public stand here and intentionally. So I'm hearing from sources close to her that she knew very well sending this letter to DOJ last night could cost her her job, in fact it did. Now federal prosecutor Dana Boente, who's been the U.S. attorney in Virginia, is the new acting attorney general for Donald Trump, and he's going to defend that executive order.
INSKEEP: A small but vital point here, you told us last night that the acting attorney general is the last person in the Justice Department who could sign foreign intelligence surveillance warrants to go after possible threats. Is anybody left who can do that now?
JOHNSON: Well, some national security lawyers have analyzed the question overnight. They do believe Dana Boente, the acting AG, can sign those warrants, but it was a source of some concern and research.
INSKEEP: OK, so we're going to continue to cover this dramatic story. Carrie, thanks very much.
JOHNSON: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: That's our justice correspondent Carrie Johnson.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Protests over the president's temporary travel ban have spread worldwide, including last night in London where thousands gathered outside the residence of the prime minister. They criticized President Trump and also what they see as Prime Minister Theresa May's weak response. NPR's Frank Langfitt reports from London.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Shame on May. Shame on May.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: So I'm here in front of 10 Downing St., and as you can hear people are yelling shame on May. They're angry with the prime minister for not saying more about Donald Trump's policies. And it's thousands and thousands of people blocking the road down here, I can barely move.
Near the front of the crowd stood Zee Bokhari, who's 18. She's a citizen of both the United Kingdom and Iraq, one of the countries affected by the ban. Bokhari thinks May should have been tougher on Trump.
ZEE BOKHARI: She's got to realize that she has citizens here that are of dual nationality like myself, therefore when she doesn't condemn the acts of people such as Trump, she's just as bad as the oppressor.
LANGFITT: The U.K. government says dual nationals such as Bokhari won't be affected by the ban as long as they aren't flying from one of the listed countries. Even so, Bokhari, who plans to attend law school in New York, wonders if she'll be able to get into the U.S.
BOKHARI: I can't lie, I'm worried. I don't think this situation will resolve, I think it will just get progressively worse.
LANGFITT: More than a million and a half people have signed a petition demanding the government cancel Trump's invitation for a state visit and meeting with the queen, but May won't budge. Here she is speaking at a news conference yesterday during a visit to Ireland.
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PRIME MINISTER THERESA MAY: The United States is a close ally of the United Kingdom, we work together across many areas of mutual interest. I have issued that invitation, the - informally issued that invitation for a state visit, and that invitation stands.
LANGFITT: The last few days have been dizzying ones for May. On Friday she met Trump at the White House and seemed to get the support she wanted on NATO and a free trade deal the U.K. desperately needs as it prepares to pull out of the European Union. Trump sounded friendly.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can often tell how I get along with somebody very early, and I believe we're going to have a fantastic relationship.
LANGFITT: But the travel ban, which was signed the same day, seemed to catch May off guard. After some delay, she offered a statement saying she didn't support the idea.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Booing).
LANGFITT: When May arrived in Wales yesterday, she was met by booing crowds.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Booing).
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Inaudible) with fascists.
LANGFITT: Political opponents called her Theresa the appeaser. Emily Thornberry of the opposition Labor Party noted that May briefly held hands with the president, and told the House of Commons yesterday the prime minister should have stood up to Trump.
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EMILY THORNBERRY: President Trump is already descending down a very dangerous slope.
UNIDENTIFIED PARLIAMENTARIANS: Yeah.
THORNBERRY: And when that happens, we need a prime minister who is prepared to tell him to stop, not one who simply proffers her hand and silently helps him along.
LANGFITT: Tony Travers says when foreign leaders ally with Trump, his policies can sting them back home. Travers is a professor of government at the London School of Economics.
TONY TRAVERS: For the time being I think it's going to be very difficult for politicians in countries like Britain, but not only Britain, to deal with the domestic consequences of some of the things that Donald Trump says and does.
LANGFITT: But Travers says it'll be hard for leaders in Europe to disengage from the new president, and after all, he now oversees the world's biggest economy and its most powerful country. Frank Langfitt, NPR News, London.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Some U.S. diplomats think President Trump's executive order - blocking refugees and visitors from certain countries is a really bad idea. Many are preparing to say so in a memo warning that this particular restriction will not make the country safer. The White House bluntly said yesterday it's not interested in their concerns.
Spokesman Sean Spicer said diplomats should, quote, "get with the program or they can go." The memo was drafted for the State Department's dissent channel which is a special way to air objections. So let's talk about that with Jon Finer who once worked in the office - ran the office that received such memos. He was also Secretary of State John Kerry's chief of staff. Mr. Finer, good morning.
JON FINER: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: What is the dissent channel?
FINER: Well, the dissent channel dates actually to the era of the Vietnam War where it was established as an outlet for people at the State Department at times of kind of internal tension and disagreements to be able to express their views if they were contrary to administration policy directly to the level of the secretary of state through the Office of Policy Planning, which I used to run.
INSKEEP: So the idea is free debate even though everybody is an employee of the president. They can speak truth to power so to speak.
FINER: That's exactly right. And it's meant to be generally kept private. That office tends to receive, you know, a handful of these a year. When I was running that office, we received one memo that was quite sensitive and got some attention on, for example, the Obama administration's policy on Syria.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
FINER: It's actually quite important that the foreign affairs manual that governs how the State Department is run - as - that people that write these memos should be free from reprisal which seems a bit at odds with the statement from the press secretary yesterday. When Secretary Kerry received this memo again on Syria policy, what he decided to do was invite the authors of that memo in to brief him on their views, and then explained to them how the administration had landed where it landed on Syria policy which...
INSKEEP: How is this at odds with Sean Spicer's statement in hearing people say get with the program or you can go, you hear a threat of some kind?
FINER: I think there is an implicit threat in that statement and, unfortunately, it seems like the latest example of an - of a series of attacks that this new administration has made against career professionals, against experts. You know, there were several career Senior Foreign Service officers who were dismissed from their jobs in the very early days of the new administration without much explanation, people that were involved in sort of basic management of the building things like issuing passports and responding to FOIA requests that are not typically political. And then now you see, essentially, an implicit threat against people who are expressing dissent through an established channel that was designed for this purpose.
INSKEEP: You mentioned that these dissents are supposed to be private, in this case a draft, which I gather has not even been formally sent through the dissent channel has become largely public and so we know what the objections are. And tell me what you make of these objections. The administration, of course, is insisting this is a precautionary move. It's temporary. It's not formally targeting Muslims. It's a relative handful of countries. They're trying to keep the country safe. What is the nature of the dissent from that from a diplomat's point of view?
FINER: Well, I think you're seeing diplomats who are the ones actually charged with implementing and explaining this new approach to foreign counterparts expressing a lot of the views that you've seen others express in the public domain. And, you know, one of the things I think this highlights is that this - these problems that the administration is running into probably could have been avoided if they had sought to avoid them by having a process in advance of this - issuing this order in which they brought in experts and - as is typical when you're making new policy - and ask them for their views.
You know, there's a reason why you have this process - one, to make sure that the product that is produced. The order in this case is of a higher quality because it benefits from everybody's expertise and experience and then the other is that the implementers, in this case the State Department, DHS and others, actually have some degree of awareness and understanding of what is supposed to be done before the order goes into effect. And I think you could have avoided against some of the problems that happened if that was the desire in advance of this.
INSKEEP: Are you saying the professionals might have helped to frame or even rewrite this so it would not be seen as a Muslim ban, not be seen as inhumane, not be partially stopped in court as it has been, it could have been done better with professional help?
FINER: What I'm saying is I think a lot of the objections that you're now seeing in the aftermath of the order would have been raised through the course of a normal policy process if one had been applied. And the administration then would have had to decide whether to go forward knowing full well the types of objections that were likely to be raised in the aftermath. Instead what you have - yes?
INSKEEP: Oh, no. Jon Finer, keep going, keep going.
FINER: I was saying - instead what you have is a bunch of objections that were raised while the train was already moving and frankly had left the station which makes it much more confusing to people who are using the program in addition to foreign counterparts who are trying to understand what exactly it is that the United States is doing here.
INSKEEP: Mr. Finer, thanks for joining us early on this morning, really appreciate it.
FINER: Thanks for having me.
INSKEEP: Jon Finer was the chief adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Well, it appears for the first time that Volkswagen will claim the crown as the world's biggest automaker - Volkswagen, the company that pleaded guilty to criminal wrongdoing for installing software on its diesel cars that faked out emissions tests. NPR's Sonari Glinton explains why.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Volkswagen has gotten into a lot of trouble here in the U.S. and Europe. In many ways, that doesn't matter. Here's Karl Brauer. He's with Autotrader. He has the reason - China.
KARL BRAUER: The U.S. just isn't the big dog anymore. China is the big dog. That's why we see so many companies scrambling to position themselves there. But Volkswagen's kind of got a head start on a lot of them 'cause they've been there for so many years already.
CHRISTIE SCHWEINSBERG: They began manufacturing in China through a joint venture in 1984.
GLINTON: OK, that's our next car expert.
SCHWEINSBERG: Christie Schweinsberg - I'm senior editor at wardsauto.com in Southfield, Mich. So, you know, we're talking 33 years ago. And that's how they rose to dominance is they embraced the Chinese market much earlier than many other automakers.
GLINTON: General Motors is actually number one in China. The Chinese love Buick. But GM sales are down here in the U.S. and Schweinsberg says so are Toyotas.
SCHWEINSBERG: They're a very car-centric brand and it couldn't build crossovers, which Americans are increasingly flocking to. They couldn't build them fast enough.
GLINTON: Besides the fines, will the scandal hurt Volkswagen's reputation? J.B. Steenkamp teaches marketing at UNC, Chapel Hill. He says yes in the short term, but he doesn't expect a lasting impact.
J.B. STEENKAMP: Unless it is followed up with a second or a third scandal. BP also continues to sell well in America after that horrible disaster of the Deepwater Horizon. People are pretty forgetful and also pretty forgiving.
GLINTON: Though in this case, German criminal prosecutors may not be forgetting too soon. Nearly 40 former executives are being investigated, including the former CEO, who made being No. 1 a goal. Sonari Glinton, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep. If you think you're having a rough week, consider the lives of some people in Gloucestershire, England who are fending off a mysterious food-thrower. A woman was jogging when she was struck by a potato. Things escalated when a person dodged a flying turnip from a passing car. Other people told a news site of a street egging and now the attacks have gone upscale. In one incident, a driver targeted a pedestrian by throwing an avocado. It's MORNING EDITION. Duck!
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's take a moment to consider the stated goal of President Trump's executive order on immigration. The order had a title. This is the title - Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. So let's raise the question. Will it do that? From a pure security perspective, how likely is this to protect the nation by keeping out terrorists? How practical is it?
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, national security correspondent, has been considering that question. Hi, Mary Louise.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: Hi, there.
INSKEEP: How do you answer that?
KELLY: So I spent yesterday calling around to U.S. officials who have been on the frontlines of the fight against terror. I heard back from 13 of them.
INSKEEP: These are current and former, both?
KELLY: These - mostly former...
INSKEEP: OK.
KELLY: ...Because they're more free to speak...
INSKEEP: Sure.
KELLY: ...About the current executive order. Thirteen of them, so not a scientific study by any means...
INSKEEP: But a bunch.
KELLY: ...But I made an effort to speak to people who had served in different vantage points so Pentagon, State Department, CIA, etc. - and also people who had served both Democratic and Republican administrations.
INSKEEP: And you said set aside the ethics, the morals, the law, whatever - is this practical? What do they say?
KELLY: I heard from not one of the 13 who got back to me - not one who believes that, from a pure national security perspective, this order is a good idea. In fact, the overwhelming number of people who got back to me said not only will it not protect the U.S. from terrorism but it would have the opposite effect. It will make Americans less safe.
INSKEEP: Why would that be when the practical effect is keeping people out, and, I guess, one of them could conceivably be a threat?
KELLY: Absolutely. And that is the question I put to them. And I want to let you hear some of these voices who I was speaking to yesterday. So No. 1, a lot of concern about the seven countries that are included in the travel ban. That would be Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia. Let me let you hear Phil Mudd. He worked on counterterrorism for both the CIA and the FBI.
PHILLIP MUDD: I don't understand the selection of these countries. What about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt? And if you're worried about people coming into this country, look at where we've seen attacks in the past few years, countries like Belgium, France, Germany, which have very easy visa access to the United States. Why wouldn't you limit them?
KELLY: The short answer, of course, is that banning visitors from France or Germany is picking an awfully big fight. And as to why these seven, there have already been some restrictions on travel from these specific countries. Those were inherited from the Obama years. But Phil Mudd's basic point - and Steve, I heard this from several people I spoke to - is you look at that list of seven, no terrorist from any of those seven countries has carried out an attack in the U.S. in more than two decades.
INSKEEP: They've come from elsewhere or been U.S. citizens...
KELLY: Exactly.
INSKEEP: ...In a number of cases.
What do U.S. allies make of all this, and how does that fit into this question of practicality?
KELLY: Let me introduce another voice to answer that. This is Hank Crumpton. He was the chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. He served under President Bill Clinton and under President Bush. And Hank Crumpton's argument is that the best U.S. allies in fighting terror historically - for decades now - have been Muslims, whether you're looking at nation-states, whether you're looking at individual people who have worked with the CIA, tribal leaders, etc. Here's Hank Crumpton.
HANK CRUMPTON: If these potential allies are mistrustful of our country, if they don't hold us in the highest regard when we ask them to risk their lives in cooperation with us, yes, that does put our nation in greater jeopardy, I believe.
INSKEEP: So he's raising the question of blowback. We're already hearing about blowback from Iraqis who are fighting alongside Americans...
KELLY: We are.
INSKEEP: ...Against ISIS, and Iraq is included in this order. What about inside the United States?
INSKEEP: Let me introduce you to one more person. This is Matt Olsen. He was the former top lawyer for the National Security Agency, former head of the National Counterterrorism Center. And Olsen told me yesterday, for him, that is the biggest single concern here, the fear of radicalization at home. And here's why.
MATTHEW OLSEN: Because this feeds directly into this notion that the United States is anti-Muslim or is at war with Islam. And there are individuals here who we are concerned about being recruited and mobilized to violence by ISIS.
KELLY: That was Matt Olsen. And one last point, Steve, Matt Olsen is one of 119 national security officials who signed an open letter yesterday. This is a letter warning that the Trump executive order poses a threat to national security. They are calling for it to be rescinded. If you read this letter, it's remarkable. It really amounts to a collective howl of protest from the national security establishment.
INSKEEP: OK. Mary Louise, thanks for helping us hear a little bit of that howl.
KELLY: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: That's NPR national security correspondent Mary Louise Kelly.
We are hearing from many voices today and in the coming days of course, both those who oppose and those who support the president's executive order on immigration. This debate really is just beginning.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We've heard plenty of debate over whether President Trump's executive order on immigration should be defined as a Muslim ban or something else. Let's consider, though, a more basic question here - what do the president and his advisers think of Islam? The president and his aides have linked the problem they're attacking to the religion itself, so let's hear how they do that. NPR's Tom Gjelten has covered both national security and religion over the years, so he's the perfect person to ask.
Hi, Tom.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: How does the president frame the problem?
GJELTEN: The phrase that President Trump likes to use is radical Islamic terrorism. That's the ideology, he says, we have to fight. Fighting it, he says, is the whole idea behind this refugee ban. He could not be more clear. Here's what he said.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I'm establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America. We don't want them here.
GJELTEN: So he's trying to talk narrowly about a particular category of Muslims, the bad guys. But he hasn't always been so clear in his thinking. And remember, in an interview with CNN last March, he said I think Islam hates us.
INSKEEP: And he was originally calling for a ban of all Muslims entering the United States.
GJELTEN: He was, and then he backed off with that. After the election, he told Scott Pelley of CBS, I love Muslims. So we're going to have to wait and see what he says going forward. You can be sure Muslim-Americans are going to be following every word.
INSKEEP: OK. So that's the president. Let's talk about some of his advisers - first, the national security adviser Michael Flynn.
GJELTEN: Michael Flynn - General Michael Flynn, who spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and Iraq, knows how important it is to have good relations with Muslims. But he's been really loose in the way that he talks about Muslims, talks about Islam - most notably last August in a speech in Dallas. This is what he said there.
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MICHAEL FLYNN: Islam is a political ideology. It is a political ideology. It hides behind this notion of it being a religion.
GJELTEN: Of course, Steve, it is a religion with 1.6 billion adherents worldwide. And then he goes on to liken it to cancer.
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FLYNN: I've gone through cancer in my own life. And so it's like cancer. And it's like a malignant cancer, though, in this case. It has metastasized.
GJELTEN: Nothing very nuanced there, Steve.
INSKEEP: And this is so different from what other officials have said because they want to try to keep as many as possible of those 1.6 billion Muslims on the U.S. side.
What about the president's adviser Steve Bannon?
GJELTEN: Yeah, we've actually heard that he was the one most responsible for writing this refugee ban. Now, it's fair to say that he, too, has had some pretty extreme views on Islam. He's gotten a lot of attention for a speech he gave to a group in the Vatican in 2014, where he laid out a pretty apocalyptic perspective portraying the United States and Western civilization in some kind of epic struggle. Now, the audio here is not great. He was speaking via Skype, but you can get what he said.
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STEVE BANNON: We are in an outright war against jihadist, Islamic fascists.
GJELTEN: And then, Steve, he goes on to use the same word that General Flynn used. He said it's metastasizing.
INSKEEP: Metastasizing - so they talk about this as a cancer. What about some of the other advisers around the president, though?
GJELTEN: Well, that's a really important question. His defense secretary, General James Mattis, has been - is very well-read. He, too, has a lot of experience in the field. He's far more careful about what he says about Muslims and Islam. And he's going to have the responsibility of working with Muslim allies - the same for General John Kelly, Homeland Security secretary.
So I think that the key thing going forward, Steve, is - who does Donald Trump listen to? Does he listen to people like General Mattis and General Kelly, or does he defer to his more extreme advisers?
INSKEEP: Mattis was interesting in his confirmation hearing. He said I've never fought in an all-American formation. They're always relying on allies.
Tom, thanks very much.
GJELTEN: You bet, Steve.
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